I’m grateful for a gray, rainy morning. II’m grateful for yet another chance to watch the ferry glide in. I’m grateful for a day of getting after it. I’m grateful it’s the end of the week. I’m grateful every time I look back. I’m grateful to be sober today.
Happy Friday! I know this is the thing you’ve been waiting for all week, the part where I explain what went into the song of the week selection.1 Here’s how it happened this week. I was leaving the coffee shop, skim cortado in hand, I like to make a pretty bold re-entrance on to the 84th street sidewalk (I look both ways first) and part of this is having music at the “blare” level in my airpods and I usually let Spotify do the driving. As I walked out of the cafe, this week’s song of the week played.2 But then I thought, oh, but maybe it’s a tie with this song:
I even like how the titles kind of fit together thematically. But, if used the Billy Preston song, this is going to be a big mess of Billy Preston love, and I wasn’t sure that was the direction I wanted to end the week on.3 Here we are, roughly 245 words in, you still don’t know the deliberately uncapitalized song of the week.4 Now you do:
For me, this almost perfectly sums up how I spend my time:
Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right, Here I am, Stuck in the Middle with You
I don’t know about you, but this alcoholic finds it challenging to navigate a life with actual, other beings, not just the 2-d versions I dreamed up to help create the necessary conditions for drinking. As a friend of mine used to say:
People.
I think one of the hardest transitions in alcoholic thinking is going from the old, create-your-own-universe-in-your-head to starting to see what actually is. Like a lot of good alcoholics, I spent a lot of time trying to divine people’s motivations, what must they have been thinking when they did that? Of course, this was idle speculation. I think my very quickly spinning off-kilter brain may have seized on this as a game, or maybe more for self-protection, or both. I was a kid, after all.
It was adding in my speculations about why people did things that actually did a lot of the damage. I turned things that were unintentional into cruel, “et tu, Brutus?” betrayals. I grossly exaggerated the impact of what people did. I think that was mostly an effort to force people to pay attention to me in the way that my narrative demanded. I call it a narrative, because that’s what it is. It’s a summing up and distilling down of my observations, intuitions and crazy speculations into what really is an episode of drunk history. Meaning, it’s the kind of history a drunk brain concocts. Meaning it’s not very true.
I started to learn that my method of figuring out what people meant was not very accurate. Asking people seemed to work a little better, but that is limited to what other people are actually aware of. Since all of the modes of analysis didn’t really yield much that was actionable or of value, maybe it just didn’t matter that much? I mean, sometimes it does, but it usually doesn’t. For most of life’s petty indignities, boorish colleagues, difficult circumstances, the answer is usually other people do things for their own reasons and there’s really not much I can do about it.
I think one of the lies we alcoholics (and maybe others of you) tell ourselves is that we can change those outcomes. That we can fix those situations, divine other people’s secret agendas and bring them over to where the forces of good and justice hang out. That we can fix other people and educate them to avoid upsetting us, or acting out of character, in the future. And when that didn’t work, when everyone kept doing what they were doing, for their own reasons, I drank.
People.
I finally realized that the only “people” I could fix were the ones on that “ride or die” thing going on in my brain. In my experience, divorce has been, what I call, a “Reverse Lilly Pad” exercise.5 Divorcing myself from outcomes, from what other people do or think, has been an anchor of my sobriety and a tremendous relief from the way I was living. I heard a woman speak at a meeting once about being told by her sponsor that she needed to pray for her enemies. The first draft prayer she came up with was deemed inadequate:
Dear Lord, Please make these MF’ers stop doing all that stupid shit.
This was roughly the condition I was waiting to be filled, and then I could begin my new life of light-fillled, happy, happy, happy, sobriety. That worked out great for me, by the way.
Do you see now why the song of the week was selected? If “you” replace the “you” with “me” the way “I” did, then it makes perfect sense. And don’t get me wrong, that whole clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right thing? That’s actually the thing that makes life groovy. Here, the song even says it:
Yes I'm stuck in the middle with you And I'm wondering what it is I should do It's so hard to keep this smile from my face Losing control, yeah I'm all over the place
See? Happy Friday.
I can actually see how often people click on links and listen to things like that. I am undeterred.
Yes, it’s deliberately not capitalized, it’s part of a new understated thing around here. I call it the “Less Pounding with the Hammer” policy.
Does that sound weird to you, too? “The direction I wanted to end the week?”
This was covered in a previous footnote.
The math problem about how long it takes for an exponentially growing population of nymphaeaceae to overtake a pond.