The Self

Self: One's own welfare, interest, or advantage; selfishness: as, people concerned only with thought of self.

I do well to remember that alcoholics don't have the market cornered on lousy behavior. We have taken the pursuit of money, power, and sex into the stratosphere but these primary instincts are installed in everyone, and they are very compelling. Many people who don't drink to excess trample their fellows into the muck as they pursue money, power, and sex.

Since I've taken some time to talk about my family members behind their backs I might as well continue the riff until it's played out. Believe it or not, it's been helpful for me to do this. Sometimes other people act like jerks and I may be too close, too involved with the circumstances to look at it dispassionately. A few weeks ago SuperK and I were talking to Spandex after a meeting, describing how our relationships with our families have played out over the years. A couple of times he interrupted to say: "You're kidding me! That's unbelievable! " I was a little startled. I have lived within these dynamics for so long that they seemed normal to me; at least they were familiar.

Yesterday was Halloween; selfish behavior and good cheer was on display for all to see as various relatives tried to maneuver everyone else into positions of submission while pretending that humility was being practiced. And for those who weren't willing to be maneuvered -- OK, that's me, obviously -- the air was thick with unspoken disapproval. I can feel the gossip flowing from different houses this morning.

The problem with expectations is that people can assume that a behavior that's important to them should be important to you, too. But if you're interested in something that they could care less about then, my, how the tables are turned. I've learned in A.A. that I have to show some interest in other people even when I'm not interested in other people as a general rule. I become interested in you when I take the time to listen to you, not when I evaluate everything that's going on from my own self-centered perspective. It's not fair for me to expect someone to be engaged in everything I'm interested in but not make the same effort with them.

This is the definition of selfish.

Hearing The Message

I solicited some advice about the family drinking situation at a meeting last night. This is a men's meeting with a lot of sobriety in attendance. It can get a little over the top from time to time, as men are wont to do, but it's a solid group of guys. Generally, I hesitate bringing up a topic in a lot of meetings because there is a tendency for people to talk at me, to solve my problem, to give me advice. I think that passing along specific recommendations has its part in my recovery, but it should happen before and after the meeting or on the phone, not in the meeting itself. I understand this to be cross-talk, which I hate. If you tell me what to do I'm doing something else. If you tell me what you did, maybe, maybe, I'll listen.


Anyway, the message I heard repeatedly was this: pray for the guy; make yourself available; don't buy into any bullshit. When we're drinking and not interested in stopping there is no solution. I've gotten pretty good over the years detaching from drunks who are drinking: "You want to drink, then drink. You know where to find us." We don't pass this message along with anger or arrogance but as a simple fact. We're like teenagers most of the time. You can't tell us anything. It almost killed me getting sober when I was All In. I didn't have a prayer when I was justifying what I was doing, when I was resisting the message. The guys I hung around with early on didn't waste much time with me, as they shouldn't have. I was still a lost cause at that point; they had people who wanted the help that I was refusing.

The other thing I heard was: Family is hard. It's painful watching someone evaporate, but it hurts in a special way when it's a loved one. And then, to compound the misery, I have codependent family members calling to insist that I drop what I'm doing and Run Over! Right Now! Solve the Problem! I keep giving the same simple message over and over. I feel like I'm talking to a piece of wood; nothing is penetrating. I'm not a woodpecker.


If SuperK is around, I use the speaker phone so that I have a witness to the drama. As a people pleaser, it's not easy delivering blunt advice. Usually she pats me on the shoulder and walks out of the room. There's not a lot to say. It isn't very complicated. I should be the guy who tells people they have fatal diseases or are losing their jobs: "Sit down Mr. Johnson. I have some bad news. . . "

Wouldn't it be GREAT if I could fix everything that is wrong? Boy, would I have a big boat.

Live and Let Live, I Said

Detached: Not involved by emotion, interests, etc.; aloof; impartial.

