What Have I Done to Myself Now?

February 28, 1985. I’m looking out the window of my room in treatment. Inpatient treatment. Two hundred miles from where I was living in my folks’ basement. I have no home of my own. No car outside in the parking lot. Twenty bucks in a change jar and that’s in the office. With my suitcase. “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” (Dylan).

February 28, 2016: I’m straddling my mountain bike on the trail along the river, looking towards that same window. One mile from the home I own outright. Tonight, I know the answer to that question: “The Best Thing You’ve Ever Done for Yourself!” Hands down. No question. Beyond a shadow of a doubt. End of conversation!

(How did I get here from there? See upcoming Hockey Stick Graph II post.)

I Am 73 and I’m Feeling Terrific!

About ten years ago, I ran across an alcohol ad that read, “if you are too tired to go out tonight, imagine how you’ll feel when you are 73,” accompanied, of course, by a pretty girl bending over a pool table. Given that I had not drank or used other drugs for around 20 years at that time, my thoughts ran more to comparing how I felt at 63, to how I felt at 23, with the latter coming up short. Way short.

At 23, I woke up sick and tired and stayed sick and tired all day, until I suddenly flipped over to “wired,” in the late afternoon. Morning promises to get right home after work and go to bed were quickly adapted to meet the changing circumstances and became, “after a few beers.”

Like “old Pop Fox” in “The Dear John Letter Lounge” (Walker, J. J.), I repeatedly modified that promise to “after I finish this beer,” until Willie sang “turn out the lights, “The Party’s Over’…” One would think that after the first thousand times I woke up sick, sad and sorry, I might detect a faint suggestion of a pattern, but that isn’t the way an addiction works.

Towards the end of my quarter-century of self-inflicted misery, I was starting to see a pattern emerging dimly from the fog. I recall climbing into the passenger seat on a beautiful August workday morning and informing my driver that I didn’t know whether I needed my head examined or my butt kicked. Unfortunately, it had become a little late for insights alone to rescue me from myself. That isn’t the way an addiction works.

(See the first Hockey Stick Graph post for details on how the self-inflicted misery lifted.)   

I finally gave up on repeated efforts to “quit drinking on my own” and volunteered for inpatient treatment. I was “sick and tired of being sick and tired,” yet afraid my life was about to lose all its “color,” like an old-time black and white movie. If I couldn’t drink, "how could I enjoy live music, play pool, meet new people…?”

It turned out I could do all three quite well, thank you, although shooting pool went by the wayside, crowded out by new pursuits, like a real “college try” and…well, see the upcoming Hockey Stick Graph II for what happened after I got my mojo back from the pawn shop. Once I emerged from the fog enveloping “The Little Land” (Limeliters), I was amazed, even overwhelmed, by all the choices available. You can’t “live large,” in “The Little Land.”

The choice is yours. If you want to feel like an out-of-shape 73-year-old tomorrow, go out and live it up with your false friend(s) tonight. If you want to feel terrific, like this 73-year-old, stay tuned for more posts. 

In the Real World, Sh*t Happens!

When ensnared in the Weird World Web of Alcohol, Other Drugs and Gambling, Bullsh*t Happens!

My house nearly caught fire due to faulty wiring, but I was “present.” Not just in the immediate vicinity, but alert, awake, aware, able to see the tendril of smoke. Had it happened overnight, when I was sleeping a normal sleep, my house may have burned down. Sh*t Happens! Had I been in the immediate vicinity, but not “present,” Slippin’ Into Darkness” (War), seeking my own personal time-warp of a drug-induced stupor, my house burning down would be yet another example of “Bulltsh*t Happens!” Things that don’t have to happen, happen. When I am “wasted,” I am performing a twisted rain dance ceremony, petitioning the Cosmic Disaster Demon to “pick me! Pick me!”

In addition to increasing the odds that there will be more BS in my life, I also decrease my resources for coping with disasters, be they “natural” (SH) or “unnatural” (BSH). I will have wasted time, money, energy and the goodwill of my rings of social support, be they family, friends, workplace or community based.

