As I’ve mentioned in earlier episodes, when you find the drink or drug or vice that suits you, you know it immediately. Even if you didn’t recognize it happening, it happens. For people with addictions, which is pretty much everyone, the substance or experience was pinned on their hearts so long ago that they don’t even know it’s there anymore, nor do they know when it happened. The addiction merges into you, sometimes gradually, but is so ingrained into life that it’s unseen. Like mixing two different paint colors, separating the two is impossible. Well, impossible for us humans anyway. Unless you somehow get jolted awake, no recognition happens, the paint is just mixed into you and you are now both colors of paint.

To illustrate the point, take most men today as an example: they will keep popping beers and opening porn sites and feeding political/personal hatreds, without ever noticing they’ve been overtaken. They will do this while they simultaneously complain about the immorality of everyone else. They are not wrong about the immorality of everyone else, but they don’t recognize the massive plank in their own eye. And I include myself in that entire accusation. I am the foolish brother in the Prodigal Son parable, but I am the other brother as well.

When you find the thing that “does it for you,” you can be conquered quickly. You will embrace it and know that this - yes, this - delivers something that was lacking before, something what you sought, what you had been looking for. You didn’t know you were seeking it, but you found it. Once you found it, now it’s part of you, unless you do battle to remove it.

The most visible examples of this comes with meth or heroin addicts, as you can watch it happen so fast, where the first high elevates the user to such great heights that they are lost in the first experience, after which we get to watch their ungracious collapse, their meteoric crash into the mountain of life. But for most people, for our accepted and private addictions, it happens slowly. The drug or experience hooks you, but you dabble, silently and out of sight. Over time you assemble your cheerleaders to support you, the enablers that must be found to allow continuing on further down the path. Then you keep dabbling at it for the rest of your life, stuck on the problem, but keeping up appearances, thinking that it’s not a problem. The meth or heroin addict reaches the conclusion fast and publicly, like a short violent film, but the rest of us require a full five-act tragedy to play out over 75 years. We make drug users and criminals our cautionary tales, our modern outcasts, as their illustration provides such an obvious error that even a child recognizes the mistaken path. Their suffering gives us a sign of one road to avoid, but there are many well-lighted paths that take more circuitous routes but end up at the same place.

I have heard this notion of “instant addiction” from users of opioids, marijuana, meth, sex, gambling, and porn. I’ve actually observed it happen in a gambler once, as he acquired the “taste” for the win. The pleasure of winning a bet spread across his face like The Grinch as he hatched his evil scheme to steal Christmas. When the right wrong touches you, even if you aren’t looking for it, you will know. At that moment, this wrong will then gather its belongings and take up residence inside your head permanently, like a bad tenant that you cannot evict. Just ask anyone who got addicted to oxycodone or other narcotics by accident after receiving pills for pain from a doctor. They didn’t know they were looking for that thrill, but they found it by pure accident. For most people the pills won’t cause a problem, but for others their entire life self-destructs into a pursuit for more prescriptions. To those observing other people with theses vices, especially with vices we do not share, this behavior is bizarre. Yet for most people there is a something like an opioid that draws us in like bugs to a trap, and we just can’t help but taste that sweetness. I recall a night out long ago when I was at a bar with two others. One was a man obsessed with sex. The second was terribly overweight and still obsessed with food. Then there was myself, who just wanted to drink to drunkenness. And as I looked around our table in that bar, I thought to myself, “Aren’t we quite the trio.”

As for me, drinking beer took a bit of getting accustomed to, but as a teenager I had acquired “the taste” and never again lost it. But I wasn’t really after the taste. None of us are after the taste, not really. We want the effect. I’ll take the result, not the taste, thank you very much. The idea that we love the taste is a cool trick. We dress up beer and liquor in a thousand flavors. Ethanol tastes terrible, so it has to be disguised for us to ingest it. We want the buzz. This is the little secret of wine “aficionados” and “craft” beer drinkers and whiskey “connoisseurs,” but they will defend to the death that they love the taste, and surely they do believe it, once alcohol has merged into their life and taken up residence. But without the buzz there is no reason for acquiring a taste. 

I am not trying to say that drinking is bad. This is not a teetotaler tirade. I needed to remove the tap from my own life, but I don’t ever pretend that drinking is bad for all people. Drinking provides much joy for people. We are all just wired for different problems, and mine happens to be alcohol, which is why I babble on about it here, but I feel that one addictive experience can help understand other addictive experiences. Most people can handle a few drinks, although there are many who think they can, but really can’t. What I aiming at is this: people lie about why they drink, because no one does it for the taste. This is how we justify our sins, with simple and sometimes elaborate lies. For the record, drinking is not a sin, but drinking to drunkenness is a sin most definitely. I didn’t make that up, but I think it’s fairly obvious that a large portion of the awful things that happen in our lives and in many families can be traced directly back to drunkenness. Generations of families are ruined by drunkenness, sometimes stemming from a single night that a father or mother was drunk, which begins a domino effect. A good rule is the G.K. Chesterton line, “We should thank God for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them.”

