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Giblet and Dumpling consider Cargo Cults and Negative Consciousness. A Play in 47 Lines.

As the curtain rises, Giblet sits at the kitchen table downstage left, looking morose and drinking a cup of coffee.  After a few moments Dumpling enters, upstage right, and crosses to the counter, where a coffee maker sits, with several mugs on a sideboard.  Dumpling grabs a mug, fills it with coffee and stands, considering Giblet for a few moments before crossing downstage and joining them at the table.

DUMPLING:  What are you doing?

GIBLET (sarcastic and exasperated): What does it look like I'm doing?  I'm sitting here drinking a cup of coffee.

DUMPLING:  Actually, it looks like you're sitting, drinking a cup of coffee and thinking angry thoughts.  And scowling.  You're a great scowler, you know.

GIBLET:  Whatever.

DUMPLING:  What are you thinking about?

GIBLET:  Some guy at the meeting last week shared something that I can't get out of my head and ... it's really messing with me.

DUMPLING:  What did your sponsor say?  Oh, that's right, you don't call your sponsor.

GIBLET:  That's what's great about you, I don't really need to work my program, since you're always so ready to step in and work it for me.

DUMPLING:  That is an infantile evasion to an astute observation -- my remarking that you don't call your sponsor is not very different from saying you don't take your insulin, or you don't take your vitamins, or whatever.

GIBLET:  Yeah, you just keep telling yourself that.

DUMPLING:  Wow, you are really a piece of work today.  So what is it that this guy shared which has your snark turned up to eleven?

GIBLET:  He was talking about having a hard time with his faith -- faith in God, faith in AA, recovery, his ability to "get" it -- and he compared the whole thing to a Cargo Cult, and the comparison is so apt it's kind of freaking me out.

DUMPLING:  How apt is it?  Remind me again what a Cargo Cult is, and most especially what it might have to do with a crisis of faith.

Giblet rises from the table while speaking, and goes to the counter, grabbing the coffee pot and returning, pouring more coffee into each mug.

GIBLET:  Well, he told the story of the Cargo Cults -- it's part history and part fable, so don't get worked up about how accurate the history bits are -- it's the larger point that's working me.  Okay, so during World War II the Allies' planes couldn't carry enough fuel to make it all the way across the Pacific Theater, so the military selected small islands along the way to build posts with fuel and supplies and such.  Some of these islands were actually inhabited, and so basically one day, as far as the natives were concerned, this big silver bird comes down from the sky, and out of its belly comes men, with materials and things, and the men build a long flat road and hang lights, which then makes for other, even bigger silver birds to land, and from those issued all sorts of things -- not just men and supplies, but things that the natives had never seen before.  Matches, chocolate, flashlights, cameras ...

DUMPLING:  Okay, sorry to interrupt, but my God, could this fable be any more condescending to indigenous peoples?  It's the typical Western arrogance manifest destiny thing which ...

GIBLET:  You are everything I hate about highly educated people, did you know that?

DUMPLING:  And yet you keep sleeping with me.

GIBLET:  Congratulations, you are part of my cycle of dysfunctional relationships.  Do you want to hear what's bothering me, or do you want to lecture me about western culture and crap like that?

DUMPLING:  Sorry, sorry -- go on.

GIBLET:  Okay, so the natives, they have no understanding of the war, or the world outside of their little island.  They're just grooving on all the stuff that is coming along with the men who come out of the big silver birds.

DUMPLING:  Chocolate and nylons.

GIBLET:  Will you stop?

DUMPLING:  Sorry, I really do want to help.  Please, go on.

GIBLET:  So the war ends, but that's all an abstract to the natives -- yet with the war over the military eventually closes the base and flies away.  No more silver birds with stuff coming out of them.  So the natives sit down, and with their best thinking try to figure out how to get the big silver birds to come back to the island so they can get the stuff again.  So they think about it, and they think about it, and they hit on a perfect solution:  Build another long road for the big silver birds to land on.  After all, that's what happened before, right?  So they tear down some trees and flatten a long stretch of land and line it with torches and congratulate themselves on their good thinking and their hard work and they sit down and wait.  But of course no planes come, because although they mimicked what it took for planes to land on the island before, they were completely ignorant of what was really going on. From their limited view they took the right action to get the result, but in the big picture they couldn't have been more off the mark.