I am fully aware that my best efforts to follow my program and live right won’t fully shield me from negative events, but I think I’m considerably less likely to get run over if don’t cross the street in a Drunkard’s Walk.

Stay out of the Weird World Web and avoid the avoidable. Sh*t Happens! often enough. Bullsh*t doesn’t have to Happen!

The Hockey Stick Graph of Early Recovery

In the business world, there is something called a “Hockey Stick Graph” that tracks the typical income stream when a successful new business starts up. First, the business goes in the hole due to start-up expenses, then slowly begins to see money coming in, a process that can be discouraging.

A hockey stick has a “blade” that slowly slants down from the tip and then turns sharply upwards at the “elbow.” If the numbers along the bottom represent time and the numbers along the side represent profits for a new business, the graph line will come to resemble a hockey stick, if the business has a good idea, a good plan and the owner puts forth a good effort.

Initially, the owners have to rent or buy a space, renovate it to meet the needs of their product, buy inventory, stock the shelves and advertise. Time and money have been spent, but no income has yet been generated. Opening the door on Monday morning and yelling “ta-da!” won’t pack the interior with eager customers reaching for their wallet. The owners might be tempted to take a long coffee break and a longer lunch, since the odds are no one will show up while they’re gone anyway. That would be a mistake.

If they remain on the premises, ready to smile and be helpful without being pushy, offer to special-order what has not been stocked and tidy up the shelves after a “looker” has riffled through them, the first customers that stop in and buy or look around will leave with a good impression of the store.

If the product meets their expectations, they will tell a few friends. Weeks and months go by, income growing so slowly the profit line floating just above the zero mark barely moves. It may be tempting to just give up, close the doors and “bag the coffee! Let’s get a drink to cry in.”

Remembering the conviction behind the decision to spend the time and money to open the doors and knowing that “time takes time,” the successful entrepreneurs stick it out, continuing to “do the next right thing.” In the community, word of mouth starts to spread. “What you need is one of those Jezgadoes that the new shop on Main is selling. They ain’t no counter-monkeys like up at the Big Box. They know what you need and how to use it.” Satisfied customers return, some of their friends come in, each of them tell another prospective buyer and suddenly the profits take a steep rise, taking off from the blade, like a Space X rocket heading for orbit.

The business has just gone "viral.”

My own recovery began in just such a fashion. 

I left treatment at the tip-end of the hockey stick blade. What was left of my brain, after I had scattered cells on tavern floors all across this great land of ours, was enveloped in a fog worthy of San Francisco Bay, remaining tissue soaked in THC, short-term memory unreliable to absent. The mind that operated out of that brain filtered every bit of information that did penetrate the haze through a web of lies that snared any incoming thought that threatened the justifications I had constructed to shield the results of my using from reality. Denial, “Don’t Even kNow I Am Lying,” made it possible to believe the unbelievable. I had to slice my way through the strands of that web, peering through the fog of a malfunctioning brain as I did so. 

I had the good idea: “Alcohol has to go.” I had a good plan: “This time you need to use recovery groups, daily readings and reminders to ‘keep the matter at the top of your mind’ (Wolfe, N) and exercise and nutrition to feel good.” I also had a strong intention to make an honest effort and make it for at least a year and 24 hours, before deciding whether this new life was right for me. Why the “and 24 hours?” If I ever decide to drink again, I have to wait 24 hours to ensure it wasn’t a passing chemical imbalance. I had my cravings, but they seldom lasted two hours, let alone 24, although some were pretty powerful for a while. 

When I returned home, anyone observing me from a distance would wonder if I had even quit using, as my life remained in the blade and appeared unchanged. I had been advised to keep my stress level down and not make any big changes. “Get a job, not a career,” for instance. I began losing some weight and I was a more cheerful and productive employee and coworker. I started driving to a small city, forty miles away, for Aftercare and recovery group meetings, stocking up on library or used books dealing with addiction issues and avoiding the bars completely. That was about it for observable change.

I had an “as-needed” gig or two in construction and on my cousins’ farms, as in when they needed me. Internally, walking over the leg-wearying plowed ground of grain fields “picking rock,” was a remarkably pleasant task with my headphones on and without a hangover.

