For some reason, turning on the grill is one of the moments when the old desires return. The sun is shining. The smell of propane or charcoal fills the air. The burgers sizzle on the grate. Summer leisure cracks open the door to old habits.

Then there is the hubbub of a brewpub and the smell of microbrews. There is the clink of pint glasses and beer flights passing by on their way to a happy table. The kitchen diffuses the smells of fried food, crispy chicken and cajun fries. Nachos and queso on waiters’ trays pass by as the surrounding laughter and music spills on the table.

Another time and place is the stroll through a parking lot where sports tailgaters hold their pre-game services under canopies and hatchbacks. The beanbags thunk on plywood and frisbees and footballs sail back and forth. Or later, in the grandstand of a stadium, the crowd roars over an interception, or the crack of the bat signals action, and the senses come alive. The smell of the pretzels and hotdogs and popcorn and beer all mingle into a callback, a beckoning for a re-entry into the game.

As simple as a song on the radio, it can come through a melody to remind me of a place, or a glimpse, or a connection. The verses tip me off to a night in a club or bar or house party or basement or couch, where something funny happened or some attraction started. The “good times” of friendly faces come back like apparitions with an invitation to try the habit on once again.

A long day in the hot sun, after working on a project or going for a long run, there is a long thirst that craves a certain kind of satisfaction that ice water and soda cannot quite offer. Physical exhaustion and being sweat-depleted is a fine time to think of cold drinks on a hot night.

Then I feel sad and ask, “Why can’t I drink normally?” Or alternatively, “Why can’t I have just one? Just one to go with this food or mood.” A drink goes well with many things, which is why most people like to have a drink.

Sometimes instead of feeling sad about it, I get mad. I go further, into teetotaler mode, where I feel upset about other people drinking because I can’t do it normally. And from there it devolves into an anger about a culture that pushes and markets drinking so heavily on its citizens. Not just today, but for many thousands of years there has been an idol made out of drinking because people love to drink. Alcohol relaxes us. In moderation it’s wonderful. But there is no such thing for us lucky ones.

When I was eighteen I recall seeing an old picture of Hercules outdrinking Dionysus. Imagine being so strong at holding your liquor that you could outdrink the god of wine. That appealed to me when I was fresh out of high school and quantity meant more than quality.

Not only the Greeks, but even Christian tradition uses wine as central to the sacrament of the Eucharist, and in another example, there is Jesus at the wedding feast at Cana, in his first miracle, creating wine from water to keep the wedding dance going on late into the night. As difficult passages in the Bible go, this is even more confusing for someone who struggles with putting the cork back in the bottle, because if getting drunk is a sin, then why did Jesus seem to encourage it? I’ll come back to that…

The answer to “Why can’t I drink normally?” and “Why can’t I have just one?” is in the historical cycle of madness that drinking created in my own life. For those who have this same problem, it is tempting and easy to fool ourselves to set foot once gain on a slippery slope called control. This is the reason I’m skeptical of any books or drugs that say you can “Control Drinking,” as millions of people who have quit for decades stop playing that losing game of control. I’ve known quite a few people that have gone down that road and slipped. I’ve done it myself. “Surrender to win” is not just a cute saying, it actually works. Even Annie Grace’s book, This Naked Mind, which I really enjoyed, has the subtitle of “Control Alcohol,” but I suspect that is bait to draw in readers, as she more or less says “good luck” to anyone who attempts to control their drinking.

An interesting conversation I’ve had repeatedly with drinkers who have tried to quit is this: they will say, “I quit for a month, just to prove that I could do it, but then I decide to have a beer on a weekend get together, then the next weekend I had a few at a wedding, and then a few weeks later I was kind of back to regular drinking.” I recall saying this exact same thing about drinking (and my nicotine usage as well). I would “quit” to prove that I was not addicted, but the attempt was nebulous and wishy-washy and usually fell off in seriousness rather quickly whenever an event with beer sprung up in front of me and I didn’t want to feel awkward holding a soda or water. But then I would pat myself on the back in congratulations on my quitting and go back to old ways. The funny thing is that this is what addiction is and does: it’s a never ending self-congratulations on just being yourself.

