Simple Gratitude.
Tonight in my men’s meeting, there was a homeless man sitting next to me. The knuckles on his left hand were bleeding. He’s staying in shelters and hopeful that he gets a subsidized apartment soon. For reasons I don’t understand, it has to happen this week or he’ll have to wait another year. He was probably 55, but might’ve been younger. So many alcoholics have hard lives and look older than they are.
He talked about his ex-wife. How she used to gamble away the child support he gave her, so he started bring clothes and groceries. And how she hated him for that. So, he used to have some kind of life. He wants a job, but he was dirty and unshaven. He didn’t say how long it had been since he’d drunk. He gave the impression of being in and out a lot.
I am grateful when I meet people like that. My heart goes out to him. I know that I am not many drinks from being much like him. I am useless to myself or others the moment I drink. Before. I’m useless as soon as I abandon the work that I need to do to maintain the condition of my sobriety, what we call our “spiritual condition”, though, it needn’t have anything supernatural to it.
I see him, and I feel so much gratitude that I found the program when I did. That somehow, I was willing to do what it takes. That I connected with the rooms and the concepts and the whole network of sober men and women in AA. That through working the program, I was able to emerge from my own alcoholic misery. And build this life that I have. I didn’t do it with will. I didn’t do it with strength. I did it with surrender and willingness.
I know that we alcoholics can recover. I have. This man can. There’s hope for all of us. I know because I’m living it.
Grant Questions.
So today, in my continuing avoidance-of-real-work plan, I’m worrying about grants. The two I have out there under review are out there. Nothing good can come from worrying about them now. And I don’t have specific plans for new ones. I did run into a collaborator at a cool lecture I went to yesterday. We put in an NIH R21 last October. We got scored, which is good! It was in the 50th percentile. Not bad for a first submission by a new investigator. I was a little surprised she didn’t want to turn and burn on it (I’m Co-I, she’s PI), and get it back in right away. But she wanted to wait a year and brush up her CV with some more papers and experience. Which is fine. We’ll get the revision in in October I think.
Now I’m also beginning, even though I swore not to think about grants for the next 4 months, to let my brain swim around in the next phase of my grant-submission life. My pilot grant is expiring at the end of October, and with it, all of my funding. I’ll have maybe 6 more months of time, then my boss thinks he might be able to get me another year of bridge funding. But no one is betting on it. That’s why I’m giving some job talks next week. But I also have to think about what grants I’m going to have submitted.
I need to submit an R01 equivalent to follow up on my pilot. Like, need to. It would be stupid and shameful not to. Which means I need some serious ideas. I’m really proud of my pilot study. It was all mine, I designed it, wrote the grant essentially alone, submitted it, and got funded on the first submission. It was exciting and special. I felt like a grown up. Like a real-world researcher.
My question is, and on twitter, several people have already told me “NO!”, why not submit for less money and a shorter time for the R01-equivalent? Offer three years and ask for $450K instead of 4 years and $1.1M? I could cover my salary with that, and actually do the work too, most likely. And I’d have enough left over for data abstracters and a part-time project coordinator. Shouldn’t we be trying to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars? Wouldn’t a review panel be intrigued by an inexpensive project? I’d love to hear thoughts. I know I have readers who sit on those review boards.
Finally, and here on twitter the answer seems to have been “no one cares”, I wrote in my pilot grant that I would submit to and attend the Winter Simulation Conference 2012. But it’s in Berlin (it was always in Florida). So I can’t go. My funding only pays for domestic travel. Is this a big deal? A little deal? I did what I think I’m supposed to do. I emailed my Project Officer. She seems to like me. She’d tell me if I’m doomed.
Putting Sobriety First.
I heard a phrase over the weekend, told to me by a friend who is still brand new to sobriety (Around 55 days. Great Job! You know who you are!) which I immediately loved and am still amazed that I hadn’t heard before. I connected to it instantly, because it had that simple ring of truth that seems to strike some resonant fiber deep inside. It was simply: “Anything I put in front of my sobriety, I’ll lose.”