DUMPLING:  Okay, wow, and this guy said all this in his share?  Where does the crisis of faith come in, and what about all that has gotten your knickers in a twist?

GIBLET:  What if we in recovery are like the natives on the island -- what if anyone seeking a conscious contact with a Higher Power in general is like that?  We have our little rituals and our writing and we pray and we this and that, but what if we're just performing a dumb show, and are as empty and misguided as those natives and will get an equally empty and dismal result.  What if it's all bullshit stage business completely divorced from a real ... well, a real anything?

DUMPLING:  You certainly like to torture yourself.  All this is a just a ridiculously complicated way to simply ask "What if there is no God?" or "What if AA is bs?"  Not to mention, there is so much needless drama, (conveniently ignoring the results we get from AA, by the way) with that line of questioning anyway.  And that interpretation of the story.  Personally, I can see a whole different point to your Cargo Cult fable.

GIBLET:  Not everyone gets results from AA you know.

DUMPLING:  I have.  And you have, when you're not throwing yourself around the kitchen, wringing your hands and wondering when it will stop working or if it's all pointless.  Not everyone treating their cancer gets results from chemotherapy, either.  Does that mean that no one should use chemotherapy?  It's a simple Program, sure, but addiction is not a simple problem -- so to reduce it to such a simplistic level is doing yourself, and your program ... and AA ... a disservice.  Because it's such a reduction that it becomes a distortion.

GIBLET:  Okay, maybe ... but the Cargo Cult story is still a good analogy for a group of people doing an empty ritual to no avail.  They built a landing strip, but they didn't get what they wanted.

DUMPLING:  Ah, but what did they get?

GIBLET:  What are you talking about, they didn't get anything, that's the point.

DUMPLING:  No, they didn't get airplanes with chocolate and trinkets, but that's not to say they didn't get anything -- they just didn't get the specific result they thought they wanted.

GIBLET:  Right -- they didn't get what they set out to get.

DUMPLING:  But that's not the same as them not getting anything.

GIBLET:  If you are about to say they didn't get what they wanted but maybe they got what they needed I am going to throw up right here and now.

DUMPLING:  Well go stand over the sink, because that IS what I'm saying.  Your little fable ends too soon.  It needs a Second Act, a Chapter Two, a ... a ... an epilogue!

GIBLET:  And what would that be?

DUMPLING:  Well, did they get airplanes full of crap?  No.  But in working towards that, maybe they learned other things, got other things.

GIBLET:  I'm going to be sorry I asked, but ... what other things?

DUMPLING (shrugs):  A greater sense of community.  A new understanding of engineering principles.  An insight that their leadership was screwed up -- the specific what-they-got isn't the point -- the point is that just because they didn't get what they set out to find doesn't mean they didn't get great stuff -- stuff that was ultimately of much greater value to them than chocolate bars and trinkets.  Thus, it doesn't even matter if there's something at the other end, it's the doing that's worthwhile anyway.

GIBLET:  I thought you said there was nothing on earth worth more than good chocolate.

DUMPLING:  Shut up -- I'm making a great point.

GIBLET:  Yeah, if you live in the Pollyanna Universe.

Dumpling slams their coffee mug down on the table and Giblet jumps.

DUMPLING:  No.  No, no no no NO.  I hate that and I reject that.  Just because something is a positive or uplifting interpretation doesn't make it any less valid or possible or important or substantive than your piss-all-over-everything negativity.

GIBLET:  I'm not negative.  I'm realistic.

DUMPLING (suddenly furious):  My God!  Have you met you?  You are nothing BUT negative!  You love to be negative!  It's bullshit, is what it is, because you don't have the balls to feel hope and embrace optimism and look for the sunlight!  It's easier and safer to just keep dragging around, acting cool and saying everything is crap -- then you never have to risk disappointment or rise to a challenge or actually do anything!  It's much easier and more fun to ponce around the house talking about how life sucks, AA sucks, God's a fantasy -- and every time I say anything positive you just make fun of it!  You know what, I don't need that!  Being negative is easy, any child can stomp on a sandcastle.  You know what's hard?  Building the sandcastle!  Keeping faith, even if you think it's silly or stupid or... or ... Pollyanna.  What's so stupid about looking for the good, anyway?  What's so unrealistic about that?  It's such a cheap trick, equating the negative with realism.  But you know what's really hard?  Constantly listening to your faux sophisticated cynicism...