These moments of self-pity struck me in the early days of sobriety when I became more serious about removing it from my life entirely. After the pink cloud of joy over quitting had passed, I faced more difficult weather around the weakness and the rainy season started. That I couldn’t solve the problem on my own I fully accepted, but the excitement over that discovery eroded with the passage of time and days. This self-pity became most obvious on Friday nights when so much of my prior life had revolved around buckets of beer and now I had to fill that time with something else.

Listening to rock or country music certainly doesn’t help, and country music in particular is a full-blown celebration of booze. Sometimes I wonder if Nashville is fully owned and operated by the liquor and beer industry. Nearly every other song on the radio venerates liquor to some degree. The songs that don’t celebrate drinking often relate to family and/or God, which makes the genre a strange combination for me, as liquor played the key role in removing God from my life, and the only thing that allowed God’s return was the removal of liquor from my life. To me, this is the great paradox of country music, but the celebration of drunkenness seems to be winning on the radio.

These triggers I mentioned are different for everybody, but it took me a while to realize the guises they take on and clothing they wear. In short, they are lies that I tell myself.

This dawned on me in an airport after a work conference when I had a rough week, after being around a lot of open bar events. Full staff, premium liquor, glamorous locations, and all free - and my co-workers were lapping it up, as we all love to do when it’s free. But that didn’t bother me, as I’d been around parties and events long enough to know that I could have fun without the buzz. Truly, I’ve realized that I have more fun at events now without it and I can be more honest with people than ever before. And no one cares that I’m not drinking. I think that took about a year to really believe. No one gives a hoot, and they don’t even notice if you have a glass of 7-up instead of a gin and tonic. Even if they do know it’s 7-up, no one cares. Plus, anyone that pressures me about having a drink usually reacts very openly when I tell them I quit. A common response I hear, “I should do that myself,” or “I have a friend that is three years dry,” or “Wow, that’s great!” Rarely do I hear what I once feared, which was: “Oh come on you pansy, let’s do a shot.” When I do hear that, I can now see the battle that person is facing themselves, but I don’t say anything to them. The ones that push it on others may have the same issue that I do. How do I know that? Because I liked to do that when I was drinking.

Being around drinkers stopped bothering me long ago and I find it much more awkward if people don’t drink because I’m around. That’s the strangest feeling, where somehow my demon causes them to tiptoe around. I am fine being around drunk people, to the point that I don’t even care, except I won’t stay out late with them because I have no interest in ever closing down a pub again.

Back to my point about the airport bar: I was sitting by myself after a long week. At tables around me sat men and women in groups, lounging and laughing over drinks. Like many a business traveler, in my past life I enjoyed knocking down a pint or two before boarding a flight because it put me to sleep in the lap of a craft beer. This airport downtime was one of those triggers, like grilling, or attending a sports event, or sitting in a restaurant, or hearing a party song. Sitting in the airport was a strong trigger for drinking. Feeling tired and slightly upset from a difficult week, I wanted to enter into the relaxation and “fun” of the others who were drinking. I was feeling sorry for myself.

But somehow, someway, a light shined on me, showing that my memory about those airport cocktails were lies, fibs that I told myself to justify the flaw that wanted to get out of me. There was an old Twilight Zone episode called “The Howling Man” where the devil was held in an old monastery, contained in a cell that he could clearly escape but for some reason did not. He could only escape if someone invited him out, or let him out, and he would howl until some sympathetic person came along to hear his sob story.

In the episode, a traveler comes along, and disbelieving the monk who has trapped the devil, falls for the devil’s story about the injustices of the monk. Of course the man lets the devil out, because he thinks the devil is not real. This pretty much sums up what I realized in the airport that day. Through great effort I had contained this demon in a cell, and now it was howling to get out, and I was feeling sympathy for this howling call and drawn to listen to its reasons for being released once again. I was ignoring all of the effort and reasons for trapping the devil in the first place.

This is what addiction does. It howls in you. Smokers know this well. I still hear this howling, but not for beer any more, but for food. There is always some kind of howling, but the howling about drinking was the worst kind and now that I have it contained in the cell, I am the only one that can let it out again. This calling, or trigger, or feeling of need is something I finally realized relates precisely to an old term that the Church uses. The word is concupiscence, which is a fun word to say and you just don’t hear it a lot today. But it is exactly what I came to understand in that airport.

