Abstinence
January is turning out to be a very puritan month. A worrying amount of people have announced some form of abstinence in the past two days. But I have a very busy work and social life, what with me being decidedly important and popular. My calendar is like a pyramid, blocks of activity, piled up, piled up again, and reaching a pointy crescendo at the top, but (as far as I know) without a moth-eaten corpse at the bottom. Therefore, I have little time available to abstain from stuff. Other than going to the gym or eating greens, Abstinences from which I have turned into an art form.
But I feel left out – when everyone else gets to the end of the month and reward themselves with that vodka/cigarette/cake/fondle they have cut out of their lives for the prior 31 days, what am I going to do? I could just double my vice intake? Take one for the team, and toast them while I do. Or, maybe I could just find new ones? Indulging in sillier and more mortally dangerous vices as the months roll-on. To the point that by Spring I’ll be naked and out of my mind, teetering somewhere between a stool and a light-shade?
I’ll probably do neither, and just carry on with the service that saw me through 2011. Ignoring the smugness of abstainers that is scarcely bearable. What’s to be impressed with? They’ve drank/smoked/snorted themselves into a mess so silly that now they are starving themselves of it.
There is of course the option of abstaining myself of the abstainers, till February 1st. When no doubt they’ll be so smug that they’ll be only be capable of talking to me when standing on a plinth whilst being echoed by a choir.
