Hello Steemit,

My name is @brandt ketterer

and I’d just like to say thanks for reading my nonsense Steemit blog.

Today’s nonsense blog will be different,

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because today is my birthday.

I am 35 years old today.

Here is what I’m drinking:

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Would you just look at that marvelosity right there. Bell’s Two Hearted is delicious. An outstanding ale. Two Thumbed up. Good job, Michigan, you done real good. I was at Bell’s Brewery a really long time ago, way back when I lived in Chicago and made a living by writing nonsense marketing copy for Groupon. Me and a fellow beer-enthusiast coworker made the drive one weekend to Founders in Grand Rapids and we figured, hey, since we’re all the way out here, why not go down to Kalamazoo, too. So we did. Long story, doesn’t matter.

What matters is

that this — drinking a beer, relaxing with a beer after a nice long snowshoe hike in the mountains, maybe even writing a review about a beer — this would all be great, this would all be fine and normal and an okay thing for someone to be doing on a Saturday evening, especially if that Saturday evening happened to be their birthevening, it would all be boy-howdy fine and dandy if not for

the addiction.

I’ve been drinking for too many years to count. No, that’s not true, that’s a lie, I’ve been drinking for almost exactly 10 years now. I can count to 10. It’s too many years. That’s correct, I didn’t start drinking until I was 25. Long story, doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’ve known it was a problem since almost the beginning, but I couldn’t stop, because addiction. I’ve tried to stop dozens of times. My record is 88 days, set last year, but that was an extreme outlier. Usually I couldn’t go more than a week. Even getting to a week was a minor miracle. I can leave drinking alone, for a little while, but I always come back to the bottle.

When I was young they told me that god was the answer, but when I was older I started thinking for myself, and I realized the lie and told religion it could just very well go off and fuck itself. Problem is, I had sabotaged my foundation, and I could find no solid ground to stand on anymore, no stable system to support existence, and so I got lost, and eventually,

enter alcohol.

For years I’ve been standing on the edge — striving to find the light at the end of the tunnel, only to find it and then watch it flicker out and die — misleading people about my mental health — feeling like a miserable failure despite my successes — and living in hell every single day of my goddamn drunken nonsense life.

10 years is long enough. It’s time to stop.

So now I stop, Steemit.

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Hello from the high Rockies of Colorado. My name is Brandt. Thanks for reading. More to come.