That is absolutely true for me. I have to place my sobriety first. Above my job, above my family, above my relationships. Because if I don’t, as time goes on, I will lose those things if I don’t. The only way for me to be fit to engage with other people, with friends, with family, with co-workers, is to be a sober person. The moment I drink, my world contracts to a tiny place. Generally a bathtub. I’ll sit in a bathtub with a lousy novel and a bottle of vodka, and that’s where you can find me. If I drink, that’s where I’ll die, most likely.
But it’s more than that. Because I don’t have to drink to be restless, irritable, and discontent. I don’t have to drink to ruin my relationships and be unpleasant and objectionable to other people. All I have to do is let my own nature of selfishness and self-centeredness take over. I only have to start caring about myself more than I care about my companions and co-workers. My sobriety is far, far more to me than just my abstinence from alcohol.
Twelve step programs are called “programs” because of a phrase in the book Alcoholics Anonymous. It describes the steps themselves, when they are explicitly laid out, as “suggested as a program of recovery.” That’s why we call AA “The Program” when we’re using shorthand, or in company that might not understand or simply need to know that we’re in recovery. Many people are surprised to learn that of the twelve steps, only the first step, and the last step, mention alcohol. And the last step only mentions it in the context of talking to other alcoholics.
The rest of the program is about how to repair our lives, given the deplorable state we find them in when we first seek recovery. How to recover from our utterly hopeless states, and resume a life that resembles one of usefulness and sociality. And about how to maintain that life once we’ve achieved it. Sobriety is, for me, and for the great majority of the people I’ve met in recovery, not really about alcohol. Because our problem wasn’t really about alcohol.
My real problem is that somehow, because of genetics or environment or both, I developed in such a way that I had an enormous amount of psychic pain, rage, shame and fear that I didn’t know how to deal with. I couldn’t confront. I couldn’t resolve. In combination with that, there was something about me, probably genetic, that made me respond differently to alcohol from most other people. Alcohol lit up my reward centers like the Vegas strip. More than anything else I’ve experienced. And it made me forget about all that rage and pain.
More than anything else, alcohol was a pure and easy escape from the things that I couldn’t bear to feel. The problem is, it stopped working. Because I grew tolerant. And so much more was needed to drive the wolves back into the shadows. And as I drank more and more, my life became less and less livable. And so I needed to drink more to forget it.
The program allowed me to stop the cycle. By giving up on my attempts to control my feelings with alcohol, I was able to address them in a healthy way. And I continue to be able to move forward in my life with a system for the management of my life. Because, I’m not much better at managing my life now than I was when I was a suicide drunk. But now, I don’t have to be the manager. I have a program. I have a sponsor. I have learned to rely on people who have gone before me, who’ve solved the problems I’m confronting now.
In short, I’ve become social. I think these are things that normal people learn to do in normal ways all the time in life. Look at the community of scientists on twitter. We help each other naturally, providing advice and guidance. Opinions are presented as opinion, generally. We want the best for each other. We cheer success and console failure. It’s a special place. And I think it’s probably mirrored in dozens of venues, all around the world.
But I never knew how to participate in such groups. Because my pain and rage and fear made me anti-social. And I tried to treat it the normal ways. For a long while I was religious. For a long while I went to psychotherapy. These things served me to some extent. But they couldn’t address my core issue: I was in agony. And I was treating the agony with alcohol.
I put so many things ahead of my sobriety, because I didn’t have any sobriety. And I lost them all, or was in the process of losing them all. When I engaged with the program, I began to learn to retain the things that mattered. To abandon the things that didn’t. To engage with social groups. To participate in life.
I can still lose all of that. Immediately and irrevocably. And I don’t have to drink to do it. All I have to do is to start putting them ahead of my sobriety. Because if I drift from the program, from admitting it when I’m wrong, from making amends, from introspection and accountability, I will, inevitably, resume my anti-social nature. And eventually, I’d drink.
I maintain my sobriety so that I can be useful in the world. I write about my alcoholism so that my life can be about more than alcohol. I put sobriety first so that I can do all the things that I cannot do otherwise. I learned how to be social late in life. Things others learned when they were children baffled me for a long time. I’m starting to get it now. I just need to remain planted in the middle row of the garden. In the sunlight. In the rain.
Marshmallows and Lies.
