I’m grateful for a cloudy Friday morning to write. I’m grateful for wrapping things up (literally). I’m grateful for little adventures and seeing things differently. I’m grateful for pretty excellent coffee and iPhone memories. I’m grateful to be sober today.

Mystery ?? Button

song of the week:

I think all of us dodged a bullet this morning. I was listening to music earlier in the week and trying to get my shit in a can.1 I was listening to the Doobie Brothers’ masterful “Living on the Fault Line” album. I wore that album out in my youth and it is the height of the Emo-Doobies featuring Michael McDonald, with whom I have a complicated relationship. I was listening to this song, which I’ve always loved:

I was deciphering the lyrics, as I like to do. And this is a very complicated story about a very complicated relationship. It starts out talking about how miraculously “she” came into his life, how badly he needed a drink of water, how he would gladly drown in her, how she was just what he needed, how through all the disappointment, love still remains, you’re a just lonely man living in an empty land. I know you’re made that way.

But then you get to the crux: “Say it please, Say you will, come back and be in my life, girl, if you just put in your heart in….” It’s another song emphasizing the importance of ex-girlfriends to the creative process.

I was thinking through Michael McDonald’s side of the relationship and it doesn’t make a ton of sense and then my blood ran cold and I had one of those realizations that feel like an icy knife in the gut:

What if Michael McDonald and I have the same attachment style in relationships?

That was what I was going to write, had I selected “You’re Made That Way,” as the song of the week. Fortunately, I spared us all of that by selecting, “I’m Your Boogieman,” instead.2 This is my favorite K.C. and the Sunshine Band song and you can see from the frenetic on-stage performance what the “C” in K.C. probably stood for. There’s another video (from the Midnight Special) where K.C. is dancing so hard he’s a good two measures late getting back to the piano for his solo.

I didn’t have a drivers license when K.C. and the Sunshine Band hit the airwaves. I was still spending a fair amount of time being driven in my mom’s Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser station wagon (with the swanky moon roof and wood panel decal on the side). The first big hit, “Get Down Tonight,” provoked a lot of uncomfortable Oldsmobile moments:” The line, “Do a little dance, make a little love, get down tonight,” had my mom wondering if I liked the song (and I clearly did) because it was about sex and me wondering if my mom was listening to the lyrics.

It’s the Friday before Xmas, so why spend it Michael McDonald-style, gazing at the sad, complicated navel of our lives, when you could be wearing super cool Elvis-inspired outfits and dancing like someone who will one day claim a folding chair at a CA meeting?3 This song is on the “Basketball” playlist and I think pretty accurately soundtracks my playing style. This is a Friday song, so go get all Friday with it.

But then that leaves us with this uncomfortable void, the awkward silence that comes when maybe you’ve run out of things to say.4 But never fear, that’s a very unlikely result here. I’m winding down a pretty improbable year, and, to be honest, when I start to do the year-end look-back, that is kind of obligatory, I’m amazed at what’s happened.

You might ask, “What happened?” Well, what didn’t? I still live in the same lovely place and have the same views and settings that propel my day. I’m spoiled to live where I live, and I know it—it’s my cocoon, a safe place, a real home—and I’m very attached to it because I don’t think I ever had one that I could call my own before. My life feels so different now—sure there are anxieties and fears and sadness and all of the normal stuff that attends life. In the olden days, it was necessary for me to drink to handle all of the normal stuff that attends life. I’ve always been very independent, very self-reliant—that was largely out of necessity and it always propelled the fear that I couldn’t manage this on my own. By “this,” I mean living a productive, happy, sustainable life. Well, it turns out, I can.

The greatest gift of recovery has been developing the sense that I can do just that—live a happy, productive and meaningful life without needing the help of my friend, Kim Crawford.

I started co-chairing an AA meeting on Monday mornings near Madison Square Park here in NYC. It’s actually at an IOP—that’s “Intensive Outpatient Program,” for those who aren’t familiar. It’s a therapeutic setting, wherein you go to group sessions, AA meetings, individual counseling sessions on an intensive basis for 60 days—often accompanied by prescriptions for Antabuse, to help recreate the sober environment one finds in sleep-away rehab.

This is a beginner’s meeting and it’s really fascinating, a lot of the people are just sorting out some of the very early questions, like “Am I really an alcoholic?” “How long do I have to call myself and alcoholic?” I see it as a huge opportunity to introduce people to the Big Book before the “Recover like me or die” crowd gets their hooks into them. I tell them that the Big Book isn’t about getting religion or worshipping anything—it’s simply about recognizing where you really stand in the Universe and answering some very personal questions about how you got here, where you’d like to go and the things that would need to change, to make that possible.

