Clean House

Some more thoughts from The Little Red Book, a semi-official AA publication (although it's printed by Hazelden, so there's an unofficial air about it) from 1970. It got a lot of semi-official input from the cognoscenti in A.A.. The parts in italics that follow show direct quotes from The Big Book and are to be heeded. The stuff in parenthesis are my components and can be safely ignored.

Here we go . . .

Resentment is common to all alcoholics.  We are never safe from it and as intangible as it may seem, it does pay off in material ways with destructive force and energy.  Resentment is dynamite to the alcoholic.  It destroys more alcoholics than anything else.  From it stem all forms of spiritual disease, for we have not only been mentally and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick.  Resentment is pure mental drunkenness.  

(I confess to enjoying the occasional resentment. It's such a smug, self-satisfying feeling, primal and inherent, to nurture and grow a resentment, making sure it gets plenty of water and sunshine. Criticizing other people, places, and institutions can be deeply satisfying. Think I'm wrong? Have a Facebook account? Scroll down through a few pages and see how many of the posts are pure, unadulterated bitching. I know my whole being expands when I'm expressing my superiority over everyone else.)

(The following is from the LRB's discussion on Step Four.)

We list people, institutions and principles with whom we were angry.  We ask ourselves why we were angry.  Has your life been any happier because of this resentment?  “It is plain that a life which includes deep resentments leads only to futility and unhappiness.  To the precise extent that we permit these, do we squander the hours that might have been worth while.”

Criticism, a form of negative judgment, is absolutely out of our fellowship picture.

(If I'm not able to criticize others how exactly am I going to be able to explain why I'm right? If I'm not criticizing you I may have to pay attention to me.)

Dishonesty.

(No need to expound here.) 

He cannot afford to subject himself to self-pity because of its relationship to resentment and inferiority.

(Self-pity is also a deeply satisfying state of mind. It's a real attention-grabber. Look at me! Look at how bad I have it! Don't you feel sorry for me!?) (This is a rhetorical question. We don't feel sorry for you.)

Few, if any, men or women escape the emotional monstrosity of jealousy.

(I'm enjoying the noun "monstrosity." Nice touch. I'm also wondering whether I'm always jealous or always envious.)

The practice of tolerance (the opposite of intolerance) is a part of recovery.  It aids spiritual progress and helps us to control our emotions.

(So I guess the point is that intolerance retards our spiritual progress and sharpens our uncontrollable emotions.)

The tendency of alcoholics to discount fear as contributing to alcoholism often causes newcomers to underrate its importance to their inventories.  (Are you fucking kidding me? What alcoholic isn't consumed by fear? These guys are way off base here.)  As alcoholics we have used a few of fear’s positive qualities but utilized mostly the negative ones, specializing to a great extent on anxiety, dread, worry, uncertainty, and apprehension of harm or evil that always seemed just around the corner. 

The alcoholic is only human.  He will be subject to all human impulses and often faced by conditions that arouse him, but he need not be ignorant of the treacherous nature of anger or the destructive inroads its impulses can make upon his recovery.

Spiritual Principles

 From Tradition One: "The A.A. member has to conform to the principles of recovery.  His life actually depends on obedience to spiritual principles.  If he deviates too far, the penalty is sure and swift; he sickens and dies."

From Tradition Nine: "Unless each A.A. member follows to the best of his ability our suggested Twelve Steps to recovery, he almost certainly signs his own death warrant.  His drunkenness and dissolution are not penalties inflicted by people in authority; they result from his personal disobedience to spiritual principles."

Bill W understood both intuitively and from his own personal experience that alcoholics don't listen to instructions.  We just don't.  This is why each  important point is made over and over and over again.  The first Tradition is about the importance of unity in our Program; the ninth warns us about organizing in a way that gives any individual undue power.  Pretty different concepts, yet the idea surfaces in both of them that if we don't adhere to basic principles we die.  That's a pretty heavy penalty.  

Die!  Kill you dead!

If you insist on running into heavy cross traffic after repeated warnings from your mama you might get run over.  If so, your grievous injuries are not due to your mama's influence or authority . . . you ran into traffic!  The car hit you, not your mama's rule!  It's not her fault and it's not her rule.  It's A Rule.

"Great suffering and great love are A.A.'s disciplinarians; we need no others."

That's a hell of a mix, a hell of a combo.

