I’m grateful it’s Friday morning. I’m grateful for some really excellent coffee. I’m grateful for exciting opportunities. I’m grateful for the way the sun comes up every morning. I’m grateful for what happens when I let it. I’m grateful to be sober today.
Song of the Week:
I don’t often pick cover versions for the much-considered sotw, I’m not sure if there is some principle underneath that, but, nevertheless, here we are. I actually think this might be a better version than the original. Also, far, far less creepy.
I have a very long history with this song. I believe it appeared on the K-Tel Hits of 1972, which might be where I first encountered it. It played a lot on the radio (where we used to hear music, especially if we lived in Iowa). The greatness of this song was then drummed into my young head by Mr. Shaffer, the hip music teacher at our elementary school and also the conductor/musical director of the Iowa City Community School District Elementary School Band, and also the Northwest Junior High Band. Mr. Shaffer was actually a big influence on me musically.
Mr. Shaffer had a big floppy head of hair, wore pretty stylish bell bottoms and the mod sports coats that defined style then, with the proviso that this was Iowa City. A young TBD was a stand-out alto saxaphonist and really enjoyed it when Mr. Shaffer would point over to me and do some exaggerated head nodding on songs like “25 to 6 to 4” or the “Theme from Mash1,” like we were really really grooving. I’m not sure that Mr. Shaffer would have translated well to the elementary school music scene today. I have a very vivid memory of Mr. Shaffer delivering a tutorial on the proper way to hold cymbals when they are not in use or need to be silenced and then connecting that to Margie Noyes, the first clarinet, and her slowness to “develop.” That led to someone, not me, formulating a really unfortunate nickname for Margie, “steamie,2” Also, Mr. Shaffer really liked “Brandy.”
In our 4th grade music class, Mr. Shaffer picked this song for us to learn and sing. Of course, this meant we got to hear Mr. Shaffer explicate the lyrics, including giving voice to what Brandy, the girl who works laying whiskey down, must have really felt. The sense of loss when the love of her life departed to pursue his true love: The Sea. The locket, made of finest silver from the north of Spain, a too slim reminder of the way his eyes glowed as he told his sailor stories. The pain, the longing, the every-day loss of loving a man who’s not around. All Brandy could do was try to understand.
This Fourth Grader did not know that much about love, but it seemed like Mr. Shaffer did. As he went through the lyrics he would really get into it, starting to sing parts aloud in between peppering us with questions about what we thought the words meant: “What does it mean when he says “my life, my lover and my lady is the sea?”3
Mr. Shaffer definitely knew something about love and loss. I could imagine him explaining to someone that he wished he could stay, but his work with the Junior High Band was just too important. As silly as this was, it got me started down a road of self-definition. I don’t know about the rest of you, but this book-reading, music-listening, movie-watching machine was developing very definite ideas about who he “wanted” to be.
If I could stitch together the amalgam of the pieces I aspired to: Cary Grant in “To Catch a Thief,” the super cool and competent Peter Graves in “Mission Impossible,” the Robert Redford conspiracy-exposing f*** you to Cliff Robertson in “Three Days of the Condor.” The sea captain in Brandy. Those pieces were what I wanted to be. Unfortunately, I was kind of an awkward, nerdy, eccentric (even then) Boy Scout with a Des Moines Register newspaper route.
If we were to stop here, this is kind of a dumb story that doesn’t go anywhere. Everyone has semi-delusional ideas about who they want to be when they grow up; maybe it’s Ricky Bobby now instead of Dirty Harry. I think it’s in the traces of that “who did I want to be” process that the roots of my alcoholism took hold. My views are based on nothing but my own experience, watching other alcoholics, reading the Big Book and spending 50 years in my own head, obsessively trying to puzzle things out. But I think the nub of alcoholism is this:
Alcohol works for alcoholics.
If you think of alcoholism and addiction as an adaptive tool, the way some early recovery theorists, like Marty Mann and Ruth Fox did, that makes some sense. For most people, the first taste of alcohol brings a sputter and an “ewwww.” For this young, proto-alcoholic, standing next to a trampoline and a semi-stricken friend, the sip that took me past the buzzline was accompanied by a bright, white light and the sounds of an angel choir, complete with Lynrd Skynrd playing lead guitar. Maybe like the “Watson, come here” moment for Alexander Graham Bell.
