A ROOM ON THE FOURTEENTH FLOOR

A ROOM ON THE FOURTEENTH FLOOR

He was stuck in Boston the day before Christmas and he was getting pretty edgy. Wildman hadn't been to a meeting for some time now and he had been literally chewing on his nails on the 23rd floor of the John Hancock building while he was at the business meeting that his office sent him to but all he could think about was lunchtime. Ah, lunchtime, when he could get away to the fourteenth floor where there was a 'Friends of Bill' meeting and he could finally get back to a routine that he had been missing for the past two months.

When your daily routine is to go to an AA meeting every morning before work and you suddenly stop, it is like stopping coffee, or for some like stopping a drug. First you get irritable and discontent. Then you get moody and then if you don't watch out you may go back to drinking. And that may not happen over a few weeks, but over months or even a year. You may feel like you have developed an aura of invincibility and before you know it, bang!, you’re hitting the bottle worse than ever.

Well Wildman had been down that road before and that's why he was so eager to get to the fourteenth floor noon meeting. He wasn't going to get caught in that position again! And he was thinking about the past few weeks and the silly things that had led him to his desperate sense that he was approaching a drink. There was his young son James who stubbed his small toe and broke it. Not ordinarily a big deal except that Wildman had left his coat on the floor late one night after coming home from work and as the boy came tearing down the stairs to greet him in the morning 'slip - boom - crash' and one child with a broken toe.

Ten hours of kicking himself in the ass followed, as well as, of course, ten days of recriminations from his wife. Which ordinarily he could take in stride but it was getting on toward Christmas and it was only his second one sober and the anticipation was getting tense and if anyone else in the household had intended to acknowledge this you could have fooled him!

'Why don't the others in the house give me the credit I deserve for all the effort I have put into my sobriety?', he thought, and then immediately had the answer, 'well why should they? You never put much thought into how they felt about your getting drunk all the time! Did you give them credit for the effort they put in understanding your alcoholism when you were in the active thro's of it?'

And he swallowed hard and stuffed that line of self pitying questioning into his pity pot and flushed it down the toilet. He had a lot more to be thankful for at this time of the year than he had any right to expect. And expecting heroic applause from his family for his staying sober was way above his pay grade.

So he really needed this meeting and he hastily debarked from the elevator and headed for the assigned room which he had previously scouted since he did not want to miss anything to a search and rescue mission. At which point he practically ran into this woman who was wandering, half dazed in the hallway, not quite sure where she was going. First she moved purposefully down the hall toward the room, then moved back in the direction of the elevator.

'Can I help you', Wildman asked. 'Is this where the meeting is', she said, sotto voce. Wildman whispered back, 'you mean the AA meeting? 'Oh, I shouldn't go I'm going to drink anyway! He dumped me, he hates me. I don't know what a meeting will do, I'm too fat, I'm just going to drink, I know it'.

And Wildman said 'well you're here already, and you may as well attend the meeting. Look, if after the meeting you still feel like drinking, well then you gave it a try!' And she stared at him sort of dumbstruck and said 'ok,' in a small unconvinced voice.

Well the usual meeting chairman was not there so the group agreed (there were only five in attendance), to let the half dazed woman lead the meeting since she clearly had the greatest need. And she told the group that she had two years sobriety, solid sobriety, and had been in what she thought was a solid relationship and here it was the day before Christmas and her boyfriend dumped her. Was it her looks, her weight, the fact that she was in AA? And as she poured out all of her fears, regrets and hopes and desires, she broke down in tears and sobbed for a good five minutes. The group murmured soothing words to her and when she collected herself she said thanks.

The meeting went on and finished and Wildman felt he had gotten a really good shot of AA out of it. But perhaps not as much as what he got when that woman came up to him after the meeting and said, 'Thanks for guiding me into that meeting. I know now that I'm not going to drink. I just needed a place and people who understand me to hear what I needed to say'.

So this morning, Wildman approaches Christmas as serenely as he has ever done. His son will walk with a bit of a limp and if he tunes his wife's squawking out just right, there will only be echoes as he goes through the day as calmly as he knows how. And he really doesn't need high praise, brass bands and memorial speeches. He doesn't need acknowledgement to any greater degree than with the quiet gratitude that one alcoholic feels for another when she is snatched back from the brink of oblivion.

© res 12/24/10

THE STORY OF Jon E

THE STORY OF Jon E

So today’s meeting turned into a celebration of Jon E’s eight years of sobriety. This was not just a time of noting (marking a landmark) but an acknowledgment of the way Jon E had gone from a gun toting cocaine addict to a much sought after community leader, in demand for his ubiquitous good works, speaking engagements as he was known in the past for his sloth and wasteful behaviors. The timbre of the meeting was that AA was the ballast that kept Jon E steady and the conduit that allowed him to conduct himself in a manner that he had always had within him but which had been sublimated by years of drug depleting decrepitude.

Having been born into a well known family, Jon E may have been rebelling against levels of expectations that his family may have had of him and so instead of growing gracefully into the role of community patron, he descended to that of community pervert and having succeeded beyond his wildest expectations he then ascended to the position of community hellion. The degree of forbearance by the community must have been great, since he had to have been excused for any number of misdemeanors, and even greater crimes. Only in a community as small as ours, in a family as notable as Jon E’s could this have occurred. It is remarkable how financial and social stature can shield people from the long arm of the law when, given different circumstances, skin color or social status, this would not have been tolerated in the same town.

But the time came when even his family could not turn the other cheek and had to ‘fire’ Jon E from the family’s business; his wife fired him from the family, and he was banished from the house. In fact he was exiled from the town and brought to a distant rehab facility to 'dry out' and then sent to another work facility to find out how to live a sober life. There he finally learned to live with the daily challenges that life throws at us, absorbing lessons most of us have long since integrated into our behaviors in childhood. And ever so slowly Jon E became a man, a father, a husband, a son and once again a valued partner in the family business.

