I’m grateful for seeing old friends. I’m grateful for time with my daughter. I’m grateful for seeing how things work. I’m grateful for next right things. I’m grateful to be sober today.
song of the week:
I was taking a very fast, semi-agitated walk the other day and suddenly thought of a song I hadn’t listened to for a long time. It wasn’t the song of the week. It was Ray Parker Jr’s other hit: “The Other Woman.”1
But like I said, I hadn’t listened to the song for a while and then I did. I think it’s a pretty groovy song, but just feel like it might leave the wrong impression and not a great fit for today. So, then I went hunting for another Ray Parker Jr song as a substitute. Most of the rest of the Ray Parker Jr. discography is kind of uninspiring. I kept thinking, didn’t he do that “Jack and Jill” song? He did, under the band name “Raydio.”2 Anyway, “Jack and Jill” is a bit tedious, lots of angst and hill climbing. So, you get Ray Parker, Jr’s greatest hit: “Ghostbusters.” Also, it’s kind of the topic today.
This week, I revisited the scene of some crimes, traveling to our Nation’s Capital to do a Ninth Step. I lived in DC for 30 years and was a pretty bad alcoholic for most of them. The last ten, a decade of trying and failing to get sober, were terrible in many ways. Not just for me. There was a lot chaos and conflict and dishonesty and injury to people who had only committed the offense of being my friend, or worse, loving me.
Anyway, I had this idea that I was also going to take a stroll down memory lane, walk by some of the old haunts, maybe take some pictures so that you all could see my drinking career in a dazzling, ironic, semi-sarcastic photo array of quotidian bars. It was a job, after all.
Back then, bars were selected based on: (1) proximity; (2) regular availability of bar stools; (3) decent food; (4) TV with good sight lines from barstools; (5) semi-secluded, not a place where friends and colleagues would pop-in; (6) kind of dark; (7) good music; (8) mafia don, semi-concealed seating, if someone did come in the front door, so they wouldn’t see me right away; (9) a decent version of Sauvignon Blanc; (10) good bartenders.3
During the course of my morning, as I was having the planned Ninth Step conversation, I found myself giving a thumbnail sketch of my life as an alcoholic to someone who used to see me on a pretty regular, nearly daily basis, in the bad, old days. When I talked about going into withdrawals after about four hours of not drinking, how I’d wake up in a pool of sweat, how my hands shook all the time, how I’d go and have a breakfast of pancakes and sauvignon blanc every day, a look of horror passed his eyes.
Watching the color drain out of someone else’s face while you describe your life, well, I noticed that.
I thought about going to a meeting at the Dupont Circle Club. I went to a lot of meetings there, often drunk, or with a plan to become drunk shortly after the meeting (or even half-time, sometimes). Why did I sit in all of those meetings when it was very clearly not working? That’s how badly I wanted it and I didn’t know where else I was going to get it. Why didn’t it work? Because I still needed drinking too much. What solved that? Doing the Steps, finding the version of myself that was enough and then making peace with that guy.
I finished what I had come to do, got to see some old friends and then it was back to the train station. No trip down memory lane. No slightly ironic pictures of places where I drank. No stories about a funny, engaging alcoholic who lived near Logan Circle. To be honest, none of it seems terribly funny, or even that interesting. Thinking about those times, those years, just feels dark and cold and sad.
Like the other day, when random news footage showing the freight entrance for the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia (Atlanta Division) stuck a memory dagger in my stomach. The prospect of walking down P Street and snapping a picture of the Commissary, purveyor of so-so pancakes and copious amounts of white wine in cute little carafes, well, it just brought to mind how it felt, careening down that street at roughly 7:55am every day to stop my hands from shaking and start my day. The desperation and despair and emptiness coming off of me so strongly it seemed like I could actually smell it. The sense of bleakness, the unshakeable thought, “how did we do this to ourselves,” as I trudged the 8 minutes over there from my house.
Which is to say, I didn’t go over there yesterday.
