HSM was a great platform for me, during my HSM Journey I reflected on allot of things, so I figured in this post I’d touch on many of those things.

Hello Sunday Morning: Hello indeed. One of the first things anyone thinks about when they start drinking is the hangover they might end up with. In the year before I started HSM I think, at a quick guesstimate I managed to waste at least 39 Sundays being hung over and in bed. I’m not really conscious of the time I waste because of drinking, I’m not talking about the night of enjoyment but just choosing not to waste the day in bed makes a real difference to my life. Aside from this my weeks are better, I feel my focused on what I want now, I know where I want to be and I use my time away from my paid work more effectivly, before HSM I spent alot of this time drunk, now I spend it focusing on my business, fitness and family.

Alcohol as a social Lubricant: Prior to HSM I used alcohol to ease things in a little when it came to socialising, it was easier to relax when I was drinking, it was easier because I felt a part of something.  After the first few months of HSM I came to the conclusion that just being somewhere was enough, if someone invited me, it was for me, if they expected me to drink, then they could shove it because I no longer had to rise to their expectations and my own expectations had changed, I no longer expected that not drinking would make things harder, I accepted that it shouldn’t. HSM gave me a great confidence, I could dance without caring, voice my opinion without reprimand and best of all I could chose my own path for a weekend. I was no longer locked into the back to back weekends of drunkenness and partying, and oddly enough, it felt good, it felt better.

I’ll miss out if I don’t drink: Once I got used to the notion that I didn’t need alcohol to have fun, this idea became completely ridiculous. I didn’t miss out, actually I gained. I have more energy when
I’m not drinking and I look after myself far better so I’m ready and willing to back up another all nighter.

Alcohol and City Crime: Go figure, and article in this week’s Border Mail (Albury Wodonga’s local rag) states that after two years of declining numbers of assaults in the city, violence is now on the rise. A total number of 439 assaults were recorded in my “lovely” local city in the past year, and I assume that these numbers might even be higher considering the number of assaults which I can only presume would go unreported. Apparently messages in relation to alcohol related violence were “not getting through”. After spending countless nights out sober in Albury over the past 9 months, it doesn’t surprise me at all really. Apparently we are a city in crisis, and no one really knows why, but the issue seems to lie with those consuming the alcohol and whether or not they take responsibility for their actions. Now, I know there is always the argument that maybe those involved aren’t just on the juice, but more so the powder and pills too, but I think socially as alcohol consumers we really suck at looking after ourselves and making sure that we aren’t the ones at the pub arguing with the bloke who looked at us for too long or power spewing on the dance floor.

Alcohol is an excuse for my bad actions: No, it’s not, and anyone out there who is telling themselves it is, is an idiot and needs to reconsider their personal values (harsh statement right..). Post HSM I have some regrets, I’ve looked back and realised that some of the things I’ve done when I was drinking were just plain stupid, they were all me and I chose to do them (not the alcohol I had in my system at the time) I just thought it gave me an excuse to be a dickhead and it didn’t.

More alcohol means more fun: When I used to go on a holiday, I would always factor in my alcohol consumption. If I’m going to Mackay for 2 weeks, I will drink 10 nights at $45 per night so ill need $450 for alcohol. About 38 days into HSM, I started to think about the atmosphere and how it influences things, how when I was 14 and drinking, 3 drinks was enough, the atmosphere and the taboo were enough to make up for everything else. Now I realise that in some cases more alcohol might mean more fun, but in most it doesn’t and that self medicating ones way through a crappy situation by drinking really isn’t good for you.

The ‘friends’ you drink with: This was something I didn’t enjoy about HSM, finding out who my real friends were. I’d grown up with a few people, spent the bigger part of my life drinking with them every weekend, they were my best mates. But after I started HSM I realised that these people couldn’t give two hoots. Sure they were there, and I saw them 3 nights a week, and I enjoyed my time with them immensely, but once I stopped drinking, and subsequently hanging out with them 3 nights a week, we weren’t so important to each other anymore. I couldn’t ring them if my pop died, I couldn’t ask them to look after my dog while I was away, and really, they couldn’t expect those things of me. We were drinking acquaintances.