…."concupiscence" can refer to any intense form of human desire. Christian theology has given it a particular meaning: the movement of the sensitive appetite contrary to the operation of the human reason. The apostle St. Paul identifies it with the rebellion of the "flesh" against the "spirit." Concupiscence stems from the disobedience of the first sin. It unsettles man's moral faculties and, without being in itself an offense, inclines man to commit sins. (CCC 2515)

This idea of an appetite or desire contrary to my reason became devastatingly apparent, as I knew from past experience where acting on the desire led.

Here’s what I mean by that. When I actually thought about my romanticized ideas about having beers in the airport bar, I remembered those pre-flight beers as some kind of positive action. What I chose to forget was sitting on the plane feeling bloated and dumb for drinking, because it was never just one pint. I remember driving home and being grumpy on arrival because I had come down from the buzz during the flight. I remembered all the times that I just felt tired the next day from the effort my body needed to push out the poison. As I’d been exercising regularly, I knew that that all of those, “I’ll just have one,” moments were always what derailed any fitness or health goals. Inevitably the “I’ll have just one” leads to more, and any one that’s ever gone to a bar with best friends knows that’s how the wildest nights begin. “I’ll have just one” is how the slippery slope starts, because the first step is not very slippery - it seems safe. Like others who try to “prove” they can quit, they end up right back in the same spot, over and over and over again. It is so easy to let out the howling man.

There’s a story about a man named “Jim” who had already messed up his life, repeatedly, and one more foul-up was going to cost him his family…

Yet he got drunk again. we asked him to tell us exactly how it happened. This is his story: “I came to work on Tuesday morning. I remember I felt irritated that I had to be a salesman for a concern I once owned. I had a few words with the brass, but nothing serious. Then I decided to drive to the country and see one of my prospects for a car. On the way I felt hungry so I stopped at a roadside place where they have a bar. I had no intention of drinking. I just thought I would get a sandwich…I had eaten there many times during the months I was sober. I sat down at a table and ordered a sandwich and a glass of milk. Still no thought of drinking. I ordered another sandwich and decided to have another glass of milk.

“Suddenly the thought crossed my mind that if I were to put an ounce of whiskey in my milk it couldn’t hurt me on a full stomach. I ordered a whiskey and poured it into the milk. I vaguely sense I was not being any too smart, but I reassured as I was taking the whiskey on a full stomach. The experiment went so well that I ordered another whiskey and poured it into more milk. That didn’t seem to bother me so I tried another.” (Big Book Chapter 3)

And so Jim lost his family. Jim is one of millions who have done this. This story, and my story, is as ancient as humankind’s discovery of crushing and fermenting grapes. In Moby Dick the blacksmith’s story is like Jim’s story. He has everything, until he chooses to start drinking, and soon he has nothing. And once his life is destroyed he longs for death but not wanting to commit suicide he goes to sea, just like Ishmael, the narrator of the book. Ishmael describes this same spiritual brokenness in the first chapter of the novel, although his doesn’t come from drinking, it comes from a general malaise caused by The Big Empty. I love how Melville describes the entrance of drinking into the blacksmith’s life as a burglar and demon.

[The Blacksmith] had been an artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to do; owned a house and garden; embraced a youthful, daughter-like, loving wife, and three blithe, ruddy children; every Sunday went to a cheerful-looking church, planted in a grove. But one night, under cover of darkness, and further concealed in a most cunning disguisement, a desperate burglar slid into his happy home, and robbed them all of everything. And darker yet to tell, the blacksmith himself did ignorantly conduct this burglar into his family's heart. It was the Bottle Conjuror! Upon the opening of that fatal cork, forth flew the fiend, and shriveled up his home. 

The “bottle conjuror” is kind of a jarring, funny statement, and seems a very dated term. But it’s not inaccurate. You see alcohol repeatedly destroying families, for generations, as it conjures up bad voodoo in so many fathers.

I wonder how many men today have followed this same path chasing a high, whether it’s drinking or drugs or porn or sex. I have taken things as close to the edge of ruin as possible. That’s literally why this podcast/blog exists. Why Did Peter Sink? Because he let the howling man out. Jim let the howling man out. The blacksmith let the howling man out. Why did he do that? Because he took his focus off what was important. He forgot about God.

