Things I Love

What does a drinking dream mean?

I’m grateful for another Friday morning. I’m grateful for a really, really busy week. I’m grateful for the proverbial phone ringing. I’m grateful for opportunities to see how much I’ve grown. I’m grateful for a life focused on what is. I’m grateful to be sober today.

Song of the Week:

This should really be “Album of the Week,” except that many of you think that’s something that holds photos on your iphone.¹ The album would be the Rolling Stones’ epic 1978 album, Some Girls. I owned said album, a real testament by someone who built a record collection from the used record stores and the cut-out bins. I listened to this album a lot. This album is about New York and it formed a lot of the background sets for the movie about my life in New York that I liked to play in my head.

Of course, the most widely known song on the album is this one (and I like this better):

Mick Jagger really does seem unhinged in this video and he’s definitely singing the spooky refrain. I love the part where he’s saying quietly to himself, “Baby, why you wait so long? Come home, come home!” and then quasi-rapping:

walking in Central Park, 
singing after dark, 
people think I’m crazy…
sometimes I sing, 
to myself

It’s possible I know something about this.

Alert readers will know that one of the things I love most about New York is the ability to take long, senseless, meandering walks that are somehow capable of soul restoration. I think I said last week that I’ve learned that there isn’t much that can’t be helped with a long walk in Central Park. You may not have been thinking of the Mick Jagger version when I wrote that, but I might have been.

Maybe the song I love most on this album is “The Girl with the Faraway Eyes.” I do know all of the words and I’m not going to go on and on, but I spent about 14 hours in the Calgary Greyhound Station one time wondering if my gf was going to show up (she didn’t, too long a story) and finding that song on the jukebox was a providential gift. Which brings us to the topic for today:

Things I love.

“Wait, what?” you might be saying? And with good reason, we’re definitely jumping around today. I fell in love with the idea of living in New York about a decade before I first got to even visit, which would have been when I was in law school. I listened to this album, watched movies like “Annie Hall,” and “Manhattan,” and just knew that I was going to live in New York one day and conduct these long, shambolic walks through Central Park (and other places) that would often include humming to myself or even softly singing sometimes, if it’s after dark and no one could really see my lips moving.

The topic for this week arrived somewhat ambiguously, as they often do, when I realized, while on the Subway, that this last week, while super busy, was actually a moveable feast of things I love. Here’s how this started: I had settled in for a longish trip and was looking around and taking in the rich tapestry of subway life and just feeling very happy and content and I started pecking out a list improbably called:

Things I Love About the NYC Subway

• A constant visual smorgasbord

• A chance to see the real NY

• It’s a train

• Sudden encounters with death

• Cenazoic Era-sized rodents

• A wide selection of candy available for purchase

• The actual florist shop in the Bryant Park station

• The ability to navigate the greatest city on earth for $2.90

• “First Off the Subway”

• Plentiful opportunities for moral indignation

• Cute dogs

• Cute babies

• Enables badass seniors

• Harrison Ford rides the subway

• The subway goes everywhere I want to go

What’s the point of a list of things I love about the subway? Sobriety is all about shifting things. It’s about flipping narratives, it’s about changing the thinking filters, it’s about realizations and turning points. Just as my belief in the power of drinking “flipped,” so too has my outlook on the world around me. When the focus is on the things and people I love, things fall into place and I can be happy and grateful for what I have. The old me was focused on what I didn’t have, and the feeling was resentment, not peace, and certainly not love.

But no one is going to believe that my love of the subway was one of the driving forces behind my sobriety. So let’s focus on the kind of love that does drive me these days. We’ll start here:

My Grandson

This is quite easy and obvious, the point is not to simply identify things I love, but think more about the why part. I waas lucky enough to have been invited to Boston to help with the lad while his Dad had to be away for a couple of days.

During the run-up to my visit, my daughter informed me that one of her goals was to get out of the apartment and get a manicure and maybe even a coffee. She also mentioned a desire to go the gym and shower, all of which provoked a stern-sounding question, “You’d be alone with B., can I trust you, Dad?” Now, it was said with a joking lilt, but there was a time, not so long ago, where the tenor of that question would have been very different.

