Daily Gratitude List 12.15.22

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

I’m grateful for familiar things. I’m grateful to see how strong self-delusion can be. I’m grateful for the way the light changes all morning as the sun comes up. I’m grateful for observation and reflection. I’m grateful to be sober today.

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I have more than a passing obsession with notebooks, pens, productivity tools, note-taking tools and systems, organizational-type software, crazy methods of dividing up notebooks into arcane sections that supposedly boost productivity but mostly sow confusion about which section of the notebook is for which things, and all sorts of other things like that. I’ve also determined that there is maybe a fair amount of AD/HD-type stuff floating around in my brain, which would explain quite a bit. Ask me how the five books I’m reading are? I really do struggle with maintaining focus and am just starting to see the interplay between those characteristics and my drinking—also, how that led to a fairly self-judgy thought-life.¹ But that is for another day.²

One of the consequences of my fascination with all of these tools (looking for a magic bullet to help focus my focus) is that fragments of things, relics of the free trial period, pop-up unexpectedly. One of these fragments floated to the surface yesterday, much like a corpse in the East River on Law & Order.³ It was the start of some fortunately-lost writing project and it talked about how the sun hit the blinds in my bedroom (this was in DC) at a certain time every morning. It wasn’t a very scintillating, or even remotely interesting observation, but it struck me, the sameness of my life when I was drinking.

I feel like I may have a claim to the popularization of the phrase, “Lather, Rinse, Repeat,” outside of the hair care sphere, of course. The year was 1978 and I was taking the required “American Humanities” course taught by “Mister, I mean, Doctor, Workman.”⁴ We were assigned to write about death and dying as depicted in popular media, I chose “Old Yeller,” as my text and at some point, I concluded the discussion of some recurring experience with the phrase, “Lather. Rinse. Repeat.” This use was drawn, I believe and hereby affirm, but definitely not under the penalty of perjury, directly from the bottle of Head and Shoulders in my shower.

However convincing my claim of first use, the “lather. rinse. repeat” nature of my life while drinking was pretty appalling. I was routinizing despair. Even though the Sun was mostly coming up on a regular basis during this time, I just noted when it hit the blinds in my bedroom and kind of became the annoying, overwhelming, nagging reminder that there was another day to get through. When things were really bad, it meant reporting to my barstool at The Commissary pretty promptly at 8am for pancakes and Sauvignon Blanc.⁵ The rest of the day was the long downward slide to kind of passing out in front of “Law and Order,” marked really only by changes in drinking locations and difficult interactions with people trying to love me. Weirdly, I found it very difficult to give this life up.

My apartment looks out across the East River—it’s a pretty tremendous view, I’m very lucky and if you’re a regular, you’ve seen a lot of it.

Views of the Sanitation Loading Facility @ 91st Street

I get up pretty early every day, a remnant of my indoctrination by the Des Moines Register. I sit in my pretty dark living room and drink coffee and listen to music and watch as the light fills the room. Obviously, I’m struck by how beautiful it is on a nearly-daily basis and how it’s possible to discern beauty even on cloudy, precipitative days. This is what struck me yesterday and this morning: My life while drinking was a bleary, not-worth remembering affair, there was nothing really inspiring or noteworthy about it, it had the charm of being slowly suffocated by a pillow. There aren’t 49 gazillion pictures of my view of the corner of 13th and R Street.⁶

This would ordinarily be the part where I try to draw some flowery conclusion, but I think you get the point. When I finally became willing to concede there might be a better way to live my life, I immediately started noticing there was a lot of beauty around me, and it never showed up the same way twice. If you want to be really technical, I look out over the NYC Sanitation Loading Facility on 91st Street. It’s in every one of those pictures and somehow it’s the thing I never really pay attention to anymore.

Thanks for Letting Me Share

1. This is an interesting phrase from the Big Book that a Sponsee pointed out to me yesterday: “Our thought-life will be placed on a much higher plane when our thinking is cleared of wrong motives.” Big Book, p. 86.

2. As though I’m actually able to keep track of things like this.

3. Reason I Love Living in NY # 83: Being able to recognize places in my neighborhood on “Law & Order.” Also, the opening montage from “The Jeffersons.”

4. As is often the case in college towns, you get some very qualified high school teachers. Dr. Workman had earned a Ph.D and got a little peeved when he wasn’t addressed in a way that didn’t recognize that achievement. If you’re familiar with the “Missy, I mean, Mom” joke from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, that’s the same idea.

5. No, it’s not a great pairing and syrup doesn’t help.

6. Of course, that’s where I lived. Is that address perfect?