What the Hell?

 Nobody gets up one fine Spring morning and says: "Wow, is my life great.  I'm healthy with a wonderful spouse and beautiful kids.  Got a nice house and two new cars.  My career is on fire and I'm well liked at work - my boss is even eyeing me for a promotion.  What the hell . . . . I think I'll go to Alcoholics Anonymous."

If you're wondering if you have a drinking problem you probably have a drinking problem.  People who aren't alcoholics don't sit around wondering if they have a drinking problem.

I'm a reformed A.A. dabbler.  I dabbled when I came in.  I pursued the half-measures recovery technique.  I did as little as I possibly could and drank; then did a little, tiny bit more and drank; I did this over and over and over again, drinking each time, staying sober a little longer each time, until I was All In.  I was out of ideas.  I knew I needed to be doing what you folks were saying to do.

I was on a cruise once where a passenger that I had gotten to know came down with a GI tract infection.  On a cruise ship the crew responds to an illness of this type in roughly the same manner as they would to someone found strapping on a suicide belt full of nails in one of the communal bathrooms.  They confined him to his room and threatened to eject him from the ship at the next port if he tried to leave for any reason whatever.  I could not overstate how upset I would have been had this happened to me.  He shrugged his shoulders.  He was fine.  He got a lot of reading done.  See?  There are people who naturally make the best of an unwelcome situation.  Freaks.  Total freaks.  I would have been planning a break-out.  I would have taken the gamble.

Anonymity is humility.

Service is freedom.

Part of The Group

"Unless we discuss our defects with another person, we do not acquire enough humility, fearlessness, and honesty to really get the program.  We must be entirely honest with somebody, if we expect to live happily in this world.  We must be hard on ourselves, but always considerate of others.  We pocket our pride and go to it, illuminating every twist of character and every dark cranny of the past.  Once we have taken this step, withholding nothing, we can look the world in the eyes." 

One of the greatest gifts of Alcoholics Anonymous is that feeling of belonging, of being in the right place, of 'getting it.'  I sort of get it some of the time.  Things sort of make sense . . . some of the time.  But I never feel like I'm floating by myself in deep space without a helmet on.  And this connectedness began to happen for me after I did my first Fifth Step.  I shared all of the deep, dark secrets that were eating me alive and lived to tell the tale.

I've been having some back troubles.  I've had them before and most people my age have them from time to time but when it's me having the pain?  Well, sir, most unfair and how do I get it to go away as quickly as possible?  I think those kinds of thoughts while simultaneously holding in my head the belief that this is the One, this is the time where it's going to be forever, never, always.

I brought this up on a phone call with one of my friends yesterday; a guy who cheerfully takes a ton of good-natured abuse from me.  He listened patiently and then started in with the perspective, wondering why he was talking to me instead of to someone with financial problems or a cancer diagnosis or an addicted child.  I took it.  He was spot on and he's a good friend and I knew it was coming, so I took it.  As a guy who dishes it out I better be able to take it.  I felt better for having shared what was bothering me and better for hearing some perspective.

One of our members in good standing was attacked Saturday by a mentally ill transient who hit her in the head with a tire iron.  Knocked three teeth out, broke her jawbone, etc. etc.  I texted with her a bit this morning.  The tenor of her responses was 1. Gratitude for the incredible outpouring of love that has come her way and 2. Balance in her expectations for how long the pain will last and how to best handle it.   It was a very inspiring exchange for me.  Grateful that I'm not alone, that I have this support network to tap into, and grateful that I have the tools to handle whatever comes my way.  I no longer have to maneuver through life all by myself.

"Happiness cannot be sought directly; it is a byproduct of love and service.  Service is a law of nature.  With love in your heart, there is always some service to other people.  Little acts of love and encouragement, of service and help, erase the rough places of life and help to make the path smooth.  If we do these things, we cannot help having our share of happiness."

Random Thoughts From A Funny Book

Society, as a rule, did not trouble anyone pushing a shopping cart.  The further a cart was taken from the store where it belonged, the more deference was paid to the possibly unstable individual who had taken charge of it.

Deceit had kept them young whereas the truth had accelerated them practically into decrepitude.

What if she were a homeless person and lived here?  Annabel had never gone in for the fad of caring for the homeless, although Alice said there was a great deal to learn from them in the way of resourcefulness.  They would come into Green Palms, the local nursing home, at lunchtime and pretend to be visitors helping their loved ones eat lunch and instead would eat the lunch themselves.

