Dry January. Why Try Dry?

I just finished another eight hour shift from hell. The manager is on vacation, we're under staffed, payroll has been dramatically cut for the first quarter and people are still pouring in for more and more groceries. I've had it. I'm hungry and surly. I hate this f#$&ing diet and I really, really want a beer.

Welcome to Dry January. The poet who said “April is the cruelest month” never tried to go stone cold sober for the month of January while dieting. It really, really sucks. Or as my wife said five days into it, “This is way too hard. I quit.”

In years past, I've quit too. I figure my batting average for this tradition since I started it about 5 years ago is about .500. Last year,I think I barely made it a week on the alcohol part. This year, however, I'm determined to hang tough, not only to exercise some will power, self-discipline and detox, but to restore some sanity to the incredible consumption machine that has become our lives.

We have too much in this country. We consume too much. We made no sacrifices or compromises in our daily lives. I see it every day in the grocery store: grocery cart after grocery cart filled to the brim with meat, junk food and sweet treats pushed by increasingly obese people-- many whom have become so fat that we now provide them motorized transport around the store to enable them to buy more food and become even fatter. It's insane.

We are a society out of balance.

Throughout history, we've always had feast days. A day every season we put aside to celebrate life, harvest, family, spirit and food. Every society and religion had this. In a simpler more agrarian society where subsistence was the measure of success and three square meals was never a given or even the norm, a day of feasting really meant something. It was special. Even then, however, there was a balance. Along with feast days, every major religion had fasting days. Days of self-deprivation, of contemplation and of penance. There was a balance.

Today, in mainstream American life, we don't have that. Everyday is a feast day topped with super deluxe feast days. It's a new tradition fed by huge corporate interests that have created a new feasting industry. There's big profit in eating, drinking and consumption. Fasting... not so much. Subsequently we've created this machine that just demands increasingly amounts of consumption with no discipline, restraint or balance. And we, obediently, pull up to the table and keep shoveling it in.

Koyaanisqatsi the Hopi call it. Lives out of balance.

I can't fix society. Increasingly I don't seem to have much steering over my own life. But my Dry January is my own small attempt at balancing one small aspect of my Koyaanisqatsi. After the excesses we call the holiday season, a month of hard diet and sobriety is hard, but it's the least I can give. It's small enough penance for the wasteful life I lead.