Dear Henry

 Dear Henry:

While I admire your inclination to write using pen and ink I assure you that my handwriting is virtually illegible . . . so electronica arise!

SuperK and I have been admiring/laughing/marveling/wondering at your repeated assurances that you are “as happy as you’ve ever been” during the pandemic. You may be marveling at that a little yourself.  

I have been looking at my relative state of contentment during the pandemic.  My life in A.A has been this weird migration from thinking I was a real laid-back dude (Translation: stoned and lethargic) to realizing I’m as Type A as you can be (competitive to a fault).  Over the last many years - especially since I retired - I’ve been attempting to merge my Type-A-ness with an understanding that being productive can be overrated.  Even more astounding to me has been trying to balance what the world sees as productive with what I see as productive.  Trying to understand the relative merits of Being V Doing.

The first time we went to Europe unescorted I almost killed us with an undoable agenda.  We’d labor to find a historic site and I’d be tapping my watch after 15 minutes, driven to get to the next place.  I showed SuperK the agenda for the next trip.  “Hmmm,” she said as she started crossing things out.  I still almost killed us, just not as dead as the first time.  Being Someplace V Doing Something Someplace.  Today we almost never travel without being able to stay in a spot for at least one extra day.  Feel a little bored, like we’ve seen what we came to see, casually, relaxed, thoughtfully, ready to move on instead of having to move on.

I still find myself chafing at the bit sometimes when I’m not being “productive.”  Museums have been part of a great awakening in my sensibility.  I don’t have to see every picture in the museum.  I don’t have to study the artist before I go.  I don’t have to read everything posted next to the painting, explaining what’s being expressed.  I can leave when I’m tired of looking at the art, whether this is 30 minutes or 3 hours.  You helped me with that - you just seemed to be looking at the art, letting it speak to you.  It’s OK to not like something.  It’s really OK to not understand something.  It’s going to seep into my consciousness differently than it will with someone else, and that’s OK.  Maybe that’s the point!

There’s an interesting spider web in the corner of my office area.  I think I’m going to look at it for a while, slack-jawed.

As ever and as always,

Love you, brother.

Resentment

Resentment:  Anger or displeasure stemming from belief that one has been wronged or betrayed by others.

I'm really kind of disgusted and annoyed at the state of my society right now.  This fact is firmly in the None of My Business category.  It's also in the Nothing I Can Do About It category.  Both of these categories are populated with thousands and millions of facts which doesn't stop me from adding new ones on a daily basis.  Very, very few things are my business and therefore possibly, potentially changeable.  

As I've been working through my frustration with the live 7 AM meeting I'm vaguely aware that these personalities and their behavior are functioning as a representation, a symbol of the general public or at least that portion of the general public whose behavior I find irritating.  Most of them I'm friends with or friendly with, at least, and very few of them stick in my consciousness for any length of time whatsoever and I'm saying this kindly.  There are plenty of people I see who don't tickle my fancy one way or the other.  It's sort of a shrug and a "huh," maybe a fist bump or a quick hug and then I'm on to someone I have a deeper relationship with.  No animosity, no special closeness.  These folks, after all, walk right past me most of the time.  That's great and fine - we can't be close with everyone.

I always say if I'm thinking of someone who - if they moved away or started attending other meetings - I wouldn't miss for a minute . . . then why would I dedicate any mental space to thinking of them?  It's amazing how many arguments I have in my head with people who aren't that important to me and  -  I should point out - aren't even present.

There's a famous Seinfeld episode where Jerry's girlfriend cannot stand George, a fact that he finds irresistible to resist.  He becomes obsessed with her, submarining other healthy relationships.  She hates him so he wants her.

I'm sure that when we get back together in person I'll be fine.  I've really gotten pretty good at shedding resentments, although I'll admit this one has been wedged in pretty deep.  My life has been profoundly affected by the behavior of others so I guess it's natural to feel some anger about that.

An Actual Running Chain Saw

 Yesterday's title made me think of one of my favorite all-time A.A. anecdotes.  I'm friends with a guy who really struggled to quit heroin for a couple of years.  He's doing great now, a fact that makes my heart sing.  A more miserable son of a bitch I cannot imagine when he was showing up at meetings in the midst of a run, sleeping in his car, shaking in his chair.  I always gave him a hug and told him I loved him, and left it at that.  It's not my job to tell people to quit doing what they're doing - that's up to them to decide.