Dumpling stops abruptly, suddenly hearing what they've said, realizing they've gone too far, and covers their face with their hands.  Giblet opens their mouth to respond, and then closes it.  Slowly Giblet rises from the table and stands, looking down at Dumpling.  Dumpling lowers their hands from their face, looks up at Giblet and seems about to say something.  With a roar Giblet whirls and throws their mug against the wall, where it shatters with a crash.

Blackout.

Curtain.

The Shovel

"Hi, welcome to Wilson's Hardware.  How can I help you today?"

"I want to return this shovel."

"Oh.  Okay, no problem, we're happy to take a return on any item in the first thirty days with a receipt, or offer store credit for up to ninety days, with or without a receipt.  Can I ask, what is the reason for the return?"

"Doesn't work."

"I'm sorry?"

"Shovel doesn't work."

"The shovel is broken in some way?  I don't see any ... "

"Doesn't work."

"The shovel... doesn't work."

"That's right.  Doesn't work.  I came in here couple weeks ago, told one of you people the situation with something I need to do, and you all told me I needed to dig a foundation, and sold me a shovel.  Said this was the tool I needed to get started."

"Oh.  Okay.  And ... I'm sorry, but how is it that the shovel is broken?  I'm happy to take it back if you like, please, don't misunderstand, I'm just ... it appears to be fine.  Completely unused in fact."

"Doesn't work."

"But how ... "

"Look, you all sold me a shovel, said this was what I needed to get started.  I took it home and nothing happened.  Got no foundation started at all."

"Did you ... forgive me but ... did you use the shovel?"

"This shovel doesn't work.  You sold me on it and I have no foundation."

"Yes, but ... did you use it?"

"Took it home and nothing happened.  Tool for the job my ass!"

"But sir, with all due respect, you have to use the tool for it to work."

"Look, I listened to you people and you convinced me that this was the tool for the job.  I bought it and brought it home.  Job's not done -- hell, job's not even begun.  Clearly, the damn thing doesn't work.  So I'm returning it."

"Sir I ... that is ... "

"You know, I'm going to tell everyone that the stuff here doesn't work.  Now I'd like a refund please, and I'll be on my way."

"If ... if that's what you really want, of course, sir.  I'm certainly not here to sell you anything you don't want.  I'll be happy to refund you right away."

"Damn straight."

Feelings ... nothing more than feeeeelings ...

December 1990

I had to park far away from the main entrance to the mall.  The place was packed.

(I used to work with a retail consultant who said that the way to judge the success of a shopping center was to see if the spaces in the back rows of the parking lot had stains from cars' leaky oil pans.  "If they do" he said, kind of tilting his head down and giving us what I was sure he thought was a sage look, "then that means the mall is often full, and people spend a lot of time inside -- especially during the holidays."  I didn't have the heart to tell him that it might also be that the mall employees, who were paid crap wages and thus often drove cars which would likely leak oil, had to park in the back row far-away spots per instructions from management -- this I knew since I had more than once been a mall employee making crap wages.  He seemed so proud of this observation -- and it could certainly be true, too -- that I just nodded and said "aaah" with the other people trapped in his seminar.  It was an early foray into "restraint of tongue" for me, and I was quite proud at the time.)

This was one of those spectacularly gigantic malls, a vast sprawl of stores, with wings and levels and sub-basements, several food courts and a merry-go-round.  It always made me think that the only thing left to add to it would have been a heliport, in case someone who expired in the holiday-shopper crush was discovered to have a donor card in their wallet, and they could then medivac the kidney or eyeball or whatever out with super efficiency.

I was buying some small gifts to take to the AA roller skating party-fundraiser-holiday-mixer-thing later that afternoon.

It took longer to walk back to my car than to buy the gifts.

When I got there I automatically slid my key in the door lock -- or rather, I tried to.

"Huh, that's funny, it doesn't fit."  I tried several times to put the key in.  Sometimes I am a slow study.  My car had been broken into.