I asked for topics on twitter this morning, because I’m feeling grayed out and dulled. This last grant actually took an enormous amount out of me. More than I thought. My single mental health day was not enough time. But I have too many things to do, and too much stuff upcoming to take more time than that right now. And I have time off upcoming. I’m looking forward to my high school reunion, surprisingly enough. I’m going to be taking a summer short course in epidemiology that will be like a small vacation. I’m looking forward to that as well. Those two things occur back to back, so I’ll be away from work for a week and a half. But it’s still more than a month away.
When I was a kid, I didn’t hate camping quite as much as I do now. Nowadays, you’d have to press a gun to my head to get me to camp. Hard. And you’d have to prove it was loaded first. But as a child, after my parent’s divorce, my mom took us camping from time to time. She was determined to provide us with all the life experiences. It’s actually pretty impressive that she did, considering her background as a Scarsdale/Barnard girl.
I inherited a rather fluid concept of a relationship to the truth. My mother is a champion of exaggeration. As time goes by, it seems she comes to believe her own embellishments. My father is a lovely man, but he too has a complex and difficult entanglement with objective reality. I think he persists in a lot of important denial. Denial that serves his need not to confront some horrifyingly difficult truths about his own life, his own past.
I don’t write these things to perform some armchair psychoanalysis of my parents. I’m more likely to be wrong than right. But it’s important to write how I understand them, because it helps to explain the way I internalized my own concepts of truth and self and independence and autonomy. How I learned to negotiate my relationship to the truths in my own life. The difficulties I’ve experienced being an alcoholic. Being a man.
On one camping trip with my sisters and my mother and her boyfriend, when I was seven or eight years old, I was burnt. We were doing what kids do on camping trips. Roasting marshmallows. Sometimes I had the patience to carefully and slowly roast a marshmallow to a uniform golden brown without blistering, a thing of beauty. Mostly, I let them burn. I loved the taste of fire-charred marshmallow. On this occasion I was trying to slow-roast a masterpiece. My older sister was doing the same. She was better at it than I was. And it wasn’t just age; she’s always had better hand-eye coordination than I do. She’s an artist.
But something went wrong with her roasting-plan that time, and her ‘mallow caught fire. Then something went very wrong, and it exploded. Some bubble of air perhaps. Or a deposit of whatever toxic goo that marshmallows are made of. A flaming blob off sugar sizzled into my wrist. I screamed and tried to brush it off. You can’t brush off flaming sugar. It just smears and burns and spreads. The sugar melted into my skin and I screamed. Like an eight year old boy being burnt, I screamed.
It didn’t last long. There wasn’t much to it. All told there were probably only three grams of it. But it raised a terrible blister. It was rinsed and bandaged and my mother did as mothers do and comforted me. I think I was told, but I don’t know for certain, that it was a “third degree burn”. I’m not even really sure what degrees of burns mean, or if they’re a real thing. But I latched on to that idea. And for the next two and a half decades, I would occasionally tell the story of the exploding marshmallow and the third degree burn.
But it was never looked at by a physician. I don’t have a scar (though I did have a small one, for a very long time). I have no idea how bad a burn it was. I only know that it hurt a lot at the time. And that I somehow got in my head that it was a third degree burn. So that was my story. And I believed it. Mostly. In the back of my head was always the inveigled uncertainty that this was a true story. But I didn’t let it stop me from the telling.
For a long time, that’s how my alcoholism was to me. I thought of myself as a drinker. I joked about myself as a heavy drinker. As a “professional”. I tried out being a gourmand, a connoisseur. I was a drunk. An alcoholic. But I wrote a different internal narrative for myself. I exaggerated the control over my drinking in my mind. I believed the lies I told myself about my consumption. I tried to surround myself with people who drank more than I did. It became difficult.
The first time I got drunk I was five years old. I had stolen a bottle of what must have been creme de menthe from my parents’ cabinet. I hid it in my room. I drank it. I knew I had to hide what I’d done, because I ate a bunch of toothpaste to disguise the smell of it. I threw up in my father’s church.
I never developed a more nuanced relationship with alcohol. No matter what lies I learned to tell myself. And I never lost that tiny schism. That little voice saying: you know this isn’t true. When I began to drink as an adult, from the time I was about 22, I always had that wrinkle of dismay in the far corner of my mind. I knew. I knew from nearly the beginning. But I always found a way to shrug off the terrible consequence of the truth, in order to keep getting what I needed.
