I’m grateful for not deciding things in advance. I’m grateful for a quiet Friday morning. I’m grateful for another chance at the plate. I’m grateful for the kindness and love around me. I’m grateful to be sober today.
song of the week:
Yes, this song has been discussed before and might have even been one of the first “songs of the week.” I checked the rules and they say nothing about having a repeat song of the week. On that topic, you may notice that I also do not believe there are rules against repetition in the composition of daily gratitude lists.1
Sometimes you don’t have to have a reason to love a song, and this would be the case here. This was a hit in 1979, and most of my opportunities to hear it were radio-based. I spent an awful lot of my formative years listening to FM radio in my room, me being me, I did manage to imbue it with some kind of weird meaning:
It also involved some detective work. I would hear about 18 seconds of a song on the radio and then you would wait in vain to find out who it was or the name of the song. So, I would end up carrying around these snippets of sort-of unidentified music fragments in my head, almost imagining what the whole song was like. This was the backstory for this song. I first heard it while at work at my afterschool job, working at the Iowa City Press-Citizen in the circulation department. That sounds fancier than it was, most of my duties were janitorial in nature. I was pushing that push broom one afternoon, cleaning up after the Friday press run, and the guys who did the printing and type-setting and all of that, they were allowed to have a radio playing and that’s when I first heard a fragment of this song. I did a great job of sweeping for the next two minutes.
1979 was a long time ago. I listen to this song, and I love the groovy, bouncy beat. It reminds me of driving around on weekend nights in my friend Mark’s green Ford Pinto (the kind that blew up), blasting the radio, very much hoping to attract the attention of passing University of Iowa coeds. This never happened. Not even once. I always thought the problem was that Mark was too much into “China Grove,” every time I would object, he would insist that it sounded really great on his souped up car stereo, and crank up the volume, rendering further complaints moot.2
We were in High School, doing minimum wage jobs, I was on the debate team. We spent our weekends cruising the very compact main drag, sneaking friends into the Coralville Drive-In, taking in the Planet of the Apes film festival at the Astro Theater.3 Only a couple of years removed from the fanciful tank design process. I was already an alcoholic.
I think the only person who had an inkling was my debate coach. We were at a tournament in Cedar Rapids and I had helped organize a “beach party” in our room at the motel. We had actual liquor and made rum and cokes and some kind of planter’s punch and I even brought a bag of sand to put in the shower. That was actually my sophomore year of high school. Coach K walked past our room the next morning and our door was slightly ajar, allowing him to glimpse the carnage, particularly the display of empty bottles. At breakfast, he sat down next to me with a very concerned look. I’m pretty sure it was my very first hangover, and I was feeling very, very ill, he looked over his owlish glasses at me, and said,
That was the older boys doing all of that, wasn’t it?
Whew, yes! I remember agreeing and that was that. I don’t think anyone asked me again about my drinking for the next twenty or thirty years. It’s not that I took a break, I just kept it under wraps for that long. By the time I was riding shotgun in that green Ford Pinto, hoping to hear a snippet of “Living it Up on Friday Night,” I was a regular at a bar called Magoo’s. My friends and I drank there on weekend nights and it was an odd crowd. A few alcoholic university professors at the bar who didn’t want to do the whole drunk academic/writer thing that was going down at George’s Buffet around the corner.4 My friends and I would be in a naugahyde booth by the juke box, along with a smattering of college kids who didn’t want to brave the Airliner or Maxwell’s or the Field House. We couldn’t go to those places because they carded teenagers like us.
Magoo’s is where I realized I was an alcoholic. It wasn’t the frequency of my visits with my friends, or the intensity of our drinking sessions, it was that I had already started going there on my own, secretly. I was busy constructing a whole secret life around drinking. There was a small and relatively obscure jazz club in Iowa City, maybe it was called “The Loft,” I went there by myself a lot, listened to ensembles from Chicago play decent jazz and slugged back Tequila Sunrises.5 Between my two spots and far-flung debate trips on the weekends, I managed to do a lot of drinking. I used the word “managed” on purpose. I was building alcohol into just another part of the routine.
It has occurred to me, more than once, that the similarities between my life now and my life in 1979 are pretty striking. To be honest, my day-to-day attire, often a button down shirt, jeans and sneakers was my uniform back then, too. I still listen to a lot of the same music, still take long, long music-mediated walks and work out a lot of problems on the basketball court. I like to think I’m wiser and more sophisticated and not just older, but, fundamentally, me and that kid are still pretty similar.
I think a lot about why I started to drink and what drove me to integrate it so completely into my life. I was very insecure, fearful, awkward and anxious. I never felt like I really understood other people. People would say things to me and I would wonder what it was they were trying to tell me. I felt like I never reacted the right way, like I missed a lot of meaning and cues. When I looked at other people, I never felt like I was a part of whatever they were a part of.