Opening the door I discovered that someone had none too gently stolen my car stereo.  The glove compartment had been riffled through, but had nothing in it but car papers and napkins and fossilized salt packets from random McDonald's drive-thrus.  (Never gloves.  Why do we still call it a glove compartment?  Never in my life have I put gloves in it -- or seen anyone else do so.)  Scattered across the passenger seat were all the cassettes of my music, apparently deemed unworthy to steal.

So I had been both violated and judged.

"Oh, man... bummer."  I said, starting the car and driving off to go roller skating.

A curious thing about my early sobriety.  Sometimes my feelings were over-sized and raw and expressed themselves almost without my permission, coming violently up and out of me like one of those aliens that explode from your chest in the Sigourney Weaver movie franchise. 

And sometimes, they were there and gone so fast you weren't even sure they'd been there, let alone what they were, surfacing and submerging like an ocean creature who moved so rapidly back to the depths that only the wake of their passing showed they'd been there at all.

Sometimes my emotional suppressor circuits were ruthlessly efficient.

I arrived in Alcoholics Anonymous an artificial construct with a frozen core, self obsessively concerned about what you thought I was doing and how I looked to the people around me.  To compensate for this fear I would manically try to be what I thought I was supposed to be as opposed to having any idea at all who I was or how I felt.

In my very early days sober this feeling was intensified a thousandfold.

It took me a long, long time to thaw completely, and then once I had, to begin to find my emotional equilibrium.

Still to this day sometimes -- though rarely now -- I feel the suppressor circuits crackle to life, and I think back to my non-emotion in the parking lot that day my stereo got ripped off.

Alcoholics are great worriers about our feelings.  We worry they're too much or too little or the wrong (inappropriate) ones.  This is of course in part because we tend to be self obsessed, and in part because when drinking we don't seem to be very good at identifying them -- and no way could we express them in any productive way.  Scenes?  Tantrums?  Sulks?  Manic diatribes?  Self righteous speeches?  You betcha.  Simple, calm descriptive statements?  No freakin' way possible.

AA is not therapy, but the tools it offers -- sponsorship, inventory work, and meditation, to be specific -- help an alcoholic no longer become victimized by their emotions, as they swing wildly back and forth from giddy to grim.

If you feel like sobriety has become an emotional rollercoaster of sorts, I can offer you these two things to remember which have always helped me in this area:

1.  Feelings aren't facts.  You may feel like you're going to die, but you're not, it's just a feeling.  You may feel like you're crap, or nothing, or you wasted your life or you are this or that ... but they are just feelings, and most likely have no bearing on reality whatsoever.

2.  If it took you a long time to swim out to sea it will take you a while to make it back to shore.  Be patient and gentle with yourself.  Always remember that simplest of facts:  We are not bad people trying to get good, we are sick people working to get well.  You may feel like you're a bad person -- but you're not.  It's just your alcoholism working to find an angle.  Talk about it with a sponsor, share about it in a meeting, write about it and give it to God -- whatever that may look like to you.  If you do all that I guarantee that the next thing you'll feel is ... better.

I'm not driving.

I remember once, a very long time ago, driving my niece to the play park.  She was young enough to be in a car seat, and although usually happy about riding in the car -- and always happy to be at the park -- she had gotten herself all tangled and upset in the way only a small child can.  Her sweatshirt was half backwards, one shoe had been kicked off, and somehow she'd managed to get part of the seatbelt behind her head and couldn't free herself from it.  She was a mess, and the more she fussed the more of a mess she was and the more of a mess she was the more she fussed.

It struck me then what a metaphor her situation was for my relationship with God.

We were doing something she ordinarily liked to do, and we were going someplace she was going to enjoy.  But no matter how much she fussed or what she did she had no control over where we were going or the route we would take to get there ... all she had any control over was her own state, her own comfort on the ride... and that she had managed to turn upside down and backwards.

I pulled over and got her straightened out, and we went on to a nice afternoon sliding down slides and swinging on swings and sandboxing in sandboxes.

But the image and the metaphor has always stayed with me.

I have no control over the route or the destination -- though based on past experience, when we get where we're going I'm probably going to discover that I like it.  All I have control over is my state as I ride along -- and I can make myself miserable and uncomfortable or I can sit back and observe in wonder the passing scenery.

But regardless of whichever I choose, I'm along for the ride, I'm not driving.

a car out of alignment

"... the main problem of the alcoholic centers in his mind, rather than his body."

