Cold Turkey

The more time I spend reading the literature of Alcoholics Anonymous the more I become convinced that one of the major thrusts is that we quit blaming other people, places, and things for our problems.  Look inside!  Stop concentrating on the outside which is none of my business.

A new guy showed up at the meeting a few days ago.  One of our members who is about his age and with just a few years of sobriety talked to him for a while after we closed.  This is as it should be - a 30 year old looks at me and sees an old man who has been sober an implausible amount of time.  He did ask for my phone number, however, and not the young guy who spent some time talking to him.  I walked out with the established member after the meeting and he commented on this fact.  He sounded a little put out which I found sort of amusing.  He suggested - actually he insisted - that I text the new guy.  He suggested/insisted that I do this several times.  

As a boy who got sober in the Midwest the mechanics of The Program were a little different.  The general tone and timbre of recovery is the same everywhere, of course, but the process varies.  The men who sponsored me early on never, ever contacted me.  I never, ever had coffee with them.  They did not "read the Book with me."  If I wanted their advice I called them.  If I saw them at meetings I learned that they were taking care of their own sobriety and that if I had a question I could pick up the phone or bring it up as a topic at my next meeting.  I was pleasant to the guy badgering me but I had no intention of calling a dude one day sober.  

I thought about it and after I got down from my self-righteous soapbox I did send New Guy a quick text.  He did not reply which told me all I needed to know.  Finally, after a few days, he replied that he had decided to go "cold turkey" and that he asked his brother and girlfriend to support him and "make sure that I don't drink."  Yeah, well, okay.  I've heard this technique before - the sloughing off of the responsibility for staying sober on someone else.  There's a line in The Big Book that suggests even if we were to try to run and hide from alcohol by escaping to the North Pole that an Indigenous local might show up with a bottle of whiskey and ruin everything.

I do not chase people.  I do not give advice.  I invariably say something along the lines of "I'll be at the morning meeting if you want to talk."  I do not meet people at meetings.  I tell people where I'm going to be; that way I'm not pissed when the individual doesn't show . .  . which is most of the time.

Think he showed up this morning?  Maybe his brother and girlfriend hid the key to his straitjacket well.

For no reason other than it amuses me . . . . 

The most likely origin of “cold turkey” is that it’s an evolution of the expression “talk turkey” or “talk cold turkey,” meaning to tell someone something straight and be completely honest. It could be a classic case of a figurative expression spawning another figurative expression.  There are a couple more literal explanations, too. One suggests that the expression comes from the fact that actual cold turkey, as a dish, requires very little preparation time. The expression, then, was to compare someone’s instant quitting of a habit to the instant readiness of cold, leftover turkey.  Yet another explanation suggests that it’s the withdrawal symptoms experienced by addicts who stop using drugs—goosebumps, chills, and pallid skin—that call to mind a cold, uncooked bird.