I do believe in ghosts. I think it’s possible there is one in my apartment. I’ve lived in a house where there were definitely some ghosts. I’m not afraid of ghosts, and as a recent movie put it, I think ghosts are proof of the existence of an enduring soul. So that seems mostly like a good thing. I didn’t visit the old haunts because I was afraid the spirits might lure me in, I didn’t visit them because they are just too terribly sad.
I get pretty enthusiastic when I talk about my life these days, how gratitude has transformed things, how even in the hardest moments, there is peace and love to be had. How there is hope and faith in nearly every crevice, just waiting to be found. That’s all true. A visit to the old stomping grounds showed me how much I left on the field; what those years cost me. Touching that old life still feels slightly unbearable. I hurt a lot of people, and that’s the thing that haunts me. But even as I work my way through that list, squashing those old beefs, making amends wherever possible, I’m starting to see that isn’t what will un-haunt the house.
It’s hard not to feel a sense of rage when I really see what I did to myself. It is compounded by the rage I feel at myself for what I did to other people. The Ninth Step is intended to help resolve the latter, but the former? I’ve heard of people doing Ninth Steps on themselves, but that seems a little like Father’s Day gifts when they kids are little: It all comes out of the same pocket. 4
I don’t have an answer yet for this, the thought that keeps cycling through my head as the Northeast Regional sways its way through Delaware, “How could we think that little of ourselves?” How could we have put ourselves in that spot over and over and over? How could we waste so much? How could we live with that much despair? How could we eat pancakes and wine every morning? How could we not see how terrible and pathetic and tragic that was? Why didn’t going to all of those meetings stop the drinking?
This alcoholic was never able to see his true value. It was always either alcoholically inflated for the benefit of others, or chronically undervalued by the alcoholic himself for the purposes of generating self-rage. I’m not sure why the machine wants to produce that result, but I think that’s some of the work left to be done. I also think that’s what will ultimately provide the basis for a reconciliation.
I have walked a fair number of actual battlefields. Some of those places are harrowing and definitely haunted, even a hundred years later. When you walk through the dense woods of Virginia, where the Battles of the Wilderness and Chancellorsville were fought, you can still the hasty trenches scratched by desperate men looking to escape the hail of minie balls flying through the air, literally shredding trees and men. It’s hard not to get shivers seeing the the spot in the forest where fire consumed hundreds of wounded men at night.
The most haunted place I ever visited was Verdun, the site of the great fort and terrible battles in France. One million men perished there in World War I. The scale of the human devastation is incomprehensible. There are signs with skull and crossbones adorning all of the trails, warning that the unexploded ordnance is still a danger, one hundred years later. I just remember barely speaking the entire time we were there. The cost, the sacrifice, the loss is almost too overwhelming to fathom.
I know there are ghosts from my time in DC, but Logan Circle is not my Verdun, nor the horrible Battle of Petersburg or worse, Cold Harbor. The remorseless progress of the Army of the Potomac is however, a pretty good analogy for alcoholism: Near the end of my time in DC, when my drinking was turning my life into a perma-eclipse, there was no question left about the ultimate result, that Army was too strong and never stopped. It was just a matter of time, only the cost and the extent of the devastation were left to be determined. Of course, the futility of it all greatly disturbs me, what was the sacrifice for? What was the aim of my civil war?
Fortunately, I don’t think answering those questions is necessary for my continued sobriety. I suppose I could try to end the self-conflict with some hard-negotiated, expertly-facilitated and mediated treaty process. Maybe a Truth and Reconciliation Commission? No, I think it’s probably enough to just stop the fighting. As for the ghosts? Like the song says, I ain’t afraid of no ghosts. I actually think it’s when they all come home that the house will become un-haunted.
I have no idea what is going on in this video. I think Ray Parker, Jr. definitely believes in ghosts, however.
Spotify—get your shit together, shouldn’t that somehow be connected?
These are not listed in order of importance. Item Ten was actually a pretty significant factor.
Note: My kids were and are completely adorable and lovable and I cherish every gift I’ve ever been given by them.