Sober24 - Then & Now

Journey's End

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 14:55:48 -0400

I love riding on trains. There’s something about that quiet little lurch the car makes when the motor kicks in and the car pulls out of the station. It’s like you’ve just been unplugged from the world.

I grew up in Washington, DC, and in the old days the Amtrak ride from New York to Washington was a particular favorite of mine. The train rumbled through darkness for a few minutes, then came into the light among those strange New Jersey marshlands that lie just south of the city. The bar car would open around then, and I’d go back and buy – if memory serves correctly – two cans of Ballantine Ale.

Gradually, the alien landscape of water and reeds gave way to towns and suburbs. Sitting back in my seat, I’d catch a glimpse of a dog in a backyard, a couple talking – or arguing – on a street corner. Little moments of ordinary life -- pretty one second, ugly the next – all of it flashing by like something on a movie screen. Something I could see but no longer had anything to do with. Something that couldn’t touch me.

I’m not the first person to have enjoyed drinking on trains, of course.

The Easy Button

Tue, 01 May 2007 11:12:04 -0400

If you watch any TV, you’ve probably seen the Staples Office Supply commercials featuring a large red device called an easy button.

In the commercials, various people face seemingly impossible office-related tasks, only to realize at the last minute that the task they thought was going to be so difficult really isn’t after all. All they have to do is hit the Staples Easy Button and everything gets taken care of.

One to Grow On

Mon, 09 Apr 2007 19:00:34 -0400

Do people grow?

That’s not quite as dumb a question as it may sound -- especially for someone like me. I’m 44 years old (45 next month), and well into a phase of life in which I don’t feel like I grow all that much on a day-to-day basis. What changes I do experience are more often, in fact, the opposite of growth: A muscle group that’s unaccountably sore after an activity that used to have no impact, or an inability to remember someone’s name or the title of a book that in the past would have sprung instantly to mind.

A Certain Place

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 16:02:33 -0400

There’s a place that I think about from time to time.

In certain ways, this place changes a lot. Sometimes it’s a crowded city, sometimes it’s a remote jungle. Sometimes it’s in Greece, sometimes South America, and sometimes the Florida coast (It’s always, for some reason, near water). Sometimes there are other people with me at this place, and at other times I’m completely alone.

Beneath these superficial changes, however, the place always stays basically the same, and I always recognize it when it pops into view, even if it’s in some new and momentarily unrecognizable guise.

This magical place is – as you might already have guessed – the place where I’ll finally be allowed to start drinking again.

Honestly

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 14:11:36 -0400

I like to think I started out in life as a reasonably honest person. As a kid I was, if memory serves, about average in this regard: not a saint exactly, but not a scoundrel either.

Then I grew up, developed a drug-and-alcohol problem, and suddenly found myself having to lie all the time.

Black and White

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 10:29:53 -0400

It’s not a black-and-white world. That’s one reason why the idea of giving up drinking – of never ever taking a single drink again, for as long as I lived – struck me as crazy when I first heard about it. After all, everybody knows that the minute you decide that you’re never going to do something again, some situation comes along that makes you do it anyhow.

Then something unexpected happened.

Don't Take it Personally

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 11:46:42 -0500

Though the winter got started late this year here in New York, it’s now been extra-cold for what feels to me like an extra-long time. For weeks now, temperatures have largely been so low that each time I step outside it’s like a fresh insult – a fresh slap in the face from the elements.

If that makes it sound like I take the weather personally, I do.

Where the Action Is

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 11:13:10 -0500

Life is full of ironies. Back in my twenties, I would have liked nothing better than to have lived in Greenwich Village. Even people who’ve never been to New York know that it’s the neighborhood with the most fun bars and the most things to do. That’s why visitors to New York from as close by as New Jersey and as far away as New Zealand gravitate here – especially on weekends. It’s where all the action is.

It’s also expensive. That’s why I couldn’t afford an apartment here when I was younger. Then, in the early 90s, I met a woman who lived here already, and eventually got married to her. Against all expectation, I ended up in the Village after all.

Can You See the Real Me?

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 10:58:53 -0500

We can’t see ourselves from outside.

It’s an obvious enough truth, but a fascinating one all the same. Especially for someone who used to drink a lot. Someone, that is, like me.

Every now and then these days I’ll find myself in a restaurant or – very occasionally – a bar with one of my friends who still drinks. Someone like I used to be. A couple of times I’ve had the chance to watch one of these real drinking friends take their first drink of the day.

It’s a real education.

Good Recovery

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 12:02:09 -0500

It was close to a year ago now when my boss, Edward Grinnan, the editor-in-chief of Guideposts Magazine, told me he had a new project in mind for me.

“I’d like you to write a blog for the Sober24 site,” he said.

Structure Goes Deeper

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 15:34:57 -0500

I lived in San Diego for a while in the late eighties and early nineties. I’d always liked the ocean, and soon after I arrived there I established a routine in which, after my day’s work was done, I’d head down to the beach for an hour or two of boogie-boarding.