I was still broke most of the time, as neither my hours nor my wages amounted to much at that point, but about six months into recovery, I got a job driving a spud truck for the potato harvest. Seven 12-hour days a week, and the money was coming in better than it had for years. Since I wasn’t spending my hard-earned cash acting as a middleman between the brewer and the sewer or burning it up in my bong, I actually saved some money, but, in six weeks, the harvest was over.

I had begun to cough up blood and jumped to the obvious conclusion: lung cancer from years of sheetrock dust and lung-busting hits of marijuana. I drove down to St. Paul where the doctor informed me that I had picked up a minor lung infection and gave me an antibiotic. As they often do, the pills knocked out the bad microbes and cleared up the infection, but the "friendly fire" also wiped out all the good microbes that inhabit our guts, help us process our food and create beneficial byproducts. The diarrhea resulting from the "collateral damage" had me more fatigued than I was from the lung issue. Ten months sober and I was still “tired,” albeit no longer suffering from the “sick through and through,” feeling that had dominated my mornings for years.  

I was staying with my youngest brother, a companion on many using adventures. His apartment was the point of departure for frequent expeditions for his crowd, who were still living the “highlife” I had formerly advocated for myself and them. It would have been easy to get discouraged and call ten months “close enough. This isn’t working.” That would have been a major, possibly terminal, mistake.

I began eating yogurt to restore the friendly bacteria. The health of my “innards”  recovered and my physical “hockey stick graph” took off like a rocket. I didn’t have to wait two more months to come down on the side of hanging up my drinking shoes. I had kind of known that I was going to like it by the time I left the hangovers behind in treatment, but now, at ten months, it was a dead-bang, no-brainer, “this-is-the-feeling-I-want!” decision. I’d had that before, of course, in my many short experiences with abstinence, but l had lacked the key piece of information that I was not a candidate for the occasional glass of beer and had to founder on that shoal again and again, unable to solve the simple equation: Me plus any alcohol equals a ping-pong of drunk to sick and tired, over and over again.

That didn’t mean I was assuring anyone, “I’ll never drink again.” Thirty years later, I still don’t do that. Overconfidence has caused more than one unnecessary setback in life, as well as in sports. But I did declare my intention to abstain from alcohol to myself and others.

At that point, I still retained a lingering notion that I would someday let marijuana back into my life. After all, alcohol causes all kinds of problems, but when you smoke weed, nothing happens. And that, of course, is the problem.

As I was piloting my twenty-year-old, but smoothly-running ’63 Chevy home on Christmas Day 1985, listening to two newly recorded, 90-minute mix tapes on my new personal tape player, I was pretty happy with my life. I had some money left over from the spud-truck job. Even though I had no prospects for work until spring, I wasn’t worried. I was living rent-free, had a library card, enough money for gas and food and felt younger than I did when I was 21 and hungover.

The physical hockey stick graph was now well up into the handle. I weighed 170 pounds, down from a high of 212, and was taking stairs two at a time. Gone were the days when I needed to wear striped bib overalls, so people could tell if I was rolling or walking. Given that my crippling hangovers were my only motivation for quitting and the fact that I had written off any possibility of completing the 12 hours I needed to graduate from college and having no desire for an “office job” anyway, my only goals were to abstain from alcohol, continue to lose weight and save enough money in the summer to survive another winter.

I still had not made a long-term commitment re marijuana, but given a “near miss” on Thanksgiving where an over-abundance of hash and grass at a friend’s house led to an uncomfortable feeling that nearly had me reaching for a beer, I knew that the weed had to remain sidelined for a long time.

I had no clue I was so much as “on the blade” of another hockey stick graph, but things that had already occurred or were in the works were going to lead to goals and accomplishments that I had not even dreamt of dreaming about yet. Goals that weren’t even on my radar that were going to lead to the most satisfying accomplishments of my life.  

This post has gotten too long already, so it will be continued in Hockey Stick II.