Alcohol and Love: You’re at the club (you know the trashy one, where all the leechy guys hang out and the girls all wear miniskirts and push up bras). Rhianna – Only Girl (in the world) is playing and your mackin’ strong with some cute guy you picked up, thinking “I wonder if he’ll call me, should I go home with him”, it’s a typical night really. For all those people out there who are searching for the love of your life at the pub, you probably won’t find it, and sucking face with someone and giving part of your self esteem away won’t help either. While doing HSM I had to opportunity to go into a pub and look at just how many people are only there to sleeze onto another person and have some quick action. Alcohol probably won’t help you find your true love, and sometimes using it to “loosen up a little” might just result in you being “too loose”…

After all of this I can say, YES, I STILL DRINK, nowhere near as much nor as often as I did before, but I enjoy it more, I don’t spend hundreds of dollars when I go out, I just buy a few drinks that I actually like the taste of and I stop when I stop enjoying them.

HSM helped me to learn that not drinking is ok, it’s easy to get swept up in our drinking culture and to really go overboard. I know that  in many ways doing HSM can make a person a little cocky about their relationship with alcohol, but there is a sense of value that HSM can bring to you personally and I think that any individual considering HSM should really get out there and just do it, give it a chance, you’ll probably enjoy it. HSM helped me to appreciate one drink. Just one, or maybe two. And to appreciate who I spend the consumption of that drink with.

Sunday Better Spent

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Hello Sunday Morning has been an integral part of my life, something which I am very sad to say goodbye to, it has given me the opportunity to explore areas of my life which I have never explored before. And has given me a forum for voicing truths.

HSM has been the platform for teaching me a whole bunch of things, many which sound a little cliché.. these are the things I’ve come to preach while doing Hello Sunday Morning:

• “Confidence is the key” Anonymous – Confidence is amazing, learning to love yourself enough to be able to dance on a dance floor sober, jump around and say stupid things without alcohol is a gift. Being able to laugh at yourself is a really wonderful thing.

• “No amount of sugar filled non alcoholic drinks will help you blur out the mess that is The Capital Nightclub Wagga Wagga” Mel Armstrong – that place is the pits! (Except Corey the bartender, Corey you are cool) Further to this I have learnt, if there is a place that is so pitiful you have to drink to get through it, just don’t go there, don’t do it! If its shit, go somewhere else! Your night will not get any better, no matter how much you drink, a shit venue is a shit venue, that is that.

• “Life is full of beauty” Ashley Smith – Beauty is remembering something simple from your childhood. Beauty is seeing someone on the train with the same T-Shirt as you. Beauty is seeing someone having a bad day at 8am and it bringing a smile to your face. Beauty is being at the pub in winter, with two hoodies on and wearing your favourite sneakers while seeing girls walking around in singlet tops, short skirts and heels and laughing into your coke. Beauty is not a drunk girl at the pub with her rack out.

• “ The beauty of empowering others is that your own power is not diminished in the process” – Barbara Colorose. People’s reactions to HSM are most intriguing. Some of you have said that HSM is some pretentious wank, a bunch of exhibitionists wanting to feel good about themselves, but it’s so much more than that. It’s about choice, it’s about empowering  people to make their own choices, it’s not about stopping drinking forever and it’s not about telling people to drink less, it’s about  empowering each other to make choices.
  On the flip side, many people have said that watching the Hello Sunday Morning experience has enabled them to assess their own drinking culture, this is what HSM is about.
  Thanks to Chris Raine,  (http://hellosundaymorning.com.au/category/chris/ ) for creating this,  you have allowed so many people to “pick up what you have put down” and opened this great forum for discussion, online and in person.

• “A goal without a plan is just a wish” Ivan Campuzano – When I began HSM I had a few goals, the most important was to somehow receive a shred of understanding on how my Dads addiction with alcohol would be relevant to a social environment and the things he may have had to experience. Alas, I understand little. But what I do know now is allot about how people view social drinking and interaction and how much drinking has become a complex part of our culture. We drink for a range of reasons. Plenty of which are not positive, and quite often we mask this with false confidence. When it comes to my Dad, I am so proud. I’m proud of his voice, and I’m proud of his honesty. My father is a man who lives by his convictions. He will always candidly tell you about his past, guts and all. I experienced some judgement when it came to doing HSM, allot of people assumed I was a reformed alcoholic of sorts, something which they spoke of like it was a dirty word, I’m sure this is something which my Dad had to deal with allot, it helps me to understand how easy it is for life to be full of false starts and I now think that Binge Drinking is in many ways dirtier then Alcohol addiction.

