12th Step

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I Feel So Sleezy

June 29, 2008 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 6 comments

Remember these? High school gym shorts from the 1980′s. Wow. At the time I thought they were pretty hot, at least on certain guys. You had to have pretty great legs to pul[ this look off, but there were always a couple of guys in gym class who fit the bill. I think the poly-knit ones we had in high school were actually a bit tighter, perhaps a bit shorter which was only made possible because the slits up the side were not quite as high. The closet of my youth was filled with the hope of a ‘costume failure’.

No one would ever dream of wearing these today, except perhaps on Halloween. High school gym shorts today are perforated nylon, loose, and come to the mid-thigh. Equally hot, on the right guy of course, if you ask me, but I’ve always thought that men are the most beautiful creatures. Read the rest of this entry »

If You Lived Here You’d Be Home Now

June 10, 2008 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 8 comments

In the late 80s and early 90s they were not an uncommon site along the freeways leaving downtown Los Angeles; huge condo projects festooned with banners that read “If you lived here you’d be home now.” When the topic was brought up at a meeting, what are you doing today for your recovery, it’s what I immediately thought of. In the rooms we usually hear the same sentiment described as, “I live in the rooms and visit the world.”

I’m an egomaniac. I like my way better. Read the rest of this entry »

Me Not Meth

June 9, 2008 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 1 comment

MeNotMeth.org

You may have noticed a link at the bottom of my sidebar for Me Not Meth -a project of the California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs. I’m giving them an extra plug here because they bribed me with a groovy t-shirt.

Yes. I’m cheap. Read the rest of this entry »

In My Spare Time I’m A Geek

June 9, 2008 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 4 comments

Over the last couple of days I’ve occupied my spare time building a custom search engine using Google’s search service.  You’ll find it at the top of my sidebar.  I have painstakingly included every single blog listed on the Top 100 Sober Blogs to be the exclusive sites searched for results on this engine. In other words, I’ve built a search engine that compiles the collected experience, strength and hope of over 150 sober bloggers. In the interest of full disclosure I should point out that I directly benefit from the Google advertising on the results pages and that may actually make this blog become self supporting. It is certainly better than placing advertising directly on the blog. But I also thought that it would be a great thing to have, a search engine that was specific to those in recovery looking for personal stories.

If any of you are interested in placing this search box on your own blog or if you’re interested in adding other blogs to the engine send me an email – outofgas@thelastchancetexaco.com – and I’ll send you the code to include or add the blog.

Peace out.

Day 500 – A Step Away

May 29, 2008 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 3 comments

AbnormalIt’s not a recognized milestone of course. I just happen to like the number, and considering that in the early part of this blog, in it’s first incarnation as methedup, which is republished here, I truly was counting days so I thought I’d just revisit the practice.

There is a place in the book that says the people close to us often recognize the growth before we do. In other places it says variously “cessation of drinking is but the first step away from a highly strained, abnormal condition,” “we feel a man is unthinking when he says that sobriety is enough” and “by this time sanity will have returned.” These are, in my mind, among the most important reasons to practice 12 step recovery. Any program of recovery which simply accomplishes abstinence is lacking something essential.

I mentioned before that I have two cousins who have also battled addiction. One of them practices 12 step recovery and one of them is simply abstinent. I don’t know if the difference between them can be directly attributable to their different methods of recovery but I know that the contrast between them is sharp and my grandmother’s funeral really brought that contrast to my attention.

My first cousin arrived the day before the funeral with his two teenage sons in tow having driven several hundred miles. He was very ‘present’, not only with his mother, but with each member of our family. When he asked me how I am I knew he had genuine interest. When we talked about going back to work after a long period of addiction he shared real experience and keenly observed that many of the jobs we can get are jobs working with people that we have no business being around; exactly my experience. He assured me, from his own experience, that it gets better.

My other cousin, the one who is simply abstinent, had farther to travel but was traveling by air. When his brother went to the airport to pick him up his luggage was there but he wasn’t. His flight had been delayed. He chose to leave the airport to go have dinner. He wasn’t at the airport when his flight departed. He changed ticket and boarded a flight which would get him to a connecting flight in Denver. He missed his connection in Denver, saying that the airline changed the gate the flight was leaving from without announcing it and that the flight actually left early. There wasn’t another flight to Idaho Falls till the following day but that flight would not get him to Idaho Falls in time. After the funeral service in Idaho Falls his brother went to the airport to pick him up while the rest of the family drove 120 miles to Preston for a second memorial service and internment. By significantly exceeding the speed limit he arrived in time for the second service dressed in jeans and a t-shirt he’d been wearing for two days. He’s “still doin’ the music thing, promoting” and wants to open a club or a bar. He was great with the kids but I never really saw him engage with the adults.

