I’m grateful for a Friday morning. I’m grateful for where I’ve been. I’m grateful for an excellent cheeseburger. I’m grateful for how I got here. I’m grateful for the sun and the smile on my face. I’m grateful to be sober today.

Mystery ?? Button

song of the week:

I’m not sure how the whole “song of the week” thing began. There is now a whole process around the selecting of the songs; invariably, that carefully constructed, deliberative approach gives way to hearing a song I haven’t heard for a long time and then not being able to stop listening to said song. This is what happened with this song.

Maybe it’s not the happiest of songs. I can remember listening to it a long time ago, like the early 2000s. I was a very unhappy, hard-drinking alcoholic. There were lots and lots of problems all around me. My marriage was already in a shambles, I was going through some fairly wrenching events and upheaval in my professional life. In those days, I mostly “slept” on the sofa in the family room, the three dogs surrounding me, the TV flickering some military history documentary all night long. The cauldron of fear, anger, shame, regret, guilt, hopelessness and loneliness was always overflowing, my stomach roiled with every boil-over.

I was still almost a decade away from finally seeking help for the thing that dominated my life. My memories of that time are tinged with dislocation and desperation. I felt empty and lost, I was so tired of living a double-life. But I had no idea how to stop. This was an extension of the realization I had in a black naugahyde booth listening to the Electric Light Orchestra:

I don’t know how this ever ends. How will this ever stop?

I remember hearing this song and so viscerally identifying with it. I listened to it over and over and over, thinking how perfectly it encapsulated my sad, desperate, entrapped life.

I remember painting the basement (I like painting) and listening to this song on repeat for three days. I was angry. I was lost. There was no sign of land and I had no idea which direction to paddle.

I drank. A lot.

I’d play this song in the car and sing along, feeling the satisfying burn of resentments and anger washing over me, creating the perfect conditions for an afternoon, or an evening, or a mid-morning rendezvous with that chanteuse, Kim Crawford. My wife knew I drank, she just had no idea how much or how often, or what happened when I did.

I was the classic Jekyll and Hyde of the Big Book, turning routine trips to the Home Depot into hurried visits to the Legal Sea Foods in the mall next door. I knew the bartenders there could be counted on to get me the three or four glasses I needed to continue the day—and I only had about 30 minutes. I still needed to get to the Home Depot and buy whatever it was for the project I wasn’t actually going to do. I lived the life of a spy, always constructing a cover story to generate time “in the black,” time where I could drink.

I got the “in the black” thing from a book I read about operations at the CIA station in Moscow in the 1980s and 1990s. Everyone leaving the US Embassy complex was, of course, heavily surveilled. It was necessary to elude the tail, using disguises and ruses and trickery, all employed to generate what they called, “time in the black.” Time when they weren’t subject to surveillance, weren’t being watched and had the time to do what was necessary.

They did spy stuff; I drank Sauvignon Blanc at the mall.

Then I would drive home listening to angry music in the car. I realize that one of the very excellent things that drinking did for me was to turn the fear into anger. Fear is a terrible feeling. The emptiness, the heart pounding, the stomach doing somersaults, the blood running cold, the sense of impending tragedy and doom—it’s all just overwhelming sometimes. At least it was for me.

I have always struggled with emotional regulation. I was subject to runaway feelings, scary racing thoughts, from a pretty early age. Scary things that I was not able to dispatch on my own. Fear was such an overwhelming feeling for me, I was afraid to be afraid, if that makes any sense. My imagination produced incipient catastrophes from relatively minor concerns, but I was 12, I didn’t know they weren’t real.

I will tell you, those first few drops of alcohol, “pink jesus punch” at Deak R.’s house out by the backyard trampoline, fell on fertile soil. I describe myself as a “white light drinker,” meaning that I immediately recognized this was the answer. Drinking was the thing that could let me navigate the world around me.

It did this by making me care substantially less about things that I used to care more about—relationships with other people being in that category, along with a lot of other stuff. It did this by making my fear feel less piquant and more distant. For whatever reason, I ran on a lot of fear from a fairly early age and part of the problem was how familiar I was with the feeling of fear—it subconsciously directed me to seek out situations that would generate even more fear, making me feel weirdly “at home.”

At some point, the dangerous alchemy occurs, when drinking finally solves whatever thing it was supposed to fix and the alcoholic brain recognizes its true champion. For me, this happened when drinking began to turn my fear into anger. I didn’t know what to do about fear, I didn’t know how to feel less fearful, I didn’t know how to pop the weirdly distorted cognitive bubble that grew in my head. Until I drank enough and the fear metastasized into anger.