But truth has a way of revealing itself. And when it comes to addiction, the truth can manifest in many unpleasant ways. So often, the truth of addiction is a corpse. The addict’s. A bystander’s. For the lucky ones, like me, it was a crushing revelation that my substance no longer shielded me from the things I didn’t want to feel. The things I didn’t want to know. It was the light in the darkroom that I was not, would never be, the man I had imagined myself to be in my head. The lie that I told myself about who I was. I didn’t have the strength to believe my own inventions anymore.
In sobriety, I’ve had to forge a new relationship to the truth. I’ve had to pivot. I always thought of myself as an honest person, because you could leave me alone in a room full of money and not fear I’d help myself to any. But the lies I told were the most insidious of all. I told myself that I was a good man despite my drinking, and I fought with bone and breath to believe it.
We say that AA’s program is a program of rigorous honesty. And we work very hard at that. I haven’t been honest every day since I’ve been sober. I’ve even told a few lies that were blatantly self-serving. I’m not perfect. I never will be. Perfection isn’t my goal. I only hope to progress. Where I’ve been dishonest, I’ve apologized and made amends. Mostly. More will come.
Today, I try to see the world as it is. I try to accept my faults as they are. I try to improve what I can. I try not to measure myself against what is expected of me, but against what I am capable of. I often find myself wanting. So I try to do a little better the next day. And I try to keep my relationship to the truth on solid ground. I’ve found that means I have to say, “I don’t know” a lot. And that’s ok. I’m not afraid of not knowing things anymore. I used to be so afraid of unknown things that I’d make things up to replace the gaps in my knowledge.
One day, as a boy, I was burnt by a marshmallow. I ended up telling a quarter-century’s worth of lies. I’m so glad to be done now.
Bizarre Rejection.
My most recent effort at publishing some science was rejected again. Another desk reject*. That’s three now, for this paper. Which is understandable given the first two journals I submitted to. Aim high, gradually hone in on the right venue. I thought I had found a good place for it, one that would really be a nice fit. The editor had it for a month, so I had assumed it wasn’t going to be desk rejected.
But I was wrong. The paper was given a desk reject because they couldn’t find reviewers. Choice quotes from the editor: “Alas, we were unable to identify sufficient numbers of qualified reviewers within our sphere to ensure an acceptable depth of review” and “I’m sorry for the delayed response, but that is a result of the time spent in seeking reviewers”.
This was the first time I’d ever heard of such a thing. It’s sort of an editor’s job (among other things, of course) to find reviewers. It’s not like this work is so far on the fringe that there aren’t people doing the work. This paper should be reviewed by a systems engineer or computer scientist, and a diabetologist. Such people are not in short supply. No scientist I talked to had ever heard of a paper being rejected because an editor who wanted the paper reviewed couldn’t find reviewers.
In my conversations about this over on twitter, several people have suggested I protest the decision. Journals have such mechanisms in place. But I’ve never even heard of a protest being made, much less a successful one. It’s like arguing with an umpire. You might do it for show, or to influence their next decision. But these decisions, once made, do not change. The editor has the right to reject for any reason.
Another question was if I had recommended reviewers. I had not. Many journals request you submit recommended reviewers along with the manuscript. But many journals also forgo this step, and this journal was one of them. I’m told by Namnezia that I should always submit recommended reviewers even if the journal doesn’t ask. So, from now on, I’ll put it in the cover letters. Apparently, this is something other people already knew.
I’ve resubmitted the paper – outside of medicine, actually – to a very high quality journal with an a propos special edition upcoming. Another British journal. My last paper was in a BMJ affiliate. Maybe I’ll move there.
So, hey out there, scientists, or other writers/artists/submitters of things, what’s the weirdest rejection you’ve ever gotten?
__________
*Desk rejects are when the editor rejects the paper as not suitable for consideration based on the journal’s priorities, prior to peer review. It may be a comment on the quality of the paper, but more likely it’s simply a statement that the fit isn’t right.
Helping an Active Alcoholic.
I’ve been pondering about what to write on this topic for a while. I’ve written about it before, though not for a very long time. It’s difficult to write about this, because I like my blog to be hopeful. I like to talk about my gratitude and my progress, and my service. I like to write about science and engineering, and I even like writing about grants and publication, despite the fact that they make me want to tear my hair out.
