I’m grateful for the blue and red sky when I got up. I’m grateful it’s a Friday the 13th. I’m grateful for quiet in difficult moments. I’m grateful for stirring music in the morning. I’m grateful for coffee and my view of what’s in front of me. I’m grateful to be sober today.
song of the week:
I love this song.1 I was a big watcher of Soul Train and the incomparable Don Cornelius (that was a voice). The Blue Notes are not Pip or Spinner class, but that doesn’t really matter. After some close examination, I’m unable to determine whether they might actually have been singing here—it looks like there are power cords coming out of the mic stands. However, the reason I love this song so much is the keyboard part at the beginning of the song. I could listen to that all day long—and beginning in the mid 2000’s I was literally was listening to this song over and over and over. But, to really appreciate the keyboards, you need to listen to this version:
As long as you’re clicking around and listening to things…
This song has been at the top of the potential song of the week list for quite awhile, before finally earning the nod. Why wasn’t it chosen before today? Was it being saved as an antidote for the Friday the 13th thing? No, as we know, I’m not afraid of no ghosts:
When I first began trying to stop drinking, it was a pretty demoralizing affair. I didn’t really know much of anything about alcoholism, despite having been one for many, many, many years. I had gone mostly undetected for most of my career. I went to meetings and listened to what just seemed like odd, nonsensical talk. Of course, I hadn’t read the Big Book, so it all made very little sense to me. I listened to people talk about what was forcing them to give up drinking.
That’s the problem with the drunk-a-logue shares at AA meetings. By the time it gets to minute 18 and all of the cool stories about the crazy exploits are told and the inner pain is laid out for display, there isn’t really much time left to explain to the Newcomer how this works. How do you go from the seat I was in to the one where I wasn’t drinking anymore? I think my initial understanding of AA is that it seemed like a place where people came to grieve the loss of alcohol in their lives.
That’s certainly how I felt. My therapist at the time, would tell me that I should feel grief at the loss of such a constant companion. There is a great book, “Drinking: A Love Story,” that really captures that element of it. But that’s just it, that’s only an element of it. Getting sober was a function of coming to understand the nature of the entire relationship—not the just the glittery, fun, amber-hued, delicious oblivion part.
I drank to complete an equation that I formulated when I was 15 or 16. An equation that I believed represented myself. There were certainly elements of “falling in love” in my relationship with alcohol; I think one of the reasons that alcohol works for alcoholics is that we are especially sensitive to the mix of hormones and other electro-chemical stuff that gets brewed by drinking. It feels like falling in love because it is like falling in love.
Unfortunately, it is a relationship that is doomed to failure. It’s a relationship built on false premises, a very shaky foundation and lots of self-deceit. Lots of self-deceit. Drinking for me was a little like having someone whispering in my ear about how I didn’t need to pay attention to any of that nonsense, that all I should focus on was myself and my needs and entitlements. Of course, as an alcoholic, my brain constantly generated the false notion that I was entitled to more than what was in front of me. Those frustrations were among the arsenal of reasons that pretty reliably got me to a bar stool before midday.
It may be deep seated insecurities and fear that help drive proto-alcoholics towards that first drink, but it’s the steady stream of self-deceit it unleashes that keeps the alcoholic drinking. When I was drinking was when the arguments about why I needed to drink made the most sense. As far as justifications for my drinking, I was like a fish with a thing for hooks. It didn’t matter if it seemed a bit dubious, I swallowed those lies whole and had plenty to wash them down.
As I worked the Steps, particularly the inventories and stock-taking involved in many of them, I began to see the true nature of the relationship: Alcohol was taking a lot more than it was giving. It wasn’t adding value in any material way and it was racking up significant losses on the other side of the ledger. Alcohol and drinking might have gotten me to fall in love, but they never loved me back. Maybe this should have been the song of the week, because it more accurately reflects the nature of my relationship with alcohol:
Note: Maybe I’m heavy on the links today, but instead of being critical, perhaps you should be grateful that’s not a Nickelback video up there. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
I see lots of talk about how alcoholics inappropriately demonize alcohol, that it’s not alcohol’s fault. We know the next sentence in that progression, that’s the fairly ferocious stigma that is still attached to addiction and recovery. We ourselves buy into a that a little bit with the aversion to settings where alcohol is served (roughly everywhere FYI). I don’t think long term sobriety comes from simply evading alcohol. It comes from a finally-honest appraisal of that most central relationship with drinking and the person I thought drinking helped sustain.
That’s what the Steps are and that’s what they accomplished for me. None of this works quickly, it’s not a 30-,60-, or even a 90-day problem. It’s a whole house renovation. Which sounds drastic except for what you have at the end of that process.
Getting sober does not feel like falling in love. Staying sober doesn’t feel like falling in love, either. But waking up sober in the morning, writing my daily gratitude list, is when I realize just how much love is around me. And there always was. It was me who got lost, not any of that love. Me and alcohol? Like the song says,
“We loved each other, but we just didn’t get along.”
Yes, I know, very repetitive.
I love a link-heavy post myself!
The Blue Notes were indeed not The Spinners, but I'll listen to Teddy Pendergrass over Phillippe Wynne any day (even if Wynne did eventually go over to P-Funk)!