Clean House

Some more thoughts from The Little Red Book, a semi-official AA publication (although it's printed by Hazelden, so there's an unofficial air about it) from 1970. It got a lot of semi-official input from the cognoscenti in A.A.. The parts in italics that follow show direct quotes from The Big Book and are to be heeded. The stuff in parenthesis are my components and can be safely ignored.

Here we go . . .

Resentment is common to all alcoholics.  We are never safe from it and as intangible as it may seem, it does pay off in material ways with destructive force and energy.  Resentment is dynamite to the alcoholic.  It destroys more alcoholics than anything else.  From it stem all forms of spiritual disease, for we have not only been mentally and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick.  Resentment is pure mental drunkenness.  

(I confess to enjoying the occasional resentment. It's such a smug, self-satisfying feeling, primal and inherent, to nurture and grow a resentment, making sure it gets plenty of water and sunshine. Criticizing other people, places, and institutions can be deeply satisfying. Think I'm wrong? Have a Facebook account? Scroll down through a few pages and see how many of the posts are pure, unadulterated bitching. I know my whole being expands when I'm expressing my superiority over everyone else.)

(The following is from the LRB's discussion on Step Four.)

We list people, institutions and principles with whom we were angry.  We ask ourselves why we were angry.  Has your life been any happier because of this resentment?  “It is plain that a life which includes deep resentments leads only to futility and unhappiness.  To the precise extent that we permit these, do we squander the hours that might have been worth while.”

Criticism, a form of negative judgment, is absolutely out of our fellowship picture.

(If I'm not able to criticize others how exactly am I going to be able to explain why I'm right? If I'm not criticizing you I may have to pay attention to me.)

Dishonesty.

(No need to expound here.) 

He cannot afford to subject himself to self-pity because of its relationship to resentment and inferiority.

(Self-pity is also a deeply satisfying state of mind. It's a real attention-grabber. Look at me! Look at how bad I have it! Don't you feel sorry for me!?) (This is a rhetorical question. We don't feel sorry for you.)

Few, if any, men or women escape the emotional monstrosity of jealousy.

(I'm enjoying the noun "monstrosity." Nice touch. I'm also wondering whether I'm always jealous or always envious.)

The practice of tolerance (the opposite of intolerance) is a part of recovery.  It aids spiritual progress and helps us to control our emotions.

(So I guess the point is that intolerance retards our spiritual progress and sharpens our uncontrollable emotions.)

The tendency of alcoholics to discount fear as contributing to alcoholism often causes newcomers to underrate its importance to their inventories.  (Are you fucking kidding me? What alcoholic isn't consumed by fear? These guys are way off base here.)  As alcoholics we have used a few of fear’s positive qualities but utilized mostly the negative ones, specializing to a great extent on anxiety, dread, worry, uncertainty, and apprehension of harm or evil that always seemed just around the corner. 

The alcoholic is only human.  He will be subject to all human impulses and often faced by conditions that arouse him, but he need not be ignorant of the treacherous nature of anger or the destructive inroads its impulses can make upon his recovery.

Spiritual Principles

 From Tradition One: "The A.A. member has to conform to the principles of recovery.  His life actually depends on obedience to spiritual principles.  If he deviates too far, the penalty is sure and swift; he sickens and dies."

From Tradition Nine: "Unless each A.A. member follows to the best of his ability our suggested Twelve Steps to recovery, he almost certainly signs his own death warrant.  His drunkenness and dissolution are not penalties inflicted by people in authority; they result from his personal disobedience to spiritual principles."

Bill W understood both intuitively and from his own personal experience that alcoholics don't listen to instructions.  We just don't.  This is why each  important point is made over and over and over again.  The first Tradition is about the importance of unity in our Program; the ninth warns us about organizing in a way that gives any individual undue power.  Pretty different concepts, yet the idea surfaces in both of them that if we don't adhere to basic principles we die.  That's a pretty heavy penalty.  

Die!  Kill you dead!

If you insist on running into heavy cross traffic after repeated warnings from your mama you might get run over.  If so, your grievous injuries are not due to your mama's influence or authority . . . you ran into traffic!  The car hit you, not your mama's rule!  It's not her fault and it's not her rule.  It's A Rule.

"Great suffering and great love are A.A.'s disciplinarians; we need no others."

That's a hell of a mix, a hell of a combo.