Helping an active alcoholic is not a happy topic. Because most of the time, it goes badly for everyone. Most of the time, alcoholism is a fatal disease. And before it kills the sufferer, it destroys their family. Sunders youth and vigor. Lays ruin to finances and ambition. It leaves us broken, bitter, vicious, defensive. And it does all of that too to those we love. There is much wisdom in Alanon’s description of alcoholism as a “family disease”. The alcoholic isn’t the only one who suffers. The alcoholic isn’t the only one who needs recovery.
Now: I do not diagnose anyone as alcoholic. I also, however, do not take the hard-line position that some in AA do (and please remember, I cannot speak for AA, nor can any other one person) that only an alcoholic can diagnose themselves. There are diagnostic criteria. But I am not a mental health professional. And I think that for recovery’s sake, self-diagnosis is the one that matters. But here is the description that I use:
To be an alcoholic, it does not matter how much one drinks (though it will likely be more than other people know), nor does it matter how often (and it may not even be missed when absent). What matters is, when a person drinks, can they reliably know, prior to the first drink, how much they are going to have? And can they choose to stop, and succeed at stopping, and not be unhappy about stopping, prior to inebriation, most of the time when they drink?
I was a daily drinker. Not all alcoholics are. But there were days that I didn’t drink. They were few and far between (maybe 3 days a year, towards the end). And there were days that I had only one or two drinks. But I was never happy. I did not have the capacity to have one drink, stop, and be happy. That was beyond me. And I still don’t have that capacity. And I never will. As I’m fond of saying: if I could drink normally, I’d get drunk every day. Because normal drinking doesn’t make any sense to me. I have no need for it. I don’t want normal.
So now I’ve written another long preface about recovery. What I’m trying to write about here is about the active, unacknowledged alcoholic, and how to help them into recovery. But the truth is, you can’t. There is no way to make an alcoholic want sobriety. Alcoholism is a disease of an isolated soul. It is a disease of the writhing pit of hellish silence that every alcoholic I know carries inside themselves, of hate and shame and fear and endless, crushing loneliness. Even in a marriage. Even in a family.
And the only thing that treats that condition is pain.
We drink because it allows us to exclude from our consciousness all these grueling miseries we cannot bear. But the terrible thing is that eventually, it stops working. We can’t drink enough to keep the wolves at bay. And when we have had enough, when we reach the point that we cannot imagine life without drinking, and we cannot imagine living the drunken life we’re living anymore, some of us, sometimes, make a decision to change.
Hitting bottom is a cliché. And it’s one badly represented in the media, and in fiction. The famous bottoms involve sleeping in gutters and going off on incredible benders. And a few people’s bottoming out looks like that. But there is no rule except this: we reach an intolerable state of spiritual, or psychic, desolation which cannot be borne any longer. A lot of alcoholics choose this moment to die. Because the choice between sobriety and death is not an easy one.
The alcoholic is on their own journey. Few of us return from it. I don’t know the prevalence of alcoholism. I know that the prevalence of sustained remission, of recovery, is rare. The only thing I know of that can help an alcoholic towards that road is to be forced to choose: life and love and hope and sobriety, or misery and shame and isolation and alcohol. But make no mistake. Most of us will choose the latter.
And it’s nothing to do with strength. Nothing to do with character. Far, far better men than me have died miserable alcoholic deaths. We can only recover through surrender. As long as we battle, alcohol will win. And because it is a family disease, because the alcoholic isn’t the only one who suffers, so many of our loved ones try to help us. Reason with us. Threaten us. Enable us. Surrender applies to them as well.
Alcoholism cannot be defeated. It can only be surrendered to. For the drinker’s loved ones, as well as the drinker. And it’s cold comfort, I know. Because a loved one in the grip of active alcoholism will probably die of it. And if you want to help them, save yourself. While an alcoholic drinks, while they do not acknowledge their problem, while they continue to seek the solution to their psychic agony in the bottle, there is only one help for them: help them to the bottom.
And I promise, if they do find recovery, they will eventually thank you.
Chronic Relapse.
