The dark side of the moon

This blasted ranch is finally beginning to thaw and it is almost spring time, this means the volunteers are beginning to show up. Every year, volunteers from around the country come and work for a week or more on the ranch, you may recall I wrote about them with fondness last year; this year, it is with a little more contempt. I will say it did get annoying when 15 year old girls would pat me on the shoulder and say, “You are on the right track,” I mean, for chrissake, 15 years old? Really? What the hell do they know. I tolerate them, but only slightly. This is a common feeling of all the guys in my phase, the new guys still see the novelty in having them on the property.

As I write this, I am somewhat unnerved by the idea that I have less than 100 days left at Rehab Ranch. I met with Art, my case manager yesterday and we started speaking about my transition planning, and what my life will look like the day I walk off this farm for good. There is a bit of apprehension I feel in myself, the idea that this experience will be completed soon.

And then as I walked to the chow hall yesterday after my meeting with Art, I began thinking about this season, I began to notice the days are getting longer, and how it was this time last year when I began preparations for moving up here. I was still drinking, but I began to accept and mentally prepare for the next step in my life’s journey, the one that would happen only after I came up on this farm.

I remember last year when I started this whole thing, the concept of being here, at this time, it escaped me. Forward thinking is one of the first things an alcoholic loses when they begin to drown in their addiction. Successes are measured in pints and liters and gallons, not in weeks or months or goals met. So here I am, winding down, watching the newer guys as they move up through the program, understanding their progress.

But the volunteers. They signal something. They are the manifestation of the progress of time to me. They have returned in full force. The cycle is nearing the end for me, I am nearly complete. I use the word “complete” intentionally. In Greek, the word Telios means ‘complete’ it also means ‘perfect’. When you study Greek philosophy and literature, you will often see people referred to as ‘teliotic’ or having achieved ‘telios’ and while we translate this to mean ‘prefect’, I prefer to think of ‘perfect’ as ‘complete’ – This is also, ironically, what the dark side of the moon is referred to, the telios of the moon.

So, I am nearing completion, but after my talk with Art, I had to decide what that meant, what does complete mean to me? It could mean that I don’t drink, I have a well rounded life, I have things to keep me free from the isolation of alcoholism. Existing in isolation, it’s what hurt the most for me. Completion could mean that a journey has ended, and therefore I will be ready for the next one. The next cycle.

There is something else though. Completion for me, in this program, isn’t ‘having it all,’ or even ‘just finishing’. Here’s how I see it. My life isn’t a circle, I am three dimensional. My life is a sphere. When a sphere is exposed, there is one part that everyone sees. Like the moon, it is the part of the sphere that faces the world, it is what I think of as my reputation. My reputation is the relationship I share with everyone who casts a bit of light on my life – indeed, the whole rest of the planet. This is where so many of us shine. Indeed, even on this blog, in my ‘about me’ section I write about how I ‘shine in the spotlight.’ I look good in direct light, I might say – in other words, I am pretty good at working my reputation, I parcel out what I want people to see.

In a 12 step program, one of the steps is to admit to God and to another human being the exact nature of our wrong doings. I speak candidly about things I have done, people I have mistreated, situations I regret here in this blog. I share it with over a thousand people a week. I don’t do it as a response to the 12 steps, in fact, I find that I follow many of the steps unknowingly, but they work in my recovery, and they work for millions of people. (I know, can you believe it, I had a nice thing to say about AA) But I spoon feed my new reputation, and you should know there is a LOT more going on inside that I don’t share, there are many things in this orbit that only I know about myself.

My proverbial days are getting longer through this process. I am exposing more and more for public consumption and this has an ability to free me from my addiction. There is a sense of escape when I lay it all out on the line like this, like as soon as I give it away, it is gone. There is a bible verse in the book of Joel, 2:25, that I love, ‘I will return to you the years the locusts have eaten.’ I love this verse because it is a sort of promise of redemption. I have gone from sobriety, to recovery, and now, I hope to move to a state of redemption. So many years I have lost to a bottle of gin. So many opportunities that escaped me. So many moments which were clouded by the saturation of intoxication. And these are returning to me, my years are being returned. I have become sober, I have healed, and now, I want to get some of what I lost back.

Through all this, I feel free from the shackles addiction. While I will always be addicted to alcohol, I need not let that control me. I am not controlled by the thought that its almost Friday and I need to get a drink. I am no longer controlled by the having to come up with excuses for a poor job at work, or missing a family event. I am no longer controlled with transportation to and from the liquor store, or blocking out part of my morning for the expected hang over. I am not controlled by this, I have my frickin life back and I want more of it.

And this all seems really great, but there is that unlit part. This is the part that people don’t see, the part that only I see. This is where addiction might hide – on the side of the telios. It is not seen, it is not viewed, it isn’t even noticed. No one has ever seen the dark side of the moon from Earth, the same side of the moon we see every night always faces the planet. But, surely there is another side to the moon. It is a sphere, it is complete, it is perfect - telios.

This is the side that I call integrity. It is the part of me that only I see. Integrity also means wholeness, completion, how strong something actually is you may note. When we discuss a building, for instance, we always talk about ‘structural integrity.’ What kind of person am I? Integrity is not a conditional word, it is not open for interpretation. It does not change with the wind, the cycle of the moon, or if I am out at a bar with friends, or if I am trying to impress someone, or if I am simply home alone and no one will ever know what I am doing. It is what it is, integrity is what I see when I wake up and saunter to the mirror, it is my inner image. If I look in the mirror and I see a man who does not cheat at life, then I know that I never will.

I fully believe in living this kind of life, a life whereby I am sober because I want to be, not because I feel like I have to show it to people. I am all for living in the dark side of the sphere, I am all for integrity if only because life is short and a good reputation is not always easy to come by, and, just like the moon, sometimes it shines bright, sometimes it shines in little slivers, sometimes it doesn’t even shine. But the other side, its constant.

The benefit is there is no tension to all this. If I make a mistake, I own it, if I do something and don’t get credit, no big deal. The stress of managing my reputation no longer impacts the side of the sphere where I live, and that is the kind of stress that makes me want to drink.

Integrity is not a difficult concept. Babies know it. Babies are real, what they are on the bright side is the same as who they are on the dark side. As I have discovered through this whole thing, we tend to make simple things way too complicated, including sobriety.

