One , Two, Three! As easy as A B C!

As I look back over the history of my battle with King Alcohol I am able to roughly discern three phases, as long as I am wearing my reading glasses, which I usually have trouble locating even though I own 27 pairs, most of them broken or damaged because I forget where they are and sit on them or set something heavy on them or trod upon them, grinding them into dust.

Phase One was the Pink Cloud Period. I was in so much pain and my life was such a mess that it was relatively easy to make dramatic gains or to alleviate tremendous pain with simple actions. It's as if I was walking around with hundreds of barbed thorns in my head, courtesy of a losing battle with a bramble patch, which I wandered into in a blackout. I had so many thorns and they had been traveling with me for so long that I didn't pay any attention to them anymore. People would say: "Man, that looks painful." I pretended that I didn't know what they were talking about. I got a lot of relief when a thorn was plucked out, even though the barbs took some flesh with them when they came out.

Phase Three, which has arrived after a lot of painful thorn removal, might be called I'm Stayin' Out of That Ol' Bramble Patch. I have been in the bramble patch, I have removed a lot of thorns, and I have no interest in running naked through the sticker bushes, despite the siren call drawing me in. It's nice most of the time. I'm calm, or calmish or calm-like, on occasion. Oh, sure, I take off running from time to time, shedding garments as I go, and plunge in without thinking. That'll probably never change.

Phase Two was a little more problematic. Let's call this the I Am So Sick of This Bullshit stage. The big, easy gains had evaporated, the deep serenity of the Old Timers was still on the distant horizon, and the whole thing reeked of tedium. Some of the big thorns had been removed but a lot of smaller, many-barbed, poison-tipped, deeply-embedded, infected thorns were still in place. I didn't always feel like a million bucks when I left -- like when I was newly sober -- and I didn't often feel like a million bucks when I arrived -- as I do now, most of the time. Some of the time, anyway. OK, now and then.

This may be why a lot of people drift away at this point in their sobriety. It feels like a lot of hard work, which many of us abhor. It's a time to be vigilant.