Dear Henry

 Dear Henry:

While I admire your inclination to write using pen and ink I assure you that my handwriting is virtually illegible . . . so electronica arise!

SuperK and I have been admiring/laughing/marveling/wondering at your repeated assurances that you are “as happy as you’ve ever been” during the pandemic. You may be marveling at that a little yourself.  

I have been looking at my relative state of contentment during the pandemic.  My life in A.A has been this weird migration from thinking I was a real laid-back dude (Translation: stoned and lethargic) to realizing I’m as Type A as you can be (competitive to a fault).  Over the last many years - especially since I retired - I’ve been attempting to merge my Type-A-ness with an understanding that being productive can be overrated.  Even more astounding to me has been trying to balance what the world sees as productive with what I see as productive.  Trying to understand the relative merits of Being V Doing.

The first time we went to Europe unescorted I almost killed us with an undoable agenda.  We’d labor to find a historic site and I’d be tapping my watch after 15 minutes, driven to get to the next place.  I showed SuperK the agenda for the next trip.  “Hmmm,” she said as she started crossing things out.  I still almost killed us, just not as dead as the first time.  Being Someplace V Doing Something Someplace.  Today we almost never travel without being able to stay in a spot for at least one extra day.  Feel a little bored, like we’ve seen what we came to see, casually, relaxed, thoughtfully, ready to move on instead of having to move on.

I still find myself chafing at the bit sometimes when I’m not being “productive.”  Museums have been part of a great awakening in my sensibility.  I don’t have to see every picture in the museum.  I don’t have to study the artist before I go.  I don’t have to read everything posted next to the painting, explaining what’s being expressed.  I can leave when I’m tired of looking at the art, whether this is 30 minutes or 3 hours.  You helped me with that - you just seemed to be looking at the art, letting it speak to you.  It’s OK to not like something.  It’s really OK to not understand something.  It’s going to seep into my consciousness differently than it will with someone else, and that’s OK.  Maybe that’s the point!

There’s an interesting spider web in the corner of my office area.  I think I’m going to look at it for a while, slack-jawed.

As ever and as always,

Love you, brother.

Resentment

Resentment:  Anger or displeasure stemming from belief that one has been wronged or betrayed by others.

I'm really kind of disgusted and annoyed at the state of my society right now.  This fact is firmly in the None of My Business category.  It's also in the Nothing I Can Do About It category.  Both of these categories are populated with thousands and millions of facts which doesn't stop me from adding new ones on a daily basis.  Very, very few things are my business and therefore possibly, potentially changeable.  

As I've been working through my frustration with the live 7 AM meeting I'm vaguely aware that these personalities and their behavior are functioning as a representation, a symbol of the general public or at least that portion of the general public whose behavior I find irritating.  Most of them I'm friends with or friendly with, at least, and very few of them stick in my consciousness for any length of time whatsoever and I'm saying this kindly.  There are plenty of people I see who don't tickle my fancy one way or the other.  It's sort of a shrug and a "huh," maybe a fist bump or a quick hug and then I'm on to someone I have a deeper relationship with.  No animosity, no special closeness.  These folks, after all, walk right past me most of the time.  That's great and fine - we can't be close with everyone.

I always say if I'm thinking of someone who - if they moved away or started attending other meetings - I wouldn't miss for a minute . . . then why would I dedicate any mental space to thinking of them?  It's amazing how many arguments I have in my head with people who aren't that important to me and  -  I should point out - aren't even present.

There's a famous Seinfeld episode where Jerry's girlfriend cannot stand George, a fact that he finds irresistible to resist.  He becomes obsessed with her, submarining other healthy relationships.  She hates him so he wants her.

I'm sure that when we get back together in person I'll be fine.  I've really gotten pretty good at shedding resentments, although I'll admit this one has been wedged in pretty deep.  My life has been profoundly affected by the behavior of others so I guess it's natural to feel some anger about that.

An Actual Running Chain Saw

 Yesterday's title made me think of one of my favorite all-time A.A. anecdotes.  I'm friends with a guy who really struggled to quit heroin for a couple of years.  He's doing great now, a fact that makes my heart sing.  A more miserable son of a bitch I cannot imagine when he was showing up at meetings in the midst of a run, sleeping in his car, shaking in his chair.  I always gave him a hug and told him I loved him, and left it at that.  It's not my job to tell people to quit doing what they're doing - that's up to them to decide.