Main Track to Sidetrack and Back Again

When trains are traveling on the “main track,” from opposite ends of the line at the same time, they are going to meet somewhere, leading to either “frozen traffic” (Dylan “Absolutely Sweet Marie”  Jason and the Scorchers light up “Marie” too) or a train wreck (Dead, G. ”Casey Jones”). Since it would cut traffic and revenue in half to wait until one train crossed the state, before another train could leave in the other direction, a work-around had to be found. The solution was to provide a place to temporarily park one of the trains off to the side of the mainline. By creating “sidetracks” in a few places, they were able to provide parking spots for this purpose, but getting a train off the main track poses a problem.

Unlike cars, the engineer driving the train can’t just turn a steering wheel and “pull off” the main track. To ease the transition, rails were laid such that a train could transition from the main track to the sidetrack. To control whether a train continued on the main track or moved over to the sidetrack, a switch is installed that moves the sidetrack rails over to pick up the locomotive’s wheels and change its direction.

The process may be automated now, but originally a switchman was employed to “throw” the switch when a train needed to be sidetracked.

At the age of 17, I was rolling down the main track, headed for college and a career. After my high school sweetheart callously dumped me, “you’ll be in college and I want to enjoy my high school prom and activities…” I turned for solace to the alcohol I had just begun experimenting with.

When it comes to a natural talent for throwing a life-switch, alcohol and other drugs have no peers. After 25 years and a lot of hard miles, on a wild ride that never got off the sidetrack, I went to treatment. There I finally threw the switch at the other end of the sidetrack and a quarter century of stasis was broken. Life on the main track beckoned.

I wanted to power-on and blast-off, but trains and lives don’t work that way. When a stopped train starts to move forward, its massive inertia has to be overcome before it can even start moving. The locomotive wheels will spin at first, as it struggles to gain traction on the slick rails. At first, there is no forward motion, then it haltingly, slowly, begins to move ahead again.

A life is much the same. Discarded values needed to be reinstated. Goals needed to be established. Forward, but where to?

For more on how this process worked in my own life, I am going to play the “switchman” and move the reader over to the “The Hockey Stick” post. For now, I’ll just say my progress was slow at first, but suddenly picked up speed. Picture a graph that looks like a hockey stick.

A year-and-a-half from the day I entered treatment, I walked onto the campus of the college I’d finally graduate from, determined to make it work this time. Even though your own life won’t take off like a nitromethane-powered dragster, tires smoking, screaming off the starting line, this is not the time to give up.

Your life is not a lost cause. Whether your immediate goals are regaining your health or the trust of your family or employer, patience is your friend. Keep on doing “the next right thing,” whatever needs to be done today and don’t let yourself get overwhelmed by the work ahead. You have to cross the Valley of Death, but keep your eyes on the “green pastures” waiting on the other side.

We were “accomplishment addicts” before we ever used any drugs and the addictive behavior took a free ride on that characteristic. It is time to get back to reality-based accomplishments. Remaining abstinent and staying true to a useful (comprehensive) Program of Recovery needs to be the first goal.

Even if that is all you do the first year of recovery, you will have accomplished a lot. And things will be coming together in ways you aren’t even aware of at the time, although others will often be able to see the positive changes occurring.

Once your life-train leaves the sidetrack and starts picking up speed, don’t just sit back and admire the passing scenery. Keep yourself alert for signals that a switch has been thrown that could lead you off the main track again or a signal that you need to avoid an oncoming freight train, like old “playmates, playgrounds and play things.”

Don't forget that the main track still has switches ahead of you today and freight trains coming your way. Be alert for the signals and make sure the switch is sending the freight train to the sidetrack and isn't shunting you off the main track, the track where you want to spend your new life. 

Hangovers Last a Week

“I never have a headache.”

“If I have a headache, it goes away as soon as I (eat something) (get moving) (sleep a little longer).

“Tired? Oh, maybe a little, but by afternoon I’m out Frolfing.”

I’m talking here about typical alcohol hangovers, but all attempts to get something for nothing via other drugs also extract usurious interest rates for the “instant-cash advance” on unearned good feelings. 