We don’t come into AA hopeful. In fact we come hopeless, that is, completely devoid of hope. We have no expectation that we will ever become sober because every time we have tried to stay sober we have failed miserably. In the first and second steps of the 12 steps we learn that we are powerless over alcohol and we go over and over the history and the herstory of why we are drunks because no matter how we try to stop drinking, we always start again all the while desperate in the hope of trying to find out how this time we got here. We start again not because we want to. We start again because we don’t know why we started and failed to stay sober. We start again because we don’t know how we start again and we start because we often don’t remember the instances between the thought of thinking about picking up that first drink and waking up during or after that bout, which may be a day or more lasting hours or days or a week after that first drink.

We come into AA hopeless and fearful that we have finally reached the end of the road. How we mighty have fallen to have come through life (often through successful careers) only to find ourselves in a room full of drunks! But here is the mystery; because if you truly listen when you finally sit down in those first hours and days in AA, you will hear stories. And unlike the chaos and dissonance of experience that you feel in the world outside the rooms, in the rooms you will feel a kinship, a fellowship, a recognition that you have been here before. You will hear stories that are yours. You will feel feelings that are yours. You will hear thoughts that you have thought before. You will hear thoughts that you have thought but were afraid to express because you thought they sounded crazy enough to you ,let alone the rest of the world. Yet here, people were saying OUT LOUD the same crazy thoughts as you and they were not ashamed, not crying about them, in fact THEY WERE LAUGHING. THEY WERE LAUGHING AT THEIR OWN CRAZYNESS AND THEIR OWN THINKING KNOWING THE CRAZINESS OF THEIR OWN THINKING AND FINALLY APPRECIATING THE JOKE AS ONLY ONE ALCOHOLIC CAN APPRECIATE IT WITH ANOTHER.

We appreciate each others’ disability because we understand it at least to the point where we understand our complete powerlessness over it and our need to be ever vigilant in order to keep the temptation for the drink at bay one day at a time. We don’t pity each other, but we do empathize, for in our common narratives we have been through the depression, the fear, the mental and physical pain. We have been through the destruction of family, the economic destitution, the destruction of soul and the reintegration of the spirit in our lives.

We also finally understand that if we want to survive we must learn to trust other alcoholics to help us over the corrugations of life’s road. Why just other alcoholics? I can only speak for myself. I have friends both in and out of the program and my closest friends are not in the program. But when, for example, you need someone to get up to speed on a project they must come to the project with a lot of basic understanding so that when you start to describe the specific needs of your project there is a certain shared vocabulary that permits fluent communication.

That is what one AA does for another AA. We start by talking the same language which in this case is really experiential. It is based on emotional and psychopharmacological experiences that most friendships don’t share in the deep almost mystical sense that I talk about here. We sit and talk. We become supports, talk on the phone, sit in meetings together and organize our lives around certain principles of living. One of those principles is, of course, not to drink. But after that, what? We already know that just stopping hardly ever is a solution for us, for inevitably we will pick up again. So we have learned to change our lives from considerations of the material to the spiritual, from the property laden to abstract more principled and moral lives.

So the one basic principle of living for AA’s is not to drink any alcohol; we have come therefore to realize and understand that in order to live a truly sober life requires change on a truly grand scale, the requirement to change EVERYTHING in your life.

(But to keep it simple, we in AA like to say that you only have to change ONE thing in your life…EVERYTHING.)

Well that sounds daunting. But when you come to think about it, just how far did you get in life with your way of doing things? Waking up after days walking around in a blackout? Or did you wake up in your bed but not remember where you were the night before or whether waking up in bed today was really after last night’s debauch or was it days before? Where did you park your car? Or did you wake up in a hotel room wondering why the Eiffel Tower was dominating the scene out your window?

I have heard every one of those stories in the rooms, all of which were much more colorful than my own, but stories I was glad not to be able to tell. Those stories serve as a reminder that as colorful or complicated as my story got, there is a lot more writing that could go into the tale if I chose to do more experimentation with the grape.

So we have determined that working with others in the fellowship is the best way to stay sober. Everyone is an anchor for someone else if they want to be. There is, however, no written formula for these relationships, just the handed down wisdom of sponsor to sponsee.

And Jon E celebrates eight years today. He is fond of saying that he could not have done that without the help of the guys in the rooms and of AA in general. And if he is a model citizen today, it is at least due in a major part to the people in the rooms of AA, that happy group of drunks who give of themselves so that others can survive the ravages of alcoholism.

©May 9, 2010

THEY DO MAKE THEM LIKE THEY USED TO

THEY DO MAKE THEM LIKE THEY USED TO

Every now and then you really appreciate local merchants. I have been buying online for years for both convenience and for price and over the years surprisingly I have been able to purchase my woolen slacks from TravelSmith and Lands End. Both provided fine fabric combined with tailoring so that I could order online and voila it appears at my door several days later and I don't have the hassle of going to Syms or Macy's or Maxx's or any other place where I would have to purchase and then get the clothes tailored. And even if I could save big schkatols at Syms or Maxx's you can't get tailoring at the latter and Syms is a downer experience.

So here I am with wonderful gabardines and worsteds (maybe 10 pair of slacks) and I have lost about 2-3 waist sizes. Quelle bummer! We're talking about $700 of clothes, so what to do? Because one of the reasons I did not buy great fabrics off the racks was the typical rip off price at the local tailor which would amount to the price of the slacks themselves.

So here I find Steve...yeah Steve about 10 blocks away from me from an online site that says, "great, great price, professional tailoring, great customer service etc..." which makes me skeptical but I don't want to waste all that money invested in slacks because I may be destitute but I'll be damned if I'll look like a schlub!

Bring in Steve Mysirlidis. Ten years off the boat, maybe? Accent so thick the only thing I understand is the OK hand gesture and the reassurance that the job will be "A OK perfect" with full waist tailoring, leg tapering and bringing in the seat, shortening the legs AND he'll have it tomorrow. And then the price. Only $45. (ordinarily not bad for rebuilding a pair of pants) but I'm not so rich now so I hem (he hems, too I know) I haw, he drops the price to $35, I snort a bit and volunteer that I have a total of nine pair to do. His eyebrows go up, his wife smells Christmas Bonus money for the grandkids and we spit in the palms and strike a deal.