But for those of us that do drink too much of them:

An impulse to do the wrong thing can conquer me. Even knowing something is wrong doesn’t provide enough reason to not to take the wrong action. Reason need not apply. Like the Lotus Eaters in the Odyssey, the high is wanted again and again and the mind never tires of it because it appears to put anxiety, suffering, and mental pain to rest.

Except it doesn’t. The Lotus flower doesn’t fix anything, not at all, but the sailors want to believe it has solved their problem. They forget other things, like where they were going, their home, their families, replacing goals or hobbies with the substance and experience that they now treasure. Odysseus’ men gladly forget all things important to them:

“…those who ate of this honeyed plant, the Lotos,

never cared to report, nor to return:

they longed to stay on forever, browsing on

that native bloom, forgetful of their homeland. (from the Robert Fitzgerald translation)

The Lotus replaces the men’s motivation and direction. There is also the loss of innocence, which is part of everyone’s journey, and this personal pathway is different for all but there are similarities between those who find the Lotus in achievement or status or gambling or drinking or sex, or some combined cocktail of those things. The sense of right and wrong is still present after the first few times, but begins to diminish the more the wrong thing is chosen. Soon the wrong way becomes increasingly normal and eventually becomes a permanent fixture that you don’t want to have judged or reviewed. Then you will not care one bit that some guy named Isaiah ever said, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil” because you will want to be with your precious. Remember, Gollum started out as Smeagol. He was a cute and happy little hobbit before the ring transformed him into a ghoulish murderer.

The echoes of this desire to do the wrong thing is sometimes subtle and you may or may not notice when it happens, but you can hear it plain as day in songs, like One Republic’s Counting Stars. The lyrics cannot be heard but as a yearning to do what his conscience tells him is wrong. This guy gets it.

I feel something so right by doing the wrong thingAnd I feel something so wrong by doing the right thing…Everything that kills me makes me feel alive

The strange twist on those lyrics is not just his desire to do the wrong thing, but his repulsion at doing the right thing. His is an advanced case of lost innocence, but common, as once the decision is made to “call evil good and good evil” then wrong behavior becomes the standard, not the exception. There is even a death wish in these lyrics of wanting to be on the edge of life and death merely to feel alive. You can see this path of destruction in a one-liner from the Parable of the Prodigal Son: “…the younger son collected all his belongings and set off to a distant country where he squandered his inheritance on a life of dissipation.” Surely he knew it was wrong, but he chose that path anyway. He wanted to live wildly and riotously. That was his drug.

There is excitement in doing the wrong thing. Fun and pleasure can come from good things, but the devil plays on the other side of that fence in the activities that we know are wrong. We think, or want to believe, that’s where the fun is at. For me, coloring outside the lines appeared to free the soul from the tethers of morality and furthermore seduced me with the promise of creativity, which I saw in others who had traveled the road of excess. For reference: see every dead rock star. Janis Joplin to Jim Morrison to Bradley Nowell to Amy Winehouse to Scott Weiland to Chris Cornell. Flawed people, but creative souls who achieved a kind of greatness in music, as a side hobby all had major drug or alcohol problems. The result is that we mashup creativity and freedom into one bowl, thinking they go together. This opens the gate to choosing actions that our conscience tells us not to do, like a nerdy hall monitor. When the conscience tells us to “No running, go back and walk,” we decide we are tired of listening to this fuddyduddy, that running in the hall is more fun, so we beat up the hall monitor and take his lunch.

This same “freedom” I saw in writers that I admired. They all seemed to disregard common rules only to make their own and become more creative because of it. Many of these favorite writers also ended up losing their marbles and soon after their life by their own hand, like Ernest Hemingway and Jack London and Hunter Thompson and Sylvia Plath.

Extracting myself from this rut going in the wrong direction, required extra help. Far more motivation and direction was needed to get out of this rut than I needed to get into it. Anyone who has found themselves in a literal rut, whether by plowing a field, driving a car on a gullied out dirt road, or even while using the tow-rope at a ski resort, you can find your way into the rut much easier than you can pull out of the rut. In fact, when watching the tow rope ferry skiers up a hill at a ski resort, I have watched kids fall down in order to get out of the rut, and that matches my own experience. Falling down is sometimes the only way to get out of the rut, otherwise you just end up following the rut to its end. Wiser folks than myself just avoid putting their skis into the rut, or having dropped into the rut, carefully step back out of it. I applaud them on their good sense.

When I was, at long last, able to step out of the rut, I reached a point where I assumed that the problem was solved. “That was easy,” I thought, shaking the snow off my hands, “Problem solved. I’ll never do that again.”