Anyway, a while back he lifted his shirt and showed me one of the most horrific scars I have ever seen, a jagged line of thick keloid running from his hip up into his armpit.  I mean this dude has a fucking scar.  He owns a small tree-trimming business and he had a run-in with a chain saw.

"Whew," I marveled.  "Wow.  What's the lesson for you with that incident?"

He's got a pretty sense of humor but I thought his response was a mix of wry amusement and sheepish wonder: "Never climb into a tree with a running chain saw . . . while you're on heroin."

This is one of those rules that seems so obvious that you wouldn't think to bring it up to someone.

A Running Chain Saw

I've been talking to a guy in The Program that I've known since he got sober.  He came to meetings for a while before succumbing to frustration having to deal with all the idiots that he kept running into and drifted away from in-person meetings even before the pandemic.  I've always liked the guy - he's from New Jersey so I can just say whatever I want to him without worrying about offending him such as reminding him that's he one of the idiots that he can't stand.  He probably told me to screw myself using more of a Jersey verb.  He does that a lot.  It's a Jersey compliment.  People in CA are so nice - I usually enjoy this but I do like to hear a good "Fuck you" from time to time.

I re-lit the thread of our relationship a while back.  In one of our conversations I was amused to hear him say that I was his sponsor.  I don't recall this arrangement being set up but . . . whatever.   Happy to help out.  He is sober and relatively sane.  Normally I don't have a lot to do with people who drift away from meetings.  I don't judge people who do that - much, anyway - but it's not my shtick.  I think it's hard to stay sober and grow spiritually without that contact with other people in recovery but it's not my place to run the lives of other people.  Live and Let Live and To Thine Own Self Be True.

He lives with a woman who has some not insignificant mental illness and he has a three year old son and a job that requires him to interact with a lot of famous diva-type people in close quarters.  When he's frustrated I'm sympathetic.  I think most people are idiots, too, but I don't have to hang around anyone I don't want to except for SuperK who is most definitely NOT an idiot but rather a person I enjoy hanging around with.

I caught him on his long commute home a couple of days ago.  He was wound up.  He'd rant for a bit and I'd interrupt to ask how his son was and how his spiritual practice was going, anything to remind him to be grateful and to stay grounded, talking over him when he inquired about my well-being, aware that he wasn't all interested in how I was doing.  At the end of the call he said next time we spoke we'd make sure to talk about Seaweed.

Look, I get it.  He probably felt a little guilty at monopolizing the conversation even though he's just another garden-variety self-obsessed alcoholic who could benefit from a little less drama in his life and little more recovery.  It's not always easy to convince people that anything - and I mean anything - that allows me to stop thinking about myself for a couple of minutes is a wonderful thing.  Sometimes I start up a chain saw and let it run in my office just to drown out the clatter going on in my head.  The running chain saw is peaceful compared to the crap I have going on up there.

An Obsession and An Allergy

"The tyrant alcohol wielded a double-edged sword over us; first we were smitten by an insane urge that condemned us to go on drinking, and they by an allergy of the body that insured we would ultimately destroy ourselves in the process."

Tyrant:  A ruler who governs unjustly, cruelly, or harshly.

Obsession:  A compulsive or irrational preoccupation.

Allergy:  A disorder causing adverse reactions to substances not harmful to most.

Whew.  Those are some good words.  I could have tossed in "insane" and "destroy" as well.  I could have written a whole entry just giving out definitions.  I try to avoid getting too extraterrestrial but I really, really believe that the words in our literature were divinely inspired and heavily vetted by our Founders.  They're in the literature deliberately and for good reasons.

The section quoted above is from The Doctor's Opinion out of the Big Book.  My sponsor always suggested that I steer newcomers to this introductory part of our literature; he said that it could be helpful for people struggling to understand what the problem was.  I've always found it instructive to think of my disease of alcoholism in this manner.  I react to alcohol in a way that a non-alcoholic doesn't and can scarcely understand (allergy) and then - once the alcohol is in my body - I can think of little else (obsession).  Less kindly and more bluntly put: I'm nuts and I'm physically compromised.

"We alcoholics have lost the ability to control our drinking.  We know that no alcoholic ever recovers control."

Never:  (Ed. Note: No + Ever = Never) At no time; on no occasion; in no circumstance.

Don't believe us?  Step over to the nearest barroom and try some controlled drinking.  You'll discover the truth quite quickly.