So perhaps it is good that I am almost complete with the program, I am almost complete in becoming the person I have become. I might even lighten up with the volunteers, I might look past the frozen ground or the resulting mud puddles. Telios, means complete, whole, perfect.

Yea, it feels perfect. It feels pretty damn good.

Mother Goose vs Grimm

I have a couple of really good friends on the ranch who are fairly new – guys who count their time on the farm in weeks, not months- or as guys at my stage count, in days left (I have 110 by the way). I love to speak to these guys, and listen to their perspectives on what is happening to them because it reminds me of what I was feeling and thinking when I entered the program.

I like to be reminded of this because when I entered, I was told by everyone about all of these wonderful changes which I would be making, changes in my attitude, in my demeanor, in my way of thinking – unimaginable changes that would begin to happen to me as I stumbled through the program. I remember listening to program residents, chaplains, house managers, each with a different, almost contrived vision; they would tell me these wonderous tales of the new person I would become.

Don’t get me wrong, this new me was inspiring to say the least – heck I could hardly wait to meet this fine fellow. They were certainly the kinds of things I would like to have happened to me, but without knowing me, these people were just shooting in the dark, and it is likely the only thing about me that would change throughout this ‘ordeal’ as I called it back then, would be my reaction and attitude to alcohol.

And so I allowed them to indulge themselves in their fruitless fairy tales of hope and a bunch of blah blah, and I listened to them with the kind of suspicion and cynicism that you might expect from a person who knew better, knew more, confident in what would happen to me. It is the kind of cynicism and suspicion that I am met with now when I speak to the new guys. So, I don’t tell them about the great new guys they will probably become, instead, I smugly sit back and just know it. I see it in them, I can see attitudes changing right before my eyes, all in response to a renewed self awareness and the forced confrontation of emotions that we, as addicts, sought to hide from.

When I am in the weight room, many guys are motivated to open up to me. I’ve always had a bizarre quality where perfect strangers look at me and think it is OK to tell me really personal stuff about themselves. A nun once told me that it is because I have a very old soul and they can sense it. I had forgotten that she told me that until recently, but I now consider this a gift.

Anyway, Matt told me the other day that he was leaving our work-out early to help a dorm-mate with chores because they were involved in a spirited debate in their LEC class about helping out your brothers on the farm. The following day, he told me that he had to cancel plans with me on Saturday because he made plans with Chris earlier and he was trying to live up to his obligations, even the seemingly small ones.

Mike has a very biting sense of humor – he can seem almost mean, but he is hilarious. He is consciously trying hard to stop insulting people with his comments. He has recognized the power of his words and he is trying to use them to encourage and not discourage. Its hard to avoid the pitfall of good natured humor, a good natured ribbing among ‘the guys’, but I explained to him that everyone in the early stages of sobriety is an emotional mess, when your brain begins to dry up, and you begin to feel things again, its alarming to say the least and so his funny comments are like spears to some guys. You might recall my sappy blogs about ‘joy’ and ‘the beauty in the little things’ that I wrote in the early days – the romantic vision of life I had adopted was only in response to the chemical painkillers that were flooding my head in a natural, mental, attempt to dull all the emotions my neocortex was suddenly trying to sort out.

The differences between the kinds of men these guys are and the kinds of guys they will be is really telling when you get them in the same conversation with a higher phase guy – like Lane.

So, Lane and Matt and I were all talking about the program and about how sobriety has made a difference to us. Matt was listening to Lane and me speak, hanging on our explanations, asking question after question. It is scary when you just begin the program, there is the uncertainty of whether or not we will succeed, of whether or not sobriety will work for us, the unnerving feeling of ‘is this the right thing for me, and will this work?’ My God, that sucks. How can I stand failing at one more thing because of addiction?

And Lane and I recognized right away what he was really asking in each question, and the fact that Lane and I both had many of the same doubts and worries was comforting to Matt. I think this is because he sees who we are now and how our lives are where we want them to be – or at least headed that way. It’s our direction, not merely our intention, that is determining our path and our destination and that’s a powerful tool to have working for us now. Where we want to be is actually where we are heading.

Lane made the astute observation that every alcoholic has an identity issue. There is so much wrapped up in identity issues for us. How are we perceived, how do we perceive others, what do we really think about ourselves. There are so many self esteem issues that only compound the more you are swallowed by your addiction. In my opinion, self esteem, one way or another, is the keystone to addictive behavior. Not a bolstered self esteem that you get from being told you did well… but the real true self esteem of knowing you ARE well, the kind of belief in yourself that can only come from within. Despite all my outward successes, somewhere I got hung up on the idea that I didn’t measure up. Situations like not passing the 10th grade because I was in the hospital for four months and couldn’t catch up despite my parents’ insistence that it could be done – failure like that – well it has long lasting implications. Interestingly enough, the summer after that colossal failure is also the summer I began drinking.

You may recall, Lane and I used to have long conversations when we were in the lower phase dorms – emotional commiserations about how unfair the world was to us, how we failed people, how people failed us, how we were alone in this, it was real at the time to us. One time in September I was writing in my journal and I read some of the entries to Lane about those conversations that we had back in June and he seemed embarrassed and said, “I think I was still drunk for the first three months I was here,” and this was probably true. The effects of alcohol, then the new effects of the brains attempt to sort out this new emotional overload, well, to say that we weren’t in our right minds is an understatement.

What we are dealing with now, they keep telling us here, is a new life. But when you step back, my new life is just regular life to most people. It’s unbelievably pathetic to think that I am now, at my age, just learning the secrets of how to live like millions of Americans live each day. A sober person, with a job that you actually do when you get there, with plans that don’t require any special attention to ‘how will I get home,’ with goals, a strategy, with friendships that are built on companionship and not how much drama we survived together. I am not embarrassed to be myself these days, in fact, I quite like it.

But the changes happen. The changes start from the day we arrive. They begin the day before when we ready ourselves for this year long ‘ordeal’. Once we’re here we realize that these crazy rehab people don’t know a thing about us, that we will do this program but doubtful anything significant about us will change – or NEEDS to change for that matter.

And, secretly, we change. Our routines change, our values change, our duty to other people begins to change. We begin to see ourselves in the mirror as we truly are and not as we think others see us. It is very empowering to look back and see yourself without the distraction of a hundred opinions, it is a quiet victory when we look at ourselves that first time in the mirror and say “I am probably going to be OK after all.”