• “Truth is what stands the test of experience” Albert Einstein – Exposing yourself and your truth to others can be an amazingly beneficial process. Honesty is something we rarely reveal and in delivering it we get to create truthful and progressive relationships with those around us.

• “Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us”. Peter De Vries  – The hardest part about HSM is not having one drink, just one, being able to enjoy the sweet taste of a wine, or being able to try a sip of some freshly opened liquor.. oddly enough, after HSM the hardest part is still not having one. My view of one drink has now changed. One drink is pointless, one drink is an unnecessary intake of kilojoules, I don’t understand the point of it now, it has lost it’s appeal, one drink will give me nothing I didn’t already have, water tastes better and is not full of sugar.

• “The children are watching us” Di Sica – I’ve become a firm believer we as adults need to take responsibility for what we create an inspire in the next generations, a pre-loved family member of mine likes to harp on about how dysfunctional and misguided the youth of today is, hello? we as youth are apart of what you made! As young adults, we have to be responsible for this.

•  “You need to be willing to give everything up, even other people to be comfortable with just yourself. When you can get to that place. You start qualifying people and things as to whether they will add value in your life or not, with a willingness to not have them at all” Chris Raine. I’ve lost friends over Hello Sunday Morning, and I am happy.

HSM has allowed me to come to the conclusion that sometimes you’ve just got to allow yourself, to follow your feelings and respect your own impulses, even if you can’t fully explain or justify them. If something feels right, it’s right.

I don’t know what’s in store post HSM, drinking socially again will certainly teach me some more things.. I’ll keep you all posted, until next time, be yourself and live by those silly cliché quotations which give you motivation.  And watch this clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTJ7AzBIJoI , Mary Schmich with Baz Luhrmann WILL make you smile.

The start of unnecessay intake.

Meeting Gabe and Chris was pretty super, it was close to one of the strangest encounters I’ve had since starting Hello Sunday Morning because it occurred to me that it was the first time in 3 months that I’ve met people socially who I haven’t had to explain that I’m not drinking to, and why. And surprisingly, we didn’t fluff on about HSM much at all. It was casual, fun and spontaneous – all of the things you want from a night out, and all of the things I feel I’ve become better at since starting HSM.

Gabe finishes his 3 month stint as a HSM blogger on the 5^th, 5 short days before I finish HSM myself, and as most of you know, Chris (aka superman-god-chuck-norris) started HSM in 2008, with his own 12 month endeavour and has turned it into a potential life passion.

Meeting these guys got me thinking about what little time I really have left on HSM, looking back three months seems like a really short time, I’m starting to consider whether or not I have gotten enough out of my experience or if I should give it a little longer to sink in. After my last (depressing) post, I have noticed that it’s only just now that big things are starting to present themselves to me on a personal level.

HSM is starting to reshape my life, in all areas, personal and professional,  it is giving me drive and incentive which I didn’t think I had left and I have decided that I need to be a little more stubborn about my choice. I’m not sure if all of this will actually eventuate in me continuing to not drink, I’m trying to avoid setting myself a goal because it will mean that I have a personal quest and it might end up snowballing, which I’m not sure I’m ready for, but we will see… Choice will change and time will tell.

The past week for me has been particularly shitty, tears and all for a number of reasons:

1. I’m  nearing the end of my Hello Sunday Morning journey and I’m starting to think allot about how HSM has affected my current life, and whether I’m getting everything I can out of this Hello Sunday Morning experience.

2. Shit is hitting the fan – Apparently Autumn is the opposite of Spring when it comes to ‘the seasons of love’, its ‘breakup season’, some of my mates are having tough times and it’s got me thinking.

3. I’m a girl – Emotions are a crazy hormone driven ride of psychosis.

All of this started when a friend of mine made a frank observation that implied that I’m a little too filthy to get a nice guy, and a little too nice to get a filthy guy.  I’m not what you’d call a ‘wallflower’.

Looks - Generally not all that deceiving

This along with a whole bunch of other HSM blogs has started me thinking seriously about relationships as a young person, our identities – who we think we, who we think others think we are, and how all of this, since starting HSM has become a little warped.. its become quite obvious, that, alcohol really has played a big part in forming my identity, or at least, who I think I am. I may just be having an identity crisis.

