Little Men in the Walls

Desperation:  The feeling of being in such a bad situation that you will take any risk to change it; loss of hope and surrender to despair which often leads one into rash or extreme behavior.

From The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous story called "Desperation Drinking" comes this description of where the brutal and inevitable decline of alcoholic drinking leads us: "This type of drinking is not pleasant.  It is no longer enjoyable.  You no longer get the kicks.  It is desperation drinking."

Here's one little aphorism about drug addiction: You take the first hit to get high but after that you're just trying to not get sick.  I tell people all the time that I wasn't looking to have fun at the end.  I was trying to mask my pain and - at the very end - I was trying to escape reality, to obliterate consciousness.  I wanted to pass out or go to bed.  I didn't want to be awake, to be conscious.  I wanted to go away.

This Big Book anecdote is kind of funny . . . in a terrifying way: "I was drinking to keep away the shakes, drinking to keep away those little men and those strange voices and the organ music that comes out of the walls."

While it wasn't a constant battle trying to chase the little men out of my rathole apartment I was starting to familiarize myself with the initial stages of such phenomena.  One example: the woman who lived below me in one city had a third shift job so she came home in the middle of the night.  Sometimes I'd wake up briefly as she settled into her place but one night she was really banging around down there.  It sounded like she was opening cabinet doors and then violently slamming them shut.  I put up with it for a while and then -  incensed - I stomped down the back stairs to ask her to quiet down . . . to find that she wasn't home yet.  THAT one got my attention.

This reminiscence from The Big Book is funny in a "Been there - done that" kind of way: "My drinking pattern isn't very different than the average you find in A.A.  After I came in I found I wasn't an exceptional drunk.  I used to think I was.  I also thought I was a brilliant drunk.  I have my brilliant moments yet, but whenever the boys catch me at it they tell me so very plainly."

While I've heard some blunt advice in The Rooms generally speaking my buddies simply let me talk out loud for a while without much blow-back or contradiction.  This lets me hear the sound of my own voice saying weird and illogical things when I have the time and an audience to closely listen to what I'm saying.  Most of us respond defensively when someone says: "You sound like an idiot."  It's generally better when we can say to ourselves: "Boy.  I sound like a real idiot here.  Maybe I better stop talking."