Everyday Chemicals; Experiments in Abstinence

Oh, the substances that make up our life, who would we be without them? A humorous exploration of a serious question.

—

About a year ago, I started conducting chemistry experiments on myself. Nothing too alarming: I would just eliminate a food category from my diet, and then monitor my life for effects of its deletion. I’d start a new experiment on the first of the month, and do my level best to avoid that substance for the requisite 30 or 31 days. One month was meat, one month was carbs, another month was alcohol, you get the idea.

But in case you don’t, please let me clarify: these eliminations weren’t additive; I didn’t swear off meat AND carbs AND alcohol, finding myself a skinny, low-energy, soft-spoken monk after three months. No, I had my vices take turns being off, one by one, like rides under repair at the amusement park.

I was hoping the effects of the eliminations would be dramatic. Like I’d go off gluten and suddenly find that I could turn invisible and pass through solid objects. Or I’d stop snacking at night in front of the TV and wake up in two weeks with an authentic Russian accent and a catchy diminutive handle like “Nikita”. But sadly the effects were largely unnoticeable, revealing themselves with little fanfare as minor modifications to the consistency of my poop.

There are two exceptions. The first was the month I avoided carbohydrates — carbs, we lovingly know them as — including almost every enjoyable food substance from popcorn to Greek potatoes, as well as all three good things about chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. I even ate sushi without rice, which is harder than it sounds because there’s nothing for the soy and wasabi to soak into and it feels like I’m chewing on something I should be French kissing. My wife who’s mildly entertained by my new weird hobby told me at the start of that month that going low-carb is, quote, “the Thomas Kinkade of diets”, but I powered through despite any opportunity for dignity.

◊♦◊

Actually, to be honest, I cheated on the carb thing. In my defense, I had to cheat. It happened because, chemically speaking, there are very few carbohydrates in distilled alcohol. Apparently this was taught to me during either high school or college chemistry class, one I was likely sleeping through, even more likely due to having over-indulged the night before.

As I understand it, alcohol is formed by the fermentation of carbohydrates — sugarcane in rum, potatoes in vodka, agave in tequila — and the higher the resulting alcohol content, the fewer remaining carbs in the happy beverage. So even though I was on a low-carb diet, I found permission from very official looking chemistry textbooks to enjoy as much distilled alcohol as I wanted. But in the same way that the air we breathe has three times as much nitrogen as oxygen, my drinking indulgences rely on a similar ratio of carbs to alcohol. I will explain.

Out with friends one night that month, I avoided my usual sugar-enhanced, Polynesian-themed cocktails for straight bourbon. And three hours in, I discovered a surprising truth about my middle-age experience: squaring off against bartenders these recent years, I’ve unknowingly had copious sugar content reinforcing my combat, perhaps even coaching me ringside with Irish accented outbursts like that snarl-toothed old coot in the Rocky movies. Despite the ridiculous calorie content of my whiskey drinks, without the sugar lifting my wings I could feel my nervous system collapsing like a helicopter struggling to stay airborne while gallons of I’d-like-to-think bourbon-colored, industrial-grade epoxy was being poured onto the rotor blades by an angry but resourceful supervillain. I didn’t drink myself into unconsciousness that night, but I could see that place from where I ended up.

◊♦◊

I was very happy to get my carbs back at month’s end, but one other chemistry experiment was even more notable than this one. Let me just say it simply: caffeine is, without question, my favorite psychoactive chemical. Sorry tetrahydrocannabinol, it’s me not you. I didn’t quit cold turkey — it would flummox my experimental data gathering if I killed the patient outright — I walked it off: a day or two of a single cup in the morning, then adjusted down to a single cup half-caff, then decaf only. I can tell how much I missed caffeine I by how much I read about it online, day after day, like chasing down the social media content of an absent lover. A normal cup of coffee has about 150 milligrams of caffeine, a Hershey-sized bar of dark chocolate has about 30 milligrams, and a cup of decaf has about 5. So including my coffee habits and chocolate-themed religion, I was coming down from about 800 milligrams of caffeine a day. To about ten.

The effects were enormous and terrifying. The first few days were painful, of course, what’s commonly referred to as “caffeine headaches”. It’s a unique type of headache, though, as if an angry soldier has hurriedly crammed their adult-sized army blanket behind your eye sockets. But my usual headache remedy is sleep, and sleep was ready and bountiful that whole month. I napped like it was an Olympic event and I was Usian Bolt, just very, very still. I slept the sleep of the dead, and it reminded me of that time I went to bed after fortifying my weekend night-out with a Phenedrine tablet and I woke up understanding that, although I technically slept, a portion of my brain had been up all night, playing Sudoku, arguing the social contract with Antonin Scalia, and scrapbooking. Sleep in the decaf month was the physiological opposite of Phenedrine non-sleep: I took mental systems offline that have been running at capacity since I figured out how to pee standing up.

◊♦◊

A few weeks into my caffeine month I was better adjusted. I was nailing an unbelievably solid eight hours of sleep a night, and I felt both as rejuvenated and as proud of it as if I had been finishing my wife off with screaming climax every night. I was a man’s man, a big sleeping baby of a damn man. I also learned, as that last odd paragraph demonstrates, that I am a competitive sleeper.