And what work he does! Better than the original pants! And I think, had I not received my B.A. in dickering in Mexico who would have thunk that I would have essentially nine pair of new pants for the new year? Not cheap, but not as expensive as new pants and much less hassle. And now I truly have a personal tailor who I can trust. Wow. Where has Steve been all my disheveled life? Well, probably back in Athens I guess. But I'm sure glad that he found his way to Norwalk for Christmas 2010. Another Christmas miracle happens.


© res 12/21/10

A LIFE EXAMINED

A LIFE EXAMINED
This is the time of the year when we reflect upon the year gone by, the progresses made, battles won, skirmishes lost. We take stock of our position on the battle field in the hope that an armistice if not a peace may be neigh. We remember with some trepidation the adage 'an unexamined life is not worth living'.

For us alcoholics the truck through the year from hard drinker to becoming solidly sober is a hard and difficult one. One harried with the dangers of recidivist backsliding. One fraught with thoughts that 'I could have just one drink and that wouldn’t hurt'. One where the notion of controlled drinking is the ever present siren song ready to thrust us upon the shoals of a fatal shore.

We are constantly challenged by sugar plum visions of drinking in happy times ( I can’t remember when that ever was) and how pleasant it would be to just experience those pleasant soirees. But truly there never were gentle soirees and the best of the happy times were when we remembered where the car was parked and who we were with the night before.

Yet we somehow harken back to these fictionally romantic times as if that would permit us to drink like normal people. Well we can’t and we never will. And that is the sober truth about the notion of 'controlled drinking'. If we could have controlled our drinking, we would not be in AA today. If we could control our drinking, we would not have had:

A) All those speeding tickets or DWIA’s
B) All those lost weekends
C) All those lost friends
D) All those lost and ruined marriages
E) All those lost cars and parking places
F) All those lost lives and souls.

Truly, controlled drinking is not in our nature, because our nature is not to be in control. And at the base of all this magical thinking is the reality of our constant striving to escape from ourselves, the need to dull the reality of life under the grit of a Morpheus substance.

Louisey, another blogger, has described the difficulty of living the 'unmediated and unbuffered' life as the 'unbearable nature of the untransformed consciousness'. How literally true that is. We can’t stand ourselves or life unless we dull our perception of life to protect us from harsh reality intruding upon our conscious existence.

That is, when we come right down to it, we all have to find a kinder and gentler way of living with ourselves. And I think the reason that we either succeed or fail in AA is that we finally come to an accommodation with ourselves if not to understand us in all our complexities, then at least to accept our complexity as part and parcel of who we are.

We may not always apprehend ourselves at the end of the day, but this accommodation allows us to exist, and with that permit us the time to ‘examine life to make it worth living.’

© res 12/20/10

OF POWER AND POWERLESSNESS

OF POWER AND POWERLESSNESS

Today I had done what I had never done before. I went to two consecutive meetings. Today being Sunday, I went to my usual men’s meeting where there were, atypically, about seventy men. The second meeting I had never attended, was a brisk al fresco one on Compo Beach where six hearty souls met around a warm fire on the beach to discuss the twelve steps on an overcast but clear morning. The Compo Beach meeting was a real treat because the men’s meeting with all the seventy men is somewhat overwhelming for me to share at and I was much more inclined to share at this small gathering and I did.

Both meetings were marked by pre holiday angst, agitation, gratitude and joy. Both meetings were either exclusively or predominantly men. So when I shared about my marriage at the second meeting, and the nods of the other five men around the fire bobbed up and down it was like looking in a mirror at guys who knew just what I was talking about, knew just what I was feeling, for they had been there and were going through or had gone through the same thing. I could speak, as it were, in code, without having to qualify and characterize every emotional tick, alleyway and byway. They knew what I was talking about. They had been down that road before. And when I left that smoky fire, I was firm in how I would proceed in speaking with the wife, the tone of my voice and the tack that I would have to take.

However the angst and agitation in the earlier men’s meeting were typical for this time of year but a bit more marked in the alcoholics where the so called holiday cheer, is something of a misnomer. Family get togethers have in the past turned into clash togethers, punch bowls into punch outs, family banquets into family brawls. I don’t know why this seems so prevalent amongst us alcoholics and to tell the truth it is somewhat foreign to me, both as a Jew (this is personally, an alienating time of the year) and as a family man where the family just isn’t that dysfunctional.

Yet the stories are almost universal that families in AA are totally dysfunctional and Xmas time is the time for functional caution to be thrown to the wind; and it is. So the men bring their considerable concerns to the meetings to thrash out their bogeymen, and let us know what their fears are, realizable or not, and to see what the collective wisdom is on how others have handled similar situations in their lives during this season of cheer. And the shares go on and people draw strength from the others in the room to be able to return home so that they can survive another holiday season with the family intact. And when all is said and done many of the men express their gratitude to the others whose participation helped those through their real and imagined annual troubles.

And James who came in feeling really sad said he was looking for more reasons to carry around his ill mood. And he made reference to another earlier share about alcoholism being all about willpower or will powerlessness. And James said that his feeling of unease came from not feeling that he had enough will power to be the source of that power to stay on that grid of life but, ‘coming into the meeting I realized all I needed to do was plug into its grid to get that power, that I did not have to be the generator of that power just to come to the meeting , sit down and let the power of the fellowship just flow through me and I then have all the power that I needed to feel good about myself and about everything else. That the AA grid had all the power I needed.’

Tanner then said he was going to be traveling and mused that when he first came into the rooms many years ago he asked ‘how long was the meeting going to last?’ His sponsor said in reply, ‘How long do you need it to last?’ ‘Today when I travel I remember that sage advice because if I don’t know where I’ll be, I need to remember that I may have to make that previous meeting last longer than the time that I am actually sitting at the meeting.’

And this is similar to the oft repeated quip of the question of the newcomer who asks how long does he have to come to meetings, to which he is invariably told ‘until you want to come’. I might even add that ‘until you have to come’ might be a corollary to that answer, because it becomes a spiritual requirement in one’s life. Nourishment for the soul, like daily prayer or meditation, ‘food for thought’.

