The ten o’clock hour was approaching. We would soon have to put away our phones and pay attention to…well, it didn’t matter what we paid attention to as long as it wasn’t our phones. On Thursday night at Aunt Charlies, that was the rule.

This rule was by order of the evening’s deejay. I’m not sure what the reason was behind it. Maybe he wanted to create an atmosphere of a simpler time. There is evidence to support this. His musical selection was disco and the posters he hung on the walls were scenes from cruisy bars in the pre-AIDS 1970s that featured men sporting Tom of Finland fashions and Barry Gibb hair. Then again, perhaps the deejay was just a fascist attention whore.

A bigger question might be why I was hanging out there. Not because it’s a gay bar. I already had that worked out. No, the question was why an unapologetic smartphone junkie such as myself would willingly deprive himself of his Wikipedia and Google fix.

There were two answers for that. One was that I had been going out every night so one more wouldn’t hurt plus I had just blogged so celebration was in order. The second was I wanted to write something scathing (or at least pissy) about these anti-smartphone scolds and figured close proximity to one of them might give me some insights.

I had been to Aunt Charlies on the first Thursday of January and managed to stay well past 10 pm. That excursion too came on the heels of posting to my blog. The difference was that on that night, I wanted to stay off my phone as I was fast approaching the limit on my data plan before getting hit with an overage fee.

On this past Thursday though, there was no data-usage crisis so insights be damned, I decided to bail. I took BART back to the hood and went to Mission Bar where nobody gives a shit what you do with your phone.

It should have been a slice of heaven, but it wasn’t. I wasn’t too far into my first drink there when I realized that I just wanted to go home. I had no complaints against the bartender or the bar. I had just hit my saturation point and was sick of it all.

That’s what launched me on my journey through the next four nights of near sobriety. I wasn’t completely on the wagon. I had a glass of wine at home on Saturday night and another one on Sunday, but there was no scotch, no bars, and no walking through the Tenderloin hoping its crusty denizens congregating on street corners would leave me the hell alone.

So what did I do? Mostly I hung out at home and binge watched “Bojack Horseman” with Rebecca. She was taking a breather from barfly duties as well so we got to enjoy each other’s company as homebodies.

I have a number of friends who have given up drinking for good. They each had their own reasons and from what I can see, it was a wise decision for every one of them. I may have to go that route one day myself, but I hope I don’t.

I enjoy the dissipation of seedy bars and drink. I just don’t have it in me to pursue it full time. Or even most of the time as was the case in my liver-spanking heyday. Now I need to periodically step back, let my triglycerides drop, and brace myself for what a lack of alcohol does to my brain.

For the most part, it’s the dreams that ambush me. I don’t know if the Terri Schiavo cerebral flatline of booze-brain slumber creates a backlog of things to dream about or if it just erodes my ability to deal with what my psyche throws at me when the dreams return. All I know is that first night has me jolted awake in the wee hours feeling a little traumatized by a combination of personal demons and plain old weird shit.

So I guess you could say I get high on life. Tripping balls on life also works. Overall, these little spells of sobriety or near sobriety do me a world of good. It’s like rebooting a computer. You don’t know what it does exactly, but it sure does something.

The benefits are subtle because the nights when I do misbehave are not too extreme. On weekends, this means getting up early and walking to Trash Muddy’s with a spring in my step rather than stumbling into the kitchen and get my coffee from the Keurig with its individual plastic containers to rape the Earth with each serving.

On work days, the current presence or absence of a hangover (really a hangover lite) has more to do with how I feel than any impact on my job performance. If I tied one on the night before, I may blink a few more times while putting a thought together, but that’s about it. Gone are the days when I would duck into the restroom and have the dying-allosaurus sounds of my dry heaves echo throughout the office.

I wonder if there is something akin to AA for people who want to stop drinking, but only for a short while. The Big Book would be excessive.  A flashcard would do. Much smaller poker chips would be awarded for staying sober a couple of days, or perhaps just a few hours. (The poker-chip thing has always struck me as a bit odd. Are members of Gamblers Anonymous awarded mini bottles of booze? But I digress.)

The funny thing about moderation is that it too should be done in moderation. Tuesday evening was upon me. Soon enough I would be perched on a barstool and having well scotch work its magic upon my brain. It would be worth braving the elements and the walk through the sketchy neighborhood to get there. I put on my boots and headed out the door, secure in the knowledge that a thousand miles of going in circles begin with a single step.