He felt as resourceful as the Cub Scout he had once been.  He hoped all his cub mates were dead, the little bastards.  They were always going on camping trips and catching chipmunks under pots and setting fire to them with white gas. They were always hanging around canals and shooting arrows into manatees, pretending they were whales.  Once they’d even captured a Key deer by lobbing baseball bats and stunning it.

But when they moved Steve to a private school he became a kind of heavy-metal Bartleby (he preferred Black Sabbath).

They were unaccountable, shadowy figures, practically bearded in Alice’s imagination, bearing peculiar half-priced gifts like peppermint foot cream or battery-operated lights you clipped onto books or socket-wrench sets.  She’d never heard of an effective or efficient godparent.

She walked quickly, sometimes breaking into a run, through the gullies and over the rocks, past the strange growths, all living their starved, difficult lives. Everything had hooks or thorns.  Everything was saw-edged and spiny-pointed. Everything was defensive and fierce and determined to live.

The idea that there was some spirit out there who paid for teeth—what was it constructing anyway? What was its problem?

Her father, over the years, had gotten progressively smaller.  He was shrinking fast, though he’d been holding at jockey size for the last month or so.

Euphoric Recall

Thorough: Painstaking and careful not to miss or omit any detail.

Honest:      Scrupulous with regard to telling the truth; not given to swindling, lying, or fraud.

"We who have accepted the A.A. principles have been faced with the necessity for a thorough housecleaning.  We must face and be rid of the things in ourselves which have been blocking us.  We therefore take a personal inventory.  We take stock honestly.  We search out the flaws in our make-up which caused our failure.  When we see our faults we list them.  We place them before us in black and white.  We admitted our wrongs honestly and we were willing to set these matters straight.  We reviewed our fears thoroughly."

Somewhere in the literature there's a suggestion that in our daily meditation we ask that our thoughts be directed away from self-pity and dishonest or self-seeking motives.  Shit fire.  Those are my three biggest areas of specialization.  I'm intrigued by the fact that a lot of the time when I'm lying and self-seeking and feeling sorry for myself I don't even know I'm doing it.  We try in Alcoholics Anonymous to avoid these behaviors - behaviors that are so ingrained in our personalities  that when we try to root them out and avoid them they adapt and transmogrify into subtler, more devious iterations of the defect.  When I got sober I worked on stopping the obvious lying that I was doing.  That made sense.  But repeatedly I found myself telling old stories and anecdotes that I wasn't sure had even happened.  "Did I really do that?" I'd think.  The human brain does a great job of taking memories and altering them to fit our current impression of ourselves.  If you work hard at being kind to everyone but engaged in some bullying or gossip when you were drinking your brain may very well take this memory - one that is in opposition to how you see yourself today - and change it so you don't have to consider this bad behavior.  I suppose this is some kind of coping mechanism.  Sometimes a public figure will get caught telling a falsehood about something in their past and our immediate reaction is to shriek: "Liar!"  Maybe so - there are a ton of liars out there, especially people in the public eye - but maybe they're embarrassed at this past behavior and their brain has obliterated the memory.  This knowledge doesn't fit their current impression of themselves.  The brain fills in a lot of blanks.  It smooths things out.  Life is hard enough without having to recall bad behavior over and over. 

 Euphoric recall, indeed.

The point here - if there is indeed a point - is that our inventory needs to be thorough.  It needs to be ruthless.  It needs to be undertaken with an attention to detail that we could not have imagined previously; indeed, were incapable of undertaking.  We need to look beyond the hurt in any situation, especially when we've been hurt by a person, place, or thing, and find our part in the upset.  It's there if we're thorough and honest.  And it's the only part that we have any control over.

Prayer and Meditation

From our 11th Step prayer and meditation meeting this morning we uncovered (again) and remembered (one more time) these thoughts . . .  

"And let's always remember that meditation is in reality intensely practical.  One of its first fruits is emotional balance.  And in A.A. we have found that the actual good results of prayer are beyond question.  They are matters of knowledge and experience.  All those who have persisted have found strength not ordinarily their own.  They have found wisdom beyond their usual capability.  And they have increasingly found a peace of mind which can stand firm in the fact of difficult circumstances."

That's for me.  I'm a good, practical, technical Germanic type - I don't do anything without proof that it's going to make a difference.  And I'm awfully stubborn and willful so I like the flat, unequivocal statements made: these are beyond question and matters that have been proven by our knowledge and our experience.  You will find strength and wisdom and peace of mind.  No "maybes" in those sentences.  Nobody is asking me to weigh in.  I'm being told how it is and not asked if I disagree.

