I’m grateful for surprises. I’m grateful for Friday morning. I’m grateful for a busy day ahead. I’m grateful for the newspaper at the door. I’m grateful to be sober today.
song of the week:
Until about 45 minutes ago, this was not going to be the song of the week. For the second time, this one song was slated to be the song of the week all week and then something changed suddenly and it was no longer the song that was supposed to be the song of the week. This one was. Spotify pretty told much it had to be.
I got my TBD 2023 in review thing from Spotify—an older person’s quibble, it’s barely December, 2023 still has about 8% left to go, shit could change. But, “ball don’t lie,” and there was one song that really stood out among the rest of the nonsense and it was this song. Part of the reason this one gets so many plays is that it is kind of a foundational piece of music for my basketball playing. Back in the days before portable music, shooting baskets in the backyard only had a musical background if I recreated one. This new way of doing it, with the IiPods and such, is pretty groovy, and this song will often just be on repeat while I shoot around. Also, this is a great song for the “First Out of the Subway” game I like to play at the 86th Street Q street stop.1 But let’s please not throw the bastardized Will Smith nonsense version of this song into the mix. I know it exists, there was a time I listened to it and thought it was funny. But why? Especially when the original is so so super-fantastic?
Something I don’t know that I’ve mentioned is how detrimental to sobriety I think social media can be. This is perhaps ironic since this all started with a sobriety-based social media account:
I don’t really participate in social media anymore. There was a time that I was very, very obsessed with it and it did kind of coincide with some of the worst of my drinking days. It was a symbiotic relationship and scrolling through social media and generating resentments while drinking Sauvignon Blanc was my most favorite and most often indulged pursuit. I loved scrolling through the current GF’s or recent ex’s accounts and try to figure out all the different ways I was being secretly betrayed and charting out these social networks to the nth degree.
I’m not a Luddite. I have a collection of Wired Magazines that go back to the very olden of the olden days, I learned Unix to use my first Netcom shell account and started exploring the Internet when it was still text-based and command prompted. I worked for pretty well known early Internet companies. So, I don’t say this as a Unabomber-type philosopher, but social media is not a great thing for civilization, it is very not good for alcoholics and addicts in early sobriety.
When I spend time over on Twitter (I will never, ever call it X), I’m just struck by how social media plays into the worst impulses of us alcoholics. It feeds our ravenous egos, gives us lots of envy and resentment generating material, allows us to obsess over all the stuff we don’t have, but should. Worst, it lets us communicate to the world, when maybe we shouldn’t.
One really distressing thing I see over and over is the demand by the recovering alcoholic for likes and attention. They will announce periods of sobriety, which is super cool, I always re-tweet those when I see them. But then the part where people complain that they thought there would be a lot more likes, is this microphone on? Need I say that if the reason one is accumulating periods of sobriety is to announce them to acclaim on social media, one is perhaps pursuing an ultimately unsustainable path to happiness.
One of the lessons of recovery is that the hole many of us feel in our lives can’t be filled with liquids, solids, butter, sugar or likes.The Big Book says over and over that one of the things that must be left behind, let go of, or plain old killed, is the alcoholic ego.2 The thing that was always running in the background, constantly reminding this alcoholic simultaneously how great he was and deserving of way more than he was getting, and that he was a worthless fraud who would certainly feel the sting of the lash of deserved fortune on the soon approaching judgment day.3
Maybe it’s useful to see sometimes. There are some folks I watch, read their posts and can almost see them heading towards the rocks. There’s someone who has written a very long article on how impossible it is to get sober in their chosen industry, but extolling the path that they have found and urging others to follow it. This is based on 27 days of sobriety. I see those messages, the ones where folks want to share their hard-earned insights after 18 days of sobriety, that is the old alcoholic ego in sheep’s clothing.
Social media gave this struggling alcoholic a new channel to manipulate the people around me and create false impressions about the fantastic-ness of my life (often intended as a “guess you chose the wrong horse” to those who no longer enjoyed my company). I love those pithy phrases, “There’s no ‘I’ in ‘Team,’” “There’s no ‘U’ in ‘Win,’” you can’t spell social media without the “Me.” And it is capitalized.
I don’t post stuff about my own life anymore and don’t really look to keep up with anyone else’s there. It was deliberate, and it was not easy to stop looking, just like it wasn’t easy to stop drinking. But I find the absence of social media from my real life to be incredibly freeing. At some level, I was letting social media and the downstream ego bath of likes and comments drive how I lived my life and what I did. An excursion or golf round that didn’t justify a post with a picture, well, why was I doing it? I’m not sure I was ever that conscious of it, but it certainly drove the bus in that direction.
Don’t get me wrong, I think social media is an unbelievably powerful force, and there are many, many ways it can be, and is, deployed for good. I just think that the road to sobriety, requiring humility and self-reflection and maybe some intentional and very necessary alone-ness, is not best traveled in an Instagram Camper Van.
You know what I always say, recovery is the path back to yourself. For me, I didn’t find that behind this: “@.“ I found it here:
You need the two long escalators to make a challenge of it, that’s why the 4-5-6 stop at 86th and Lex doesn’t work.
Speaking of “The Killer,” I have a new favorite joke and it involves a bear.
I have been stealing that “sting of the lash” stuff since reading A Confederacy of Dunces.
I see that the people who are most likely to "get" me likely read Confederacy of Dunces. I loved it. The honesty of Stevie Wonder admitting in his lyrics that he traded his Sunday school money for candy is one of my favorite lines in that song.