"Alcoholics Anonymous" (AA's Big Book) Chapter 2, 'There is a Solution,' pg. 23

Treating the disease of alcoholism is like driving a car that has its wheels out of alignment.

It's driveable, but what's needed is an equal, constant and opposite compensation on the part of the driver against the pull of the car's misaligned wheels.

For me, Alcoholics Anonymous -- the whole deal: Steps, service, meetings, fellowship, sponsorship -- are the equal, constant and opposite compensation against the pull which alcoholism exerts on my thinking.

If I let up on doing the deal it takes very little time for my thinking to begin to drift.  And the longer I slack off from constantly working to compensate for that sick, selfish pull, the farther I drift into life's oncoming traffic -- and the greater the likelihood for real tragedy.

The mystery of addiction is that, no matter how often this point is brought home, no matter how clearly one may see it or how strongly one agrees, it's still possible -- even easy -- to forget.

Metaphorically speaking, the evolution of my relationship with a Higher Power.

Metaphorically, the evolution of my relationship with God can be expressed like this:

I cried out "God! I'm starving!"

And a banquet appeared.

Later I cried out "God, I'm starving!"

And the food to prepare a banquet appeared.

Still later I cried out "God, I'm starving!"
And God said, "So?  You know where the supermarket is."

Alcoholics Anonymous suggests that, to bypass all the religious rhetoric and spiritual dogma many of us have been exposed to in our lives (and which generally we used as an excuse to justify resentment and willful behavior rather than looking for the deeper truths beneath) we create our own idea of what God is like  -- an idea of God that "works" for us so that we can then develop a faith that works for us.

But regardless of how deeply your faith begins or becomes, or whatever conception of a Higher Power is eventually meaningful to you, it seems that certain spiritual laws are always in place, (even though, try as we might, we never fully grasp them in their entirety).

And when it comes to alcoholics in recovery, chief among them seems to be:

God will do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, not what we will not do for ourselves.

Or, as a smart friend of mine puts it, perhaps a bit more succinctly than I: "God don't do dishes."

sometimes

Sometimes being an alcoholic is like being a car
with a crazy person at the wheel.

shwish-thunk, shwish-thunk, shwish-thunk...

DUMPLING:  What did your sponsor want?

GIBLET:  He was talking to me about the 10th Step.

DUMPLING: "Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it."

GIBLET:  There's no one here to give you an "A" you know.  You were like, a total kiss-ass in school, weren't you.

DUMPLING:  What?  I was just providing exposition, that's all.  Jeeze.  What did your sponsor have to say to you about your 10th?

GIBLET:  Oh, he was all "You need to keep the lens clear so the light can come through... regular writing will do that... daily maintenance equals daily reprieve... " blah blah blah.  He's okay and all, but his analogies ... jeeze!  And, oh my God, don't get him started about pizza. He has ruined pizza for me with all the pizza analogies.

DUMPLING:  Oookay.  Nice attitude.

GIBLET:  No, no, I get it, it's just ... I didn't get sober to do homework every damn night.

DUMPLING:  OOooh, he wants you to do a written 10th Step every evening, that whole "when we retire at night" thing.

GIBLET:  Has anyone ever told you that your propensity to quote AA literature is more annoying than it is informative?

DUMPLING:  Yes.  Every time I do so with a dry drunk.

GIBLET:  D'oh!  Good one!

DUMPLING:  Thank you.

GIBLET:  I just don't see why writing it down every night is any better or more ... anything ... than just kind of making amends as I go along in my day and all.  I'm a "spot-checker" not an every-night-writer.

DUMPLING:  Well I like his analogy about keeping the lens clear.  Think of it like the windshield wipers on your car.

GIBLET:  Oh my god, is this about my brakes again?  You will NOT let that go.

DUMPLING:  No, no, no.  But like, picture yourself driving in the rain.  I know!  Let's do a visualization! 

GIBLET:  <sigh> Okay.  But in the visualization my brakes work fine.

DUMPLING:  Fine. Fine.  Your brakes are fine, and you're driving in the rain.

GIBLET:  Am I in a hurry?

DUMPLING:  Shut up.  Go with it.  Close your eyes.

GIBLET:  While I'm driving?

DUMPLING:  I'm leaving.

GIBLET:  No no no ... I'm closing my eyes.  See?  Eyes closed.