We fed B., changed him and then put him down for a nap and K. zipped out the door. I assumed the grandfatherly position, sitting in a chair in the living room reading and thinking this was going to be a piece of cake. He started crying about 14 minutes after my daughter left and I was not going to interrupt her afternoon out. We did the jiggling and walking thing, which would temporarily abate the crying, but as soon as the jiggling/walking stopped (on account of back pain), little B would resume his complaints.

Eventually, we ended up on his playmat and that was just the ticket. Since I was alone with him, it felt like a good opportunity to cover a lot of ground without provoking too much consternation and dissent. We discussed the virtue of baseball’s National League, we talked about dinosaurs and a little bit about pirates. I did mention that it would be ok if he called me “skipper,” and that he didn’t really need to check with his mom on that. Based on the definitely non-gas smiles and the cooing, we are on the same page on a lot of issues.

I had a dream last night about drinking. I haven’t had one of those in a long, long time. In the dream, I was in some swanky bar and there was a glass of red wine in front of me. In the dream, I took 2 or 3 really big swallows, just to make it clear it wasn’t an accident and then, while I could still taste the chewy tannins in my mouth (in my dream), I literally thought,

What the f***?

There wasn’t any context for the drinking in the dream, I just did it. When I was sitting in the dark with my coffee earlier this morning, I thought about the dream, why would I have it now, what does it represent, does it mean I’m on shakier ground than I think? Then I shifted to this thought exercise, what if I had done this in real life, what would it mean, how would I feel?

I do believe in the value of day-counting in early sobriety and I do believe that it is important to announce anniversaries and demonstrate that it is possible to attain long periods of sobriety by working the Program. But if I had three swallows of wine, how would I feel about starting over at Day One (leaving five years of chips on the table)? There was a time, actually a lot of times, when the re-starting of the day count was maybe the last bulwark against that first drink. Sometimes that would work, a lot of times it fell victim to the “f*** it” epidemic that was usually raging in my head.

I found myself thinking, if I had a drink, what would that change? I laughed out loud when I realized the answer:

Nothing.

Here’s my train of thinking: I decided that if I had two or three swallows of wine, I might not reset my day count. Then I asked myself why I thought that would be appropriate and the answer that came back was because nothing happened, the drinking of the wine didn’t change anything about where I was in life, or what I had built, or the happy, content interior life I now lead. That little bit of wine didn’t change any of that. And that’s exactly the miracle (when I flipped the idea around):

Drinking doesn’t change anything anymore.

My drinking started because I believed that drinking DID change things. It changed the way other people saw me, it changed the way I acted and the things I did and said, it changed my outlook on life, it changed my social life, it changed my habits and practices in all areas of my life. Worst, it fundamentally changed how I thought about myself. Drinking made me believe that I was incomplete and dysfunctional without it. But I see so clearly now that drinking has lost all of that power; it’s no longer relevant to any part of my life.

Drinking doesn’t change anything anymore.

Like in that one song, “Poof, vamoose, you son of a b****!” I realized drinking had no power over me anymore. Could I give drinking that power back? I sure could, but have no intention of doing that. The point is, this how the obsession ends. Quietly, maybe not even noticed for a while. But the obsession ends with the realization that drinking doesn’t change anything anymore; it’s not necessary, it’s not relevant and, to be honest, with a litte bit of distance, seems kind of pointless and boring.

How is that connected to my grandson? Because, it’s when I think of the things I love most in the world that I most realize how empty the promises of drinking were. When your life is full of love and there’s a cute baby squeezing your finger and flashing a toothless smile, there really isn’t a need to top it off or to have a nightcap. I drank because I thought it would make people love me more; instead, it drove away the people I loved most in the world. By focusing on the abundant love I have in my life, I see everyday the power that alcohol lacks.

That little boy already has me twisted around his tiny baby fingers. I actually miss the sensation of holding him and looking into his eyes. The magic of quietly getting to know each other, getting to know all about him, getting to love everything about him, and getting to hope that maybe he’ll like me, too.

There’s no glass of wine that stacks up against that.

Happy Friday.

1. An “album” was an archaic method of organizing and distributing music. Sometimes, weirdly scratched into vinyl (a process invented by a hearing-impaired genius) and then played by spinning it in a circle at precisely 33 revolutions per minute with a needle scratching over the other scratches. An “album” could contain as many as 20 songs, but typically 8-12 would be considered average.