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In case you somehow hadn’t heard, this month is no longer just January. It’s now Dry January, a month in which people opt to give up alcohol for 31 days for complicated reasons such as drinking is bad for your brain and body, although it may make your body more attractive to others who are not participating in Dry January.

I don’t drink, so my experience of Dry January has mostly consisted of politely nodding along (read: nodding off) when people talked about it.

Until January 2024, that is. On New Year’s Day, I came down with a bug that became a two-week respiratory and sinus infection so bad it led me to do Weed-Free January, with cannabis, which I’d fallen into smoking nightly as a sleep aid after it was legalized 10 years ago.

I would not be confessing this if I hadn’t gotten so sick three weeks ago.

My illness kicked into high gear driving my daughter Lucy, a junior at the University of Oregon, back to school. We weren’t five minutes down the highway when she shouted, “Eww! What’s that smell?” from her seat a foot and a half from my ear. I figured she meant an odor coming from outside the car.

“Maybe they just repaved that weigh station back there,” I said. In January though?

“Maybe,” she said.

“Wait. Could it be my breath?”

It could be, and was. Like a road-meets-horror movie, the stench was coming from inside the car! I unearthed from the console a mask from two or three variants ago, and once again found myself breathing through semipermeable fibers as my nose ran and I tried to stifle my cough.

Back in Bend that night, I shivered and shuddered like I was doing a polar plunge in an off-balance washing machine as I brushed my teeth. Who needs an electric toothbrush?

For two weeks, I battled congestion on two fronts: Down south, my lungs emanated a foul rainbow of phlegm. Up north, I battled a sinus infection, I think. At least that’s how two coworkers diagnosed me after I told them of the yellow watery mucus draining from my nose like a busted urinal.

I know, I know. I shouldn’t seek medical advice from colleagues. In my defense, though, they never send me home with multiple referrals.

By Jan. 5, I was no longer willing to put my poor lungs through the nightly paces, and took the last toke of the cannabis I’d become reliant on to sleep soundly.

Lest you judge, I remind you cannabis has been legal for a decade in Oregon, and it was not I who signed it into law. Weed was an affordable, easy fix for the awful bouts of insomnia I’d periodically endured in my adult life.

And like that, I was doing the devil’s lettuce version of Dry January — never mind that January’s temporary teetotalers are apparently using cannabis to help them abstain. Lots of people use weed in ways that suit them, and I have no beef with them. But I have a difficult relationship with pot, as in I find it hard to draw the line between a toke before bed and trying to guarantee the promise of slumber like my pipe was a notary public.

Ask any midnight toker, and they’ll likely tell you they don’t remember their dreams. Mine have roared back with a vengeance, vivid and surreal like a “Mad Max: Fury Road” director’s cut projected on the backs of my eyelids.

Before you suggest edibles or tinctures, let me be clear: I don’t want to rely on THC, CBD or any hemp-related letter combos anymore.

I’m not sure if it was being so sick, or the fact that I wasn’t so groggy in the morning, but over the past few weeks I also lost my appetite for coffee, which I usually drank three to four cups of. I’ve mostly been drinking green tea, followed by a cup of coffee later in the morning.

Ya know, ‘Be nice, you’re in Bend’ applies to shoveling your sidewalk after it snows, too

My wife, Catherine, is also abstaining from her nightly can of wine. Prior, I’d often walk to the convenience store to fetch her nightcap, and rare was the time I didn’t come home with at least some junk food.

We’re saving money by not buying wine cans, cannabis, coffee and Cheez-Its.

This month has been all about addition by subtraction, and you can add another “c” word to the list: Last week, my wife said she had bad news: She’d seen a Consumer Reports article about dark chocolate being high in lead, harmful in many ways, and cadmium, a metal that can cause kidney disease and brittle bones.

Lindt, my go-to brand for the one healthy thing I thought I’d been ingesting, is among brands highest in the metals.

I liked it better back when experts touted the benefits of dark chocolate, not its metal content. There are safe levels of consumption, Catherine said, but I still threw my 85% chocolate bar in the garbage.

I didn’t seek these changes out, but I welcome them. In recent years, I’d sometimes thought, “Wouldn’t it be wild, and wildly hard, to quit pot and coffee?”

It had seemed to me the one way to do the impossible — feel like a kid again. I didn’t try pot until I was 25, and didn’t start drinking coffee till my 40s.

I’m not getting younger, and I’m having trouble sleeping, but otherwise, I really do feel pretty great.

Still, I beg February to hurry up and get here.

If January takes much more away, I’m going to need a drink.