Liner Notes for Episode 15

Breakfast with Joanna

I know I say this every week, but what a great “breakfast” with Joanna!

Breakfast with an Alcoholic: Episode 15

I usually start with the substance and the lessons, etc, but thought I would cut right to the chase today. I think in one of the promos I said something about Joanna hitting it out of the park musically and that’s because she, like me, loves Warren Zevon. She’s a lawyer, I’m a lawyer, people like us like this:

Of course there is this majestic anthem, too¹:

My personal encounter with Warren Zevon came in the Winter of 1982-3 while attending the University of Wisconsin.² I was out cavorting with my friends and we happened past the Student Union at some point pretty late in the evening. Out of nowhere, my friend Glenn gets hit in the side by a snowball. Pretty hard, too. We looked around and saw a bunch of guys by a bus firing snowballs at us for no reason. Of course, snowball fights don’t really require a reason and we launched a massive retaliatory strike. There were snowballs everywhere, white streaks criss-crossing the night sky, thuds and groans when the icy ones hit, the annoying spray of exploding snow sliding down your collar and under your sleeves. Glenn suddenly called out, “Shit, that’s Warren Zevon!”

He had been playing the theater at the Union that night and now was part of this unprovoked snowball aggression and who doesn’t want to say, “I hit Warren Zevon with a snowball?”³ Sadly, none of the living participants of that fight can make that claim. Warren Zevon threw a couple of haughty snowballs at us, laughed and got on the bus. At that point, his band broke off contact and got on the bus, too. We threw a couple of half-hearted snowballs at the bus windows, but the fight was over and we would never cross paths again.⁴

You probably thought I was excited about the Warren Zevon thing just so I could tell my self-indulgent snowball fight story, but that’s not really it. Listen to this and tell me it’s not a Top 5 Recovery Anthem:

Well, it's tough to be somebody
And it's hard not to fall apart
Up here on Rehab Mountain
We gonna learn these things by heart

I think the “falling apart” is a big part of getting sober. Here was how Bill W. described the bottom:

I who had thought so well of myself and my abilities, of my capacity to surmount obstacles, was cornered at last. Now I was to plunge into the dark, joining that endless procession of sots who had gone on before. I thought of my poor wife. There had been much happiness after all. What I would not give to make amends. But that was over now.

No words can tell of the loneliest and despair I found in that bitter morass of self-pity. Quicksand stretched around me in all directions. I had met my match. I had been overwhelmed. Alcohol was my master.

Big Book, p. 8. ⁵

So, there’s the surrender, the end of the road part. But I’m not sure that’s all of it. If you stop there, you’re just a broken-down alcoholic playing out the string. But sometimes, against that backdrop of stunning and complete defeat, the idea that maybe there’s a way out gets planted and sometimes, against some pretty serious odds, it takes hold and starts to grow.⁶ That’s the miracle part, the part where we start to recover from our formerly hopeless addictions to drugs and alcohol and begin to reclaim the lives we were meant to lead. For me, hope took root while I was licking my wounds in a sober house in NYC during the pandemic. For Joanna it came after another night of partying and the realization that she just couldn’t keep living the way she had been.

Joanna made me laugh when she said she was “stubborn.” She and I were both corporate litigators and I will tell you that it does take a fair amount of aggression and shall we call it, “sticktoitiveness.” The idea is that you take a position and defend it vigorously. This is not the ideal mindset for recovery. The Big Book tells us again and again that self-honesty is the critical, essential element of getting sober:

Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves.

Big Book p. 58

I think it’s really hard to be a long-term alcoholic or addict without a pretty well-honed ability to persuade yourself of some pretty ridiculous shit. Like, “lots of other people drink like this,” “this life isn’t so bad,” “pancakes are better with sauvignon blanc”, “my drinking only hurts me,” and the best one: “ I’ll stop tomorrow.” I think the “falling apart” is the necessary destruction of this capacity to lie to ourselves. For me, it was arriving in NY in September 2020 and realizing that I simply couldn’t continue living the way I had been and I couldn’t keep believing my own lies: My life was bad, other people didn’t drink like this and pancakes and wine are a horrible combination. It was the moment I was finally honest with myself. For sure, it had been a long time coming: 40 years of drinking, more than ten years of trying to get sober. But what it took was falling apart. I finally fell apart and told myself the truth.

But, like the song says, even if your “superfine mind has come undone,” the good news is that:⁷

Any minor world that breaks apart falls together again

And I’m definitely a major dude with at least half a heart.

Thanks for Letting Me Share

1. If it was me, I’d leave this playing while I read the rest of this.

2. I am 100% your “Badger Buddy.”

3. This naked aggression against me and my friends? This naked aggression shall not stand.

4. I’m sorry, I love this song, too:

5. One of the amazing passages in the Big Book: “Trembling, I stepped from the hospital a broken man. Fear sobered me for a bit. Then came the insidious insanity of that first drink.” Big Book, p. 8. The fear of imminent death only sobered Bill up “for a bit.” My kind of alcoholic.

6. It does kind of remind one of this: “As he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on the rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly and since they had no root they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them.” Then this, “But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty and in another thirty” Matthew 13: 4-7, 23.

7. The Wilco version is pretty cool, but here’s the original: