I’m grateful for another cloudy, gray morning. I’m grateful for the hints of blue sky. I’m grateful it’s Friday and for the coffee on the desk. I’m grateful for purpose and confidence. I’m grateful for the life I’m still building. I’m grateful to be sober today.
song of the week:
This is just plain, old bad-ass music. I loved and love The Pretenders. I was a High School senior in 1979 and I actually paid full price to own this album. Most people know the album for this song:
MTV was a brand-new thing back then and this was one of the first “story” videos—there weren’t many videos back in beginning and two of the first 25 played were Pretenders videos (of course, two were by REO Speedwagon).
And here is something semi-historic that is happening because I’ve been listening to The Pretenders all morning: Co-Songs of the Week. Also, I’m going to nominate this song as containing highly recovery-appropriate messaging:
co-song of the week
Seriously, they do get the point:
“We are all of us in the gutter. Some of us are looking at the stars. I look ‘round the room, life is unkind. We fall but we keep getting up, overandoverandoverandoverandoverandover”
Even the name has a kind of ironically homey feeling for alcoholics: The Pretenders. I mean, for this alcoholic, drinking was the thing that let me pretend that things were different, that I was different. I realize that, at some level, the fixation on the late 1970’s and early ‘80s is not just because the music was so groovy, it’s also because that’s when I think I started to lose track of myself.
Reading the stories from the back of the Big Book is eye-opening in a lot of ways. We read them at the Anyone Anywhere meeting on Tuesday nights:
What always strikes me are the commonalities in the stories; time after time, when the alcoholic is recounting their early years there is a sense of apartness, of not fitting in and then the realization that alcohol solved that problem. The second area of commonality is the nature of the lies that are told to the alcoholic, by the alcoholic: That this is what everyone does, this is just blowing off steam, this could be controlled, if that was absolutely necessary. For some people, those things are true, a Dry January or a Sober October, will help reset things.
A quick digression, if you, or someone you love is, or should be, considering a Dry January, let me suggest a gift:
For us alcoholics, those month-long pauses are not something we could just whip off, it took me a lot of work to get my first 30-Day chip. For the non-alcoholic, there is usually not the thicket of lies and deception built around the drinking, it isn’t necessary.
That’s the other part of it, we alcoholics know, from pretty early on, that we need to keep the true details of our drinking on the down low. This is because we know, at some level, that we don’t drink like other people and that if “people” actually knew how much and how often we were drinking, more tellingly, how often we thought about drinking, well, they might see it as a problem.
In the law business, the lie that comes after the crime helps establish “consciousness of wrong-doing.” If you don’t think you committed a crime, you tend to spend less time covering it up. However, at some level, deep down, still safely in the denial-constructed fortifications of our alcoholic hearts, there is this flickering idea that the drinking just might be a problem. That’s what triggers the deception, and I think it’s more instinct than thoughtfully-deployed tactic.
Alcoholics tend to lie about crazy, meaningless stuff, and that is super-maddening to the folks who love alcoholics and addicts. Why lie about some of the stuff that alcoholics lie about? Speaking for myself, it was all a big ball of string and I knew that things were so precarious that even the smallest tugs on the string had the potential to start the whole unraveling in motion. One of the alcoholic self-lies is that continued life is contingent upon continued drinking. So, the reflexive lying about anything that could potentially lead to a question about anything becomes an automatic thing, I often was not even really aware as I told some of the innocent lies that protected the bigger lies.
Sometimes, I get these weird waves of emotion when I listen to music from the period, say 1978-1984. Those were the years that my alcoholism developed, that the first excavation of dependence was completed. I think when I’m in the right place, listening to those songs takes me back to that person a little bit, to what I was doing and thinking then.
Here it is, the end of 2023, and I’m not 100% sure I understand everything I’m signing up for by potentially making this song the anthem for 2024. But then again, I’m not sure exactly what happened in 2023 on a variety of levels. I’m not sure what exactly is meant by:
Now come on, baby, Get in the road
But I love the guitar solo and the way she counts out the measures and the super bad-ass harmonica, so I think I just may do it. And there is this:
“I’m standing in the middle of life, with my plans behind me…”
As always, your posts set my mind to wandering. But right now this badass song is trying to set my feet to wandering and get my walk in before it gets dark out here in the Northern Plains. Two things about middle of the road, one of my favorite Pretenders songs: I've never seen the lyrics printed out, but I've always heard 'I'm standing in the middle of the road with my past behind me." Also, I never knew that that was Chrissy playing the harmonica and I always thought that transition to the harmonica was her growling/yowling like a cat.