And Barry the coffee maker, who had to leave early, sort of summed up the mood for us with his light hearted request ‘fellers, can the coffee maker get his round of applause early today, because he is leaving early and an early thanks would help him since this week he is working on issues of self esteem’. Which cracked everyone up, as his remarks usually do, and he spun around and walked out of the meeting.

© res 12/19/10

Not seeing life as an addiction

There are times when I get crazed at the over-flow of addictions or thoughts of addictions. There are those of us who, once they believe or know that they are addicted to drugs or alcohol, decide it is easy and right to believe that they suffer from an addiction to food, candy, ice cream, coffee, frappaccinos, oregano, pepper etc. Why? Because it is too easy to blame weakness on addiction as the only way to manage weakness. And the only way to manage weakness is to call it an addiction than to manage by any other fashion. And I am not referring to moral turpitude. Just laziness in both thought and action in the behavior of daily living.
Because we addicts have agreed that will power is misapplied when it comes to managing alcoholism. So we believe that will power, or the power over the will, had no place in life whatsoever. And, therefore, running from our responsibility to manage our will has become the past time of the alcoholic in AA.

Some of us would rather pin all of our shortcomings on addictions. We would rather do that than admit that not all of our problems are addictions, cross addictions, cross infatuations etc., and that not all approaches to solving them are by means of AA. It is easier to do that. Otherwise we have to expend more energy in ways that AA has not prepared for us to have us examine ourselves. Which is OK. We just should not expect AA to solve all our problems by means of the 12 steps, because as useful as they are, slavish adherence to those principles will not begin to approach those problems which do not have solutions within their purview.

This is not to say that AA principles cannot be utilized in these instances. I just don’t think that their blanket application should be mistaken for a blanket cure, nor thinking that the use of AA principles in their application has employed a finely honed wit in figuring the treatment of a difficult problem. Administering pablum to solve a difficult problem is as bad as looking to find difficult answers to justify explanations to simple problems.

I am reminded of my psychiatrist friends who often sit back in exasperation at their patients after believing they have provided them with tools for dealing with the vicissitudes of daily living only to find them as ill equipped as ever to deal with their teenager yelling at them for no good reason and then go into a meltdown wanting some grand answer to it all. To which my psychiatrist friends inevitably offer as a nostrum 'Get a life'!

What I am saying, in case this is not very clear is that that we alcoholics tend to over dramatize our shortcomings as addictions to explain why we have trouble handling life, rather than just admitting that we have trouble handling life because we are addicts. One is the fallout from the other, not the reason for everything else.

And yes, I spend too much money. Am I addicted to spending? I think not. Do I have problems in establishing boundaries for myself, yes. Not everything in my life is an addiction but many of my life’s problems have stemmed from me not tending to my alcoholism; and tending to that wreckage takes time. And the cleanup from all that fallout requires time not just another label to pin the mess on.

And the time required to attend to this cleanup may be as long as it took to create the wreckage in the first place. It may not be just a desire to solve the problem with the drunk’s earnest needs summed up by 'I want what I want when I want it', talking and not listening to the body, soul and mind’s need for the time to heal.

So today I don’t blame my physical and mental poverty on a spending addiction. I don’t blame my joblessness on the fates, and I don’t blame anyone about why this is all happening to me because I was the one who brought it on myself. And in acknowledging this I take the first step toward acceptance of my problem and the first steps on the road to my cure.

res 12/12/10

DREAM

DREAM. 12/10/10

I had a peculiar shred of a dream. I was just at the edge of sleep when all of a sudden I wondered what if I were not to wake up and if in fact die, what about non existence? What would that feel like? and then I realized I would not even feel that I wouldn't exist anymore and I started to be really depressed and anxious. Why had this happened to me? Was that all there is? We are born from nothing we live and then we die and return to nothingness?

And what of my new found serenity? What about my spirituality where had my belief in a higher power gone? And as soon as I thought about the implications of all of this there was darkness, nothingness, complete homeostatic equilibrium.

I can't even describe the feeling of this non feeling; no anxiety, no joy, no fear, no nothing!

And this caused me to wake up in a blind panic . I hadn't said good bye to my daughter, I hadn't said my adieus to friends and family, and I hadn't filled my wife in about what all the dregs of the 'estate' were. But most of all was the sense of great disappointment that there was no hereafter, just nothing. No better place,no'other world'or other plane of existence. Just an overwhelming sense of disappointment and bland blackness.

Wow.

And then today 12/11/10 Miel says how down and out of sorts he is because he had to put down one of his dogs and I immediately went to that thought that maybe I am one of those dogs and my fate is not really determined by my higher power, and maybe even, my higher power is really someone like Miel.

And 'higher power Miel' will one day think that I need to be put out of my misery and I will, willy nilly, be put down because, (not that I want to be put out of my misery), Miel,my higher power, wants to put me out of my misery so that he can be less miserable about my misery. Wow about that!

And I will go straight to oblivion and he will go on to have an out of sorts week and then have to go to a Saturday men’s meeting to tell them how his dog needed to be put down so that he can give up his misery to his higher power and he will feel oh so much better for sharing that. And…


And I will be dead, and not even know it!...And...


As I said, it was a peculiar shred of a dream.



© res 12/11/10

BROKEN SHOELACES

One of the recurring themes in the rooms is alcoholic thinking and the many forms it takes. We marvel at our creativity in how we can turn fantastic things into things that are just good, good things to bad, bad things to worse, and worse things turned into impossibilities.

We have even developed code words to describe those circumstances in which we make choices that lead us to that sisyphusian slide toward inevitable disaster, a road that we knew from the start would end in just that manner but because we are who we are, alcoholics, once embarked on that path, we are almost mythically doomed to stay the course until it plays itself out to once again prove to us how alcoholically we think.