DUMPLING:  Okay.  So, you're driving and it starts raining, and you turn on your windshield wipers.

GIBLET:  shwish-thunk.  shwish-thunk.  shwish-thunk.  That's my windshield wiper sound effect.

DUMPLING:  Yeah. I got that.  And you know what?  Every shwish-thump of the wipers...

GIBLET:  Thunk.  It's shwish-thunk, not shwish-thump.

DUMPLING:  What?

GIBLET:  You said shwish-thump and it's shwish-thunk.

DUMPLING:  I am going to shwish-thump you in a minute.

GIBLET:  Thunk.

DUMPLING:   Look, what happens if your wiper only goes shwish-THUNK once?

GIBLET:  I can't see, because the rain fills the windshield again.

DUMPLING:  That's right.  So think of writing your 10th Step every evening like your windshield wipers -- once, or rarely, doesn't keep the windshield, or, like your sponsor says, the lens, clear.  It has to be regularly wiped ... or you can't see.

GIBLET:  Huh.

DUMPLING:  You see, your alcoholism is like the rain...

GIBLET:  Yes, yes, yes, I got it, I got it!  God!  You don't have to spell it out for me.

DUMPLING:  Oh.  Okay, then.  Good.

GIBLET:  You're feeling pretty pleased with yourself right now, aren't you.

DUMPLING:  A bit, yes.

GIBLET: <mutters>  insufferable.

DUMPLING:  I heard that!  You can put that, and that crack about me being a kiss-ass in school,  which you didn't exactly clean up in the moment, Mr. "I'm a Spot Checker!" on your inventory tonight!

GIBLET:  shwish-thunk.  shwish-thunk.  shwish-thunk.  What's that?  I'm back in my visualization, I can't hear you over the pouring rain!  Shwish-thunk!  Shwish-thunk!

DUMPLING:  Oh my god!  I hate you!  I am leaving!

GIBLET:  What's that?   Sorry, no can hear ... shwish-thunk! Shwish-thunk!

The Pitcher Plant

I was fifteen years, three hundred and sixty-four days sober.  It was probably about 9:00pm, and I was standing on the sidewalk in front of a dive bar.

Now, in my experience of bars (which, if I do say so myself, is vast indeed) this was the "just right" kind of dive bar.  Cheap, strong drinks.  Couple of pool tables (probably missing a ball or two, but it didn't matter, they were just there to lean against, mostly).  Rough crowd, but not in the sense of how they came at you.  No, this rough was the result of how life had come at them -- just right for not feeling judged and secretly considering myself a wee bit superior; in essence, perfect drinking companions.  People went to this bar for the sole purpose of getting drunk.  Even if they told themselves they were there to get laid, I'm pretty sure that was merely a plausible excuse -- a smoke screen to preserve some final shred of denial.  In a bar like this, cruising was just what you did to pass the time between drinks and smokes -- for all the scenes in films and on television of drunks staring with maudlin intensity into their drink, let me tell you, that gets boring pretty fast -- so a little sloppy footsie was merely cheap entertainment.  The agenda was drink and the objective was drunk.

I was pretty sure, standing there on the sidewalk, that it was a bad idea for me to go into that bar, but why exactly it was a bad idea seemed a little ... distant ... right then.

If I had to guess, the way I felt right at that moment is probably the last thing a little bug feels before it slides down into a pitcher plant, and discovers at the bottom that the sides are too slippery to get back up.  Apt, huh.

As I type these words I have been sober for 7834 days.  So many of them have been full of joy and gratitude and fellowship that I am often dazzled and humbled by the embarrassment of blessings I feel I've experienced... and the stories of those days I am always happy to share.

But tonight, after talking on the phone with a good, old friend, far away, who is heartbroken over the relapse of a longtime sponsee who had had many years sober, ("I thought he was okay! He was okay! We had just talked and everything was normal and now..."  And now he's in the hospital.  Sometimes it feels like I type "in the hospital" a lot on this blog.  Don't know why that should surprise me, now that I think of it.  After all, at heart this is a blog about a terminal illness) I can't help but think back to that night, the evening of my sixteenth sober anniversary.