Relapse is a word filled with sustaining terror. Terror, because the life I live when I drink is a terrible life. Small. Isolated. I drank alone. Or I went to places where I don’t know anyone and drink among strangers, so that there is no risk of being pegged for what I am, recognized as who I am. And then drove home drunk. Tiny life. Sad and isolated and miserable. Sustaining, because my life today is wonderful, and fear keeps me honed in on the things I need to do to keep my life the way it is. Open. Social. Engaged with the world. With my career.
The speaker at my Sunday morning mixed meeting was a chronic relapser. I’ve known many people who are. Who keep trying to go back and find a way to drink normally. Or who simply can’t bring themselves to contemplate a life without anaesthesia. That was frightening for me. I liked to be able to not feel the things that hurt and lingered and pushed their noses into my consciousness like wolf-hounds in the dark of night.
She spoke about giving up drinking over and over again. And about how she would be sober for months, and then have one drink, and try to convince herself that that didn’t count. Since she didn’t get drunk, she shouldn’t have to change her sobriety date. She claimed to be sober, currently, for about five months. I believe her, because I believe people until they give me a personal reason not to. And because it does me no good to be doubtful. I am happier when I am trusting.
But I am deadly afraid of relapse. And I have not relapsed yet. I never tried to quit drinking until I quit drinking. Many times I tried to abstain for a short while, or to control my drinking. But I never tried to quit. Because I didn’t want to. Because I knew I couldn’t. Because I needed it. Going without alcohol even for a day put worms in my skin and started my mind on a whirlwind of craving and obsession. Relapse mean willfully inviting all that back into my life.
Relapse means abandoning my usefulness to my fellows, both in recovery and in my family and in my professional life. It means abandoning my ability to contribute to science and engineering. It means looking carefully at this life I’ve built over the past four years and deliberately choosing to let it all fall apart. Because the thing about relapse is: we’re sober when we take the first drink. We have to choose, with all of our faculties present, to lay down our sobriety, our serenity, and actively choose misery and darkness again.
Why on earth would anyone do this? How could anyone just throw away all the progress and dignity and courage and hope that we get by working a program of sobriety? I don’t know. I know that I haven’t been tempted to. But I see it happen, all around me, over and over again. People become complacent. They forget how miserable it was. They stop going to meetings. I can see how that happens. When I feel good about where I am, I often feel like I don’t need to go to a meeting. But I’m wary about that. I know that the first thing I need to do when I start feeling that way is to get to a meeting.
It’s so insidious. We in AA talk about alcoholism as “our disease”, as if it is this separate thing, a malicious homunculus, ever-present and plotting against us. It’s an easy construct. It’s helpful sometimes to say: “My disease wants me to drink.” But the truth is, it’s just another part of me. Part of my intrinsic character. I am an alcoholic. My disease is a part of me. A defect in my brain, my genetics? Perhaps. There are people who know better than I do about that.
We relapse, in the end, simply because we’re alcoholics. We drink. It’s what we do. I don’t know any better way to put it than that. If I do not scrupulously maintain my condition as a sober person, I will very likely drink again. And so I am diligent. Because I am not immune. I am in good standing, no doubt. I work hard at my sobriety. I haven’t wanted a drink in a very long time. I haven’t craved one in longer. I do still miss alcohol from time to time. But I have found such a great way to live without it. A way that I could not have found if I were a normal person.
And so it’s funny. Sometimes I pity the non-alcoholic. Because they don’t have access to this wonderful program of living that I do. But then I stop. Settle back. I remember that this isn’t an evangelical program. People live their own lives and it’s not my business. Just as most normal people have some difficulty understanding what I’ve been through, where I am, how I’ve gotten to where I am, I similarly do not understand their motivations, impulses, drives and ambitions. People make choices. Why we do is often a mystery.
The choices that matter to me are my own. I choose to maintain my condition. I choose not to drink today. I try not to worry about tomorrow. Because I do today the things I need to do to take care of tomorrow. And not more. Because I can’t live tomorrow. I only have now. And now is pretty good.
Mental Health Day.
I stayed home today. I submitted my grant yesterday. It’s an R01 equivalent. 4 Years, $1.05M. I’m co-PI. It’s a resubmission. First time around our priority score was 29.2. Funding line is around 20, and variable. Our revision was essentially a wholesale rewrite. I’m hopeful. If it hits, I’m in good shape for my career. Not so many people get grants like this, even in the cohort of people who really want to be major scientists, and have the talent and background to do that. I got a really nice note from my co-PI telling me I’ve learned a lot about grantwriting and submissions. It was quite a compliment.