Up until now I haven’t really evaluated how much drinking creates my identity, when I want to be chilled and laid back, I drink Toohey’s Old – apparently the drink of old men (an old man actually shook my hand vigorously at the Newmarket Hotel and shouted me a schooner of old because he was so impressed with my efforts) and Goon, my alternate choice is for when I wanna be frisky and loose. I have an image of myself, based on the drink I consume, and so does everyone else. Now that I don’t have Laid back Old and Super loose Goon to keen me company I’m “Sober Sadie, the Pathetic Lady”.. and this has an many ways effected how I build relationships now, sober.

HSM has taken me on an odd journey, for want of a less corny phrase, it has been quite the ‘path of enlightenment’. I’ve changed allot, a hell of allot. In many ways I haven’t, and it is more that, I feel that people’s view of me has changed. Sometimes I feel like I’m having to defend my HSM choice, I’’m getting some responses like “Well, fine that you chose not to drink, but I’m not a bad person because I’m drinking Mel” which I then have to take a big step back and explain that I’m doing this for myself and not so that I end up judging anyone else. That I’m not judging anyone else.

This is where making friends and ‘benefits’ becomes super tricky. So how is picking up without drinking? Or just making friends in general… Weird….

Being sober can be daunting for me, but more so I find that it is daunting for those around me. Telling people almost automatically puts me on the outer.  Allot of people have asked me how the whole ‘scoring’ thing goes when your sober.. and I’ll be honest, it’s unusual. When you’re sober you’re a “no go zone”, or worse, someone tells you “Mel, I actually really like you, but I don’t want to get hammered near you because I’ll feel uncomfortable and I’m worried I’ll make a huge dick out of myself” ah dilemma, DILEMMIA!

Another odd and very relevant point is that I in some ways, find myself second guessing the drinkers around me, even if they have only had one drink and when I have spent quality time with a drinker, I’m wondering how much of it was the booze talking.

And then there is the whole, wow, I just macked on with a drunk person, AWKWARD.

The problem with me right now, is im stuggling to like the person I am. It is not knowing, being scared of my life when I go back to drinking, at the moment, this is how I feel.  I want to go back to drinking, but for all of the wrong reasons, for example in some social situations, it really does make things,  A WHOLE LOT EASIER. I quizzed a mate about this (oddly enough the same mate who got all of this started) and he said that he “firmly believes that in every social situation, drinking makes things easier, why? Because drinking is such a huge part of our social make up, therefore, if you want to be accepted, you should have a drink.. or four…. As Australians, WE ARE a stubby of VB, Thongs and a Barbie…That’s how it rolls”.

It’s not that I want to go back to getting smashed, but I do believe that social drinking is a very integral and important part in our society; more so, it’s that at this stage, I’m finding it difficult to see my social life, without alcohol. I like everything HSM has given me, but the part I need is really superficial, I can’t justify drinking because of my relationships with other people.. why can’t I form relationships without alcohol? I want to drink to form relationships but this goes against what I am trying to create by doing HSM for my life, and others.

I have had a ball so far, and I have saved some serious CASHOLA! As all good things come, so must they go, and go they have, I toured the state (well, Central southern and eastern) with the dollars I would have spent on beers, I clocked up some km’s on the car, 2786kms.  Wagga Wagga, Junee, Bethungra, Cootamundra,  Young,  Koorawatha, Cowra, Blayney, Bathurst, Lithgow, Katoomba,  Sydney, Wollongong, Kiama, Berry, Bomaderry, Nowra, Sussex Inlet, Swan Lake, Tinjara Falls, Nerriga, Tarago, Bungendore, Queanbeyan, Holbrook, Albury and then Melbourne. Yeah, “I’ve been everywhere man”. Wow, we live in an Amazing country, anyone who doesn’t admire this place needs to leave, pronto! I’ve done some pretty extensive travelling of Australia as is, but HOLY MOLEY, there is always more to see, always more to discover and early mornings are the time to do it!

I survived my old mate Casey’s 21^st, under the cover of heavy makeup I dodged plenty of sideways comments “its Casey’s 21^st, how could you do this”… how indeed. I woke up early the next day, the only one in the house without a hang over!

