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