I’m grateful for a little kitchen experimentation. I’m grateful for a trip to the museum. I’m grateful for seeing where being myself takes me. I’m grateful for being able to let things develop. I’m grateful to be sober today.
I’m not sure if I should be offering some kind of apology for the text around the “Subscribe” buttons that I put directly above this paragraph every morning or not. I do note the tone has gone from clever (I think), to pleading, to snarky, to dismissive and now it’s gotten very close to the “Do I need to stop this car?” point. I think my approach to marketing and customer relations maybe draws too heavily on Ignatius J. Reilly’s letter to I. Abelman, Esquire, particularly the part where he warns that, upon further complaints, “you will surely feel the sting of the lash across your back.”1 Even though that does very effectively communicate the point. I’m not sure where that leaves us, except maybe some people are wondering if this was all a back-handed effort to generate some enthusiasm for subscribing? I would note that it would indeed be a very back-handed way of doing it.
It’s kind of ironic I find that line from Confederacy of Dunces so funny. Ironic, because that line pretty much sums up my pre-sobriety life. I did a lot of stuff knowing full well that I was surely going to feel the sting of the lash. I don’t mean to suggest that this was a lifestyle thing, it was just my way of life. When I drank, I was able to ignore consequences, push fears and anxieties into that overstuffed hall closet, the one where tomorrow’s problems are kept.2
Bill used alcohol in a pretty similar way. He describes the Great Crash of 1929 this way:
I was finished and so were many friends. The papers reported men jumping to death from the towers of High Finance. That disgusted me. I would not jump. I went back to the bar. My friends had dropped several million since ten o’clock—so what? Tomorrow was another day.
Big Book, p. 4
Alcohol gave me that same kind of insouciance, the ability to ignore the plain consequences of my actions. Somehow, alcohol made me feel impervious and invisible—and those were two really excellent things for someone who was shy and awkward and didn’t always get people and felt a ton of pressure to manage everything to the nth degree and felt incredibly personally responsible for every bad bounce, bad result, bad feeling. And I was doing the kind of jobs where you kind of had to be “on” a lot of the time. I began feeling the crushing pressure to succeed very early and drinking was the perfect complement; alcohol enabled me to live a life that was out of balance from the very start.
I say this not to extoll the virtues of drinking, it’s to illustrate that my relationship with alcohol was very complex. Alcohol was interwoven through most of what I did, that’s why the idea of just stopping not only seemed, but was, impossible. How can you pull one of the load-bearing, foundational blocks out without bringing the whole structure down?3 I proved the futility of that exercise many, many times.
Every failure drove at least one more failure down the line, the accumulated shame of all of those failures driving the realization that I must just be so severely flawed that I’m incapable of ever getting this, incapable of following the steps of a simple program, even though I knew that’s what’s necessary to save my own life. The inescapable conclusion that I was one of those poor unfortunates who just couldn’t and wouldn't get it. I had the answers to the exam in my hand, and still couldn’t get a passing grade.4
To outsiders not possessed of an alcoholic brain, this conduct is baffling, painful, insulting and disrespectful. I would get caught drinking over and over and over, and one of the sentiments often very angrily expressed was, “how did you think you were going to get away with that—do you think I’m stupid?” Of course, this was often followed by the very logical piece of inductive (or deductive?) reasoning:
You must love alcohol more than you love me.
It’s kind of hard to not come to that conclusion. It was kind of hard for me to not come to that conclusion, that I must love drinking more than my kids, my family, everyone who loved me. That made me feel very, very defective, a real dweller of the underworld. This was a familiar feeling, however, and I had a ready antidote for many, many years. I write about this a lot and probably very repetitively, but it’s because I’m still kind of struggling to find the right way to express and describe the madness that really takes root when you’re an alcoholic.
I was able to function in the outside world pretty effectively for a long, long time. I was drinking every day for a long, long time. I asked precisely the right question that summer night at Magoo’s in 1981, how was this ever going to end? Suddenly, it was thirty years later and I was trying desperately to stop before drinking literally cost me everything. I tried everything and couldn’t stop. I spent ten years trying to get sober and never had more than 90 days or so. It just wasn’t going to work for me.
And then it worked. I don’t think it was the accumulation of consequences that did it. I began to realize that alcohol hadn’t actually solved anything, hadn’t actually resolved anything. It just let me put off the consequences for a bit, but I had been paying up in dribs and drabs along the way for a long time. My account was sadly, pretty current in terms of misery owed.
I think things changed, I think it began to work, when I really started to see that there was a way forward. When I really, really read Bill’s story I finally grasped what I had to do if I wanted to get what he had gotten. People started showing up in my life to help illuminate the way and I had finally reached the point where one shrug’s one’s shoulders at the mountain of improbable evidence accumulating, and says to one’s self, “why the f*** not.” This may be the first honest communication with “one’s self,” in a while and it can be kind of jolting.
The difference in my life now? It boils down to exactly what Bill said it would— being willing to believe in the existence of a Higher Power, one that could and would restore me to sanity, if sought. My life these days is a head-shaking affair—but not the old kind, the “how could he think he’d get away with that?” kind. It’s me doing the head shaking and sometime laughing, somewhat insanely, out loud.
I did this yesterday evening after a couple of pretty wondrous things happened in quick succession-including one that arrived in the actual U.S. Mail. The Big Fella has a sly sense of humor, to be sure and I think we may like some of the same movies. I thought about the things that had happened, how they replaced stories in my head that were very, very different and very, very wrong. The Big Fella is very ambiguous sometimes, but other times the evidence just gets stacked in front of me, pretty relentlessly, until I finally relent and stop trying to fit events into my own cramped, wrongly-framed narrative. Those were the stories I wrote for too long and they all ended in the same place: A stool about 3/4 of the way down the bar at the Logan Tavern, in front of the second TV. Things changed when I finally saw I could write a different story.
Last night in my kitchen, I weighed the new evidence, looked out the window for a bit and laughed “okay, okay, I get it.” That’s how my life has changed, simply by being willing to consider the possibility that maybe I was wrong for a long time and that there might be a better way. So far, the indications are pretty promising.
Thanks for Letting Me Share
This is a reference to A Confederacy of Dunces, a book I read a number of times in my youth. I like this book so much, I always keep a spare copy because sooner or later I meet someone who should read it.
I’ve mentioned this before, but wasn’t the World of Tomorrow at DisneyWorld profoundly disappointing? Who knew the Future was so appliance-centric and available in only three colors: Harvest Gold, Avocado Green or Burnt Orange.
If you’re spending a lot of time pondering the question, the whole thing probably needs to come down.
This is also the story of the Securities Regulation class I took the last semester of law school, except I did pass that.