Live and Let Live

I have an elderly relative who would appear to be drinking a whole hell of a lot of alcohol right now. This guy had an alcoholic father and has exhibited alcoholic tendencies his whole life. Maybe he has been drinking on the sly all along. It's not always easy to tell. Some of us are very good at hiding our drinking; we have a great capacity for alcohol. Personally, I was one of those guys who appeared to gain composure and self-control the more that I drank.

And then a lot of us are high bottom, functioning alcoholics. I'm always amazed when I meet someone who comes into A.A. after having a successful career and raising a family and buying houses and doing all kinds of other adult things that I never got around to doing. I was too busy drinking.

It's difficult to watch someone drink like this. It becomes much harder to process the alcohol as we get older. When we're young we have a lot more stamina and strength and balance. The kidneys and liver are functioning well and purging the poison that is alcohol quickly and efficiently. It's easier to get away with it. We can power through the pain and crisis.

Over the years I've gotten pretty good at detaching from alcoholics that I'm not emotionally involved with. It's not against the law to drink, after all. The cops won't try to stop you if you want to sit in your living room and drain half a gallon of vodka every night. We know the virtual impossibility of trying to stop a drunk who doesn't want to quit drinking. You could have dropped me into the middle of a dry county on Sunday into a Mormon compound surrounded by barbed wire and snarling Dobermans and I'd have a case of something and a bag of something else within the hour. Generally I don't bother with someone who wants to keep drinking. People told me to finish the job and come back when I was ready.

Maybe some day I'll go to Al-Anon. I hear it's a wonderful program. Shorty brings it up all the time when I bitch about my family. In my defense I think that A.A. has done a good job of teaching me how to keep my hands off of the things that I have no control over. I've learned about not taking responsibility for others. It's not my job to tell other people what to do, despite the fact that I am eminently qualified to run the world. I try not to take it personally. I'm not thinking about how I impact someone else when I do something so I assume that they're not thinking about me. People aren't doing things at me, they're just doing things that make sense to them or that they think they need to do.


I don't know.