God, that sounds so dramatic.  I'm sorry, I wish there was a way to describe these experiences accurately without sliding into what I fear sometimes are overwrought prose, but... I think milestones, like anniversaries of any sort, bring to the fore things which are unavoidably dramatic in their way; comparisons, reflections... and, beyond the "milestone effect," I suppose a life and death struggle is always going to be dramatic.

Which, for those of you reading this who may be less familiar with the threat of relapse, the challenge of long term sobriety, and how alcoholism is like being afflicted with spiritual termites, forever working under the surface to eat away at your foundation, is what I was engaged in, standing on that sidewalk on the eve of my sober anniversary:  A life and death struggle.

But the most terrifying part of the story (for me anyway) is that although I was indeed fighting for my life, at the time I wasn't entirely convinced of that fact.  Which is, at the risk of piling melodrama upon drama, how it gets you I believe.

That night, what I was actually thinking about, standing on the sidewalk, considering the door of the dive, was my name badge.

At the time I was just a little over 40, and I had the kind of a job in which you wear a name badge.  Now, it is a saying I've heard around the rooms that there is absolutely nothing wrong with good honest work for good honest pay.  This is certainly a beautiful and true spiritual axiom, shot through as it is with a kind of puritan work ethos which always makes me want to both salute the flag and iron a shirt, but it in my observation it is said more often by people with big jobs and larger salaries than it is by those with smaller jobs and humbler salaries.

And earlier that week I had sat in a meeting and heard a lot of men who I happened to know drove very expensive cars and lived in rather grand homes, pat themselves on the back and heartily congratulate each other for their rigorous honesty, as evidenced by how they always returned the extra if a cashier gave them the wrong change.  Both as I sat in that meeting and listened, and then later, standing in front of the dive (and even now, for that matter) I didn't want to take anything away from those men, many of whom I held in great high regard.  But in the meeting I couldn't help but feel a slow sour roll in my belly, as I considered that it is one thing to return the change when it is a solely spiritual exercise, good and right though that is, and quite another to return the change when it is the equivalent of the rest of what you have in your pocket.  In theory, of course, on a spiritual plane these acts have the same beautiful value.  Sadly, however, I do not live on the spiritual plane, I am stuck here on the physical one, with the rest of the name badge wearers.

So there I was, later that same week, and I had been walking along, quite possibly muttering to myself, when I came upon the dive bar.  I was feeling jealous, and ashamed of feeling jealous.  I was feeling resentful, and I was judging myself for feeling resentful.  I sternly accused myself of being self obsessed, and then grieved my all consuming ego, and the never ending tug of war it engages me in.  In a handful of hours I was going to be 16 years clean and sober. Whoopee.  And where had it gotten me?  I was over 40, 16 years sober, and wore a name badge at work for God's sake!

STOP.  Right there, for those of you that missed it?  That's not me talking anymore.  That question is the moment in the story when the killer enters the room.  "And where had it gotten me?"  That's alcoholism, talking to me with my own voice, pitch perfect in its impersonation and unerring in its aim for the jugular.

Snap your fingers, because just like that, the mental fog rolled in, and against that backdrop, with wicked craft, alcoholism rearranged the pictures of my life into a mosaic both pathetic and cruel.  The conclusion I reached (and I remember this part clearly enough to give me the shivers now) was that AA had become kind of a joke, and that it didn't work for me anymore.  Sly, huh?  Not, "AA doesn't work" -- no, it was "AA doesn't work for you anymore."  Lost in that fog, my life of gratitude and service became an exercise in futility.  Suddenly, the only logical conclusion -- against a resume which included too many name-badge jobs in the past several years, and what that night seemed like a wheel-spinning life of trying to give back "what had so freely been given to me" -- was that I had been duped, or was stupid, or was too stupid to see I'd been duped.  And now it was too late and I was all used up -- and while maybe AA was great in general, it "didn't work for me anymore."

So there I stood, more sad than self-pitying I believe, though to read it now you may not agree, teetering on the edge of the pitcher plant.

It is often said that there will come a time in the sober path of each recovering alcoholic where all that stands between you and a drink is your relationship with your Higher Power.

Unfortunately, standing on that sidewalk, I did not believe in my Higher Power. 