Anger gave me way more options. I could direct it at people in order to make them feel a taste of the pain they were causing me. I could employ it passive-aggressively to emphasize to loved ones what it might feel like if I was really gone. I could use it to justify doing whatever the f*** I wanted to do at that moment. Anger was useful, anger could be expressed —when drinking.

Much later, as I was on the way to ruining yet another relationship, I would spend most of my evenings with my bartender friend, Antoine, talking about basketball and quietly nursing resentments as I made my way through yet another big green bottle.

One super useful skill I acquired as a Boy Scout was learning how to start a fire, even in wet and windy conditions, or in the snow. The critical thing is creating a small burning core and then gently growing it, so that it can consume the bigger pieces of kindling that had been pre-gathered. I would cup the nascent flame, gently blowing on it to coax a little more temperature and encouraging its spread. Hopefully, there were dry pine needles involved, because when you got the flames big enough to ignite that shit—well, that was an explosion and now you’re off to the races.

I guess you could say I drank like a Boy Scout.

Once I’d turned enough fear to anger, I’d engage in some passive-aggressive texting with the girlfriend, hinting at all kinds of resentments from my barstool. I’d usually hustle home around 10:30—she liked to call around 11ish to say goodnight. Since she thought I was sober, I didn’t want to do that call from a bar. If I’d hit that magic mark, just enough to get me angry, but not enough to make me sleepy and loving, well, we could have an actual and very satisfying fight on the telephone and by text.1

There were way too many mornings that would unfold with me stretching gloriously in my bed, feeling relaxed and maybe even happy for a moment or two, then reaching for my phone and realizing,

Shit, I think I we broke up again last night.

This happened more than once. This happened a lot. The duration of the break-ups ranged from two hours to two months. We always got back together, well, except for that last time. Why? We were both too scared to let go. That was also a very familiar and comfortable spot for me—the feelings of being trapped, the feelings of claustrophobia, that came with knowing that I was in the wrong place. Letting go meant going back into the dark unknown. I was too scared to do that, but it was exactly what I needed to do.

Drinking turned my fear into anger, a feeling I had a better chance of managing and expressing. The problem is that anger and fear send very different messages. The anger told me that I had been wronged, under-appreciated again, taken advantage of, and expressing that to the wrongdoers was very satisfying and also very futile. The problem was the inexhaustible well of fear down there, which meant there was going to be a need for a corresponding amount of flinty white wine.

My fear was telling me something very different. My fear was telling me that we were a long way from home, and that it was getting dark and it wasn’t really obvious where the path was. My fear told me that my life, as I was living it, was not sustainable. My fear was telling me I was really lost, that I had lost sight of myself.

Anger locked me into conflict, it rooted me to a life that I found unsettling and unpleasant. But for a long time, feeling angry was way better, and much more tolerable, than feeling that fear. So I hung in there, woke up every morning feeling more disaffected, more fearful, counting the minutes until I could wash those feelings away and turn them into self-pitying razors of death I could send whizzing at the people who made the mistake of loving me.

Living in fear sucks. Sitting with feelings of fear sucks. Fear sucks. But only by sitting and listening to my fear, over and over, was I finally able to discern the true message. My fear was really telling me that it was necessary to change and even pointing to the thing that needed to be done.

It was when I stopped running from my fears that I found myself.

One of the things that grabbed me about “Hanging Around” was the way it started,

and then the dark part is there in the very first stanza:

and then,

That’s not really the story of any particular relationship, it’s the story of my life while drinking. I spent much of my life, maybe what could have been my best years, on a barstool; witty banter and white wine flowing, just waiting it out and giving way, way too much away. Sometimes it feels like I let a whole life drift away on a river of golden wine.

I love the mornings. I love, and have always loved, getting up in the dark, taking in the delicious quiet, watching the sun slowly come up and seeing the possibility of every day emerge anew. I never feel alone or lonely in the early morning hours. Me and my coffee, maybe on the pirate balcony, watching the sun emerge over the power plant and the RFK bridge is pretty hard to beat.2

I love this song, but it makes me sad to listen to it. I think about what was and what could have been. But that doesn’t matter, it’s what is here and now that does. I can only make my mark on my today, and that’s exactly what I intend to do. There’s no more hanging around and feeling sorry for myself. Fear was my guide to the promised land, listening to it was hard but necessary. But it was listening to my fear that has unlocked so much about my life, generate so much happiness and content.

As I may have written in the not-so-distant past, this is more my vibe in the mornings these days:

Happy Friday.