When I got back to Albury I decided I’d weigh myself, with my goal of 6kgs to be lost by June 10^th, well on track with 4kgs lost so far.

I’ve sadly, but gladly learnt allot about my mates so far, apparently some people don’t want to know you when you’re not drinking anymore, some of my mates haven’t even given me one iota of support, some have found it hard to even remember why I’m not drinking. But on the flip side, out of the woodwork have come some amazing friends who have themselves been completely blown away by my HSM quest and are completely supportive (maybe it’s all the free rides?)

There’s a few places which you’ll never get people going sober, and one of those is the strippers, unless you’re highly desensitised or stupid. Seeing as we all know I’m stupid, we’ll assume it was stupidity which lead me to ‘Kittens’ in Melbourne’s CBD Recently. After a night of celebration for a mate of mines 25^th, we decided it would be a great idea to shout him a few beers at a ‘seedy’ strip club, and boy was I in for a shock! The only sober supporter I was pleased with my free entry, took a deep breath and braved the dark corridor into ‘Kittens’ to be greeted by barbarians and boobs. I’m going to be 100% honest here, it was great. Forget about the girls, what about the guys! So many revoltingly drunk men staring it scantly clad women can bring a smile to any sober persons face.

And finally, the crème de la crème of my HSM experience, my friends see me as a massive extroverted, noisy and irritating individual. I have never experienced much poor self esteem, except, strangely enough, on Sundays. It had been quite the group joke for a while that we all needed partners, but only on Sundays (when we felt depressed and alone). It’s taken me 7 Sundays to realised that, I haven’t woken up depressed for a while now, and I’ll harbour a guess that it’s exactly because I haven’t had any drunk downers. Further to this, the last 7 weekends have helped me to figure out that I don’t need alcohol to be confident, in actual fact I think I’m more confident without alcohol, I can only explain it like this, when I’m drinking I have the ‘proper’ Mel inside my head saying “don’t act like a nong” and now I don’t have that voice of etching doubt, I can be confident about my actions and the hardest part is trying to explain my actions without using alcohol as a justification. Friends and family, I really am just this crazy, always have been, it never was the alcohol at all.

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I grew up as a pretty standard citizen, I volunteered in some council run youth initiatives, which helped to provide cheap, drug and alcohol free events for under 18’s. I played plenty of sports, Netball, Basketball, Swimming, and Ballet.

The general feel from most kids around town is that there really is not much to do, now personally I think this is a cop out, but I’m 22 (since last week), I have my own car and have had my licence since I was 16, and my parents always allowed me to travel, finding things to do wasn’t difficult for me, I got out, I holidayed, most kids don’t have the luxuries I was granted and so this is where our drinking culture begins.. For allot of kids in Albury, you start drinking early, my first social drinking occasion (which my parents didn’t know about) was when I was 13, it was a house party, unsupervised at a mate from schools house. It resulted in oceans of vomit, burnt legs, toasting toast on the heater in the morning and finally, getting grounded. It was great fun, a freedom that as a young teenager I found exciting. From here it was a plethora of underage parties and sneaking ‘Redbear’ cans and any other alcohol you could skim off your parents stash.

If you ask my parents, they will say that my brother and I have been good kids, we have never gotten in any trouble, never called them in the middle of the night from an unknown location, never come home so intoxicated we can’t walk and never brought the police home, but we were ratbags. It’s fair to assume that Mum and Dad didn’t always know what was going on in my brothers and my life, but they always knew where we would be, who we would be with and that our phones would be on.

Drinking underage is a huge thing in Albury, I don’t want to fall into the trap of saying every kid does it, but a fair few do and it seems that this is very much a ‘graduation’. I don’t know anyone in Albury who waited until 18 to get drunk.

Paddy's Bar, Saint Pat's Day

Stupidity...It helps a little.