There is also another change that I noticed about guys who have been in recovery for a while versus the guys who just begin. The guys in the beginning are all really preoccupied with maintaining sobriety. This seems like a noble goal, like a decent plan, like the whole point of being here.

But after a while, sobriety moves lower and lower on our list of priorities, until it eventually drops right off.

Now, before that freaks you out, let me explain. When you live a sober life, when you live the ‘new life/ (regular life)’ you begin to see sobriety not as the goal but the byproduct of a happy life. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me earlier that it works like this but it does. You see, in the beginning, being drunk wasn’t the problem. Being drunk helped me AVOID problems. Not solve them, but avoid them. Then they came back – more of them, and I drank more. Then I had more problems, more sadness, and now loneliness. So I drank more. And before you knew it, I had this laundry list of issues I had created and only one solution – Sangria and Gin!

The biochemical compulsions of addiction are pretty minimal after 6-9 months, and they continue to reduce as time progresses - and so the triggers we need to be mindful are emotional and memory triggers. This is why it pays to keep a positive mind.

I explained about the employment of the reality window, when your belief window changes, that changes the result. Now, in this new life, Lane and I meet problems, but we have been given some skills on how to deal with them and the ‘need’ to drink is never triggered. People ask me all the time how I am going to remain sober and I think the answer is wrapped up in my ability to see things as they truly are, through my new beliefs- that includes my self. Have I improved my self esteem? You bet.

And with that comes all sorts of benefits – things like the need to build a romantic relationship with someone who wants to share in my aspirations and on my terms, sober ones; the ability to shrug off the kinds of pains that everyone (yes even you) feels when they get around their families; the ability to accept that we deserve to be happy as much as the next guy whether we failed the 10th grade or not!

I had dinner on Saturday night with Matt and he relayed this thought to me. We went roller skating earlier in the day with a bunch of guys. He said to me that he had a ‘moment’ at the rink because he thought about the fact that he was roller skating for the first time since the one time he went as a kid – with a bunch of friends – and there was no booze or drama. He thought about how the next day we would all get dressed up and go to church. He decided that he deserved this bit of happiness, that he deserved to do nice things. This small happiness will not prevent him from drinking, but it will prevent him from the ‘need’ to drink – at least for that one day.

So let me explain the sobriety as a priority thought again – I am just saying that living sober isn’t the priority to me, staying happy with myself is my priority, and I have a lot of tools to stay that way. Sobriety is the benefit of not 'needing' to drink.

I will never be happy trying to stay sober – that’s like white knuckling it on a daily basis – maybe this is why I don’t like AA because, to me at least, (and ONLY to me) it seems like there everyone is living to stay sober, not living sober to stay happy.

There are really new guys on the ranch as well. Some are counting their time on the farm in days not even weeks. One of these guys just came in last Friday – and I asked him how its going. When he came he hadn’t shaved, he looked tired and worn out. He looked like a drunk. I know that he had a rough couple of weeks before he arrived. Yesterday, he told me he is beginning to enjoy himself and that there were some things that he needed. A bike was one, and the other was a nice shirt to wear to church. If you remember my blog from the beginning, my appearance was pretty important to me. Its how I was perceived, how I felt like I should perceive myself, through the eyes of people perceiving me.

I thought it was great, though, that he asked for a good shirt to wear to church because that shows growth from the way he looked when he first arrived – his perception and awareness is already changing – and beginning with how we present ourselves to the rest of the world is the beginning of a change that will eventually progress into the perception to how we see ourselves. This eventually leads to a sorting out of issues and the eventual acceptance of self, then the cool part – when we like to be who we are. And this is when we stop living to be sober, and start living as someone who is again happy. I hate to burst your bubble, but there isn't such thing as a 'happy drunk.'

That’s what I call recovery. As for the wonderous fairy tales I was told in the beginning about all the great changes I would be making…well… if I could go back to May and start this blog with ‘Once Upon A Time’ I would because, sleeping beauty is up and kickin, Rapunzel has let down her hair, and Humpty Dumpty, well, he's sittin pretty with only a few cracks to speak of. And me, well, these days I find myself recounting these same fairy tales to the new guys, but I will say, I am definitely more Mother Goose, less Grimm.

Have a great week all

Sometimes it ends uncomfortably.

Last night I skipped my work out in favor of cake and ice cream. Am I forgetting my priorities, you may ask? No way. BUT, each night before a graduation, we all gather in the West Dorm (the final dorm) and have cake and ice cream – just the residents – to give a private send off to the graduate before the ceremony the following day.

This week, we are celebrating TWO graduations. One happened today, the other tomorrow. This is a lot of cake, but well worth it. Both of these graduates are changed men – both of them I knew from when we all first arrived. It’s a little strange to think that people that were new when I started are graduating. My, how a year flies by.

“Stubby” was a hard drinkin mountain man – one time during devotions, a chaplain asked how you can tell a friend is a real friend; Stubby raised his hand and said, ‘The guy who will back you in a gun fight,” and this was the kind of life he led.

He grew up in a small mountain town, transplanted from the hills of Arkansas – Take a moment and imagine the Hatfields and the McCoys. Now imagine a neighborhood where they are the most sophisticated people on the block, and you’ve imagined Stubby’s neighborhood.

He once told me that if he met me before he entered the program, he probably would have robbed me.

He is kind these days, gentle, calm. He gave me a hand written note one day in January that said, “I think you are doing a good job.” I didn’t know what he meant, and he said he didn’t either, but he felt like he should tell me.

I can say that the fabric of my life is indeed richer by the colorful thread of friendship I made with Stubby, a man I may never have met had I not come here.

Keith was a meth user, and rough around the edges. He had no teeth when he came in because of the decades of drug abuse. He was aloof, even mean, when he got here. And he leaves with a certain amount of eagerness. His smile is huge these days, his dentures are on the way – and he has a sense of resolve about him that I find admirable.

Keith has always got a cookie to give, it’s his thing – and I have a hard time imagining the kind of person he speaks about when he tells of his days as an active addict.

During this three day celebration, there is one resident on the farm who is noticeably absent. Tom is a resident who is preparing for a planned departure. In the order of rankings, he is number one – he has been there the longest. And it is time for him to go.

There is a strange phenomenon on the ranch where some guys get cozy and feel the safety of this life, a life they can hardly think about losing, and they max out their time. The ranch allows people to extend certain phases for a long time, in fact, its entirely possible I could still be in phase II at this point if I had decided.