Obligation was a factor in my attendance at grandma’s funeral but my real motivation for being there was to be there for and with my dad and despite the sorrow of the occasion, or perhaps because of it, the time with him was the most intimate, open time we’ve ever spent together. We talked about the contrast between my cousins and he shared his observations about my recovery. In the second appendix, “Spiritual Experience”, it says, “Quite often friends of the newcomer are aware of the difference long before he is himself.” My dad shared with me that this visit was the first time we’ve seen each other that he did not detect any flaws in my way of thinking. He said there were no ideas I shared with him that he disagreed with. He did not think any of my recent experience or plans for my future strange.

Perhaps it is because I tend to be hard on myself that I still see the flaws in my character more than I see the progress. I do see that I am recovering, though. At this point being abstinent without this thing we call recovery seems as strange to me claiming comfort, support and protection by painting shoes on your feet.

I don’t want to make this about religion . . .

May 5, 2008 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 12 comments

Tommy: Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Saviour?
Hedwig: No, but I… I love his work.

John Cameron Mitchell, Hedwig and the Angry Inch

I don’t want to make this about religion because it isn’t about religion. It’s about the same thing everything else here is about. Me. It’s what it was like, what happened (and what’s happening), and what it’s like now. For me. It is my experience, my strength and my hope. It is also a place where I can sit down, slow down, cool down and give the loving Creator of my own understanding room to go to work. It is part inventory, part meditation, all reaching out.

My story is not unique by any stretch. Young men from my home town have gone down similar, almost identical paths. I don’t know all the specifics of Troy’s story but I know he grew up in a similar environment, one fought with pressure to conform to the dominant culture. I can only hope that there was more tollerance in 2006 than in the 70′s and 80′s, when I was his age. In my own case, by the time I was 14 years old I had developed a concrete intellectual bias against every system of thinking which claimed to be the only truth. I carried that bias into every part of my life, judging things which I had never examined.

In my own experience, gaining hope in the second step that a “Power greater than myself” could restore me to sanity, and then gaining enough faith to turn my will and life over to the care of that power, as I understood it, was only possible because the message was delivered to me in a way that I could hear. The men who guided me left the specifics of their own conception of a Higher Power at the door, and instead shared what happened that made them willing to seek that relationship and what that relationship had done for them. At no point did they ever tell me that they had the one truth. They carried the message by strictly adhering to the instructions on page 93 of the book Alcoholics Anonymous which says, among other things, that I could choose any conception of a Higher Power I liked, as long as it made sense to me, and that there was no use arousing any prejudice I may have against theological terms. I was willing to believe in something, so long as you didn’t tell me what to believe.

The meetings I attend most regularly have now been completely invaded by a group of not very Christlike Jesus people who call on themselves to share at meeting level to watch out in the rooms of AA. “There are forces of darkness in these rooms that are marking Christians and taking them out of here.” If you point out to them that there is a way we do things in AA and a reason that we do it they just say, “Then we’ll disagree.” If you call attention to the fact that when they share the way they share, that newcomers and young people get up and leave the meeting, visibly upset; that the way they are sharing does not help to carry the message, they say that they are merely sharing the truth as they understand it.

The program, however, has nothing to do with looking at them, with judging them, and everything to do with looking at me. What part of me is so prideful that I need to be ‘right’ on this point? What within me makes me refuse to accept these people as they are? What is the origin of the blind spot in my faith that makes me think that as a group, the 2nd Tradition won’t see us through this or that the people being driven from the rooms won’t find their way back when the time is right? What am I so afraid of that I cannot seem to find it within myself to treat these people with the same pity, patience and tolerance with which I treat people who can’t stay sober or people to only identify as addicts or people who talk about taking steps they have never taken. Why do I only see that they are not helping the program rather than seeing that the program could help them?

In my 5th step my sponsor pointed out that he though I had a lot more work to do in the area of God and religion. I actually blew him off. “No. Really. I’m so completely OK with all that,” I told him.

No. Really I’m not.

So Spank Me

May 3, 2008 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 10 comments

As much as I hate cross talk in a meeting there are times when sharing what needs to be shared and not cross talking seems almost impossible. Side conversations are annoying, too, but often less so. I’m afraid I participated in both yesterday. Actually I managed the cross-talk thing more successfully. The side conversation thing was to point out something to a sponsee. Since I frequently judge myself too harshly about many things I’m going to absolve myself of this particular sin.