Turns out I didn't have to believe for Something to throw me a rope.  Because although my alcoholism had performed its dark magic, and suddenly every good thing in my life had no value, the very next thought I had was about some of the men I sponsored at the time (and some of whom I sponsor still).  I didn't believe AA worked for me anymore -- but I did believe it worked for them.  I believed wholeheartedly what I told them about sobriety, what we read together in the book "Alcoholics Anonymous" (AA's Big Book), the transformative process of the 12 Steps -- I believed all of that was Right for them, and would help them, and would ultimately save their lives in ways they couldn't imagine.

Thus, while I couldn't see any point to staying sober for me, I could see it for them.  And I knew that if I drank, which, if I went into that bar that night I most certainly would, then it would put the lie to every true thing about recovery I had told them.  And although I was in the depths of despair, consumed with sadness and jealousy and resentment and self pity, I just couldn't do that to them.  Even though (on that night) I didn't think I was worth saving anymore, I believed my sponsees deserved their chance at saving themselves.

So I didn't go in.

In that moment when we each stand on the edge of the pitcher plant, I think there's always a rope.  Today I do not believe that God picks and chooses who gets thrown a lifeline and who does not.  The problem, perhaps, is that we cannot see it when we most need to -- so what is it that clears our vision in that terrible alcoholic darkness?  For me it was my connection to the men I sponsored.  God works through other people, and it was from the threads of all my sponsee relationships, which grew from being of service, as AA taught me, that a lifeline was fashioned and my life was saved that night.

Too dramatic a turn of phrase?  If you think that, all I can say is, buddy, you've never seen me drink, and you've never seen what happens when an alcoholic with long term sobriety picks up again.  And God willing, one day at a time, if I stay connected to the people in AA, you never will.

I went home that night, and called my friend, the one who had called me tonight, heartbroken about his sponsee.

And by the time I got home, the fog had started to lift, and just talking to him dispelled the last of it.  I didn't even really get into what had happened earlier that evening.  I just basked in the camaraderie of an old sober friend, who spoke the same language and fought the same fight and had his own scars to prove it.

Things don't look too good right now for his sponsee.  But what I know is that from working with him, my friend will have his own rope, his own lifeline, when he needs it, there on the edge of the pitcher plant.

Stay close, and do not spurn these relationships which AA offers, as odd and clumsy as they first appear.  In my experience God works through these connections with other people -- so you better give Him something to work with.

illuminating what you might secretly believe

To illuminate what you might secretly believe about your Higher Power, work backwards from how you feel (and what you fear) about what God's will is for you.

If you view "God's will" with trepidation, or suspicion, or alarm, if you're afraid that God's will might be hard, or boring, or painful, or unrewarding, then I believe the trick is not to work on letting go of the fear -- the trick is to change your belief about what God is; to re-examine how you understand God.

There can be a pretty vast difference between what I understand (that is, what I think I know), what I hope and what I believe.  And for me, before I can actually come to believe something (about God) I have to pull my deep down doubts up into the light and give them their day in court.

For years I had beliefs about God and the way the universe worked that I didn't even know I had.  I talked a great game about a loving Higher Power, but I was just parroting what others said -- I was actually disconnected from what I truly believed.  It was almost as if what I wanted to believe distracted me from what I actually believed.

The freedom that AA's philosophy offers, the "choose your own conception of a Higher Power" allowed me to stay, but it also baffled me for a while.  And in the vacuum of no particular dogma, my old ideas, the old fears and almost superstitious belief system I had about how the universe works, began to seep into the foundation of the new faith I was trying to build.

I was so busy working on the new super structure of a "God as I understood God" that  I didn't even notice the plumbing problem I was having under the foundation.

I've written here before about the stunning insight I had once, while praying the 3rd Step Prayer (which, for the new kids, is a beautiful request to God to "build with me and do with me as You will), that half way through the prayer I looked like I was bracing for a blow.

In a kind of wild, third person perspective I saw myself praying in that moment, and my body language betrayed a buried belief I didn't even know I had:  That God's will was going to hurt.

That was when I learned:  To illuminate what you secretly believe about your Higher Power, work backwards from how you feel (and what you fear) about what God's will is for you.

For me it turns out that I cannot change what I believe, in any substantive way, until I discover and confront what it is I actually believe -- not just focus harder on what I want to believe.  Without doing that, trying to change the nature of my faith is like being very busy decorating the top floors of my house with happy colors while the foundation slowly erodes.