Before and After

A while back someone made some snarky offlist (private email) comments to me that I exaggerate about how "bad" I was.   This picture was taken about a year and a half ago at a going away party for some of our friends in MX. You'll need to click on it and enlarge it to get the full scarey effect.  What do you think?  The photo was snapped by my lovely brother-in-law, Danny, I'd kill him but he's actually done me a favor by capturing this shot in time.  Danny and my other brother-in-law, Scott, had come for a first visit to our casa down there and we were going to Carnival in Merida.  This was taken before we went to Carnival, can you imagine what I looked like after Carnival,(there are pics but I'll spare you and me), can you imagine what I'd look like today if I'd kept drinking.

As you can see by the light pouring into the doors at the front of the bar, this is not in the wee hours of the morning, if I recall, this was taken about 5:30 in the afternoon, and as you can see by the capn's face and by, well, me, it is way past time for me to go home.  I was supposed to go home and fix some elaborate meal I had planned for my brothers-in-law, instead I went home and passed out.  I'd actually dried out in advance of the planned visit, but I blew it a couple of days before and this is me in drinking just to appear normal and avoid withdrawal mode, how do you think I'm doing?  Pretty pitiful, huh?  Gotta love that hair and that belly.

That's my friend, Karen, singing karaoke in the background (she's English and she's probably singing her favorite anthem, Tom Jones' Delilah), we call her the energizer bunny.  She's the life of the party and she wears us out.  I was her ten years ago.  She likes her beer but I don't think she'll ever end up looking like me in this picture because she has too many other passions in her life, drinking isn't her main one, as it has always been for me.

Although it may be hard to believe, I was actually pretty far along in my journey to sobriety at this point, this was when I was doing my damnedest to moderate.  As I've said, I never got much better at moderating, as this picture is proof of, but I got better at abs'ing and it was about four months after this picture was taken that I decided to permanently abs.  If Danny had shown me this picture earlier I might have given it up then but he didn't show me this until a few months ago.

 I think he was keeping it in case he needed to blackmail me at some point.

 He's back in my good graces now though, he redeemed himself by taking another pic of me a month or so ago at a nephew's wedding.  I don't like many pictures of me, but I'm pretty proud of this one.  I think it says, "If I can do it, you can do it."

What do you think?  (That's me in the middle, in case you couldn't tell. Oh, and that's just diet pepsi in the cup)