In my first job as an addiction counselor, I ran an eight-week program for clients, mostly college students, who had picked up a Second-Offense Driving Under the Influence conviction. This was easy to do in a small college town, so most did not meet the then-current “Alcohol Dependence” criteria for a more intense Outpatient Treatment recommendation.

The group members met with me first for an individual session so I could get to know them and to sign a “contract” that included a commitment to abstinence for the length of the program.

The clause was intended to allow them to test their ability to refrain from drinking, but something at least as useful came out of it as well. I am sure that not all of them honored their vow, but all had assured me that they were by no means daily drinkers, typically stating something like, “I only drank on Friday nights, to blow off steam after a stressful week.”

We then met for six weekly group sessions, with one of the topics being, “how is this not drinking going for you? Difficult on Friday night? Bored?” Few found the new regimen all that tough and some even stated surprise at how much more energetic they felt. The real surprise came at the end of the program when we had an individual “exit interview.”

A spontaneous admission that repeatedly emerged was, “my grades have never been better.” It seemed to be more than a time issue, as they still dated or went to movies and such on Friday night, plus they spent an evening a week in group. I began to drill down to see if I could determine the “why?”

I started asking how their week nights compared with their experience the previous semester and that is when the lights began to come on for both of us.

“Last semester I promised myself I would go to the library or study in my room every night and put in the time needed to get the grades I knew I was capable of, but that usually didn’t happen. I’d decide to watch a favorite TV show and wind up watching the next one and the next, or someone would come in my room or I’d drop by theirs and the next thing it was ‘too late to get anything done anyway, I’ll hit it hard tomorrow night,’ and that happened a lot. Even when I was studying, I didn’t feel sharp. Stuff wasn’t sticking, especially later in the week when I’d feel kind of hyper and starting to focus on weekend plans. This semester, I’m already in the library by Sunday night and I stick to my study-hours most of the week.”

It wasn’t only students who reported a difference in their week nights. A thirty-something woman with teenage daughters said, “come to think of it, my daughters never used to come home until it was bedtime. Now they spend some evenings at home or come home before they are required to. I got to looking at that and realize I am a lot easier to get along with, not as grumpy and critical of them. I think I’m in a better mood in general and they like to be around me now.”

A salesman in his forties reported that he always had intentions to get up early and get into the businesses he sold supplies to, before they got busy and didn’t have time to listen to his pitch. “Now, I even buy breakfast for some of them and have their complete attention.”

I thought of my pro football team, the ones that were Super Bowl contenders on paper every year, then wound up leading the league in DUI’s and seeing their hopes fade away. Getting blown-out on the plane flying home Sunday evening was dulling their focus and reaction time in practice, all week long, as well. Blown plays the next Sunday gave them something to drink over after that game too. (North Dallas Forty) I decided that if I were a General Manager, I’d require the entire team to commit to a no-drinking policy for the entire season and watch the team step it up a notch, instead of down, for that reason alone.

When you hammer your brain and body on Friday, the effects aren’t gone a day later. The Medical Aspects of Alcohol video, widely shown in treatment programs, used an example to help you see that. “You hit your thumb with a hammer and throw away the hammer. Your thumb-hammer level is now zero, but the pain lingers on.” The human brain is the most complex structure in the known universe. Just like a dragster is more complex than a basic automobile and needs to be treated more delicately, the more complex anything is, the less resistant to abuse it tends to be.

Getting “hammered” on Friday night is similar. Your Blood Alcohol Level might be zero by noon, but the delicate mechanism of your brain is swinging wildly, like a child’s mobile with a piece removed, trying to reestablish equilibrium. Signals of distress are heading towards your already confused brain, an externally induced depression settling in, magnifying any natural tendency you have in that direction.

The gut microbiome you flooded with poison is trying to repopulate itself and get back to helping you extract the nutrients from your food that your system has come to depend on.

Your internal EPA, also known as your liver, is trying to clean up the toxic spill, so it can get back to its many natural functions.

By the time all that settles down days later, it is time to “blow off some steam.” Steam that might be put to better use exercising for the endorphin rush that is a byproduct of that useful behavior.