"Our immediate temptation will be to ask for specific solutions to specific problems, and for the ability to help other people as we have already thought they should be helped.  In that case, we are asking God to do it our way."

Here a few qualifiers pile up quickly: ". . . if it be Thy will" and "Thy will, not mine, be done" and ". . . knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out."  Getting the drift?  You can pray however you want, ask God for anything, get real outrageous even, as long as you understand that Something Else has the best plan, whether you can see it at the moment or if you don't agree that it's indeed the best plan.  No one really cares what your plan is.  

Another potential pitfall . . . 

"Why can't we take a specific and troubling dilemma straight to God, and in prayer secure from Him sure and definite answers to our requests?  Quite often ... the thoughts that seem to come from God are not answers at all.  They prove to be well-intentioned unconscious rationalizations."

Rationalize:    Attempt to explain or justify (one's own behavior or attitude) with logical, plausible reasons, even if these are not true or appropriate.

Well, I'm not sure about the well-intentioned part.  Or the unconscious part.  I think a lot of the time we know exactly what we're doing - trying to get God to do what we want.  I do know a ton about the rationalize part.

I am pretty sure that when someone - especially some religious professional in a fancy suit - tells me the facts about God and what God is or isn't . . . I back away.  These people are often crazy.  I don't think God plays favorites when he reveals his truths to people.  I think they're accessible to everyone.

"Perhaps one of the greatest rewards of meditation and prayer is the sense of belonging that comes to us.  We no longer live in a completely hostile world.  We are no longer lost and frightened and purposeless.  The moment we catch even a glimpse of God's will, the moment we begin to see truth, justice, and love as the real and eternal things in life, we are no longer deeply disturbed by all the seeming evidence to the contrary that surrounds us in purely human affairs."

Now THAT'S a Promise.

The Fellowship

Fellowship:  Friendly association, especially with people who share one's interested.

Lonely:       Sad because one has no friends or company; sad feelings that come from being apart from other people.  

"But there exists among us a fellowship, a friendliness, and an understanding which is indescribably wonderful.  We meet frequently so that newcomers may find the fellowship they seek." 17

"To watch people recover, to see them help others, to watch loneliness vanish, to see a fellowship grow up about you, to have a host of friends - this is an experience you must not miss."  89

"But even Bacchus boomeranged on us; we were finally struck down and left in terrified loneliness.  Almost without exception, alcoholics are tortured by loneliness.  As we became subjects of King Alcohol, shivering denizens of his mad realm, the chilling vapor that is loneliness settled down."  151

Bacchus is the Roman god of fruitfulness and vegetation - his Greek counterpart is Dionysious.  Did not know that.  I thought he was the god of alcohol or wine.  This is why I look shit up.  Who knew?

Terrified!  Tortured!  Shivering denizens of a mad realm!!  Jesus, please keep that chilling vapor the hell off me.

This image is a woodcut from 1782 by an engraver named John Warner Barber.  King Alcohol is not a new phenomenon.  Note the skeleton standing next to him - this dude is the King's prime minister.

I jotted down these notes for a short lead I'm doing next Monday at a meeting where the secretary reads a few sentences or a paragraph out of the Big Book and makes this the topic of the meeting.  It made me think of how terribly isolated we were when we were drinking.  Some of us were noisy good fellows who wanted to be the center of attention and some of us were cowering in the corner but it didn't matter - we felt alone.  The phrase "The Fellowship" is used lots and lots of time in the A.A. literature.  We know how important it is to be connected with others.

Lurking Seaweed

Lurk:  To remain concealed in order to ambush.  (Ed. Note:  I love this definition!  Lurking thoughts of drinking alcohol.  Outstanding.)

"None of us like to think that we are bodily and mentally different from others.  This delusion that we are like other people has to be smashed.  If we have admitted we are alcoholics, we must have no reservations of any kind, nor any lurking notion that some day we will be immune to alcohol.  What sort of thinking dominates an alcoholic who repeats time after time the desperate experiment of the first drink?  Parallel with sound reasoning, there inevitably runs some insanely trivial excuse for taking the first drink.  There is little thought of what the terrific consequences may be."

The topic of today's Zoom meeting was how to tell the difference between God's will and my will.  I didn't know there was a difference.  I thought if I wanted it then God would naturally fall into line with my wishes.  Apparently not.