But there were downsides. The most obvious of which was my inability to multi-task. I was walking the neighborhood with my wife one night after dinner, and I was thinking about something that happened at work earlier that day. Quick thought-process inventory: that’s two things. Then my wife asked me a question, something about the kids, maybe about summer camp plans coming up in a few months. And — whump — system scramble, and I almost fell over. Literally, my legs simply abandoned their role in the walking process, mid-step mind you, and I very nearly fell over, ass over tea kettle. How many licks to the center of the tootsie roll pop? Yes, three. That was too many simultaneous thought-processes in my head that month. I started paying a lot more attention to what I was doing and what people were saying to me for the rest of that month, as I was worried that if I started day-dreaming while someone was speaking to me, I was risking the integrity of my cardiac rhythms. It was as if someone had uninstalled VMWare from my internal data center, and the handful of processes that I collectively understand as “being conscious” we’re running on bare metal.

There was another strange effect as well, one I had to talk over with my brother-in-law. He’s a recovering alcoholic, 23 years sober, and a fantastic resource for a conversation about many things, including both addiction and self-awareness. He’s also rather chatty; he once said that, like Al-Anon, there’s a special twelve-step program for people like him who talk too much: GoOnAndOn-Anon. Anyhow, the lack of caffeine was changing me so much — my lack of ability to multi-task, traded in for a new-found but tragic capability to pay attention to boring people that talk to me slowly — that I became worried about how much I would change. What if I kept changing, I asked him, would I even like who I became? What if caffeine was the underlying bedrock of my whole personality, like the three-hundred year old timbers that support Boston’s back bay, the ones I heard that crumble into woodsy nothing when removed from the seawater and exposed to air?

My brother-in-law had been there, of course. And he confessed that it was once a huge obstacle to his sobriety. It takes support and courage built over time to face that question, he told me, not just “who am I on the other side?”, but “do I even want to be that person?”.

◊♦◊

I was reminded of my whole decaf experience recently, having just returned from a week-long writer’s workshop in Big Sur, California. It was led by a well-known female author with a singularly powerful voice, and resultantly many of the workshop attendees were people for whom that voice resonates. Said another way: the male attendees at that workshop were outnumbered fifteen-to-one by the women that week.

When I got home, I had dozens of anecdotes to share with my wife, who stayed home with the kids and the puppy and the cats, and had gotten everything ready for our family vacation coming up the following week.

“So, what were the women like?” was one of her first questions. We were clearing up the kitchen after dinner, and I paused for a moment trying to phrase it accurately.

“Everyone had aspects that were normal and ordinary, as well as aspects that were shocking and amazing,” I said. “Hopefully including me. But many of the women told me they enjoyed hearing a male perspective on some of the more intense things that came up.”

“Like what?”

“Like … broken trust, obsessions, grief. Almost everyone brought the ghost of a parent with them. One of the women in our group shared a funny, bittersweet piece about menopause, and we spoke about it later.”

“Feh,” she huffed, suddenly slightly more defensive than she probably intended. “What would you know about menopause.”

I shut up, and silently watched her in profile as she worked at the kitchen sink, rinsing some dinner plates with slightly less caution than a few moments earlier. I stepped backward, perceptually, not physically, and looked at her closely. I noticed on her arms the small discolored patches that started fading in a few years ago, ruining what used to be a perfect uniformity of her delicious nakedness. I noticed the tension in her jaw, the weakening shape of the skin there and along her neck. I saw the faint lines stretching backwards from her eye corner, disappearing under her reddish-bronze hair that I know would be much, much different but for the magic of her colorist. I saw her feet pressing firmly on the floor in a heavy-heeled way that a young woman’s feet simply do not. I saw the curve of her shoulders lilt with the faintest suggestion of a heavy, misshapen burden. She looked hard into the soapy water, down, down, down.

I moved to her, gently pulled her hands from the water, and turned her to face me. I held her wet hands as they dripped helplessly on the kitchen floor. The eyes I have seen so many times sparkle with a radiant happiness that once I could only imagine making a woman feel were looking at me now with sadness, and shame, and resentment. Not resentment towards me, but towards the stupid feminine molecules which have chosen to abandon her, a terrifically unwelcome chemistry experiment. Who will she become? Will she even like herself?

I held her in silence for several moments, looking into her eyes intently, willing the darkness to flee, struggling for words. And what came to mind was a Brian Andreas piece we have decorating a bedroom wall in our home. It’s a playful sculpture inscribed with these words: “Someday, the light will shine like a sun through my skin & they will say, What have you done with your life? & though there are many moments I think I will remember, in the end, I will be proud to say, I was one of us.”

I held onto her there in the kitchen. “I am one of us,” I said, squeezing her hands.

“I.” squeeze “Am one.” squeeze-squeeze “Of us.” squeeze.

She nodded, her tears that slipped sadly across her cheeks a few moments before now touching the top of a smile. Our secret world, her incredible character, irresistible.

Next month: dairy.

Would you like to help us shatter stereotypes about men?
Receive stories from The Good Men Project, delivered to your inbox daily or weekly.

—

Photo: Getty Images