There is a safety in all this, a level of security. It’s a new life, and its easier to maintain when you are accountable to the ranch. But this, I say vehemently, is NOT REAL.

You can NOT live on the ranch. A man of my age, of any age, is NOT supposed to live on a rehab ranch, this is NOT NORMAL. I wrote months ago about how I feel like this place is home, and I have since rethought this attitude. It is uncomfortable for me, it is frustrating, it is a real pain in the ass to be there, and it is supposed to be.

Some might read this blog and think to themselves that it seems like I got off scott-free for all the heartache I caused through my life. I know this because I get letters all the time from people who remind me of the hurt I may have caused and the fact that I am living a fairly tale at other people’s expense, and it isn’t fair.

Perhaps this is true, maybe there should be more of a penalty for me, but the fact is, there is no excuse for the way my life played out – there is also no reason for the blessings I have received, it is what it is. It would be nice and easy if life worked on a credit system, a system of blessings and punishments – where you can add to your prosperity by doing nice things for people, bank good things, then spend them on a few things you probably shouldn’t do – but this isn’t how it works.

The truth is, I do pay for my life’s experience. I have a conscience and a memory and there are times when my past does come to haunt me. This is true for anyone who spends a year on the ranch. There is a LOT of silent time. The activity I detail on the ranch is only the tip of the ice berg of reflection that each of us does and works through.

I wrote a while back about Phil – one of my friends who broke the lamp on his step-dads head at Christmas and his parents want him to apologize before he is allowed to participate in the family again. For four years, this has been brewing, and for whatever reason, he won’t do it.

I know he thinks about it. I know he carries this burden around with him all the time. I can see the weight on his shoulders, the weight of wanting to unload this – but he refuses to apologize.

I’ve asked him why and he doesn’t have an easy explanation but it must be something. He struggles with this, and I think the refusal to apologize is only a small part of something deeper that he feels, there is some other reason he won’t do this, and so he works through this pain – this solitude – by himself – without the full participation of his family.

But he is working through it sober. And I have realized that while I am here, my problems are not going to all vanish, the slate will not be wiped clean, but I can deal with my problems without the assistance of a shot of gin (or a glass of gin), and go on. Phil is incorporating whatever pains him into a sober reality.

It’s not the clean wrap up that everyone thinks it is when families and friends attend graduation ceremonies. Inside, some turmoil is still there for many of us, but we deal with it in a different way now, we deal with it as sober people.

And so while I detail an often recreational lifestyle on this ranch, you might need to understand that there is a lot of work going on; at the heart level, in the memories, in the building of a sustainable future and coping mechanisms. Tearing down a person who has been so bolstered by the illusionary effects of drugs and alcohol, then rebuilding that person from the ground up seems like a lot of work. Now, imagine that you can not tear the entire structure down, but you have to somehow rebuild it with existing beams, a few existing walls, even some of the light switches – you don’t get to start from scratch, you have to build around these things, whether they are broken or not. It is even more daunting.

This is all a big emotional mess if you ask me!

But it is what it is, and this is the only way to have a life, they tell me. So we all do it. And on graduation days, families and friends come and encourage the newly sober graduate, the residents all know that deep down, it’s scary, and still painful to be standing up there. There is a sort of humiliation, an embarassment, to say I was successful at rehab.

We also know that sometimes in life (or on the farm), we have to move on, like Tom, because we have outlived the experience, that we are not gaining from it and maybe we even have to be sent away. When life has stalled like this, it often takes something drastic to kick start it. There is a time when you get so in to your groove that it becomes a rut, this is likely when we start drinking again.

I don’t know really what to say about all this – I tend to close this blog each week with some sort of pleasant wrap up… and I struggle to leave it open ended like this, it is within my addictive tendency to want to put it into a nice package, but I won't, its real life. Uncomfortable isn’t it.

EMAIL: snapshotsfromrehabranch@yahoo.com

DAYS SOBER: 290 days

DAYS SINCE I SAW BONNIE HUNT: 281 days

Red Shoes come in convenient packages.

There are things that you, who may not have alcohol problems, probably take for granted; routines that you have worked into your day or week that you hardly even notice. Alex always knows when it’s Tuesday because Popeye’s has some chicken deal and Alex loves chicken, especially when it’s cheap. A friend of mine in the City was telling me that she gets off work early on Monday nights so she can watch “Hero’s.” Towards the end, when I was drinking, I always knew that Friday would include a trip to Blockbuster so I could enough movies to keep me occupied while I drank a litre of Sangria and one pint of gin. I knew I would pass out by 11:30 (midway through the second movie) with half the pint left – enough to get me through Saturday morning until I could go back and get more.

By the end, my routines always included alcohol in some way. Either I was including alcohol or I was trying to recover from it. I was a very organized drunk, it always managed to make it into my budget as well as my schedule. Its interesting how we always schedule things we love.

Routines are safe and easy for an alcoholic – and as I have said before, we like a nice, easy to package and wrap up kind of life; emotionally as well as in our daily grind. I was surprised when I stopped including alcohol in my life how few routines I actually had. Nothing about my ‘organized’ life was even remotely organized without that one consistent companion. It was alarming at first and thankfully, by design, at the ranch, there is a rigid time structure in place that helps to fill the vortex of a life suddenly out of whack with the void created by instant and immediate sobriety.

But now I am at a point where my synthetic ranch life is transitioning to my painfully real life and I think establishing new routines is pretty important. I still go to devotions in the morning, I think this is important so I can stay connected to the ranch and so I can start my day with friends. I sit with the same guys every morning, Matt and Mike and they have become part of my routine; Mike because he has become my most trusted confident and Matt because he considers himself a “linguistic renegade” and I love to interact with people who elevate normal conversation to the level of art. I look forward to our half hour of friendly banter. Most of my other friends don’t make it to devotions these days because of school or work. Some of the staff sometimes make remarks about the fact that I still do this. Its my routine.

I know that on Saturday I will spend the day with my dad. I will probably do laundry, we will bum around town – we eat, we catch up on the week, we gossip a little, he always has something for us to do. Every week when I leave my time with him we always say, “OK, so NEXT weekend, we need to work on the house, do chores etc.,” but we never do… saying it is part of our routine. When he drops me off, he always rolls down the window and says, “Hey Kid, did I ever tell you that I love you more than anyone in the whole world,” and I usually laugh out load and say, “Yea, you did.” “OK, good, see you next week” he will reply. This is a cherished part of the routine. The kind of routine I might have missed out on had I decided to stay drunk.

