I’m grateful for a couple of very rainy days. I’m grateful to live on a high floor of the building. I’m grateful for dinner and a meeting with my Sponsor. I’m grateful for a cab that magically appeared in the rain. I’m grateful to see how things happened and how things work now. I’m grateful to be sober today.
Your Sponsor and I hit a meeting last night. I’m on the Upper East Side, and we often go to meetings up here, but I’m always agitating for more field trips, so we ventured all the way to a meeting in the Village. Did we prove we were hip and cool alcoholics last night? Did we have a lot of meaningful insights and revelations? I’ll let you judge based on our actual conversation on the way out of the meeting:
Your Sponsor: Man, these stairs are really steep. Owww. Me: Yeah, people don't really appreciate that it's the going down the stairs that is tremendously painful.
In a dazzling display of the synchronicity that flows from long-term sobriety, we walked out of an AA meeting on a very rainy New York night and lo, a Shake Shack appear-eth out of the mist and gloom, and not just any Shake Shack, but a Shake Shack Innovation Kitchen.1 There, we reflected on a variety of topics, notably, when one orders the Cheese Fries, at first there appears to be way too much cheese melted deliciously over the top (is that even possible?), but by the time you get to the end, you realize it’s actually pretty close to exactly the right amount. Plus, the wooden french fry fork is just plain classy and thoughtful.
We also talked about how often people go to AA meetings to talk about how much they don’t like AA meetings. I don’t mean this to be judgy nor am I reporting anyone to the Central Office for insufficient enthusiasm because I, one hundred percent, felt this way for many years. I would sit at meetings and inwardly sneer at the people who “needed” to be there; I found the idea of turning my life over to God to be kind of a sweetly simple idea that would never work for someone as smart and sophisticated as me. I read the Big Book and imagined a guy wearing a straw boater with a Thurston Howell-style accent giving me super helpful advice on getting sober, fresh from the 1930’s.
What I really thought? I hated the creepy, kind of stupid sayings on the wall. I hated the way people said things in unison, like, “God, could and would, if sought.” I hated reading “How it Works” and hearing the part about people who couldn’t grasp a life that required rigorous honesty. I hated hearing people talk about boring lives and lengths of sobriety measured in years, not days or hours. I hated the fact I couldn’t stop drinking.
If you notice, I spend a lot of time here in the mornings trying to understand what changed—what really happened? I still don’t really know yet, obviously, a lot of things changed in me. I think the best boiled-down version is that willingness and humility finally emerged as the ways to organize my life. My rejectionist approach to AA was a function of the demon, or maybe a little vampire, living inside of me.2
That is the guy who was twisting and darkening my thoughts and helping me craft stories that ended perfectly when paired with a flinty glass of Sauvignon Blanc. That guy really hated AA and he was very good at finding lots of ways to remind me how completely ridiculous the idea of living without alcohol was. He helped me see that the people at AA meetings, the ones who calmly announced anniversaries and talked about non-specific spiritual awakenings, were mostly full of shit and probably leading pretty empty, unexciting lives; lives that would never do for guys like us.
I went all-in with that guy. He and alcohol were doing a pretty great job of managing things until I found myself at the edge of my 50’s, alone, out of options and living in a sober house in a city where I knew basically no one. I’m not completely sure where that guy went then, maybe things finally got too tough, even for him. But he split and left a pretty big, f****** hole. Maybe I was just too tired, too spent, to conjure up another self-imagined god and accidentally let the real one (whatever that might be) get a foothold (or the spiritual equivalent). All of a sudden, the words started making sense, the stupid sayings helped remind me how I had stupidly fallen for the self-deception from that guy,3 and this idea of a spiritual awakening being the thing that turned the exercise from stopping to drinking to leading a sober life--the life I was meant to lead all along--well, maybe it wasn't so far-fetched.
More than 120 years of wisdom was trying to find a way to get home in the rain last night. The streets down there get pretty confusingly named and located , especially in the dark. We were lamenting the lack of awnings in modern New York, the often random nature of Uber meeting points and the fact that more people don’t read the Big Book and find the plan for a contented life right there in the first 16 pages. However that sliver of light gained hold in me, it was reading the Big Book, studying it carefully, and then actually trying to implement the teachings in my life, that helped it grow strong enough to light the way out for me. It’s what finally made it possible for me to get sober. It’s what makes it possible for me to stay sober and getting a cheeseburger in the bargain doesn’t hurt.
Thanks for Letting Me Share
When you really compare the standard vs. innovation menus, I think you mostly see an effort to imagine new roles for Bacon in more foods.
I just think Vampire is classier than demon or werewolf, also you can go more places, even in the get-up. Especially in New York.
Is there anything more mind-bending than really coming to understand how thoroughly we deceive ourselves?