Beware the Ides of March

I’m grateful for a cloudy Friday morning at my desk. I’m grateful for the new coffee cups. I’m grateful for a train ticket to see a certain grandson. I’m grateful for soft spring breezes. I’m grateful for chilly mornings. I’m grateful to be sober today.

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song of the week:

Like Ryan on “The Office,” I’m a fake fan of Smokey Robinson.1 Yes, yes, he’s very talented, just never really liked his versions of his own songs. imho,2 the Smokey-recorded version of this song has a lot to do with Stevie Wonder, but no need to be negative, it’s just that I much prefer this version. Of course, I listened to it quite a bit in college, back in the early days of the punk, new wave, ska era.

This song went back into heavy rotation just about seven years ago, if I recall correctly. In fact, it was exactly seven years ago (roughly). I perhaps have mentioned my disdain for February, well, maybe it’s just February spreading its ugly tentacles across the calendar, but the first couple of weeks of March haven’t been great either, from a historical perspective.

That year, March 14 was a Thursday, and I knew it was going to be my last day of sobriety for a while. You see, I pretty much knew that A. was going to break up with me the next day. I watch a lot of YouTube videos about space and physics and astronomy and all the freaky stuff that happens out there—including the multi-verse and time-travel. Well, I think in many of those parallel universes, the ones that branch off from every decision and turning point, she and I ended up spending the rest of our lives together.

As March 15 dawned, I knew that I wasn’t residing in one of those universes.

In A’s cool, efficient, CEO-way, she had asked me to be available for a call that morning. She was in California for some meetings and some time-off. I was in my office and she called around 9:45 am (edt), I looked at her picture coming up on the phone, gulped and answered.

“Hey.” That’s all I could muster. “Hey,” came back and there was just the tiniest bit of warmth left. She launched into something of a speech and knew that she had probably prepared talking points for this. That’s because I knew how hard this was for her. I wasn’t angry, I knew this wasn’t her choice, wasn’t how she wanted things to turn out. I was the one who had placed us in this terrible spot. We both knew things were coming to an end, I was struggling every single day to not drink and my success rate was not great.

I’ve had a lot of really bad moments drinking, but the days leading up to this March 15th were some of the worst. Every time that glass touched my lips and I gulped a little more of that pale golden elixir, I also knew I was potentially committing the last great act of treason that would end this forever, would drive the silver spike into the sort-of ghoulish shell of a relationship we had been clinging to. We both knew the soul had already departed, we were just awaiting the burial.

She was brief and to the point. She might have used the phrase “ROI” to explain why this had to be the end. I numbly said something along the lines of understanding and, for the 11,732nd time, told her how sorry I was. She hated it when I said I was sorry, she correctly pointed out that it was selfish and manipulative the way I always said I was sorry. The thing that she hated was that every time I said, “I’m sorry,” it was a not so subtle request by me for absolution and reassurance.

She was right, it was really manipulative.

But, I was sorry and I really didn’t have any other words. She hung up and I looked at my phone. As our trust levels dove earthwards (hers, mostly), she had asked that we share our locations on our phones. I know this is a relationship milestone these days, but I think it’s a really terrible thing, because it substitutes for actually trusting someone.

I know they’re not going to do anything wrong, because I’m always watching where they are.

I watched her blue dot walk along the beach after we hung up. I knew that she had made plans to take a long walk after talking to me. tbh, I had been watching her blue dot for a bit that morning, I could see her walking on the beach rehearsing what she was going to say. I watched the dot for a bit, then turned off the location sharing and she vanished. I stared out the window for a little bit, then weirdly, brightened a little. I pulled on my coat and left the office,

It was a perfect day to drink.

The first round of the NCAA basketball tournament would be underway that weekend, and I thought about the very precious silver-lining in the catastrophic event that had just occurred.

I was free to drink as much as I wanted. Whenever I wanted.

It was a pretty beautiful spring day, as I recall from the walk to the Logan Tavern. I sat on my favorite stool, ate terrible, dry chicken wings, watched basketball, guzzled sauvignon blanc and thought about what a gift I had been given. F*** everyone, I am what I am and that apparently is a remorseless, pretty hopeless alcoholic.

I know for a fact I listened to the song of the week as I headed home late that night. I was very drunk. I had spent the day and most of the evening at the Logan Tavern. I had been busy, I had started looking at new apartments I could buy, A. had always kind of hated my place and we had been working with an architect to renovate and it would have been very, very cool.

But that dream had washed away a long time ago.

Moving to a new place, a fresh start, that seemed like a good idea.Also, I had fired up the dating apps, since we’re making a fresh start, might as well. When it got late at the Logan Tavern and I really wasn’t ready to face walking in the door at home, I went down the block and down the scale to Stoney’s. Lots of bartenders drank at Stoney’s after their shifts were done, they had perhaps been serving me all day and evening and now we were drinking together. That seemed right to me, I think it seemed pretty awful to them.