Curtis and I have a new routine. Every Tuesday he has a long break between class and his campus is only 5 minutes from where I work so we’ve decided to make Tuesday a standing lunch date.

“We should really try to make Tuesday lunch our thing,” he told me a couple weeks ago
“Cool, that’s great, because you don’t get to see me much anymore?”
“No, because if you don’t take me to lunch then I am stuck at school until 3 and I don’t want to do that. I mean…er…yea because we’re friends.”

His honesty is one of the reasons I enjoy his company. But we used to talk when we were in lower south about how cool it would be to do normal stuff like have lunch with friends when we got to higher phases, so now it’s possible, it would seem stupid to not do it.

This Tuesday he and I were eating and he asked me, “So what are the chances you are really going to stay sober once you leave – like what is the percentage you think you will succeed.”

This is a question that we all ask when we get to this part of the program – real life is pretty real to say the least and most of us are trying to figure out how to incorporate this into our sobriety.

I answered him and then asked him why he was asking. (You want to know what my percentage was, don’t you, but I am not saying). He asked because he told me that he ran into a graduate of the ranch recently and this graduate was drunk. This troubled Curtis quite a bit because I think he saw this failure as a failure that he too could have. It’s a dangerous question when we think, “I can use SOME things, I can’t do others,” because when we begin to bargain with ourselves on what we can ‘get away with’ – well, this is addictive thinking and its relapse time!

It’s shocking to see someone finish the program and then run back to the bottle. One graduate a couple weeks ago left the farm and THAT NIGHT went to find an old friend to get hammered. Its troublesome to think about because it makes each of us wonder - what’s the point. I mean, if I relapse, perhaps I should just give in and give up.

I mean, really, why am I spending this whole year doing all this if my chances of success are so slim. What in the world am I thinking, and who the hell am I fooling with all this. Statistically, I have not finished drinking – statistically, there is still a 78% probability that I will drink again. (Out of the hundred guys who enter the program yearly, only about 25% will graduate, and only about half of the graduates will remain sober – 12% of the guys who enter the program)

So Curtis and I began to dissect the situation. One thing we both agree on is that the guys who tend to fall are the ones who come in with the absolute, gung ho, this time there no turning back attitude. The guys who have no margin for error. Rigid, unbreakable willpower to stay sober. 90 meetings in 90 days guys – the guys who were drunk and high and probably ‘bangin some whore’ Friday, entered the program on Saturday, and Sunday they were Uber-Christian and 'living sober'. Those guys drive me nuts.

I’ve always maintained that the possibility of relapse is real – and I am far far from an Uber-Christian. Heck, I probably sin in my sleep. My relationship with God is real, however. The package of sobriety to me isn't pass or fail and I used to challenge my attitude and say that I was too passive about the whole thing.

But the point is, as an alcoholic, we like things simple, in boxes, with names. Things like “drunk” “sober” “recovered” are all easy packages. It’s not an accident that cheap wine comes with a twist off top, that the curve of a pint of liquor fits nicely in your back pocket.

And real life offers NONE of that. There are no easy packages in real life, there is no twist off top to drink from life’s solutions. It's blurry. It takes time. Sobriety is an endurance race – and the 90 meetings in 90 days guys are almost always successful at GETTING sober. Hell, I was sober every Monday morning by 11am. Hung over, but sober, and I maintain that GETTING sober is a cinch. Staying sober is the hard part. But how I define success at this isn't always going to fit into a package.

I have inched along in this rehab at a painfully slow rate. You may recall, I hadn’t planned on staying past June of last year. Then I was convinced that I would be home by fall. Christmas was out of the question and there was no way I would spend New Year’s on that stupid ranch.

But, here I am – beginning my 10th month in the program and life is purring along with new routines and I have made only baby steps. Sometimes I feel like I have traveled only a short distance, made only slight course adjustments.

Is this the solution? I have no idea, but it is a solution for me, for now. The baby steps, just a few small things which result in a few big results. There are many times, most times, I don’t feel like I have done much, gone far, my journey hasn’t seemed particularly difficult. It’s almost been comically easy in some ways. Has the solution ALWAYS been this easy to grasp? Sobriety.

And then I rest because there is some comfort in knowing that my real life, my new happy real life, has always been only a small distance away from me. I am able to stop beating up on myself for ‘letting it get this far’ because, maybe it didn’t. This makes it possible to forgive myself for many things, things I have harbored and resented about myself through this whole program. It’s like Dorothy in the Wizard of OZ, when she sees that home was only a click of her red shoes, away. And forgiving myself for messing up is gong to always be part of my sobriety.

I know you may be thinking that I should consider this work. I can hear my parents now talking about how much more I will appreciate things when I work hard for them, but this doesn’t seem like work to me. It seems like something I am able to do naturally, like walking. Maybe I shouldn’t stress out because I am not stressed out. Maybe I don’t need to feel like I should be feeling something else; maybe my new package is emblazoned with, ‘Tastes great, less FEELING’?

So here’s how I will wrap this up. Like all the guys here, I worry about relapse, I worry about staying sober, I feel like I should worry about it. I catch myself feeling rigid, like if anything happens and I have a drink, I will be immediately transported through some cosmic tornado to a distant land where my companions will be scarecrows, tin men, and "linguistic renegades." But then I think, that’s not how it has to be. In the crappy event that something happens, I need to get up and click my shoes, and remind myself that my reality isn’t so far away and its time to get back to it. I am less scared by this.

Does this grant me permission to relapse. Hardly. But it also grants me permission to forgive myself and start over if I do and NOT give up, grab a litre of Sangria and go back to old routines. Is that an easy package to live in?

Yes.

So, if you see me walking around town, clicking my heels, never you mind, it’s just part of my new routine. And if it’s a Tuesday, I will either be on my way to eat cheap chicken with Alex or have lunch with Curtis. If its a Saturday, I am probably playing hookie from chores with my dad, who loves me more than anyone else in the whole world.

All in all, my life comes in a pretty nice package.

Have a good week all - enjoy your routines….

Insight from two seperate rambles.

Well, as the year has jumped to a start, Brian and I have been asked to once again, go to high schools and speak to students about our life – The kids at these schools are always positive when we get there because we never tell them to ‘not do drugs, don’t drink’ – instead we speak about our story, we tell the gory details and they laugh at the fun ones. And we are honest with them and they ask us a million questions.