The variety of addictions makes no difference in this circle of insanity - the pursuit and the outcome is the same. People may not go to an asylum today, but the trail of wreckage this behavior leaves can create a personal asylum to live inside. The howling man is famously cunning and baffling. He calls upon and converts us like the Pied Piper, in an instant. How easily we fall for the lies that we tell ourselves, and act in ways that go directly against our better judgment and reason. I am truly stunned at how easily I can be pulled or pushed to act against my reason. What I’ve come to realize, and with grace I can remember for many years to come, is that the desire and triggers will be back - those desires will never fade completely. They will forever call upon me to let out the howling man. That’s not something that can be solved in our hearts, not alone, and to let the problem begin again, even in the most small way, is once again to let chaos and very real sin back into my life.

I recall someone asking me, “What would be the thing that pulled you back to drinking?” and I immediately thought of going out in a Blaze of Glory, in one rip-roaring wild time. There’s a Tim McGraw and Faith Hill song that appears to have been written by someone with a good grasp on the struggle of addictions and this idea of going out with a bang:

I wanna drink that shot of whiskeyI wanna smoke that cigaretteI wanna smell that sweet addiction on my breath

You know some cowboys like me go out like that

What’s he talking about? He’s romancing his old times as the good times, dressing that pig up, putting lipstick on it, giving it a big kiss, pretending those days were all magical and fun until the mean old world took away his joy. It’s a pity party. I love this song. He’s thinking of the escape and wanting to ride out into the sunset one last time, to disappear from the struggle of this world. And it’s all a lie. He’s invented an ideal escape because he wants to feel young and free, because he’s confused being drunk with being alive, when what it really made him was boring and imprisoned.

Or maybe that’s just what I realized in the airport bar on that winter day.

For myself, I can recall many years ago sitting in Munich at the Hacker-Pschorr brewery, near the grounds of Oktoberfest, and thinking it was like Field of Dreams but for beer. I could picture Ray Liotta saying, “Is this heaven?” and the Kevin Costner would answer, “Nein, this is Bavaria.” Likewise, I recall being at a Swiss Oktoberfest at a small town and looking around at the scene of giant beer steins and waitresses in push-up bras and the brass bands and singing songs and toasting “Prost!”, and I thought to myself: this must be the closest thing to heaven on earth, as everyone was so happy and full of pure joy…and full of so much…well...liters of beer.

Not only that but I will think of music festivals when I was young, where you park the car and immediately you can hear the music and bass from far away. The anticipation of the night could be felt and tasted like the sting of whiskey or gin on my tongue. The sun just starting to sink meant the night’s possibilities were just beginning, and it was time to shutdown the work week in trade for the time to get rowdy and stupid. With a gang of friends of the same mindset, the music and the summer night again felt like some kind of a heaven.

And in both of those “heavens” what I conveniently leave out is the next morning, the day after, the things I said, and worst, things I might not have even remembered. So while, yes, there are good things about those nights, there was much more than just the sunset and the music or the German waitresses. I was just remembering the setting, but had forgotten the plot. There was so much more to the story than a fleeting feeling about my arrival or a moment in time where I felt the joyful spirit, or what the Germans call gemütlichkeit. For others, those things can be enjoyed, year after year, but no longer for me, because I could not quit drinking once I started.

Thus the saying “Do not trust your feelings” stays with me, as my feelings listen to the howling man and want to let him free. There is so much more to life without the howling man, and I can still enjoy a memory of a Munich night or a street festival hoedown. I know that there is no going back to those days, or at least not in the same way. And that is the journey, I suppose, that we all get to walk in this world, to find out what we are built for and what we must avoid. Somewhere a baby is being born right now that will get to walk these same paths that we all do, and he will grow up hearing advice of older, wiser people, and if he’s anything like me he will just ignore that advice and go find out the hard way. William Blake said, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” but there is a better path to wisdom than that.