Anyway, a while back he lifted his shirt and showed me one of the most horrific scars I have ever seen, a jagged line of thick keloid running from his hip up into his armpit.  I mean this dude has a fucking scar.  He owns a small tree-trimming business and he had a run-in with a chain saw.

"Whew," I marveled.  "Wow.  What's the lesson for you with that incident?"

He's got a pretty sense of humor but I thought his response was a mix of wry amusement and sheepish wonder: "Never climb into a tree with a running chain saw . . . while you're on heroin."

This is one of those rules that seems so obvious that you wouldn't think to bring it up to someone.

A Running Chain Saw

I've been talking to a guy in The Program that I've known since he got sober.  He came to meetings for a while before succumbing to frustration having to deal with all the idiots that he kept running into and drifted away from in-person meetings even before the pandemic.  I've always liked the guy - he's from New Jersey so I can just say whatever I want to him without worrying about offending him such as reminding him that's he one of the idiots that he can't stand.  He probably told me to screw myself using more of a Jersey verb.  He does that a lot.  It's a Jersey compliment.  People in CA are so nice - I usually enjoy this but I do like to hear a good "Fuck you" from time to time.

I re-lit the thread of our relationship a while back.  In one of our conversations I was amused to hear him say that I was his sponsor.  I don't recall this arrangement being set up but . . . whatever.   Happy to help out.  He is sober and relatively sane.  Normally I don't have a lot to do with people who drift away from meetings.  I don't judge people who do that - much, anyway - but it's not my shtick.  I think it's hard to stay sober and grow spiritually without that contact with other people in recovery but it's not my place to run the lives of other people.  Live and Let Live and To Thine Own Self Be True.

He lives with a woman who has some not insignificant mental illness and he has a three year old son and a job that requires him to interact with a lot of famous diva-type people in close quarters.  When he's frustrated I'm sympathetic.  I think most people are idiots, too, but I don't have to hang around anyone I don't want to except for SuperK who is most definitely NOT an idiot but rather a person I enjoy hanging around with.

I caught him on his long commute home a couple of days ago.  He was wound up.  He'd rant for a bit and I'd interrupt to ask how his son was and how his spiritual practice was going, anything to remind him to be grateful and to stay grounded, talking over him when he inquired about my well-being, aware that he wasn't all interested in how I was doing.  At the end of the call he said next time we spoke we'd make sure to talk about Seaweed.

Look, I get it.  He probably felt a little guilty at monopolizing the conversation even though he's just another garden-variety self-obsessed alcoholic who could benefit from a little less drama in his life and little more recovery.  It's not always easy to convince people that anything - and I mean anything - that allows me to stop thinking about myself for a couple of minutes is a wonderful thing.  Sometimes I start up a chain saw and let it run in my office just to drown out the clatter going on in my head.  The running chain saw is peaceful compared to the crap I have going on up there.

An Obsession and An Allergy

"The tyrant alcohol wielded a double-edged sword over us; first we were smitten by an insane urge that condemned us to go on drinking, and they by an allergy of the body that insured we would ultimately destroy ourselves in the process."

Tyrant:  A ruler who governs unjustly, cruelly, or harshly.

Obsession:  A compulsive or irrational preoccupation.

Allergy:  A disorder causing adverse reactions to substances not harmful to most.

Whew.  Those are some good words.  I could have tossed in "insane" and "destroy" as well.  I could have written a whole entry just giving out definitions.  I try to avoid getting too extraterrestrial but I really, really believe that the words in our literature were divinely inspired and heavily vetted by our Founders.  They're in the literature deliberately and for good reasons.

The section quoted above is from The Doctor's Opinion out of the Big Book.  My sponsor always suggested that I steer newcomers to this introductory part of our literature; he said that it could be helpful for people struggling to understand what the problem was.  I've always found it instructive to think of my disease of alcoholism in this manner.  I react to alcohol in a way that a non-alcoholic doesn't and can scarcely understand (allergy) and then - once the alcohol is in my body - I can think of little else (obsession).  Less kindly and more bluntly put: I'm nuts and I'm physically compromised.

"We alcoholics have lost the ability to control our drinking.  We know that no alcoholic ever recovers control."

Never:  (Ed. Note: No + Ever = Never) At no time; on no occasion; in no circumstance.