Strangely Happy

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 13:21:48 -0500

Back in my using days I would, on occasion, hear reports of people who had given up on drugs and drinking and supposedly gone on to live happy lives.

I didn’t have anything against such people – if, indeed, they actually existed. But I had my doubts about this supposed happiness of theirs. How robust, how real, could it possibly be?

Getting to Willard

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 16:04:48 -0500

I'm a big fan of the 1968 horror film Night of the Living Dead. Well, actually something more than a fan. Like a lot of people who saw the film at an impressionable age (nine in my case), I didn’t really experience it as a film at all. For me it was a reality.

It still is, too. No matter how many times I see the film – and I’ve seen it quite a bunch of times by now – I never get sick of it. Though the plot is simple enough – a group of people barricade themselves in a lonely farmhouse to escape a horde of cannibalistic zombies – for me the movie has a kind of bottomless quality to it; one that prevents any of its scenes from becoming shop-worn, no matter how often I return to them.

"Do you like my hat?"?

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 16:11:48 -0500

I love a good party.

My affection for parties goes back – way back. Not, as might be imagined, to high school or thereabouts, but to a time when I was seven or eight, when I discovered a Dr. Seuss Beginner Book by P. D. Eastman called Go, Dog. Go!

Sweet Oblivion

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 14:38:51 -0500

“The soul lusts to be wet, and to die.”
– Heracleitus (Translated by Guy Davenport)

Oblivion, obliterate…

What great words! Both go back to the Latin ob-litera – literally, to cover over a letter (with ink, presumably – as we might do today when blacking out a sentence with a marker). Both words are also associated with the idea of being forgotten. To obliterate is to erase from memory.

I myself associate the words first and foremost with – not surprisingly -- drugs and drinking. To get obliterated, to me, means to get so intoxicated by whatever substance one is taking that one is no longer there. Take the right drug and boom! You’re history.

Amateur Night

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 09:58:15 -0500

I was never, even back in my earliest, most (comparatively) trouble-free days as a drinker, much of a fan of New Year’s Eve. This was largely because I distrusted the basic polarity the event was built around. On New Year’s Eve, everybody got artificially cheerful. Then, the next day, all that good cheer turned out to be illusory. The sky – at least in New York, where I’ve spent the majority of my adult New Years Days – is inevitably overcast. Nothing’s really new or different at all. As the U2 song so well puts it: “Nothing changes on New Year’s Day.”

The Wisdom of Addiction

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 12:52:00 -0500

When I first got sober, I heard a lot about the importance of living spiritually -- of seeing my life from a new perspective.

My only problem with that was that I ALREADY lived spiritually.

How Embarrassing

Wed, 27 Dec 2006 15:23:40 -0500

I’m embarrassed about a lot of things.

I’m embarrassed about all the dumb stuff I did when I was drinking. And I’m embarrassed about all the dumb stuff I’ve done since I got sober. I’m embarrassed about the fact that I’ve ended up – absurdly – writing so much about the topic of sobriety. (Can’t I think of anything more interesting to write about? Don’t I know you’re not supposed to attach your name to recovery material anyhow? Etc, etc.)

Stalag 13

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 16:16:54 -0500

I grew up in a very large house (actually a converted cow barn) on a street that is suburban today but that, back in the early ‘70s, was closer to being outright rural. My mother and I were often alone in this house, and in the evenings I’d look out at the lights of our neighbors – wavering behind a green curtain of summer leaves or bright and bare through winter branches – and wonder why it was that people lived this way: close enough to know that others were out there somewhere, yet too far away for the fact to make much difference.

I watched a lot of TV during my years in that big converted cow barn, and the shows I liked best -- from The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Mayberry RFD to MASH -- were always those that featured a community of one kind or another.

Far and away my favorite of these shows was Hogan’s Heroes. With their secret radio messages, underground tunnels, and endless late-night excursions into the German countryside to blow up bridges or secure some all-important roll of microfilm, Hogan and his men inhabited what was, to my mind, a supremely enviable world. Unlike the safe yet subtly insecure semi-suburban limbo I lived in, Hogan’s world was one where all apparent dangers and discomforts were mere camouflage. Truth be told, Stalag 13 was a place both comfortable, and comforting, in the extreme. A place where people were always coming and going, where something was always happening, and where (despite all the endless times Colonel Clink threatened Hogan with a spell in the cooler) no one was ever really alone.

Why couldn’t my own life be more like that?

My Problem with the Moment

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 10:24:41 -0500

Considering what an abstract thing it is, it’s amazing what a central role the concept of time plays in recovery. Is there another sub-culture out there that puts so much emphasis upon such a slippery – indeed, totally un-graspable -- concept?

Not that alcoholics and addicts come to recovery ill-prepared to talk about time. In fact, all alcoholics are time philosophers to some degree, because it’s really impossible to be a drunk or addict and not to have meditated at least a little on what time is and what it means. And in particular, about that supremely mysterious and vexing time-related entity called…

the moment.