As I mentioned, I would come back to the wedding feast at Cana, the first miracle of Jesus. Dostoyevsky has a chapter on it in The Brothers Karamazov, where a character considering this miracle states, “The first miracle he worked was to bring men happiness…to help men’s gladness.... ‘He who loves men loves their happiness.’” At the request of Mary, Jesus produced more wine, but with people having free will, the guests still needed to make their own decisions on whether to drink to excess. Jesus isn’t there as a life-coach at the wedding that night, but as the world’s greatest guest who just happens to be beginning his ministry. There is much to be interpreted regarding the wedding feast at Cana, more than I can go into here, but for people like me who can’t control their liquor, the fact that free wine is present does not erase the divine gift called free will, nor does it make allowance for discarding the holy virtue called temperance.

The point to take away here is this: if you’re quitting, or trying to quit, but you don’t think you can have fun without beer or liquor in your hand, then you’re not yet in the right headspace to be among the party crowd. Other people do not need to change their ways to accommodate your struggle, because that would make you king and controller of the world, and that’s kind of the whole problem. It definitely helps to have supporters in your corner, but you cannot expect everyone to change for you. Control is the problem.

The desire for control is what you need to let go of to make progress. The miracle is that, at some point, you won’t care if someone drinks right next to you, or pushes it at you, or even dumps it on your head. That is the miracle - you will not care any longer.

However, there is a saying, “If you hang around in a barbershop long enough, you will probably get a haircut.” This sounds old fashioned today, but the meaning for people who try to quit drinking is this: if you spend time in bars while trying to quit, sooner or later you’ll have a drink. If you spend time with all of your old drinking buddies, you will at some point have a drink. So to change your lifestyle, the separation needed requires choices that are hard, and often means losing friendships. In many cases, people even stop listening to their old music because of how close the association is to the desire to fall into the old pattern.

The party crowd will never go away and cold beer on a Friday night will always sound good. The key is to “keep your own side of the street clean” and let others worry about theirs. Someday you will no longer care. You will watch tipsy people slur their speech with amusement and not want to join them, but you must endure some hard days and nights to reach each rung on the ladder. For bonus and motivation, know that you will get to bed much earlier and feel good every single morning. That may be the most unsung wonder of deliverance from a lifestyle of using alcohol. Every morning you wake up like the pre-game cheer from the Dillon Panthers of the TV show Friday Night Lights: “Clean Heart. Clear Mind. Can’t Lose.”

This is a responsibility and burden for us who come to know the problem that dogs us through our days. The Gospel’s presence of buckets of wine doesn’t get us off the hook, not by long shot. Here are some tidbits, food for thought, on why that’s the case from my favorite book, the Catechism:

“The virtue of temperance disposes us to avoid every kind of excess: the abuse of food, alcohol, tobacco, or medicine. Those incur grave guilt who, by drunkenness or a love of speed, endanger their own and others’ safety on the road, at sea, or in the air.” (CCC 2290)

There is no free pass just because there is a wedding party at Cana. The nod we want to give ourselves will inevitably contradict a path to virtue, and if you already know you can’t control it from a history of excess, then the house will always win in the end. The odds are not in your favor.

“Temperance is the moral virtue that moderates the attraction of pleasures ... It ensures the will’s mastery over instincts and keeps desires within the limits of what is honorable … Temperance is often praised in the Old Testament: ‘Do not follow your base desires, but restrain your appetites.’ In the New Testament it is called ‘moderation’ or ‘sobriety.’ We ought ‘to live sober, upright, and godly lives in this world.’ … Human virtues acquired by education, by deliberate acts and by a perseverance ever-renewed in repeated efforts are purified and elevated by divine grace. With God’s help, they forge character and give facility in the practice of the good. The virtuous man is happy to practice them.” (CCC 1809, 1810)

Most men have something calling to them, something that wants to get back into the world, to turn them away from virtue, to allow them to feel defiant instead of obedient. To open that beer, to go to that website, to hit up an old flame, to eat the whole box of cereal in a single sitting…ok, the last one might just be me. As I’ve mentioned before, I have much to learn, miles to go. It’s very easy to write about virtues and difficult to live them out in the real world. But that’s the goal, and as I seem to like goals, I’d rather have a positive public goal than a secret negative goal. Catholic Confession and psychotherapy alike tell us that you must name the thing that ails you to deal with it properly. Naming the problem is one thing. Letting go of control is next, and that is done through a Higher Power, not medication. Removing the cause of my sinking means asking for God’s help, and that is the right step toward daily perseverance, moderation, and steady sobriety.

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