We read Bill’s Story together last week and I got to give my usual preface to establish what an insanely brilliant con-man/salesman Bill W was. That being able to lay claim to the elements of Bill’s story as my own, was what jump-started my recovery. When you read the story aloud, there are lots of details that jump out—Bill W renting a plane once to “complete a jag,” or setting out to find fortune and fame with his wife, Lois, riding in a motorcycle side-car, the time spent “working on a farm,” which really meant he and Lois were living as legit hobos for a while.

Anyway, its really rewarding to get to spend time with people at the very beginning of their journey. I mentioned at one meeting how familiar the setting was to me, how I’d done time in several different IOPs and how I’d been kicked out of several IOPs. One young man, got wide-eyed and asked, “How do you get kicked out of an IOP?”

It’s pretty simple, actually—you just keep drinking.

Let’s just say I got pretty familiar with the half-life of Antabuse. I had graduated from the 60-day intensive program and was in the after-care program, which involved regular counseling sessions and a once-weekly group session. The nights of the group sessions were great for drinking, because I knew that I had roughly seven days until the next possible test—and they tested randomly, so it wasn’t for sure that I would even get tested. To me, that meant I was free to drink.

I developed an insane regimen that involved multiple Bikram yoga sessions, steam room time at the gym and pretty intense, sweat-inducing workouts. That’s how I was going to beat the IOP testing protocols and keep drinking. The insanity of the plan was revealed by the fact that it’s not possible to “sweat away” the evidence. The test that is commonly used, doesn’t try to detect alcohol in the blood, it simply looks for a protein that is produced when one metabolizes alcohol. My plan was doomed from the start, and crazily, I knew that.

Right there, I can see how different my thinking was. The crazy places I was sent by the deformed, wrong messages my addicted brain generated. I like to think I’m occasionally clever, and have definitely gotten away with things over the years. This is mostly the consequence of careful planning and a little Ferris Bueller-style luck here and there. This was a fundamental difference. When drinking, my alcoholic brain produced plans that had no chance of success, that were as doomed as a WWI-style trench assault.

When I see that now, remember those days and the way I thought about the world, all I can do is exhale and shake my head. I just can’t believe I walked through the world that way, and for so long.

I don’t have a lot of words of inspiration as the year ends. I’m pretty tired and my re-appearance at a law firm for the first time in nearly three decades is a big reason why. But I’m exhausted in the good way: I’ve been given a chance in my sixth decade to build something brand new and a pretty swanky perch to do it from. Is there a fair amount of fear and anxiety that attends this enterprise? Yes. Does it require a nearly daily effort at self-invention and excruciating levels of “showing up?” Yes. Do I feel more alive and vital than nearly anytime in my life? Yes.

Finding myself, which I think is the ultimate goal of recovery, opened doors that I couldn’t have imagined and has led me to a new approach to life that produces profound satisfaction and excitement. I learned that all that is necessary to unlock this wondrous treasure is to accept life moment to moment, and as the Big Book says, approach those moments with willingness, honesty and humility.

On some personal notes, I am heading to Iowa for Xmas and will be compiling something for next week—and it may very well include some selections for song of the year and some of my favorite essays. If you have thoughts on this, you know I would be delighted to incorporate them. I do want to say that this is maybe the most improbable part of my life. I have wanted to write for pretty much my entire life. My hard drives and notebooks are littered with failed attempts at profundity and notoriety.

It turns out, I was writing the wrong things. Starting this newsletter and getting to write about how I recover and how I live—and share it with all of you. Well, I can’t tell you exactly how much that means to me and how important it’s been to my recovery. It’s been writing this, and getting to share it with you, that has helped me find myself. So thank you for that—you don’t know how much it means to me.

Last thing. You may know that my son is in the Navy and his ship deployed earlier this Fall.

I learned over the weekend that his carrier strike force (he’s on the USS Gettysburg) transited the Suez Canal and is now on station in the Red Sea. That’s where a certain young Lieutenant, the apple of my eye, will be spending the holidays. I don’t think it’s possible to send too many positive thoughts or prayers and that’s how I’m approaching it.

My wish for everyone, and especially that brave, young Lieutenant, is that this holiday be full of peace and calm and good tidings among us all.

Happy Friday. Merry Christmas.