When I finally decided it was time to head home, I finished that last drink, put on the airbuds and played the song of the week. I had a jaunty attitude for the first few measures of the song. I had conjured up this image in my head. It was of a swanky, sophisticated alcoholic, but an alcoholic in the noble, artistic, kind of tragic way. Like Hemingway or F. Scott. I was trying to convince myself that’s probably what people in the neighborhood thought about me, when I realized that it was just the tragic part that applied. I wasn’t a debonair, devil-may-care alcoholic.

I was a lonely, sad man who had just drank away one of the best things that had ever happened to him.

For those first few days of the second half of March, I still tried to be careful and sneaky about my drinking. There were still a few fantasies that hadn’t quite stopped breathing yet and one of them was that A. might change her mind, maybe this was a test to see if I was really committed to trying to get sober. Of course, my actions had already answered that question. But my alcoholic brain was still scheming, trying to figure out how we could potentially account for the days following the fake break-up. I even thought about what was being said at the AA meetings I was no longer attending, just in case I had to make something up.

There was no need to worry, I wasn’t being put to any test. She was gone and not coming back. Most of me knew that, it was just the Alamo-style alcoholic command center that never gives up hope on anything; it was already great at obscuring the losses that had already occurred. As long as I kept drinking, things wouldn’t actually be that bad.

These were actual thoughts that I had back then. And at other times, too. My alcoholic brain just produces some stunningly-ridiculous ways of thinking about the world, many of the thoughts that are produced are just wrong, not based in any kind of reality. Those thoughts ruled my life and were in the process of ruining my life.

Things got pretty dark from there. It wasn’t long until I had to drink about every four hours or go into withdrawal. You know how I feel about mornings these days. Back then, it was definitely like waking up in the coffin and knowing that your day would be spent in soulless, empty pursuits and that tomorrow would be exactly the same. I started to wonder about why I would want to continue to live this way, and, to be clear, the alternative I was musing about wasn’t finally getting sober.

This Spring, this March 14th, things couldn’t be more different and I’m not sure I really understand how all of it happened. Of course, that’s a big part of what I’m doing here on Fridays, hoping that in the course of writing it all down I’ll figure more and more out. I know that the more I understand, the less shame I feel.

I was watching a YouTube video the other night about the Bronze Age collapse. The mystery of how several thriving civilizations just vanished about 11,000 or 12,000 years ago. One of the theories is that an asteroid hit the gigantic ice sheet that covered North America back then and triggered instantaneous melting on a scale we simply can’t imagine. When we look at the landscape of the Western United States, the idea has been that some of the fantastic geological features, the valleys and chasms cut in rock, the weird ripples and structures of places like the Bad Lands. It’s been suggested that the world looked this way because of millions of years of subtle forces being applied. That may not be the case.

Our world is more likely shaped by sudden catastrophe.

The flooding caused by the asteroid impact would have been unimaginable. Those valleys cut in rock might not have taken a million years of erosion; they might have happened in a matter of weeks. Think about the power necessary to shape the world like that. When I look back, I see that my history has been studded with catastrophes. When I look at the histories of the people who loved me, well, say hello to Mister Alcoholic Asteroid.

That drunken March 15th, was one of the last times I tried to convince myself that my drinking was an under-appreciated aspect of my sparkling personality. I was just a middle-aged alcoholic doggedly trying to drink away anything of value or beauty that was still hanging around. I saw that finally. It was just going to be a long, agonizing few years until I could finally take the steps I needed to, the steps that led to the reclamation of my life.

I’m not watching any blue dots today. I’m not saying goodbye to anyone. I’m not trying to do my best Wile E. Coyote and convince myself that the catastrophes are necessary. I stopped chasing the Road Runner a long time ago. When I wake up, I marvel at the way that every sunrise is beautifully different, instead of preparing to sit on the same stool and consume my regular alcoholic breakfast of champions: White wine and pancakes.

While my alcoholic world was riven and shaped by catastrophe, by contrast, my sobriety has been shaped by a very small and subtle force: Willingness. The Big Book makes the point that sobriety doesn’t need to be about building the Hoover Dam to prevent future catastrophes, the gigantic changes that occurred in my life started with one very small change:

A willingness to believe that there could be a power greater than myself in the Universe.

That was all that was necessary for me to make my new start, my new beginning. I didn’t have to undo or prevent massive catastrophe. I just had to imagine a world where I was meant to be exactly what I was. I just had to believe that maybe I was placed where I was supposed to be. I just had to believe that all I had to do was show up as myself and let the next moments unfurl as they were meant to. That’s what willingness meant to me.

What willingness did for me? I think you know.

Happy Friday.