That feeling of “apartness” is pretty commonly expressed by alcoholics and addicts, so I can’t say it makes me unique. I think a couple of Sloe Gin Fizzes gummed up the hamster wheel enough that those feelings were no longer so sharp or potent. I have pretty fuzzy memories about one of my first trips to Magoo’s by myself. I can remember taking a seat at right at the corner of the bar and I remember making small talk with the bartender—that became a life-long habit. I remember wondering what people thought, did they know I was 17? Was I pulling this off?
I can remember quite a bit of that episode, but what I really don’t have a clue about is,
What was I trying to accomplish?
Most of my high school colleagues did their drinking in secret, in cars and parking lots and houses where paren’ts weren’t, lots of dark country roads where you could pull off, listen to The Who and drink a lot of beer. I did a fair amount of that, too, but I had already settled into the habit of drinking by myself at relatively obscure bars. I was developing the methodology and tradecraft that would underpin life as an undercover alcoholic.
I knew that I drank way differently than my friends. They liked drinking and the silliness it permitted. I needed it. I’ll bet my grip on those mugs of beer was a bit tighter than theirs. Like Adam and Eve, I was conscious of my wrong-doing, but I wasn’t quite clear on what exactly the sin was. I mean everyone drank, and it seemed like it happened roughly all of the time, so why was my precociousness a problem?
That’s a lie I told myself, that being 17 and drinking like a middle-aged alcoholic was really just me discovering something really cool and getting there first. Deep down, I knew it was a lie. I knew that my drinking was wrong, was shameful, was going to eventually lead to my ruin, would disappoint everyone who had the remotest of feelings for me. But I also knew that I couldn’t live without it. That’s how I started keeping the greatest (really most tragic) secret of my young life—that I was an alcoholic and already couldn’t control my drinking.
One thing I know, I never made a decision to be an alcoholic. Sure, there was plenty of reckless behavior, and discovering the ability to manipulate brain chemicals and hormones at a young age creates all kinds of not fully appreciated risks and dangers. I was blazing a trail in my brain with alcohol-generated dopamine that would just get easier and easier to traverse over time. When I look back at things I regret doing when I was young, things I did wrong, I can see how most of those incidents were really the Tequila Sunrises already doing the talking.
Recovery is finding the way back to yourself, that’s how I look at it. Maybe my choice of sneakers and attire and Saturday activities, seem pretty frivolous, immature, juvenile even. I’m okay with that. I mentioned that I approach my drinking history like a cold case, looking at the facts with a fresh set of eyes and seeing if I can learn anything that will help. In some ways, what I did when I was 17 was turn the keys over to alcoholism, I turned myself over to alcoholism because it seemed like a better version of me.
That’s actually where the crime got committed. When I began believing the biggest and most pernicious of the lies:
Alcohol made me a better version of myself.
A few months ago, I made the nearly fatal mistake of trying to install Microsoft Teams on my aging and beloved mac. In my experience, it’s just never a great fit and there are so often problems, I approach installing Microsoft products with a bit of fear. I was justified in this case, because as the installation process tried to encrypt my hard drive, it crashed, leaving me with a partly encrypted disk that had no unlocking passphrase….
I spent the next week researching fixes and none of them worked. I finally had to erase everything and start over, going back to the beginning and re-installing everything all over. That took a long time and was kind of frustrating.That’s what getting sober required. I had to go back, find the guy who got lost, kid really, and make peace with him. Not so much in a navel contemplation way, but finally accepting the “flaws,” the quirks and eccentricities that are me, and that I couldn’t accept about myself in 1979. Getting sober wasn’t about “not drinking,” it was about rebuilding a life without alcohol as an essential construction material.
Accepting myself. Accepting whatever is in store for me, accepting whatever silly quest the Universe (or that semi-malicious 13 year-old) has me on, those are the real underpinnings of my sobriety. The person I was trying to fool the most for most of my life, the person I was really trying to give the old slip to, was myself. Fortunately, I don’t have to find a way to travel back to 1979 to change things.6 That guy was here the whole time.
Before thou judgeth, I inviteth thee to write a daily gratitude list for a couple of years consecutively and then report back with your feelings on that topic.
The Doobie Brothers were very much into that thing where different tracks would play on different channels—this was especially cool with headphones. You might try “Children of the Sun,” “Black Water,” and “Black Betty,” for excellent examples of this.
They would play all five (six?) of the Planet of the Apes movies in chronological order. Which, of course, like Star Wars, made sure that the story couldn’t be followed.
I liked Sloe Gin Fizzes, too. I have a sweet tooth.
There is another time travel project that I’m still working on.
Gotta say - I enjoy your writing. I'm (I think) a similar age, I spent some time in Iowa (Des Moines) and a lot of your observations ring true. Thx. ~billy.