One of those code words is the use of the term ‘shoe lace’ or ‘shoe string’ in the context of allowing a broken shoe lace to set the tone of one’s behavior, or not for the rest of any given situation. So if you are at a Christmas party, and a co worker accosts you to regale you with besotted requests to do more sales next year, you can either push him aside and perhaps incur his ire for the rejection or you can stand there and listen to his proposals while he, in his drunken zeal, projects spittle into your face while speaking to you within your comfort zone nose to nose, you reeling from his alcoholic breath but gently accepting him gracefully knowing full well he will not remember any of it in the morning.

Or take Barbara, who because she was put off by the coach of her son’s lacrosse team, could have taken a behavioral obstinacy of her son to heart. But to what end? He didn’t break the ‘shoe lace’, it was his coach; and taking it out on her poor son for whom she has nothing but love would be absolutely the wrong message to send both to him and to the coach. Families are no place for pecking order displacement activities.

So when Mack related his tale of presumed woe it was all the more instructive and illustrated just how far and to what lengths we alcoholics will go to when our “thinking gets stinking.” Mack literally broke his Timberland shoelaces from his boots and decided to go to Wal-Mart to try to find a replacement. After sifting through what he described as about seventy pairs of shoe laces and not finding the correct size his stupid thinking meter went off and he decided to survey the area for stores that might have the proper replacement.

His wife suggested that he call Timberland to find where he might find a replacement, a rather reasonable suggestion, one that was easy, required little running around and also went straight to the heart of the problem with a really good chance of a successful outcome. But Mack “knew” that he had to canvas seven area stores because that was what had to be done, regardless of the chance of success and regardless of whether they were Timberland outlets.

By now he had worked himself up into such a fever that he had to go into NYC to go to a Timberland store and found himself double parking in front of the store illegally, running into the store finding the proper shoelaces and waving them in front of the clerk like a mad man blurting out his story and the illegal parking and the seven stores and 70 pairs of shoelaces at Wal-Mart looking for all the world like a rabid beast, that the clerk just said “Take the shoelaces, don’t get a ticket on their account.”

Frightening isn’t it? How we can bring other people into our maelstroms and if they permit it, they will be dragged down with us; but if they are truly perceptive as this clerk was, they just let it go, recognizing the situation for what it was and understanding that Mack was in greater need of the shoelaces than Timberland was of the five dollars that they might have charged and the thirty cents that they ultimately lost. But think of all that good will that they gained.

But here was Mack three days later warning us of the dangers of going where the broken shoe laces took him and can take us. And I looked around the room and watched as I saw fifty heads nodding. We all had been there.

I cannot say how normal people see this behavior except to say that they have seen us alcoholics perform acts of madness like this time and time again and perhaps have scratched their heads, wondering what all the fuss was about. And truly what was all the fuss about? Except to note that Mack has twenty five years of sobriety and still the need for vigilance is ever present.

So if you ever see perplexing behavior like this and wonder where it is coming from, think back on what I have shared with you today. More people than you realize think like us, but not all acknowledge just what they are and how they got that way. And still fewer stand guard to thwart this behavior before it becomes manifest, not just for our sakes, but for all those around us.

December 4, 2010 res

Caught In The High Beams

CAUGHT IN THE HIGH BEAMS

The topic of humility came up for discussion today and Joan popped her hand up, immediately going to a place where she always goes when she wants to blame herself. Last night she ran over a faun. And of course she blamed herself for it. She pulled her car over in the rain and just stood in front of the headlights staring at the little dead thing on the road, another driver pulled over and commiserating, said that it had happened to him too and wasn’t it a shame that they just dart out like that. He helped her pull the faun to the side of the road while she awaited the police, all the while replaying the scene, how could she have changed the outcome?, could she have not been going so fast?, was she going too fast?, was it the rain?

 

And so on, the second guesses kept coming until she was struck with a vicious thought  “ where was the mother”, trying to blame it all on an alcoholic Mother Bambi that was in absentia, as she no doubt felt herself to have been at other times in other places. “I always go to that self blame place when things like this happen. I probably couldn’t have avoided this but I went there anyway because that is my default position.”

Humility for her would be realizing that she is not so important or great enough in the grand scheme of things to be able to effectuate the outcome of all events. Humility would mean having been able to accept the outcome of her situation regardless of whether she liked it or not.

Tom then mentioned that he observed a flash of familiar behavior when dealing with his 30 year old adult daughter. She was looking for a pair of sneakers and when she could not immediately find them she burst out in a stream of invective, a torrent of cursing, totally over the top and untoward and unsuitable to the situation. Tom, who had recognized more than a bit of himself in this behavior when he had been drinking, was too embarrassed to say anything and decided not to have a bruhaha just then as he thought it would be non productive. But it bothered him and was more than humbled by the notion that this “bad” acting was “inherited” by his daughter from him, no doubt through his fatherly demonstrations of parenting. Embarrassed, humiliated, and now needing to become humble he decided to take the bull by the horns.

So the next day when he drove his daughter to the station for her to return the NYC where she lived, he asked her to sit by him in the car a bit before she went for her train. And at that point he reminded her that he was in the AA program you remember “yes dad, I know”.

 

“ 'You know that I faced issues myself like that loss of temper that you had. I deal with the causes for that behavior in AA and the degree that alcohol played in it. I do not know if you believe alcohol played any part in your behavior yesterday but it didn’t have to. The principles are the same. I don’t let that rage let me reach the point of that behavior anymore because it is not fair, it is non productive, it holds others hostage to that rage and it keeps people at arm’s length and they do not know what to do with it so they shut down.' And I thought she was going to get angry but she just sat quietly, nodded and went off to catch the train. 

 

"The next day she called to say that she appreciated the talk and recognized exactly what I had been saying about myself and her own behavior and appreciated the gentle observation; because it was better to get it from dad than from anyone else.” And with that Tom’s voice trailed off ‘humbly’.

James always has something pithy to say and today was no different. “I spend all day with myself and I am always fascinated by my story; All the time. (And then he repeated “…and I am always fascinated by my own story.”) And today I listen to yours and slowly become fascinated by yours. That’s humbling, and something I am not used to experiencing. Humility isn’t thinking LESS about you, it is thinking about you less.

