The Little Demon logoThe Little Demon
on My Shoulder
Notes on alcohol, my head and what happens next

The Little Demon on My Shoulder

Written while I still don't know how this ends.

Start readingLatest: Ten Hours Sleep and Some Strange Dreams
Detail of one of my paintings: dark gold and copper, thick with texture, with glowing shapes rising through it.
Detail of one of my paintings.
01 / Why I'm here

I started writing things down.

I became addicted to alcohol. After something changed in my head, I started writing down what was going on in it.

Thoughts. Questions. Memories. The arguments I had been making to myself for years. Sometimes just something that occurred to me while I was making coffee.

It helped. That is why I kept doing it. I analyse everything, and now I'm trying to understand this.

Why I'm writing this
02 / The little demon

The argument in my own head.

The little demon is my name for the part of me that could always construct an argument for alcohol. Somewhere along the way I started calling him Gollum. G for short. Then I became Sméagol. S.

G and S are both me. The circumstances change. The conclusion doesn't.

You had a good game. You did a healthy thing. You are allowed a drink.
Hey, it's Friday. Have a drink at the end of a long week. That's completely normal.

S: Emm, no. Not for me it's not.

You've done your first AA. Surely that's worth a wee reward.
Everything G says
03 / The writing so far

The tip of the iceberg.

By fifteen or sixteen days without alcohol, I had already written far more than you can see here. These entries are a small part of those notes. I'm planning to keep writing for at least a year.

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A Note Before I StartBefore you begin · 1 min readWhy I started writing, who G and S are, and why the contradictions stay in the notes.
 •
I Don't Know How This EndsPrologue · 3 min readThe night something clicked. Written from inside it, without knowing how the story ends.
 2
The Demon Changes Its ArgumentEntry Two · 3 min readA few days after the click, the demon stopped saying "get drunk" and started saying "you've earned it".
 7
I Don't Want to Be an AlcoholicEntry Seven · 2 min readA few days after writing "I am an alcoholic" to my wife, I started objecting to the word.
 11
Bye DaddyEntry Eleven · 1 min readSomething from that Friday night that keeps coming back to me.
 •
Ten Hours Sleep and Some Strange DreamsJournal · 1 min readTen hours sleep, a CCTV dream, and a message that never arrived.
Browse all the writing
04 / As it happens

I don't want to write the clever version afterwards.

I will probably contradict myself. I might understand something differently later. I want the notes to keep what I thought at the time, including the things I might eventually decide were complete pish.

There is no finished ending here. I'm writing while it's happening, and nothing gets made up. That includes being honest that I use AI to help me write it.

How this is written
05 / Follow along

More thoughts to come.

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