It’s interesting because our visits are gaining in popularity, when we started, we spoke to one class a day, and it was only to those students who wanted to hear us speak. Tomorrow, when we go, we will be speaking to four different full groups, lasting the entire day. In April, we will be going to Estes Park to speak to another large congregation as well, and I am really honored that I am able to share some of this with so many people, impressionable people.

The kids always ask us what there is to do in rehab. When that question was first asked to me back in October, I immediately said, ‘We don’t do a whole lot,’ and then I continued…

“This summer I went to like 5 Rockies games, I went white water rafting, hiked in Rocky Mountain National Forest like 6 or 7 times. I learned how to ride a horse and the basics of mule training. I skied twice and learned how to snow shoe. I went to the Art Museum, the History Museum twice, and saw the Ghengis Khan exhibit. I helped deliver a baby cow, I bottle fed baby goats, I was an announcer at some pig races (where one was named after me!), I learned how to cook a kick ass lasagna. On warm days, there’s nothing to do, so we play kick ball, volleyball or horse shoes. I weight train, and ride my bike. I’ve been training for a marathon. I’ve cliff dived at Horsetooth reservoir but am afraid of heights so I only did it once. I was baptized in a real river with 30 other people. I painted a youth retreat in Wyoming and the pastor liked our work, he invited Lane and me up to paint the chapel. I fed the homeless in Cheyenne and sat through the worlds longest night time winter parade. I was on TV several times, interviewed by a major daily newspaper and began speaking to people all across Northern Colorado about the life transforming journey to sobriety. I quit drinking.”

And when I began to ramble, it dawned on me, the year as it began last May was viewed as a detour from my real life, the year I was ‘going to take off’ from life… but it was hardly that at all! Instead of taking off from life, my life has taken off! And completely sober. This is how my life is supposed to be. And I am detailing this because I want to illustrate the full life I am living because I am sober – and I am illustrating it for those of you who are apprehensive about quitting with your drug of choice. It’s a cool way to live.

This week, something shocking has happened and I am still unsure of how I feel about it, so as I tell about it, whatever emotions may seem lacking are only because I am still dealing with them.

I have a friend in Denver, who I will call Aaron, and this past Saturday he decided to drink a half gallon of Jack Daniels and swallow a lethal dose of muscle relaxers. When he was discovered 11 hours later, he was barely breathing, his blood pressure so low his heart was considered almost dormant – and he barely survived the ordeal – as of this writing, no one knows the brain damage he may have suffered. I spoke to him when he woke up yesterday, he was hardly coherent, and muttered about nonsense.

I know my family and friends who remember when I suffered from aspiration pneumonia and was in the hospital for several weeks can relate to this wait and worry portion of what I am experiencing. Is it some kind of divine retribution that I have to feel everything I may have made other people feel throughout my illustrious drinking career? What the hell is this all about. I’m a little mad about it, I suppose.

I mean, it gets pretty taxing on my nervous system to always be remembering, to always be recalling, to always be feeling…. It gets a little stale to be so ‘raw’ all the damn time. Remorse is a powerful emotion and I do feel remorseful about so much, but for chrissake, there’s a limit. At some point I am going to have to close the book on the past, and hope that the cosmos kindly does the same. I’m getting sick of all the ‘lessons’ I am learning – OK, OK, OK, fine, I may not have been the greatest person on the planet but it seems cosmically unfair to unload a bunch of experiences on me all at once.

And when I feel like I have reached my limit, which I feel, mechanisms which would have at one time forced me to retreat from this and go get drunk are engaged in a different way. In addictions class I have learned how to change perspectives, to change my belief window, to manage my stresses by tracing them backwards until I get to the source, identify the source, then change the belief. There is an immediate sense of release at the other end and life is, again, manageable.

But it gets exhausting. I wonder, sometimes, if this is sustainable. I suppose there are people with much more stressful lives who don’t have drinking problems, so somehow it must be sustainable. But its damn exhausting to always be on some sort of course correction. Not because I fear relapse, but because I like the person I am now and I don’t want that person to change for the worse. Whether I drink or I don’t, I can’t lose touch with the guy I’ve been building. That’s also stressful.

I’m getting sick of it.

So, this morning as I settled in to the coffee shop where I sometimes write this blog, frustrated and a little angry, and really tired, I didn’t even know what I would write about – I just knew that I am exhausted at maintaining sobriety. I started writing and began to ramble. At the table next to me, a woman came in with her kids. I see her sometimes when I am here.

While she was ordering, her daughter, about 8, made her way over to me and she said, “Hey, you have a good day, OK.”

I was a little floored but I smiled and returned the pleasantry and got back to my ramblings.

Then her mom corrected her, “Lisa, get over her, stop bothering people,” she apologized to me for her daughter’s intrusion.

And her daughter said, “Sorry, but he always tells us to have a good day when he sees us, and he didn’t, so I thought he was waiting for me to say it first.”

Her mom and I both laughed… I was touched. I realized that people may not always realize what I do, what I say, I may not even realize it, but people know how I make them feel. And this morning, I wasn’t making her feel like I usually do, and so she picked up the slack for me.

And in my life, that’s how it works best…. If I live my life well, a good life, if I make people feel decent, or have decent experiences, then on those occasions where I would retreat to my bottle, I can instead just go about my day, because someone will notice, and pick up the slack. And so the cosmos is hell bent on making me feel what I made other people feel, that’s fine – and there is bad with that…. But the more goodness I spread around now that I am happy and sober, the more that comes back to me as well…. And that, somehow comforts me.

You know what, I WILL have a good day.

You too.

Three moms

This past week, I have been dealing with moms. I want to start out by saying that I love my dad, and the fact that I don’t write about him in every single blog is not an indication of the importance I place on my relationship with him. He is cool, wise, and warm. As I grow older, I enjoy the time building the relationship I always wanted to have with him. He is good counsel, he is a LOT of fun, and he is as much a part of my treatment as anyone. More so.

My mother, however, is a colorful creature who, without trying, provides me with the kind of subject matter most writers dream about.

But back to the other moms I have met this week. Through a series of unusual circumstances I have crossed paths with three mothers who each have a son in a different stage of addiction and recovery, and to speak to these mothers is a profound lesson on the tireless concern that a mom has for an addicted son, the stages of addiction, and as I spoke to each of them, I could have substituted my name for their son’s name, I could have substituted their faces for my own mom’s.