Jock was thinking that playing a round of golf with his son and his daughter was in some instances humiliating, particularly when he would have to referee the fights that inevitably broke out between them around the 5th hole. But he allowed how that paled in comparison to the family situation that obtained three years ago when he had just given up coke, ecstasy, marijuana, and alcohol. He had almost committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning and was certainly near death in other physical ways. He had emotionally checked out from his kids and wife.

 

So today arguments around the fifth hole with putters raised over shoulders and giggles running rampant on the golf course are a long way from the sealed garage and a humbling reminder of the rough road he and we all have traveled.

Had I not heard the Bambi story I would have identified with Tom and if not for Tom then Jock and if not for him then any number of others who spoke up during the hour. All of us have great stocks of humility stored from the humbling events of our lives; events we no longer try to control, wills we no longer try to bend to ours, and rivers, the courses of which we no longer try to change. 

 

These are losing propositions, as they always were. I just now can finally admit it and it is in that admission that I have found my own humility.

Res 7/14/10

RISK/REWARD RATIO

I was speaking with Nigel apropos of the meeting this morning which was laden with shares regarding how boring and lonely life was after alcoholism and how unstimulating sobriety has become. But everyone agreed that being sober far outweighed the consequences of alcoholism.

Jake shared that he is now going on 2 ½ years of sobriety and he is in a lonely slump. He has no girlfriend, he is at sea as to what to do on a Friday or any other night and the only friend he has is his puppy. And he has the feeling that wherever he goes he feels out of place. The girlfriend is an old story with Jake and nobody has been able to counsel him adequately as to what course he should take.

John is worried about his teen son who wants to experiment with drugs and alcohol but feels hamstrung by his father who while not passing judgment on this desire, has led a life of sobriety for fifteen years and by his very presence takes the “fun” out of the experimenting. It’s a dilemma that many drunks have experienced with their kids. Who wants a parent whose existence screams “don’t experiment or you’ll end up like me”? They would rather have a quiet partner as a parent, one who has no experiences to teach them.

So Nigel and I discussed the nature and origin of all of this ennui among our fellow drunks and we tried to put a face on the causes of these effects. First, having been raging drunks, we were always on the edge of life living a high risk and perhaps high reward lifestyle. As long as we were strung out on alcohol and drugs we were fine with taking risks, in business, in personal style, in driving and all manner of other behaviors most others would deem as anti-social and reckless.

Yet the intermittent reinforcement of high returns for risk taking solidified those acts and since non sobriety was the cause of our risk taking, its role in life was reinforced. This is the same dynamic that drives gambling.

But once we have undertook a sober existence, the associations of this behavior with drunkenness was unavoidable and we decided that risk taking was an unnecessary and unwanted threat to our sobriety so we eliminated these edgy behaviors to avoid the risk of falling back into drunken behaviors. So we developed a keen aversion to risk taking and we avoid risk like the plague. And we then accepted, rightly or wrongly that this existence must be the price to pay for sobriety and we became restless and discontented with our new life as we now know it.

But Nigel pointed out that the fear of becoming a recidivist sucks up the creative juices and clamps down the creative impulses. We want to remain in a psychically comfortable zone where we do not want to risk our sobriety on any behavior that would make us uncomfortable so we chose to remain placid, moderate and bored. But Nigel said that we, a group of very talented guys, should not be consumed by the fear of falling off the wagon because we may yet pursue risky deals if we know the risks and understand how to mitigate them. And if our fear prevents us from acting we must accept the consequence of being bored to death.

But taking the risk bull by the horns in life requires a vigilant eye and deep wellspring of strength of character. And ultimately the reward for taking that risk is the creation of something new, unique or better than things were prior to going creatively ballistic. If only we could coax our fears out of hiding in the closet into the light of a bolder, calmer us.

The truth is that we have become comfortable in our aversion to risk. And that has made us complacent, not wanting to rock our collective boats, our tranquility and serenity for fear of diving into the bottle again. It is a fine line between fear and folly. We have a healthy fear to avoid people, places and things that will expose us to taking up alcohol consumption again. And we are anxious for fear of once having extended ourselves out of our comfort zones that we will fall prey to those anxieties that led us to drink in the first place. But fearing that this will occur is unproductive, for it keeps active minds fallow.

And as our minds rest from planting too many ideas and activities we miss another imperative, to be engaged, aware and living a zestful life. Because the excitement that new ideas and processes provide makes us fully engaged with our families, society and with our own lives.
So the challenge for us, as Nigel counseled, is to strike out in new directions plying our intelligence in the pursuit of novel and interesting pursuits so that we never more have to complain that sobriety can only be manifest as an inevitably dour and dull existence.

Res October 24, 2010

In The Time It Takes...

She delivered the news rather matter of factly. When she had gotten sober eight years ago she and her beau had had a hard relationship; hard drinking, hard sex, hard loving and hard knocks.

But she felt that had she not sobered up she would have gradually plunged down the hole of despair, desperate drinking and debauchery, she dragging him down and him returning the favor, pounding down drinks, drugs; using hard and living hard and fast.

So she cleaned up her act eight years ago and never looked back. And every now and then she would try to bring him along, each time tentatively testing the waters and then scurrying away as if bringing the sober word to him were the bogey man of his life.

Eight years passed. Last Friday she invited him to dinner and she made another cautious attempt to bring him into the fold and at last he seemed to finally get it and made a promise to try ever so hard to approach a sober life. Today would be the day.

She went home with some nervous trepidation but hopeful at the possible breakthrough until she heard the message on the answer machine. He had thought it over and he could not see himself honestly in sobriety and was sorry that he could not breach the rift of those years of pain.

And this morning she received a phone call that he was dead.

Just like that. Dead. The rift was too great the Stygian waters too swift and deep. What he was saying was that it was too late for him, for salvation and he was checking out.

She told us this so matter of factly because death, of late in the rooms has become rather matter of fact. But life for her and the rest of us requires these precious daily reminders to keep us coming back; reminders that it takes no time at all for death to claim us - only the time it takes to go out to dinner.

Slips, Inevitablity or Part of the Growth?