I've been trying to sort out my impressions about my father's drinking. Not morbid wallowing in the mud kind of thinking, but thinking none the less. I don't know what else to call it. Reflection? Musing? The paralysis of analysis? I have to be careful I don't over think, which I love to do, but sometimes I have to think things through.

Shorty and I usually come up with this conclusion when we talk about any dysfunction that we can detect in our families: "It's painful." I need to embrace that simple concept more often than I do. Sometimes it's just painful watching someone I love go through something that I don't want them to go through. It's even worse when I'm not able to change the behavior that causes the painful circumstances. I don't know why everyone can't see that I know what they should do.

It's delusional for me to think that things would improve if other people would only make the changes that I recommend. Sometimes I can't stop myself from chiming in, usually with negative results. It's even more laughable when I consider that a lot of the time I'm looking at behavior that others have embraced for years and years and decades. Like I have the power to change that.


While I love my father and I know he loves me we don't have much of a relationship. I don't think he was particularly interested in getting married and having a family. When I was growing up he came home from work, ate dinner, and left for his bowling league, poker game, golf league, volleyball league, softball league, The League of Nations, in league with the devil, beleaguered and haggard. He was very active in his church. It's not that things weren't good, it's just that they weren't . . . anything. He wasn't around. He wasn't involved.

I wonder what it was like for him growing up with an alcoholic father. Probably not much different.

I've been able to work through a lot of these feelings over the years. It has been a slow -- sometimes EXCRUTIATINGLY slow -- process but it has produced some results. I can step back from the drama and make informed decisions. Sometimes I feel like a 911 operator when I take calls. I try to calm down the caller and help them handle the crisis. It doesn't feel like a loved one on the other end. I want to help them solve the crisis. I don't feel the obligation to take the entire weight of the crisis on my own shoulders. I don't buy into the drama any more. "Just the facts, ma'am, just the facts."

My best friend watched his alcoholic father struggle at the end of his life. He had a lot of regret and a lot of fear about dying. He was adrift spiritually and because he had spent most of his life thinking about himself and neglecting others -- with pretty predictable results in his family -- there wasn't a great rallying around of the troops to help ease his passage. No one was behaving maliciously, they were just doing what they had always done. They were a product of their environment. They were practicing what they had been taught. People can't stop on a dime and change like that.

I have to be very careful when I write about others. It's easy to sit up in my ivory tower and take pot shots at other people. I'm all over your flaws; it's my flaws that I can't see. But I need to sort things out from time to time as well. It's not easy facing some of these problems. Sometimes I feel cold and analytical. Calculating. But I know myself how long and hard a process it was to get to this spot. I didn't decide to stop being involved. I learned how painful it was being involved and how to adapt to manage the pain.

It's not always my fault. The solution is always with me, but it's not always my fault. If you walk up and pop me in the nose, that's not a defect on my part. Letting you do it over and over -- that's the defect.

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.

Tireless Termites

Termite: Any of various pale-colored social insects that are very destructive . .

I took a call from EMC recently. Most of my friends and I have a basic understanding about the phone. If I get voice mail when I call someone I leave a message and a schtickle of information. Most of the time I can say that everything is fine and I'm merely checking in. I touch base with a lot of people to make sure that my awareness of my surroundings is not completely insane. This is not unusual. I'm always checking: "Is this insane? Is this weird? Should I stop doing this?" I have no idea most of the time.

On occasion, the Termites of Fear are ceaselessly devouring the foundations of my sanity and I need to talk to someone sooner rather than later. Being an adult, sort of, I practice adult phone etiquette and indicate this in my message. At that point I expect a phone call as soon as it's convenient for the other person, but I don't sit around and wait: I move down my long list to the next guy. My tolerance for pain is much, much lower than it used to be. And I don't think any of us have the market cornered on right behavior.