Don't believe us?  Step over to the nearest barroom and try some controlled drinking.  You'll discover the truth quite quickly.

Tortured By Loneliness

What are we likely to receive from Step Five?  For one thing we shall get rid of that terrible sense of isolation we've always had.  Almost without exception, alcoholics are tortured by loneliness.  Even before our drinking got bad and people began to cut us off, nearly all of us suffered the feeling that we didn't quite belong.  Either we were shy, and dared not draw near others, or we were apt to be noisy good fellows craving attention and companionship, but never getting it - at least to our way of thinking.  There was always that mysterious barrier we could neither surmount nor understand.  It was as if we were actors on a stage, suddenly realizing that we did not know a single line of our parts.  It did let us act extemporaneously.

In the next paragraph we have the phrases "the isolation problem" and "the old pangs of anxious apartness."  I like the word "terrible" to describe our loneliness.  I like the verb "tortured."  I know Bill W liked to showboat but these words really hit home for most of us.

Terrible:  Dreadful; causing terror, alarm, and fear.

Torture:   Intentional causing of somebody's experiencing agony.

One of my most consistent dreams revolves around me showing up at a school or university days or weeks late, unsure of the location of the classroom I need to be in, aware that I've done none of the work required up to that point.  I'm convinced that I'm reliving those terrible feelings of not having done what I'm supposed to have done.  That feeling of standing on a stage and not knowing any of my lines while everyone else is perfectly prepared.

I still suffer from too much anxiety although it's a drop in the bucket to what I used to endure.   Paralyzing anxiety is long gone.  Anxiety as a mild irritant is still with me and I'm sure that it always will be.  Alcoholics make way too big a deal out of everything and I think we do it with our feelings of anxiety as well.  Everybody is anxious from time to time.  It's part of the human condition to be mildly anxious.  It can be scary out there.  Sometimes there really is something after you.

At least in dreams when I'm showing up for class late I'm fully clothed.  That would be a whole different set of paranoid anxieties.

Me. Me. Me.

 Always pondering the tension between doing what I want to do - personal freedom - and being mindful of the needs and comfort and welfare of others - the social instinct.  I am amused - as a non-rules guy - how irritated I can get when other people break the rules, even in those cases where I can see how someone else might see the particular rule as stupid or useless or where I see the rule as stupid or useless.  It's the rule, goddammit!  Of course, when I think a rule is stupid or useless I'm not great at following it.  This makes sense to me because I'm insane.

If I like something I want it to stay the same but if I don't like something I want it to change.  Also insanity.  Also, a direct contradiction to the Serenity Prayer, an A.A. staple.

"When A.A. was quite young, a number of eminent psychologists and doctors made an exhaustive study of a good-sized group of so-called problem drinkers.  They finally came up with a conclusion that shocked the A.A. members of that time.  These distinguished men had the nerve to say that most of the alcoholics under investigation were still childish, emotionally sensitive, and grandiose."

The only thing shocking about this is that they only used three insulting adjectives to describe us.

When I do something that may threaten the health, physical safety, or emotional well-being of someone else . . . what's the calculus I use?  What's my motivation, my thought pattern?  Do I simply not give a shit?  Am I paddling along happily in willful ignorance?  Is it a combination of the two? 

Me.  Me.  Me.

Action V Intention

More from the priestly priest . . .

As time goes by, the gap between intention and performance grows larger. It is normal for alcoholics to be all-or-nothing: some thing is either worth doing or it is dismissed as rubbish, nonsense, or something beneath contempt. And even then, the chances are nothing will happen. Most alcoholics live most of the time in a state of complete potential. They may be about to do something, they could do something, they may be thinking about doing something, but they rarely do anything, other than drinking. Planning looks wonderful and powerful, and contemplation looks helpful, but action is unusual. Many alcoholics have set out to write the best novel in the world with a blank sheet of paper and a bottle. Very often the bottle is finished before a single line has been written down. They attempt to take alcohol along with them on their path to fame and fortune, success, and fulfillment.

Action: Something done, often so as to accomplish a purpose.

Intention: A hope; a wish.

(Ed. Note: Action appears in the literature 48 times; Intention, 3. Apparently action is where the excitement is.)

There's a passage somewhere about the fact that the alcoholic judges himself by his intentions while the world judges him by his actions.  Talk is cheap.  Action is where the rubber hits the road.

