I’m grateful for a Friday morning. I’m grateful for the prospect of snow. I’m grateful for a new routine. I’m grateful for evidence of growth. I’m grateful for advil and ice. I’m grateful to be sober today.
song of the week:
Happy Friday. How you doing? This is so obvious that it’s pretty embarrassing. We’ve been doing this sotw thing for quite some while now and we haven’t covered this song or anything by the Eagles. WTF, TBD! One of the very first concerts I attended would have been the Eagles in Cedar Falls at the Uni-dome. I think it’s actually pretty much impossible to have been of FM-listening age in the 1970’s and not be an Eagles fan—it might not have come naturally, perhaps the love of the Eagles was actually more North Korean-style behavior modification involving repetition of a song like “New Kid in Town.” Which I hated but everyone else seemed to love.
“Hotel California” has to count as one of the great albums of all time. I think literally 2/3 of the planet knows all of the songs on this album, and could probably sing along. Some of the phrases, “you can check out, but you can never leave,” became part of the cultural fabric so long ago, no one remembers where it came from. And also, like aren’t most of these songs the songs of addicts and alcoholics? I mean seriously. There have been periods of times where I listened to this song a lot:
Sure, kind of over-dramatic, but it does capture that really horrible moment in time when you realize that dream of complete freedom for the 19th time. “You never thought you’d be alone, this far down the line.” It also does capture the life of the alcoholic,
“the hours go by like minutes and the shadows come to stay, so you take a little something to make them go away.”
The concept of “wasted time” can be a tough one for us alcoholics and addicts. No matter how happy and grateful you can manage to be, living that #odaat dream life, there are lots of nagging reminders about the things that could have been, that might have been. This alcoholic would have added, “Things that should have been.” And I realize, that last one is beyond my pay grade.
Part of what I carried around with me was the shame and regret that came from hurting other people, blowing up relationships, creating terrible situations. Even if you manage to not think about the details too much, those heavy, heavy thumbs are always on the scales of internal justice.1
Of course, that’s the point of the 8th and 9th Steps, and that’s not what we’re here to talk about today. 2 Except for just a little bit more. I’m finishing my third week at this new gig that I already love very much. What do I love? A swanky office with all of the coffee I can drink. There was a brief moment a few evenings ago, at the “attorney mixer,” where I thought that I had discovered a sprawling cache of free snacks. I dispatched texts to my children along these lines:
Like always, there are disappointments and “misunderstandings.” It turns out, just like freedom isn’t “free,” neither are the snacks in Cafe 43.3 It’s still ok, I’ve been in this environment long enough to know the tricks of the trade. The 2pm stroll past the conference rooms—usually the window between the end of the 12:30 lunches and the clean-up. Is anyone really being hurt? Also, there is about zero chance anyone is going to confront the older guy walking down the hall with a sandwich, it just looks like it’s probably supposed to happen.
And now, we have reached the actual topic for today, “what’s probably supposed to happen.” I’ve said variations of this for a while now. My official-ish, mantra, pithy sum-up of my worldview is this:
“The things that are supposed to happen, generally do happen and probably around the time they are supposed to.”
You could look at this and think it’s an attempt to abdicate responsibility for one’s life. There is also that language in the New Testament about not worrying so much, because look how great the birds have it. That one never made much sense to me, living like a bird just seemed less ideal than what I had going at the time. The hidden responsibility in my worldview, the thing that makes sense of the stuff that’s happening, involves showing up on an authentic basis.
That doesn’t sound like much, and maybe for lots of the non-alcoholic world, it’s less of a challenge. Sorry, I wouldn’t know about that. For me, that has been an almost insurmountable mountain. A challenge that forced me to confront my greatest feat:
That I wasn’t good enough.
Or whatever word you want to swap out with “good.” I drank because I saw that it helped me become a more presentable and palatable version of me. And it worked. The thing is, I always knew it was really just a work-around, a before-its-time hologram. I knew that people were believing in something that didn’t really exist, and the strain and anger that generates are tough to manage. Of course, drinking helped a lot with that, too.
The song of the week is one of my favorites and should be very, very recognizable to anyone who pines for the “Alcoholic Lighting Round,” as I do. We’d crank this song in the green ford pinto as we careened around Iowa City and the secondary roads of Johnson County, I would always get a laugh when I would turn the volume down and do a perfectly timed, announcer voice,
Are you with me so far?
I very much aspired to be a “cru-el dude,” very, very much. I just could never really pull that off. I mean, I tried, and that’s why that 8th Step list has that K2 feel to it.4 I listened to the sotw, earlier this week, and it provoked one of my out-loud laughs, which people around me on the subway don’t seem to know how to take. I used to listen to the sotw on the way to work, kind of a psych up, let’s go baby routine. This was another staple in that genre:
I mean, I still run up the subway escalator, but my life is far, far, far from the fast lane. I spent a lot of time on a barstool (the unit of measurement is years), lamenting the fact that things would never change, that everything had been and was wasted time. That was a world where jumping in a car and driving as fast as f*** somewhere, hopefully pretty f***** up while doing it, was pretty appealing.5
It turns out that things change and they can change pretty f***** fast. I’m overwhelmed, happier than maybe I have ever been, and waking up in even more wonderment than usual. I’m the new, old guy at the law firm, padding around, cadging snacks and drinking absurd amounts of coffee, getting to build something. It’s hard to describe how meaningful it is to me. I also know exactly where it came from:
I started living the principles of the Big Book.
I’m not an AA automaton, saying the prescribed things in prescribed intervals at prescribed locations. My program is the answer to the questions that are posed by the Big Book. Your answers to those questions will be different, thus our programs will be different. Vive l’difference. The point of recovery is not finding new church basements, that’s a beautiful and valuable tool, a tool that should be cherished, like one of my grandfather’s hammers. But it’s not the point, the point is finding the life that was left behind in that mad rush down the highway.
And then living it.
That is one horribly muddled metaphor. I know.
We’re actually going to be wrapping up Steps one, Two and Three and then launching a whole Step Four and Five campaign—about which I have many ideas!!
The actual name for the place that has the snacks. Also, there is a sparkling water dispenser, which makes me very happy.
K2 vs. K-9. Who wins?
Note: the song actually grew out of a high speed drive with a drug dealer.
Congrats on the new job! It’s amazing where recovery can take you!
Love it! I tried to be a cru-el dude also didn’t work. Fuck all that wasted time 😉