So after working on it for a month straight, and getting everything done, I crashed. I needed to sleep in. Then I went running. It’s gorgeous out there today. 63 degrees, blue sky, light breeze. I set up about a 10:30 mile pace and just kept going. My plan was to do 2.6 miles. I did 6.22 (10 kilometers) without slowing to walk once. In just under 66 minutes. That’s the furthest by far, far, that I’ve ever gone. In my life.
As I just tweeted, four and a half years ago I was a suicide drunk. I smoked a pack of cigarettes a day. I was significantly overweight. Today, I am well employed, forwardly mobile, and in very good health. It’s incredible to me, and I’ve felt like weeping with gratitude all day long.
I’m tired. But I’m well. It’s a wonderful world out there. And there are no boundaries.
Conscience vs. Gossip.
So, there’s a minor, and I mean really minor, issue going on in my men’s meeting. That meeting, for the longest time (by which I mean, something like 20 years), had a rotating chairperson, and speakers were members of the group. For the past year and a half or so, we’ve had a single chair, N., who has steadily asserted a little more in the way of change as time has gone on, being more rigid about the time (fine by me), and bringing in outside speakers once in a while (also fine by me). Those changes have rubbed some guys wrong after all this time. N., when he can’t chair, has always asked Tan Man to chair for him.
Tan Man is someone I’ve complained about before, on my old blog if not on this one. I don’t like him. He went on about wanting to sleep with my ex-wife during my divorce process, in a crude and licentious way. I wanted to put his face through the asphalt in the parking lot. But I didn’t. I never even confronted him about it. I just ignored him. And obviously, I’m still carrying a bit of a resentment about it. I need to let it go. After all, I’ve been divorced nearly two years now.
But here’s the deal. Tan Man is apparently drinking again, and calling guys up from the meeting drunk at night. He hasn’t called me. I have no evidence. And the truth is, it doesn’t matter. I’m told he denies it when called out. But he’s done it before, and admitted it. He comes to the meetings, and pretends to be sober when he isn’t. I confess, I don’t get that. I really don’t. But some people are sicker than others, as they say. And if he’s showing up to the meetings, it’s because somewhere in him there is a desire to stop drinking. So he’s welcome.
But people who are being fundamentally dishonest about their sobriety should not be put in positions of leadership in AA. I feel like I shouldn’t need to put up much of a defense for that statement. It’s one of the basic things about AA. The “leadership” (such as it is – chairpersons do not govern), is a cohort of sober people, working a program. It is especially troublesome to me that a person being (possibly, probably) dishonest about his sobriety would be the group treasurer. We’ve had a problem before with a man being treasurer who was sober, but with a serious gambling problem. Guess where the money went.
People who are active in addictions are not trustworthy. Period. They should not be given any positions of authority. So, what’s my responsibility here? Basically, none. I participated in the group conscience of the meeting and we elected a new chair. A man I really like. Humble, calm. A professional engineer. Sober ten years. I spoke to my sponsor about my feelings about Tan Man. Since Tan Man hasn’t called me drunk, and I haven’t smelled it on him, I have nothing to say about it. It’s not my business until it becomes my business.
What is my business is the health of the meeting. And so I’ve talked to the men who’ve been there longer than I have and we’ve agreed to return the treasurer position to a rotating commitment as well. And that’s as it should be. No group should be dependant upon any one person for the health of the group. It’s a collective environment. But I need to make sure that my motivations are correct.
Just because I don’t like Tan Man doesn’t mean I should be predisposed to consider him to be dishonest about his sobriety. Or judge him an inappropriate treasurer. Just because there’s gossip about him doesn’t mean I ought to participate or pay attention. But I have trouble separating gossip from true questions of conscience sometimes. The important thing is that I don’t start thinking of this group as belonging to me. I’m no more likely to be right about the direction than anyone else is. Which is why we take group consciences. And this one went the right way.
We just talked about the direction we wanted the meeting to go, not about any one person. And I kept my mouth shut about Tan Man, because it’s not my business yet. And probably never will be. Especially as long as I’m nursing a resentment about something that happened two years ago.
