Dry (Fourth of) July

Y'all. I just celebrated Independence Day sans booze, for the first time since I could legally drink, I'm certain, and probably for the first time in longer than that. And it didn't suck. Quite the opposite in fact. Turns out, if you go into a dry month from a positive place, and with a carefully curated mindset, it's pretty fucking cool to be sober. If you view it as masochistic deprivation....you get the point.

My brother, sister-in-law (and my arriving-soon nephew) went to see Journey and Def Leppard on July 3, and...let's just say being one of very few sober people at a rock concert is entertaining. The crowd was crazy, loud, happy and drunk. I was just the first three.

Here's the coolest part (and a big duh, I know): I remember the whole concert. Now, I don't usually get so shit-faced at concerts that I black out. But just a few drinks can surprisingly impair your memory of an event. And this was one I wanted to remember.

Background: When I was about 11 or 12, I started discovering music outside of what I found in my parents' record collection. (If you're young, yes, that's how we used to discover music, and yes, they were records. As in big, round, flat discs of black vinyl. It was cool. Trust me.) My favorite bands were Aerosmith, Def Leppard, Poison, Bon Jovi and Guns N Roses. (I'll take a second here to send up some thanks for the fact that I grew up pre-Tipper Gore and parental advisory warnings. Barely. Whew.) With this show, I have finally seen all of my original five live in concert. It was a very cool moment for me, the guys sounded (and looked - Phil Collen anyone??) amazing, and sharing it with my sibling made the whole thing even more special. Mother nature took it upon herself to provide one of the most stunning sunsets I've ever seen (see above), against a night that struck the perfect balance between warm and cool.

I thought long and hard about making an exception to my Dry July commitment for this trip. My brother and I didn't get along much until I got old enough to be his drinking buddy. Since I hit my 20s and started voluntarily hanging out with him, alcohol has been there too. It does not make us angry assholes at each other. It gives us something to talk about, and an anchor for showing each other around our respective places of residence (we haven't lived in the same town since 1989). We don't tend to get stupid and sloppy, but sharing a mutual love of IPAs is part of what we do. (And it will be again. I'm not becoming a teetotaler.)

But you know what? I went to three pubs with my brother on July 4, and didn't have a single beer. And you know what else? We had some amazing conversations while I drank club soda. He's about to become a dad, and me being the only other person on the planet who shares the experience of having been raised by our parents, there was a lot of retrospection going on. We both agree that we love our parents. But we also know that they're human, and they did some bizarre things during my and my brother's formative years. I truly believe they did the best they could and only with the best intentions, but there are things Mark doesn't want to repeat with his own son. This was deep y'all. We confided stories about things we still don't quite understand. We talked about music. We laughed. We left the bar well after midnight, and I got us home in one piece, with all my faculties intact.

I won't lie and say I had no twinges of wanting a beer. I did. But looking back, it was more a situational craving than an actual jones for the beer itself. The important things are my brother, and the conversation, and the music. The beer comes in last.