I am writing about this because it really gives me some insight to the heartache I may have put my own mother through, or the joy I eventually provided to her, through this journey to sobriety. The other reason I am writing about it is that I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I am not special, and that my experience isn’t radically different from someone else who might be entering treatment – I wrote that because I want people who read this to understand that I am not remarkable, and that I have achieved success and triumph because I am living sober, not because I have some sort of special quality that others lack. I am your garden variety alcoholic.

I can’t imagine the emotion a mother must feel when she watches her grown son succumb to the torment of addiction. One mother who reads this blog often does so with her drunk son in the next room, sometimes she listens to him throwing up from the physical effects of long term abuse, or the short term of another bender.

She worries at night,
she is disgusted,
she loves him deeply,
she can’t stand to have him around,
she doesn’t want to be near him,
she can’t fathom the thought of him alone in this,
she misses him.

This is an indescribable emotion I would imagine. It’s the kind of emotion she feels in an instant – all of these feelings, wrapped up in a few split seconds every time she thinks about him; even when she doesn’t.

This mother takes comfort from reading this blog, she has said that there is something comforting to see the progress, the challenges, the changes. She reads it with the hope that soon, her son, will be traveling his own journey – the same destination, his own path.

Her son is on the list to come to the ranch. This is the first part of seeking treatment, but sobriety is an endurance race, it is not a sprint. As a runner, I can say with every ounce of confidence that every endurance run I do starts with what seems like an insignificant step. It leads to the next, then the next, and before I realize it, I look back and I am 5 miles away from where I started.

He drinks alone, he can’t stop. He is me, in another family. He struggles not knowing what to expect. He wants to be sober but the method on how to get there escapes him. There is obvious tension in that family because he has been graciously allowed to live with his family until he gets into the program. His life, like mine did, has turned into a minute by minute exercise in addiction maintenance, like mine were, his days are spent consumed by an excess of the pointless. He spins his wheels, and goes no where. This is the critical point that every addict on the farm describes right before they come here.

The chaos of a life which has spun completely out of control is mostly a blur to an addict. I want you to notice the verb in that last sentence, ‘has spun’ and not ‘spinning’ – I use this because by this point, he has either decided “I am about to stop drinking forever, this terrifies me, so I an going to consume so much now so I won’t have to face the idea that I am going to eventually have to stop,” or it means he has given up.

But what I told this mother was this is unsustainable. Something will end at this point. The addiction will go away, or he will die, but no one, not even the most seasoned veteran of functional drinking, can sustain a drinking habit or drug habit when it has reached this point. I say this with sincerity, if he continues, he will die – and soon.

This mother has glimmers of hope. He has days where he is lucid, she says she can still see glimpses of her son somewhere in there. She calls to discover he is advancing up the list. She tries to go about her day, tries to live like normal. She wants things to return to normal. How they should be, normal.

She said she would come visit the ranch on a day she could be sure that things wouldn’t fall apart, and his drinking wouldn’t become a wet mess if she were to leave him at home. He isn't ready to come visit. She is held hostage by his addiction as much as he is.

We have a new guy on the ranch. He came in a couple months ago. Immediately, I sensed a reserve, almost sadness about him. He doesn’t mope around or appear to be melancholy, but, his smile is only slightly illuminated, it remains dimmed because he is where he is, doing what he is doing, and why he is doing it. I know this smile, I had it too. It’s not a forced happy, its more like, ‘I will tolerate this, I will appear happy but I am perfectly fine with living my own sadness without you even involved.” It’s the kind of smile that never makes it up to your eyes – it’s stalled somewhere before it gets there, perhaps right below the tear duct. By the end of this program, I hope his smile moves back up to his eyes.

This new guy was given the profoundly sad news last week that one of his best friends was found dead, a drug overdose.

He dutifully put his smile on, he went about his day, kind of in a daze. I observed him for several days – because we work out together sometimes, I know him socially, so I made it clear I was available if he wanted to unload. The ranch is a very safe place, but when you first get there, it is really hard to find a place to be comfortable and to find someone with whom you feel comfortable. You may remember, Curtis came to me first when his brother died over the summer. It was a privilege that he came to me. Providing compassion to Curtis, a friend who’s trust I earned, prepared me for the new friend who would require my compassion, a position of trust I hadn’t deserved or actually earned from him.

Because he was still in Phase I, and the rules of the program state that he can’t leave the ranch without being escorted by a higher phase guy, he humbly asked me if I would go with him on a Sunday afternoon to get clothes to wear for a funeral, to get his haircut, and a few small things he needed. WOW!! It’s as if an angel was at work here – I was being asked to go shopping, AND get a haircut. If anyone on that farm knew the importance of a haircut, it was me. Good grooming has been one of the guiding principles of my treatment plan.

His mom also accompanied us. Her son had already been in the program for almost 60 days, and she could hardly contain her glee at how he is progressing, and that he is somewhere safe. It is a small gift that we are able to give our moms while on the farm, the gift of relief. She was a lot like my mom, ‘When can you get a pass, we should go see a movie, what do you need, tell me about your friends.”

It was as if she finally found her son again, like he had been gone, and VOILA here he appeared again. It was as if the past several years were like a bad bad dream and now she had woken up, and here he was, all the time. When my mom dropped me off at the ranch that first day I arrived here back in May, she hugged me, fought off the tears and managed to kindly ask me to, "bring my son home.”

I watched the careful dance this mom danced, the one that my family made around me in the beginning. Not knowing how much to ask but having a million questions, not knowing what to say, but wanting to say a million things, not knowing how to act – they don’t want to offend, or say the wrong thing, but for chrissake, HER SON IS BACK and she is ecstatic.

When we stopped to get his haircut, she and I had a moment to speak. Of course she had a bunch of questions for me. I have been there 9 months now (257 days to be exact) – and I have worked a pretty good program. She is friends with my chaplain, her son has my chaplain, so the opportunity to speak to me was one where she might be able to fast forward and know what to expect, and one in which she might understand what has already happened.

She grew silent in our conversation. As she looked out into space, out of nowhere, she said with grief, ‘They used to find him curled up in a ball, asleep on the street.’ I listened as she began to pour out tales of her sadness, of her worry, she spoke from such a deep place in her heart about how she feels safe that now he is safe. She never looked at me when she told me of these things, its as if her mind shut off and her heart was talking, she was channeling the fear of a mother who lived with the idea that she could lose her son at any time. She spoke of her hopes for him, all the while restrained by her emotional caution. She hasn't completely submitted to the idea that this time, this may work, but she wants it, she hopes.