So I don’t know about the line between conscience and gossip. But I know that I tend to think I’m important in ways that I’m not, and that that leads me to unhappiness a lot of the time. When I relax, surrender my need to have things my way, participate in the conscience of the group, and only take stands on issues where I truly have something at stake, I am almost always at much greater peace with my decisions. Matters that don’t influence how I live my life and work my program are not so critical, in the end.
“Falling Ash and Brilliant White”
I was almost six on May 18th, 1980. Almost six the way five year olds think of it; my birthday was still more than two months away. We were on the road. Me, my father, my sisters. Coming back from Grandma Eva’s house. She died a few years ago and I didn’t go to the funeral. She lived in Kennewick or Richland or Pasco. I still can’t tell them apart.
Mom had stayed home and my father took me and my sisters to see Grandma Eva and Aunt Christy. And Uncle Chet, even though he wasn’t Christy’s husband, he was Eva’s. He should have been Grandpa Chet but he was Uncle Chet. I guess because my real grandpa died when my father was a child, and he never got around to calling Chet “dad”. Uncle Chet died when I was 10 or 11, and I didn’t go to his funeral either.
On May 18th we were riding back from the tri-cities, and on our way home to the suburb of Seattle, Woodinville, where I grew up, sort of. We lived in what my sisters and I call to this day, “The Woodinville House”, even though my little sister has no real memory of living there, and mine are mostly vague and terrifying. But my older sister remembers it better than I do. Better than I want to. She and I went back there a few years ago, before it was razed for duplicate, standard subdivisions. We looked over the ruin of blackberries that had once been the pasture that our goats and horses grazed in, the skeleton of the old barn, the A frame where I learned to toenail two boards together.
My father had a darkroom in the basement, not that he was ever really a photographer. Another of his abandoned artistic attempts. My father was an artist with no medium. I guess that means an artist with no discipline. When my sister and I ventured into the basement (A place full of good memories as well as bad. Mom used to do everyone’s laundry together and we’d have great laundry sort-o-thons.) we looked at the door to the dark room. I remember the red light bulb. The peeling black paint on the ever-moist walls and the spider-webs that clung to my face every time I forced myself inside to confront some terrible something. I’ve never known what.
My sister said: “Let’s not go in there.” And I said: “No, let’s not.” And we went back outside and I found myself sobbing and she held me and she asked what was wrong and I said: “This is the last place where we were a family.”
On May 18th we were crossing some southern pass on a Washington state highway where there were sand dunes. The sand dunes were on the east side of the mountains. That makes sense because the west side gets all the rain. We always made my father stop and let us play in the sand. I loved the dunes. But I don’t think I’ve been back there since that day.
We had left Grandma’s very early in the morning and it was about 10 am, I think, when my father saw the clouds. Thick, black, rainclouds, he said. I know it was the morning, but it still feels like evening because of the night that followed. So I remember looking westward and watching the sun set through a nightmare of storm clouds. But it was morning.
My father ushered us into the old van. It had a motor mount on the inside with depressions on top for drinks and change. I was sitting in front; it was my turn. There were policemen when we got to the top of the pass. They had flashlights. One was talking on a radio. My father wasn’t talking at all anymore. He put the radio on. He told us to be quiet and there were creases in his forehead. It was getting dark, and I was waiting for it to rain.
It did not rain on the 18th of May, Anno Domini nineteen hundred and eighty in the southwest part of Washington State. What did happen is that Mount Saint Helens let forth a twenty-seven thousand ton explosion of ash, fire and light that blackened the sky, scorched the earth, and seared the memory of a boy, not yet six, with the image, burned forever, of his father’s face, etched in brilliant white by the dashboard lights of an elderly van on Interstate Five.
To this day, my sisters and I recall that day with the phrase: “midnight at noon.” At the hour of noon, I could see nothing. Nothing but the outline of my father’s forehead, nose, and jaw, and the ash falling through our headlamps. My younger sister looked up at my father from the back seat. Too young to understand the gravity, or even the meaning, of her question, she asked: “Daddy, are we going to die?”
“No dear. Don’t worry. But please be quiet. Daddy has to concentrate.”
Infactorium 