To Thine Own Self be True
Make My Funk the P-Funk
I’m grateful for a bright, sunny summer morning. I’m grateful for the way things happen when I let them. I’m grateful for being bad at predicting outcomes. I’m grateful for chances to share my sobriety with others. I’m grateful to be sober today.
song of the week:
I discovered Parliament during the 1977-78 school year. I was scavenging the cut-out bins at the local record stores and saw the cover of the album “Funkentelechy” and knew I had to have it. This is also the studio version of that great song:
I had a part-time job at the Iowa City Press-Citizen and even back then, I was a dangerous man with a little money in my pocket. I plunked down some of that hard-earned cash (the minimum wage was $2.35 per hour), and headed home to play that on my pretty fantabulous stereo (for a 15-year old making $2.35 per hour).1 While we’re on the topic of wages and employment history, the job at the Press-Citizen represented a 230% increase over the wages I was previously earning pulling weeds on my Uncle’s soybean farm.
I had heard snippets of Parliament on the college radio station in Iowa City and maybe once in the car listening to AM radio driving through Chicago.2 I can’t tell you why this song clicked with me, but it sure did. The album also came with a poster, it featured the villainous Sir Nose D’Voidoffunk.
Of course, this soon adorned the wall of my room. It was not so long ago, on a Saturday gambol through the many used record stores of New York City, when I spied this very same poster on the wall of one establishment. As I was paying for my haul, I did mention that I had that very same poster on my wall about 40 years ago. This received no reaction at all. Not even a barely-polite, “oh,” with a tiny head nod. I have you covered if you are feeling the need to understand more about the Funkadelic philosophy or about the mythology of the planet P-Funk.
This was maybe one of my top 5 favorite songs of that era. To round out the list, I would include “Peg,” the lucky song of 1978.
It would also, for sure, include this gem:3
We are 3/5 of the way down a rabbit hole, and it’s time to pull out of this particular dive before I spend time debating between The Clash, the Beatles and the Foo Fighters for the last two spots. Also the “Humpty Dance.”
But here’s the thing. If you knew me in 1978, you probably did not know that this was one of my favorite songs. If you knew me in the ‘80’s, ‘90’s, etc, same answer. I’d listen to this song on the previously mentioned fantabulous stereo, the speakers were gigantic and came up to my waist. They produced about as much base as the house could handle, without coming off the foundation. But they could only be deployed in this fashion when no one else was around.
This became a theme, or maybe a defect in my thinking, from very early on. The idea that I would be ridiculed and teased if I were to reveal bits of myself, the things I liked, the things I thought, the things I was afraid of. I came to believe that the only version of me that was palatable and sale-able to the world at large was the one I was painstakingly constructing and that required the prodigious consumption of alcohol as a building material.
Drinking helped me be who I thought I needed to be and helped me forget the person I actually was.
My recovery has involved understanding my thinking patterns and feelings, trying to trace them back so that I can address them by the root.
I have found that when I trace back my reactions, my feelings about a variety of topics, there is usually a nugget of fear at the bottom of the glass. There are a variety of toxic fears residing like murderous clowns in every alcoholic’s basement. The fear of failure, the fear of humiliation, the fear of being alone, the fear of being rejected, to name a few.
I’ve struggled with all of these, as do most of us. There is something in the alcoholic brain, I believe, that will someday be discovered, and will explain why we feel some of these things so much more acutely than the rest of the world and why alcohol and drugs work so perfectly for us to smooth over those very same fears.
In my case, the fear of ridicule and rejection was very strong and it required that I keep a lot of my true feelings to myself. I found safety and even a sense of superiority in the isolation that I was spinning around myself like a caterpillar’s cocoon. I’d go along with whatever other folks were going along with, but my real feelings and preferences and tastes, well, that’s kind of a private matter.
One of the consequences of this thinking pattern is that it’s pretty hard to really get to know me. If I’m afraid to share my favorite song… For this alcoholic, it divided my life into two spheres, the one I shared with others and my own private Idaho.4 It did force me to choose between my two greatest fears: The fear of rejection and humiliation or the fear of being alone. Well, I started living more and more of life in the alone-sphere.
The only way I knew to accommodate the duality in me was to drink.
The hardest, highest mountain I’ve had to climb in recovery is the one where I accept myself for who I am. This ultimately requires the courage to be myself, and show up as myself, for most of the waking moments of the day. I believe that we are shaped by forces we usually can’t control, and the Universe, however it is run or governed, prefers it when we are of service to each other and/or react from places of love, kindness and understanding, whenever that’s possible. The consequence of this is that if I’m not myself, then the whole system gets mucked up, because the intricate machinations that create the ebb and flow of the life that courses around us rely on us being ourselves. The Universe, like a sports teams, functions much better when everyone plays their position.
The Big Book says that sobriety and recovery are dependent upon our ability to deepen and widen our spiritual existences, and this is best accomplished by placing oneself at a place of maximum service to the Universe, or the people that the Universe has sent careening in my direction.
Be myself, express myself, show myself, that seems like such a basic formula, and so horribly syrup-y that I can hardly believe these words can even be produced on this keyboard. But that basic formula is the foundation of my recovery and has helped me resolve the greatest fear of my life. The fear of being myself and by myself. This may seem trite, but the road back to myself can only be located and traversed when I am myself.
It turns out this is not really much of a secret. Even though I am always blathering on about the importance of reading the Big Book, you don’t have to read a single page to learn the real secret of Alcoholics Anonymous. It happens to be on the front of all of my one-day chips:
Happy Friday.
And no, everything didn’t cost a nickel back then.
Getting to listen to the Chicago radio stations was kind of revelatory.
Note: The referenced songs are described in the essays.
There are literally song references everywhere and I’m not pointing all of them out.