It is Labor Day here in the United States and if the typical course of events is to play out today, there will be much celebration, family and friend get-togethers and the usual holiday libations. If memory serves well those festivities will tend towards the over zealous and more inebriated and therefore are to be avoided or stood apart from by those of us in AA. And of course this morning's AA meeting, which was attended by at least sixty bright eyed drunks focused on the perils of holidays and the dangers of "slips".

The meeting was a beginners meeting and there were many in their first week of sobriety, some recently returned from 'experimenting' after periods of sobriety ("maybe I can have just one drink"), and others just joining the fellowship in order to achieve a modicum of peace in their lives trying to pick themselves up from the wreckage of some former existence. And the moderator turned the discussion to the topic of trying to avoid slips because, (and he quoted another AA from a few days before, "a drink isn't just a slip, it is a disaster"). And Emit shot his hand up to tell his story how he had after two sober years found himself romancing a drink in the most peculiar set of circumstances.

Emit had been two years sober, tidied up a previously codependent relationship, steadied his financial footing and generally regained years of whittling away of his physical and social life till he was well on the way to recovering a new life. So when he went on a date he felt he had his sobriety under control. She offered some wine and he felt he had this whole thing under control and would be able to take a glass of wine.

Two days later in jail, having committed a crime in a blackout, his fiscal and social equanimity in a shambles he now learned that he cannot trust himself with one glass of wine. Because, he now knows that that led to 4 liters of vodka, blackouts, violent behavior and the lock up.

There are those who maintain that slips are not a requirement for growth in the program and others who warn that there is no guarantee that if you go out you will ever come back in. My experience has led me to believe that for myself, I could not convince myself of the severity of my disease until I "slipped" once, twice, three times, each time the recovery being more difficult, each time the fall even farther, each time hitting bottom even harder. But for me, and for most others sobriety does not come without a spiritual awakening and until that point sobriety only means not drinking and that is just being a dry drunk.

Until I began to see that I needed to cleanse my soul, to look into the center of my being, sobriety meant and would mean very little to and for me. Until this last time when I saw the reason for being sober. Actually I did not "see" any reason at all but rather "felt" the need for sobriety... the "need" to live. And until that happened, I would have never appreciated or understood life without a drink.

So as to whether slipping is the 'organic' way that one achieves sobriety, there are many who will attest to the fact that it is not a requirement.But for those lost souls like myself, if we are lucky enough to find our will and need to live before alcoholism claims us, then slips probably are an organic and inevitable part of the cycle of recovery.

Because one can try to adopt the steps with all one's heart, but actually believing them to the point where you can save yourself is where the promise of AA meets that desperate hope for life.

LOOKIN’ GOOD

They said "You know you're looking good"

I threw back a querying glance. "In what way?"

And Jack said "Well you look good".

"Yeah, I heard that but I don't quite understand".


"Well you have to see you as I see you. I've been looking at you for the better part of ten months and I don't know how much you may have noticed you in the mirror, but I remember. I remember a tired looking, ring-eyed, furrow-browed and sad looking guy who hauled his ass in here every day. Every day I hoped I would see a smile, hoped to see some physical evidence of a mood lift. I was looking for a lift to those drooping shoulders, a straightening of the gait, a bit of a spring in the step, less of a shuffle. Some outward sign that things were changing. But you seemed to shrivel even more from the Fall to Winter.


I was thinking about what Jack had said and recalled that Roger had said something similar just last week. And Big John said at our agonizing sponsor meetings that he saw more of a spark in my eye, more eye contact and that even though our meetings were sometimes contentious, at least they had life in them, that I was not letting life roll me over, that I was standing up to it and facing it, challenging, it meeting it on its terms and dealing with it. And Roger's observation was that I looked fit, lost weight, looked healthy and rested and that I was dealing with the challenges that he and I had discussed and I was gradually solving the problems of employment and what I wanted to do with myself when I grow up, that we had been talking about for months.


And it was then that I understood what others had been observing that I only recently began to be consciously aware of myself. And this is quite astonishing to me, because this is the first time in forty years (that's a broad statement) that I can say this. I have been changing my self-image of myself. Sounds redundant. But I have actually been changing my image of my body image. For the first time in the past forty years (because the last time this occurred was when I was in college doing body building) I have looked at myself in the mirror and not been disgusted with the image that I saw. Rather than see a fat schlubby figure, I stand tall, such in the gut, actually acknowledge that the gut is less present than it has been for years, and throw my should back and try to look like a better image of me. And I haven't done that in forty years and certainly not during my marriage.


I have written before,(not here), that as a kid I had an awful body image, a fat, rolly kid, one which was at odds with pictures that I saw of myself when I later looked at myself when I was older. And I would look at those pictures wistfully when I "truly" was a rollier and pollier me looking back on a svelter me. But now I do recognize the new me; I know the me that Roger, Jack and Big John are referring to.


That person is someone I have gradually been getting used to and growing into this summer, first quite tentatively then enthusiastically. At first, I was afraid when my underwear felt too large, but it was a cheap enough investment to replace some with a smaller size. And when that worked to my delighted comfort, I decided to explore new avenues of personal hedonistic gratification. I swapped out some excessive large T shirts for more closely fitted ones that would have been embarrassingly revealing of an ample gut in years past but which now reveals just a nicely flattened belly. We are not talking Charles Atlas, (Arnold Schwarzenegger for those too young to know Charles), but just a better proportioned guy for 62 years old. Two years ago I thought that I was going to look like a fat version of Family Guy!


So when someone, especially someone in the program comes up to you and says he thinks you look good, you pay attention. Because you know that he is paying attention. These guys are not just giving out compliments. They are making observations. Jack could have said that he notice that I was glum and could he help and he may have actually done that. But he also noticed that I was looking well and by that observation he also helped, and he knew that.


We know that help is parceled out or distributed differently, sometimes as a friendly, how are you doin'? Or a " you sure are looking well rested" to "you look like you could use a hand or could speak to someone or ..." you name the need. That is what we do, and depending upon the effect, that is why we do it.


And this morning, I am grateful to Jack for letting me in on his casual and off the cuff observation. It may of been casual to him, but as you can see, it had a more than casual effect upon me.