She bought me a Smash Mouth Hamburger.

I accompanied this new resident to the funeral the next day because he still hadn’t phased. He spoke to me about his conflicts with that day. He wanted to be with his friends to grieve but he knew there would be alcohol and drugs around and he wasn’t ready for that. He wondered what he might have done if he wasn’t at the ranch. He was troubled all day by the tapes in his head, playing forward to what his friends were doing. The divine message that his friend senselessly died from an addiction, from an overdoes, was not lost on him. To his mom, I say, I believe that your son is gonna be OK… he get’s it. He wants to get it.

I thought about the first son, and how I wished he could have been at that funeral to see the kind of love people have for him, and so he could witness the devastating effects of unbridled addiction.

I also heard from a third mother. Her son was doing very good. She didn’t speak to me about his addiction, instead she spoke about a newspaper article she read over the weekend in which her son was written about because of a few career successes. She spoke briefly about her weekend, and she mentioned plans for her son when he went on weekend pass, the fun stuff they might do – or the regular stuff that they might get around to. When I talked to her she didn’t mention a thing about alcohol or worry, life had gotten back to normal.

And that mom was my mom. And next weekend, I will be bringing her son home.

Peace all,
Keep the faith


DAYS SOBER: 268
DAYS SINCE I WATCHED THE BONNIE HUNT SHOW: 259

I am a selfish jerk. So what.

So, this weekend, I went to the City, and I went out. I had a great time, but as I mentioned in last week’s blog, I went out with someone who I was slightly more interested in that ‘just friends’ and I’ll tell you one thing, this changed EVERYTHING for me.

I have been going out with friends since I have been here. Many of them drink and I have even watched as they metamorphed into completely different people. When you are sober and you watch people you know well begin to drink, there is an almost immediate change in their behavior. It’s a slight widening of the eyes, there is a definite slur – even a small one – the smell is toxic – eyes seem to glass over. Other people may not notice this, but I can see it right away – almost after the first drink someone takes.

When I watch this, I chuckle a little at my own drunken behavior. I mean, who in the hell did I think I was kidding all those times I was drinking and claiming, “No, I am not drunk,” – My parents and Alex all say that they could tell immediately – sometimes within the first sentence. I remember being at grocery stores, the library, the bank, at restaurants, tons of places, just hammered and thinking that no one knew. But the smell alone… that musty, dirty, old booze, hot breath, stale cigarette, sweaty, ‘its coming out my pores’ smell…. It doesn’t have a name, but almost everyone who knows an alcoholic can smell it from a football field away. It’s the putrid smell of a spirit rotting.

Back to my friends. As the nights progress, these people change, become more emotional, rambunctious, I can see the common sense and composure begin to fade. I am usually jovial and happy around them – I never mind if someone drinks to get drunk – I decided early on that I was not going to be one of those recovering know-it-alls who is ready to prescribe addiction examinations to everyone because I made it through a few months of treatment.

God, I hate that.

But watching ‘people I know’ become ‘drunk people I know’ doesn’t really bother me. In fact, at this point in sobriety, it helps reinforce my commitment to staying sober. When I watch cool, calm, collected people become bumbling idiots, it helps me stay on the straight and narrow.

But a strange thing happened to me this weekend during the ‘date’ – I realized that when I am invested in someone, more than friends, someone with whom I want to build something more substantial with, it DOES matter that they drink. I know, I am as shocked by this as you are. I hardly cared a stitch about a buddy or friend or even a family member drinking, but when it comes to the person I want to let inside my heart – well, it certainly matters. And I just don’t think I can date someone who drinks.

You might be thinking that I don’t want this because I may be tempted to drink – but that isn’t it at all. I am not tempted to drink. I find it repulsive, in fact. THAT is why I can’t date someone who drinks. I just don’t want it in my life – not at that level anyway. I don’t want to deal with the drama and confusion that comes with it, I don’t care to deal with the lack of control and the emotional mutterings of a drunk person. I want to be able to go to bed with the same person I woke up with and I want to be able to wake up at a reasonable hour in the morning and do reasonable things and not waste a day on a hang over. So much of my life has been handed over to MY OWN hangovers, why in the hell would I spend another minute on SOMEONE ELSE’S hang over.

Hypocritical, perhaps. I don’t really know what to do about it except say that I am not above being a hypocrite in this regard, I know people stayed with me, loved me, and maintained relationships with me even when I was a dead-inside drunkard, perhaps they deserve a shout out, and I don’t know why they did it, or how they did it, but I am not going to do it. I am spending a heck of a lot of time trying to take care of myself right now, I don’t have the time to be taking care of someone else.

I think I have discovered why they say someone in recovery shouldn’t take care of anything more complex than a houseplant for a full year – for me, if the house plant bugs me, I’ll pull it out, and throw it away, or stop watering it.

They have rules about you doing the same thing to people.

Does this make me a selfish jerk? Maybe. But it makes me a SOBER selfish jerk. I am OK with that.

Anyway, I am not closing the book on the new relationship, but I am going to be a little more critical of where it’s leading. I’ll keep you posted.

Work has been going great. I love my job, and I love the job I am doing at my job. I feel a real distance from the ranch, though, and I don’t really like that. Lane and Marty have already moved to the final dorm before graduation. Next stop – freedom.

Brian, Curtis, then I will be moving to this last dorm in the next few weeks. We do have a transition group meeting that the top 20 guys are required to attend. This is a group that arms us with some real world skills as we transition away from the ranch into real life; when we are no longer accountable to the UA/BA’s we get, and only accountable to the guy standing in the mirror. I have recently found out that I am number 22 on this list. WOW!! I remember being number 72!!

I know there are many people who follow this blog and read it because there is someone in your life who is struggling with addiction. I want to assure you of one thing, I am not special, I am not unique. The successes and the happiness, and the personal triumphs I detail are not only mine. There are MANY guys on this ranch, many guys who have completed all kinds of programs who also have this kind of re-ignition of their spirit.

I am just the one who invited you along.

Peace all, have a good week.

PS - the email for the blog is snapshotsfromrehabranch@yahoo.com if you would like to write a personal email.