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On Tuesday, I passed out at work. The worst thing was that I was in the middle of a PEG (Percutaneous Endoscopic Gastronomy) and PEJ (Percutaneous Jejunostomy Gastronomy) Tube feed training, basically they are tubes surgically inserted into the body, mostly inside the abdominal wall “which provide convenient delivery of ‘Enteral Nutrition’” or liquid food. I LOVE how amazing medicine is and how far it has come, so I’m sitting, attentively listening to the coordinator talk about wiggling tubes and festering wounds when I start to feel a little hot, it’s important to know, that normally, I’m the queen of avoiding queasy, I can handle bodily fluids like an Eskimo handles ice. So I start to feel a little warm, and then the hotness turns to the definite feeling of either a good spew or a pass out, I quickly excuse myself and make a mad dash for reception, I make it that far before laying on the ground, I then realise I’m the welcoming parade for anyone walking in and I get a co-worker to help me to the kitchen. I wake up a few mins later thinking I’ve wet my pants and feeling like I’ve been swimming in a pool of someone else’s body odour with my shirt hitched up around my boobs, (why the hell am I so wet and unsatisfied).

I took a wonderfully expensive trip to the hospital in an ambulance to be poked and prodded and asked questions like “are you 100% sure you’re not pregnant”.

When I arrive back at work I’m getting the same questions as well as the side comments “so Mel, big long weekend on the sauce huh”?

I spoke to my Dad about it a few days later, (my Dad’s a really blasé man, for example when the last cyclone went through Mackay, Dad went about his usual day and relaxed while everyone else fussed over taping up windows, “It probably won’t hit us”) anyhow, so Dad’s not at all worried about me passing out, but does ask, “have you been replacing the alcohol with anything else”? I hadn’t, I hadn’t even considered that I should replace the sugar I usually had with anything else and to make matters worse I had actually been drinking a whole lot less of crappy drinks in an effort to be healthy.

So I pose the question to my doctor, and sure enough he thinks it is “very plausible” that the cause of my sweaty and somewhat revealing pass out would be caused by lack of sugar usually found within my alcoholic drinks of choice.

Note to self – start drinking more fruit juice.

On the Saturday I learnt all about what energy drinks really do to your body, brace yourself for some mel-o-drama.

I decided I would have a can of a popular energy drink, I was feeling a little bored and tired and needed abit of a pep up, I normally don’t drink this stuff at all and I was about to find out why. For starters, it actually tastes pretty terrible, secondly, its frickin’ expensive and thirdly its effects (which are normally masked by my drunken state) are not all that pleasant. After one can I felt terrible, my heart was racing, I was far too alert for my liking, and I felt like having a massive spew. About 45 mins later I was at home and after trying to drink lots and lots of water I actually had a little spew. I don’t know if this would normally happen but basically I’ve decided if it makes me feel bad without alcohol then chances are I shouldn’t drink it with alcohol anymore.

Hello Sunday Morning this week has taught me a few more things. Remember to stay healthy, and energy drinks aren’t for everyone.

My first week of HSM has been intriguing, but somewhat mundane.

About two days in I found myself daydreaming in the bathroom, when all of a sudden I had this semi panic attack, I’ve never been one for this kind of drama, however clearly I hadn’t really evaluated the extent of THREE WHOLE ENTIRE MONTHS of not one single drop of alcohol (unless I gargled a hell of allot of Savacol), I found myself thinking, ‘far out what have I possibly committed to’, ‘there really is no going back now’, and the worst part is I have to blog it, really blog it, for real, on the internet!!!  I can now sort of understand how Dad might have gotten to this point and backed out, he had a few false starts, I’m facing three months, Dad faced life.
Needless to say the optimist in me took over and I managed to convince myself that I was really over thinking this and surely it could just be a walk in the park.
But on the other hand I am still hanging out at the end of week one reminding myself that I have actually never ever quit anything before, this is the first time I have actually had to give something up.

The next saga of the week was telling everybody, I got some goodies, the first notable response was from a mate who responded with; “Hey Shorty, wanna come for a drink? ON THE MOON”, closely followed by,  “don’t you just find that all the most amazing things pop up when you go on a dry”. An acquaintance at the pub looked at me remorsefully, grabbed my shoulders and asked, “why, are you okay? What’s wrong? Are you sick?”, she was actually serious, no one in their right mind would surely give up alcohol for any period of time unless they were sick right? “you’re on antibiotics aren’t you, don’t lie”. But all in all the big surprise came from my closest mates boyfriend, footy jock, cultural can crusher, drowning drunk, the boys boy, he was all for this new adventure of mine, gave me a whole heap of encouragement and even suggested a few tips for getting Hello Sunday Morning out there.