Anonymity

We live our lives as if they were all a secret - nobody watching what we do. Why would the package store clerk notice that every week I would buy a fifth of McAllen Scotch? Even if I spread the wealth and came around every fourth week by the time I returned, wouldn't he have noticed that I like Mrs. Jones and Mr Malden come round regularly for the same stuff? Clockwork really.  Why would the Deli man notice that after years of ordering three beers and a cookie for lunch, that when I ordered a pastrami sandwich and coke should I have expected anything but the query "what no beer"?

 What makes us think that our behaviors are so insubstantial? And again, did you think that they aren't? Do you care? If you didn't then why do you behave as if you did by acting as if this were just a routine purchase?

We think we live furtive lives because we are ashamed of ourselves.  That's the plain and simple of it all.  We are not hiding from others we are symbolibcally hiding from ourselves.  Because that is why we isolate, we do not want to face painful feelings, issues and facts.  I can't name all or even some of them.  They differ from individual to individual.  One man's fear is another's fodder.  One woman's shame is another's glory.  But the arch of the act, the feeling of shame that the drink causes is usually the same and we all travel that same route.

This morning in the municipal parking lot behind the church I was sitting in my car smoking when I noticed Gary thundering up in his Harley, his slight figure practically enfolded by the immensity of the machine, the noise swallowing his form in a gulp. But as he passed in front of the rising sun his silhouette traced an image akin to a comic book character, chiseled jaw, German WWII troop helmet covering his head as he gently nestled the bike into the parking space. Harleys don't sputter when you turn them off, they KACHUNCK, KACHUNCK with a percussive vibration that you feel in your toes until the deep throatiness KACHUNCKS to a halt.  And I thought to myself how in the world could I ever have imagined myself becoming friends with this tattooed motor biking chiseled jawed, German-helmeted, comic book character out of an Easy Rider extras call, had I not been in AA.  It would have been an extra ordinary circumstance to have met him.  Yet he is just an ordinary guy.  Sure, he's been in jail for two felonies, but what the hey, he still has artistic tendencies.  And not for nothing, his four year old daughter is the most charming kid this side of the Saugatuck River.  And this guy's greatest fear is that he will do something stupid that would keep him from seeing his little girl.  There is real growth in that guy, and I've seen this over the two years I've known him when he has remained sober and I have not.  He did something more righter  than I did!

I'm trying the draw the measure of myself against the model of these men, friends that I have made in the rooms.  And they are friends.  I don't know them all by name but I know them by sight.  And if I were to ask any of them for help I no doubt would get the same response "always say yes to a cry for help" or "never say no".  We do that because we never know when we will need that helping hand ourselves so in a sense it is a call for the behavior of self preservation. "Do unto others for your own selfish ends and you will feel good about yourself.  It always works that way, you know."

There is a price for anonymity, it is called notoriety.  Hide as we may from our own worst behaviors we are tattlers on ourselves in the worst possible ways.  We don't mean to be.  We didn't mean to throw up in all those taxis or fall down all those stairs.  Or mean to break all those bones, or noses, or dent all those bumpers.  We didn't mean to do all those things.  And if those things were done quietly and nobody knew who the culprit was then we "got away with it."  We try so hard to remain anonymous and we are befuddled and angered when someone suggests that we may be at fault (rightly or wrongly) for some mishap, as if we could not possibly have been the perpetrators and sheepishly ask "who me"? 

I have a friend who was used to tying one on just about every night.  He had enough to drink one winter evening and on driving home he stopped for gasoline having noticed that he was low.  After he filled up, he noticed that an hour had gone by since his last drink at the tavern so he decided to find a late night liquor store to cap off the night with some vodka.  This added an additional hour to his evening's sojourn and when he reached home he entered the house and his wife immediately quizzed him about his whereabouts.  He had lame this's and that's but the reason for the third degree turned out to be that she had been visited by the police who claimed that a car registered to their address had broken a gasoline pump! The police had left a half hour before his arrival home but my friend was required to go to the station in the morning to clear things up.

Nobody notices us hmmh?  Well apparently he had driven away from the pump with the pump nozzle still in his gas tank, resulting in his ripping the hose from the filling pump. The oil company eventually billed him for the $500 of damages but strangely his was not charged with any crime.

So we want to be invisible and think we are until we aren't and we wish we had been.

The point, not to put too fine of one on it, is that we have isolated ourselves so much in our heads that we believe we exist in an opaque bubble and so are invisible; we don't want anyone to pay attention to us so we wishfully think their attentions away whether it is paid or not.  Our invisibility is a figment of our imaginations and only when confronted by harsh reality, usually having to do with the law, or a restraining order or lawsuit, do the blinders come off.
res

Is there an alcohol cure

When I think about my alcoholism I think of worry, trouble, depression, lies, deceit and lots of skulking around but not a lot of fun.  I think of years of lost sleep, lost love, lost trust lost personal treasure. So when I think about a "cure" I think in relative terms and usually in cures as 'freedoms from' somethings like freedom from lost sleep, lost love, lost trust. A cure for me means I no longer have to lie about things, no more hiding liquor around the house and no more making up of stories to cover - up what I was doing when I did not show up to a function that I had promised my presence at.  

I know that others would like to hope that there is a cure for the craving of alcohol or the need for putting an addicting substance in your body. And if you are reading this and truly have a continuing interest to participate in this forum I will share with you all that my experience has shown me.  I do use medication to suppress cravings and I would like to say that it works very well.  But I cannot say that unequivocally. And that is because that by the time that I truly surrendered to the program, I was so out of breath and mentally exhausted from all the tribulations, that I still do not know almost nine months later, whether my lack of craving is the result of medication or the result of emotional exhaustion.  Only time will tell.  And of course I cannot say that there are no times that I have not had at least a small desire for a nip, just not that overwhelming need to have slug, right now not later just now here and all other things be damned!

So I start the blog hopeful that there are other experiences out there, other opinions, other life stories.  I do not intend to have great debates but in true AA fashion we can only bring our experience strength and hope to our own recovery and the rest is up to us.  We can take what we need and leave the rest.

I await with interest the future.

Dr. Bob