I don’t think that everyone who drank Pink Jesus Punch at Deak Rummelhart’s house that night became an alcoholic. But I did. Here’s the real problem that alcohol solved for me:
It let me stop criticizing myself.
This was the real superpower that alcohol gave me. You see, the dark underside of that longing to be more like Paul Newman in “Cool Hand Luke,” was a growing sense of shame that I wasn’t. When you think about it, that’s kind of absurd, blaming yourself for not being more like something that didn’t actually exist.4 I don’t how shame came to be part of the equation of who I am—but it ran pretty deep. I think that sense of inner shame is pretty common among us alcoholics and addicts; it’s true that drinking and using let us escape other people and external obligations—but it was mostly me that I was running from.5
If you think about it logically, me attempting to run from myself ought to be a pretty close race, statistically likely to result in a dead heat, given the very evenly matched speeds of the competitors. If I was going to beat that motherf*****, I was going to need an edge, something performance enhancing. One of my favorite jokes of all time features campers in a tent under imminent attack by a monster Grizzly Bear.6 One camper is calmly lacing up his sneakers, his companion says, “You’re nuts, you can’t outrun a bear—they run like racehorses!!.”
I don’t need to outrun the bear. I need to outrun you.
Et voila, a little chugging of Pink Jesus Punch, or Upside Down Margaritas, even a few Tequila Sunrise’s—and I was way ahead, looking back on the sad, rest of the field and savoring the victory that was just shortly ahead. Except, there’s the real problem with this particular race.
There isn’t a finish line.
It took me literally decades of running before I saw that; it took me literally decades of drinking before I understood what I was doing. I don’t think that either alcohol or 15 year-old TBD were intrinsically bad or evil. It was the nature of our relationship that was problematic. I needed to quiet the constant voice in my head wondering why we still didn’t measure up, why we hadn’t accomplished more, why more people didn’t like us, why were we always so alone?
At that time, the answers all came back to me. The thing that stopped the clearly objectionable line of questioning was drinking. That was the ultimate nature of our bargain: I’d keep drinking and that would stop the thinking.
True acceptance is very, very, very had; but true acceptance has been the key to my recovery, to my tranquility and happiness. I needed to accept that things, at this particular moment, are exactly as they should be—including me. I had to let go of the idea that it was up to me to traverse the chasm between what I was and what I should have been. My job is to show up in each moment as authentically as I can and the next moment and the one after that, and trust that things will unfold as they are meant to.
That’s easy to say and hard to do. It requires trust, faith, optimism, resignation and self-honesty—it took this alcoholic a long time to even begin to develop these traits and it’s an ongoing process. But accepting that this moment is as it should be takes quite a bit of practice. I used to focus on what I didn’t have, what I wasn’t—the chasm between the largely unobtainable things on my wish list and what I had was simply too much for me to manage. That’s a big part of why I drank. Acceptance is truly the answer for that.
I’ve listened to Brandy a lot, for like more than 50 years! I have my own theory about what was going through her head at night, when the bars closed down and she walked through a silent town. Mr. Shaffer’s version of Brandy is about loss, grief and unrequited love; I imagine Brandy differently. I see her walking home alone, touching the locket at her throat and thinking about someone who truly loves her and always will, gratitude at having this unexpected and deep connection, and wondering where the journey might lead. Maybe this moment isn’t exactly what she might have wished for, but it’s enough and it’s unfolding into the next moment, just as it is meant to. Just like the one after that will, too.
Happy Friday.
Actually, “Suicide is Painless,” which is a reference to the feigned death scene of Painless the Dentist in M*A*S*H—one of the truly funny movies of all time.
No, I’m not going to explain.
The whole song lyrics to poetry thing was very big in education in the 1970s. A very hip English teacher covered “A Well Respected Man” by the Kinks—I wish it had been “Lola,” because I really didn’t understand what that song was about.
That alone makes it so much harder.
There are lots and lots of songs about the difficulties inherent in this process. Perhaps an upcoming newsletter….
It may be that all of my most favorite jokes involve bears.