Here's a section from the Big Book that drives home the point about the power of alcohol in our lives: "I have had many men who had, for example, worked a period of months on some problem or business deal which was to be settled on a certain date, favorably to them.  They took a drink a day or so prior to the date, and then the phenomenon of craving at once became paramount to all other interests so that the important appointment was not met."

When I was a kid my family and I decided that I should become an eye doctor.  In college I exploited a loophole to get accepted at optometry school after only two years of undergraduate work.  I killed myself, doubling up on classes and going to summer school, in a huge hurry to get somewhere.  I was fine for the first two years of optometry and even passed the first set of the state certification boards, although my alcohol consumption was really interfering with my ability to do the work.  The start of my fifth year of university saw me simply drinking.  I went to class but I didn't study.  I knew this wasn't going to turn out well but I was unable to get off the bus - tomorrow I would jump back in!  Inevitably, I was asked to leave.  Four years of work and I decided to drink and use instead of continue my studies.  This is, as you can imagine, a painful memory to contemplate, even though I've pondered it many, many times. 

Alcohol gave us wings to fly.

And then it took away the sky.

Lying, Reality, Facts, Honesty

Lie:  To give false information intentionally with intent to deceive. 

Truth and honesty are no friends of the alcoholic. These are commodities which the rest of the world finds valuable, but which the alcoholic finds an embarrassment. Very often an alcoholic will automatically tell a lie rather than the truth, since in doing so he is actually able to control reality a little better, and he does not have to remember those difficult-for-the-unwary details called facts. An obvious difficulty for the alcoholic is that memory is impaired, particularly during periods of alcoholic amnesia. Trying to remember what lies have been told to which people, placed on top of alcoholic amnesia, leaves a sense of chaotic control which is nothing less than a foretaste of hell itself. 

Remember how exhausting it was to lie and lie and lie and then have to come up with a backup lie to cover the first lie in case you got caught and you found yourself way down this rabbit-hole of branching lies which went every which way but sometimes intersected, layers and layers and levels of lies . . . Jeebus, it was exhausting to remember what you told to whom. I found myself confused as to what actually happened from time to time, compounded by the fact that I was in a black-out or a brown-out and wasn't clear of the facts if I even had an inclination to tell them. I found myself in A.A. relating a story from time to time and thinking: "I'm not sure that actually happened." I had lied about it for so long that it was so deep in my consciousness that I didn't know what was what.

I don't know about the ". . . nothing less than a foretaste of hell itself." I think our priestly friend got a bit dramatic with that one.

Honest: Scrupulous with regard to telling the truth. (Ed. Note: Scrupulous! I love it. Exactly and carefully conducted. Beautiful.)

Even in early sobriety, recovering alcoholics may find that they still have the tendency to tell a lie rather than the truth, simply because it has always been easier to do so. To tell a lie is to create one's own reality—the greatest accomplishment of the alcoholic.

My non-lying self took a while to develop. Ahem . . . is still developing. I quickly understood that malicious lies were not spiritual - I had to quit lying to hurt people or to slyly carry tales. Then I migrated to the lie of omission - as a clever, practiced spinner of lies I found I could often carefully construct my words so that I could get the person to whom I was speaking to believe something that wasn't true even though my words were technically true. I was proud of this loophole until I looked the word "lie" up and found that a lie was anything that caused someone to believe a falsehood. My clever fucking around with the dialogue didn't absolve me of anything.

Today I practice rigorous honesty, to the best of my ability. I tend to exaggerate and fluff and gloss over and round up to make myself look better. If the number is 10 I make it 11. That extra 1 doesn't help me at all. I don't know why I do it but I do it. But I'm proud to say that you can absolutely trust whatever I have to say.

Reality: A real entity, event, or other fact.

Fact: Something actual as opposed to invented; something that is real.

 

To tell the truth means accepting real reality. Alcoholics hate to do that. An alcoholic will change and adapt all facts, figures, dates, promises, and vows, since everything about him has to serve the single purpose of the alcoholic - to keep his relationship with alcohol secure. Obviously, his situation sometimes involves some compromise, particularly when he is actively threatened by people in authority. However, it is not likely that he will put aside his main goal for long.

Facts . . . Schmacts. Don't get in the way of my alcohol or drugs.