But as I’ve mentioned in earlier episodes, my first attempts to stop drinking failed after a month, or after six months, or even after a year. I had to try and try again. And it’s not impossible, not by a long shot, that even after five years of sobriety I won’t fall headlong right back into the rut again. It happens all the time to people. The rut is always there, if we only choose to put our ski back into it.

Switching metaphors here, let’s move from skiing to dragons. The dragon doesn’t go away. There is a decent chance I will revert back to the same mistakes of the past. But beyond that, even if I may have penned the dragon of drinking, there are plenty of other dragons to face in the world and nearly every day these cause struggle and trouble for me, or rather I allow struggle and trouble into my life. Some days are better than others. Some days I feel that there is nothing that can derail me from doing the right thing. On other days I struggle from the moment I awake in the morning. Those are the days when I forget about God. Why Did Peter Sink? Yes, again, the same answer. He took his eyes off God.

Without a doubt, as creatures we will never be perfect. It’s impossible. The lizard brain is strong, but we can strive away from its wiles that seduce us. Rather than go toward it, we try to resist it. But there are times that we fail. Two sayings I like about perfection are as follows:

* Progress, not perfection.

* Perfection kills.

I can’t claim either of those quotes, but I will steal them for my purposes. Now, these quotes could be interpreted as license to do whatever you want and then seek forgiveness afterward, making them half-hearted enablers of the vices. After all, you could distill “Perfection kills” to mean “I’ll never be perfect, so why try at all?” But that is reducing it to an all-or-nothing scenario where our efforts toward the good are nullified. Even though we will fail, we must strive toward goodness. When we fall it is by choice. Adults are just like any child who wants a cookie, who knows that it’s often easier to get forgiveness for eating the cookie than it is to get permission. So we often perform the act and then the supplication is made later.

This is what often bothers people about Christian forgiveness, as it can come late in a person’s life. However, if there is one thing Jesus makes clear, repeatedly, it’s that God doesn’t care if the change of heart comes late in life, he only cares that it happens. There is the parable of the laborers, where those laborers who worked only an hour in the field received the same pay as those that worked all day. “It’s not fair,” they complain. But nothing is lost for those who worked all day. The eternal reward is the same and just as great. There is no keeping score on who turns back to God, or when they turn back to God. Those already turned should have joy now, and when others turn they should share in their joy. The expectation of getting more than others is one of our human flaws that must be shed if we are ever to understand the idea of salvation. The death row confession and plea for forgiveness angers people. Yet that forgiveness is precisely what the penitent thief on the cross next to Jesus receives in his final hour. An overarching theme across all the Gospels is “the first will be last and the last will be first.” As a reader, I almost feel beaten over the head by that concept, which is good, because that’s the only way I remember anything. The idea goes against our instincts, especially in our merit-based society.

So what happens when you do screw up and revert back to old ways? First of all, there was a saying in AA meetings: “We don’t shoot our wounded,” which always seemed like the right answer for those who struggle but keep trying, who need a hand. For anyone who started drinking again, but returned to the meetings, an acceptance was there but no one was offering a sappy “poor me” attitude. There was acknowledgment from the group but not praise.

Obviously, the goal should be to avoid the error at all times. Obviously. But who among us can say they don’t make mistakes? Wait, I forgot: we have Facebook and everyone’s life on there is perfect. But just for an instant, imagine a world where people didn’t pretend to be perfect, like say, well, in the real world, the non-digital world, on a planet called earth. Imagine our actual world where people are flawed and screw up all the time and say they will do one thing but do another.

We mess up. That is what we do. We think that we won’t mess up, but then we do. So let’s say you start eating the Lotus flowers and then by some miracle you stop eating them. Then after a while, you may forget why you stopped eating the Lotus flowers because life was easier with them. Life was more enjoyable while you were escaping to eat the flowers. Then what do you do? Wouldn’t it be easier to just go back to old habits?

I don’t have all the answers, but I’ve had some good advice given to me.

The first thing to do is this: take the next right action. That is all you can do for starters. Stamp it on your forehead. “Next right action.” And after that action, you can take the next right action. Wash, rinse, repeat.

I can’t fix much, but I can fix one thing. One thing at a time, one day at a time. The “next right action” idea must be volleying around in my head just like “surrender to win” and “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner” and “Why did Peter sink?” These phrases are the way back. One step at a time, one cheesy little quote at a time.

There is a second danger I need to share, and this is just as dangerous as the wayward ways of the Prodigal son, the foolish brother. You get into the first rut through disobedience to what your conscience knows is right behavior. But there is a second rut that can be fallen into, on the other side of the screw-up, after you’ve corrected the first error. This other rut is carved by righteousness, and in that rut lies the other sin, the oldest and greatest sin of all: pride.

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