I decided I’d head out on the town, take it all in for once, sober, Albury has 7 drinking based establishments in the main street, all within walking distance of each other, until recently we had a few more, some went broke, I wonder how in a town this pissy, but you never know I suppose. One burnt down a few years back and the others are pretty much all within walking distance of the main, so in total you have an easy 15 places to drink in the CBD including Clubs, plus more in outer suburbs.
I made an effort to go to a few places, on Sunday after watching a preseason practice match of the footy, I headed to a local nightclub, no beer in hand and no beer goggles, I was mortified, the male to female ratio was alarming, at a guess 25:1, I bailed quick smart!

On Saturday I headed out and the first thing I noticed was a massive amount of security present in the street, I’d never really noticed this before, I headed to my regular spot ‘Paddy’s Irish Bar’ or ‘The New Albury’ their slogan is ‘Paddy’s, the place to be’, it was packed out, Art v Science were playing and they had reached capacity, so this meant a nice wait in the line and some visual entertainment in the form of some idiotic ‘flat brimmers’ trying to get into the pub without ID (the new craze in town, buy a flat brim cap, talk like a toss) .

Once inside I actually had a blast, it was nice just to be the observer for a change, I caught myself wondering if I’m normally as pissy in public of if I hold myself better.
I popped home at 3.30am before getting the dessy call, apparently it is now my ‘civic’ duty to ensure my drunken friends make it home safely, quite funny when you consider that I drive a Honda Civic.

While waiting for my mates to get into the car, I watched a guy who was a couple of years below me  at school, scream at a taxi driver while kicking the car and spitting at some passersby. There’s something about watching some innocent quiet kid from the front row of your roll call, making an idiot of himself, being publically violent and abusive that makes your skin crawl. I don’t know if I normally would have noticed this kind of thing if I was drunk?

Being out on the town this week really made me assess the safety of Albury, It’s been a long time since I’ve walked the 6kms home at the end of the night with my heels in hand, and more recently I’ve wondered if it has been really safe to stand in the taxi line and wait an hour to get home, but it really really gets me thinking, now that I have seen it all without my trusty ‘lexia lenses’.

Overall, for the first week, much of what I expected to happen, has happened, but some things have cropped up which I didn’t expect, mainly the presence of violence and safety of my home town. Maybe, as sad as it sounds I’m going out with my eyes open for the first time and that’s why things are creeping up on me.

An intersection on the main street of Albury, which is now complete with Security.

I began my Hello Sunday Morning journey in October 2009, well, it was a false start, I intended on starting HSM but I didn’t want to commit to being locked into the obligation of not drinking, partly because I would be obligated, and being obligated would make it harder, also because I would miss plenty of ‘big’ events, more so, miss out on drinking at these big events. Now I’ve decided it’s an inevitable part of my HSM journey,  that I will miss out on drinking at a number of social events, regardless of when I start.

Alcohol, for me, is a social lubricant, I can survive without it but I suppose like everyone I do drink to feel included, mainly weekends, but I also have my mid week drinks, and the occasional after work piss-up. Drinking is something I’ve always had around me,  My father was an alcoholic, because of this I’m the luckiest person I know.

Despite my Dads choices (no, not mistakes, just life) my brother and I never went without, we were given the best chance at every opportunity available, we have both been able to learn and mature greatly from our experiences. A big part of our exposure to alcohol was respect, Dad knew he had a problem and he always explained that with any addictive substance, when you use it, you have to learn how to respect it, and if you ever forget, you might end up like him.

In 1999 my Dad set off, 2313.4 km’s north, to Townsville to attend a rehab centre. Dad was alcohol free for 3 years, and oddly addiction free for 11 years.  Part of my HSM journey is being able to somehow have some idea, a true respect and appreciation of some of what an addict, my Dad, had to go through and experience, socially and emotionally, it’s important for me, even if it is only an extremely small part of what addicts struggle with.

While I’m with the HSM crew I also want to reclaim my weekends (I haven’t been getting out in the bush nearly enough) and lose 6kgs (3 months should be plenty of time).

Back to the BIG things I’ll miss while being with HSM, the things I’m worried ill have more false starts over; holidays with my old flat mates, my 22^nd birthday,  my old mate Casey’s 21^st, gigs in Melbourne, May holidays, almost every AFL football match of the season!

Will my Hello Sunday Morning experience be like a fad diet? Will I be cheating on the side?  Hopefully no false starts…