I’m not as eager to absolve the woman who was the target of my cross talk. In fact I just got off the phone with my friend Owen who was also disturbed by this chick who was aparently there not for recovery, but rather to promote her business and spewed a version of the message on AA based on a poor understanding of both the program and the English language. I guess it’s OK for her to think that because the 1st step says “we WERE alcoholic” and that our lives “WERE unmanagable” that it means that she now has power over alcohol. She is, after all, a “nationally certified Christian counselor”. We were all invited to take one of her cards which were pinned up by the stack on the announcements bulletin board.

Correct me if I’m wrong, I said, but doesn’t the book say that no real alcoholic ever recovers control? My understanding is that lack of power and an inability to control is exactly what the problem is and that my only hope of being delivered from the problem is to seek and align myself with a greater power by taking certain, simple, clear-cut steps. I believe it says that what I get isn’t control, but rather a “daily repreive based on my spiritual condition”. I think it also says that at some point there will be nothing standing in between me and picking up except that Higher Power. My experience is that I “recovered from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body”, not that I have regained power over drugs and alcohol. I have not been given the power to control drugs and alcohol. The problem of desiring to control them was simply removed. And that is what I shared.

I am impressed that she is “nationally certified” but wonder if she is state licensed. And since the message I heard from her was not THE message of AA, I threw her cards in the garbage after the meeting. Maybe that wasn’t the right thing to do.

So spank me.

School and Work are Fine

May 2, 2008 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 4 comments

“School and work are fine – and that is what we do between meetings”
Karl M., Covina, CA

“Why do we have to listen to the same people tell the same stories at every meeting?”  Norman leaned over and asked me that at a meeting last night.  He’s right, of course.  We hear the same people share the same stories day after day after day.  Particularly in a small city like mine where the fixtures at the meeting don’t really change.  It is actually one of the things I like best about blogging.  It gives me the opportunity to take a look at today and apply the lens of the solution offered in 12 step programs.  It helps me see the present more clearly.  It gives me new stories; new experience, new strength and new hope.  It gives me a constant source of new stuff to share at meetings; stuff that is already developed and grounded in the solution.  Sometimes, but not very often, it works the other way around; I find information about what I’m living by listening in meetings.

The collective experience, strength and hope shared by sober members of 12 step recovery is much bigger than I can avail myself of in local meetings, though, and my own answer to the problem at the root of Norman’s question has led me not only to the blogs my colleagues write, but to podcasts of AA speaker tapes.  (You’ll find a link on the sidebar, or you can search for “AA speaker tapes” in the search field of iTunes.”  I load my iPod up with these.  At some point every day I’m listening to the experience, strength and hope of other people on this path; other people that I am unlikely to ever meet or hear otherwise.

The problem and the solution are the same, of course, so I’m probably simply hearing new information because the voice is different, and that is a great thing.  Everything that I can add to my recovery is a great thing, and I’m grateful today to have been shown an answer to a couple of my questions about my recovery by Karl M. of Covina, CA in a speech he gave at the Denali Workshop.  I’ve listened to that podcast three times in succession now.

I’ve decided I am absolutely returning to school and that I’m returning to learn a trade, rather than a profession.  I just don’t think I have it in me at the moment to remain in a job that takes up all the psychic and emotional energy I have that I would rather commit to recovery.  I need to double my income fast and I need it to leave my mind and spirit free to give to AA.  Karl talks about how grateful he was that he visited AA before he visited the counselor at the school he was going to attend.  “School and work are fine, but we live in Alcoholics Anonymous and we visit the world.  We don’t live in the world and visit AA.”  I felt that.  I suspected that.  But I didn’t have an adequate way of stating that so clearly and I didn’t have any validation of that in the recovery community around me, at least not so that I could understand.

The other thing I gleaned form this particular tape was the answer to a question that I didn’t even know I had.  How do you know that you’ve given your will and your life over to the care of God.  I’m not going to repeat the explanation Karl gave.  You can learn that well enough on your own, and I would encourage you to, but the answer is absolutely yes.  I have definitely turned my will and my life over to the care of God.  That answer struck me to my core and validated everything that I am doing today for my recovery.  Like finding a landmark on a seldom traveled path at the point you’re sure you’re lost, this bit of information, delivered clearly and specifically and in a way that I could understand, has given me a much needed dose of faith and hope.

It’s fantastic to be sober.  It’s fantastic to have been given a life and a purpose, and it’s fantastic to be able to share it.

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