My Buddy Chivas

Life gets lifey sometimes.

If you keep doing what you've been doing you'll keep getting what you've been getting.

Tolerant:  Showing willingness to allow the existence of opinions or behavior that one does not necessarily agree with; a willingness to accept the belief, habits, feelings, or behaviors of another group, culture, etc. as legitimate even if they differ from one's own.  (Ed. Note: Funny how the word 'willingness' keeps popping up . . .  )

From the text of Tradition Three: "Our Foundation office asked each group to send in its list of 'protective' regulations.  The total list was a mile long.  If all those rules had been in effect everywhere, nobody could have possibly joined A.A. . . "

Here are a few phrases that pop up after that surprising and hilarious sentence: "pretty intolerant;" "After all, isn't fear the true basis of intolerance?"  "Could we then foresee that troublesome people were to become our principal teachers of patience and tolerance?"

When I ask people who have gone out why they picked up a drink again, what their mind set was, what happened, the reasons are mundane, insignificant, and boring.  Lazy and self-serving reasons.  The reasons are so shitty that they're actually excuses and not reasons.  No one - I repeat: no one - has ever told me that a relative just died in a car accident or that they recently learned they were diagnosed with some horrible, fatal disease.  They just drink.  They want to drink, they're not spiritually fit, they're not plugged in, and they just drink.  One young guy who had accumulated about ninety days was at a gathering, saw a bottle of Chivas Regal, and poured himself a drink.  "Seemed like a good idea," he told me.

That's his new nickname.  Chivas.  "Good morning, Chivas, good to see you!"  I can be such an asshole.

I told a Chicago guy once that I liked to party.  He said that I was drinking, not partying.  I mentioned to another Chicago guy that I didn't know why I kept relapsing.  He said that I wasn't relapsing, I was continuing to drink, that you had to actually quit drinking in the first place to relapse.

Irritating, these Chicago guys.

But a lot of irritating guys listened patiently when I talked - if by "talking" you mean "spewing nonsense" - and planted good ideas in my head, ideas that I took and used to build a good life.  They never told me what I had to do - they told me what they did and how it worked out for them, the implication being that I could try it out or not or I could try something totally different, that the idea was to try things different than the ones I was currently using which clearly weren't working out very well.