EMC was burned up. I could tell right away because normally his cadence is nice and deliberate. He was talking a mile a minute. I don't think that I passed along any profound information; from what I could tell, assuming he wasn't lying too much and exaggerating too ridiculously, he was behaving in a perfectly appropriate manner and responding with hale and good cheer to some stressful information. Mostly I listened, which I've learned is all I really want from my friends most of the time, and dispensed some hackneyed and fairly obvious advice: You're upset so take a deep breath and calm down before you do anything. This isn't philosophical advice worthy of Gandhi or Plato, for god's sake. I'd expect to hear "Look before you leap" from philosophers like Foghorn Leghorn or Bullwinkle.

Good old Foghorn. He always knew what to say.

Don't Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight

"Here's the thing I hate about you most: you are so inconsiderate."

I mulled over this remark. I figured that I had done something inconsiderate. Otherwise I couldn't think of any other reason that she would call me inconsiderate. Probably I was pretending to listen to my wife when, in fact, I was thinking about myself, which is my favorite topic, as I have made abundantly clear. ("That's no fucking secret," SuperK told me when I admitted this once).

"You just said that people like me," I pointed out. I heard that. I hear compliments. It makes me think of my grandfather who was hard of hearing unless he wanted to hear something.

"They don't know you like I know you," she replied, which is pretty true. She knows me quite well.

"That's not true," I defended myself. "Some of them know me pretty well."

"They don't have to live with you," she said. I don't know how she does it, to be honest with you.

I wasn't going to win this argument.

'Night, 'Night, SuperK

A few years ago I had a routine medical procedure that required a general anesthetic. To complete the work, my doctor had to take a long metal probe and . . . well, I can't imagine that anyone is interested in the details. Trust me, the prescribed anesthetic was definitely required. I have an incredible tolerance for pain but would rather die of whatever disease this procedure was trying to detect than be awake during said procedure.

Yesterday I took SuperK to the hospital to have the same test done. Both of us are amped up pretty good as a general rule. We're both highly competitive, highly energized, Type A personalities, which makes for some interesting marital dynamics from time to time. I might have mentioned to her on the way to the hospital just how pleasant a little spritz of Demerol can be. I also think it's interesting that the spelling of "marital" and "martial" is very similar. Just move a couple of letters and voila!

Afterwards, I poured her into the car and listened to her repeat the same things over and over for the next 15 minutes. She said: "Wow. This is a great drug."


"Yeah, tell me about it, " I said.

"I am totally, completely relaxed," she continued.


"Yeah, I told you about this on the way down here, right?" I replied, a little piqued that I didn't get a shot of Demerol so I could tolerate the boredom of a hospital waiting room. "Can we talk about something else?"

"OK, calm down," she giggled. "Why are you in such a bad mood?"

"Because you got a shot of Demerol and I didn't," I pointed out.

She sat out in the backyard and knitted and read for the rest of the afternoon. I remember hanging out in the coffee shop when I had my pop of the Big D. Just sat there and watched the world go by. And this from a dude who is burning energy like a nuclear reactor most of the time. It took the sense of urgency away, the feeling that I wasn't Getting Something Done. For the non-alcoholic/drug addict, it's a big waste of time, sitting there with a stupid grin on your face. For the lover of opiates, it's the whole point of things.

I ran into a friend that night at a meeting who has 40 plus years of sobriety. She inquired about SuperK.


"Oh, yeah, that's a good drug," she laughed.

We talked -- not seriously -- about what a wonderful world it would be if I could get up in the morning and inject a syringe full of Demerol. Maybe half a syringe if the day got tough. And could it hurt to have one more shot to help me get to sleep? I'd be selling my china to buy pounds of the stuff in a week.


"How's my little drug addict?" I asked SuperK this morning.

She looked up. "I hadn't really thought about it," she said.

What a freak. We did talk about how this might increase our empathy and understanding when we run into heroin addicts at our respective institution meetings. We could see how one could quickly get carried away. Then, top it off with a really horrible and long withdrawal.