LOL Sober

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I was very sad on Friday night when news broke that Matthew Perry had died. I had been a Friends fan, and I liked a few of his movies, too. I became aware later in life that he’d had all sorts of struggles with pills and alcohol, and then he had several significant medical issues in recent years, too. He’d talked openly about finding sobriety for stretches. I saw him do a few interviews to promote his book a few years ago and you could hear the recovery in his voice. I identified with so much of his story.

A few random thoughts on him:

First: People really had glowing things to say about him as a person, most notably how kind and generous he was. I like to hear that because in my experience, a lot of alcoholics and addicts are wonderful human beings with giant, empathetic hearts. That can get disguised under all the substance abuse and hiding and lying to keep the game going. But there really are quite a few people with beautiful souls out there. Some stop using. Some don’t.

Second: I always felt conflicted when I saw people like Matthew Perry talk openly about substance abuse and recovery. Does it violate the 12-step tradition of anonymity? Is the tradition of anonymity outdated? Does a celebrity talking openly about addiction issues help others? Hurt others? Have no impact? I genuinely don’t know the answer. But, as someone who has chosen to speak publicly about recovery in a general sense, always careful to avoid mentioning specific fellowships, I do tend to think it is helpful. And so that’s where I ultimately land on Matthew Perry. On this day, a half week since he died, do I think his life led to some people getting sober, or at least knowing more about substance abuse and recovery? Yes, I do.

Third: I used to get really drunk or high (or both!) and think that if I just had more money, I’d be able to stop. I thought that I wouldn’t have financial insecurity and could pay off all my student loans and credit cards, then I would be able to stop using and start life with a clean slate. If I absolutely had to, I could take a leave from work with no money concerns if I were rich, and I could check myself into a really nice, tranquil rehab in Florida or California or Hawaii. If I just had money! I gotta say, now that I have been sober for awhile, I have seen too many times where money has the opposite effect—it can get in the way of truly hitting rock bottom. Matthew Perry made tens of millions of dollars from Friends, and I’d be curious to hear from him whether being rich and famous helped or hurt his efforts to get sober.

Fourth: Aside from the addiction stuff, I always admired Perry’s comedic ability. As someone who tried comedy for three years, I learned pretty quickly how a person’s affect and mannerisms could make the same joke land 100 different ways. He played Chandler Bing in a way where he could take a decent joke on paper and make it a home run by using slumped shoulders, or a tilted head, or enunciating one word a little differently. It’s a remarkable skill that is very hard to master. When I think about the 10 funniest people I’ve ever heard, most of them are one-of-a-kind not because of the material they write but how they deliver it. Think about Jerry Seinfeld, Joan Rivers, Richard Pryor, Kevin Hart, Jim Gaffigan, Robin Williams, Wanda Sykes… these are people who had something about them that made them one-of-one. They all had a very specific style that made it impossible to imagine anybody else being able to pull off the exact same funny thing they did.

And that was the epitome of Matthew Perry’s Chandler Bing on Friends. Name somebody who could have made that character connect the way that he did. I think all six members of that main cast were very good at what they did, and it’s hard to contemplate another actor playing any of the six. But could someone have done a decent impersonation of Joey as a big hunky meathead? Or could another actress have done a decent representation of Monica or Phoebe? And, apologies if this is blasphemous, but I kind of feel like David Schwimmer and Jennifer Aniston were kind of just playing Ross and Rachel as David Schwimmer and Jennifer Aniston.

That’s a long way of saying that I thought the Matthew Perry had maybe the highest WAR of any actor in any sitcom ever. WAR is a baseball statistic that stands for Wins Above Replacement, which measures how good a player does compared with the average player who plays the same position. The best players have the highest WARs, which shows that they can do so much more than a run-of-the-mill guy trying to do the same things on a baseball field. Matthew Perry’s WAR was incredible as Chandler .

So no matter what we find out ultimately caused his death, I feel safe saying that for all the ups and downs of his life and career, Matthew Perry had a pretty damn good WAR as a human being, too.

This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:

HEARD AT MEETINGS

"I was happy to get to my second AA birthday because then I could say that I had 'years' of sobriety. At my fourth anniversary, I was even happier: Then I could say 'years and years.'"

(Credit: Grapevine, November 2009)

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe

If you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces right now, but paid subscribers do have access to monthly premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!

I was talking to a friend at the gym the other day and he said something that hit me hard. He is a physical trainer, and a good one. He asked me how my workouts were going, and I said I was in the best shape of my adult life (at least since high school).

But I also said, “I wish I could lose this stomach. I’m working out 90 minutes a day, doing strength training and cardio, and I still have about 25 extra pounds, all in my gut.”

And he said, “Well, you cannot outwork a bad diet.”

I asked him what that meant, and he ran through some very basic facts that caught me off guard a little. He said that if I run 1.5 miles every day and then eat three Oreos, that’s about the same amount of calories. I will drop three Oreos in 10 seconds, so I had a “Whoa” moment thinking about all that huffing and puffing and sweating for 15 minutes, all to eat three Oreos and neutralize it. Basically, even if you work out for four hours a day, you can’t outwork a bunch of terrible food.

The final point he made was that if fitness isn’t a lifestyle, where you lift weights, do some cardio, eat well, sleep well, hydrate well, do minimal drugs and alcohol and don’t smoke… you’re not going to see the results you think you will. If you go to the gym and then drink soda and eat donuts all day, that’s not a lifestyle and your body won’t look or feel great.

I’m writing about this on a sobriety newsletter because it made me think about my spiritual diet. This fall, I have been getting to meetings almost every day, talking to my sponsor once or twice a week, sponsoring some guys and making a call or two every day. That’s a lot, right?

Yes and no. In this metaphor, going to the gym is the equivalent of basic recovery program stuff, and diet is everything else I do.

My diet isn’t always great. I have days where I only get to a meeting, and then I spend the other 23 hours driving kids around, watching football, complaining, watching more football, gossiping, watching playoff baseball, eating bad, scrolling social media for four hours a day… it’s all doing nothing positive for me. Is it fun to watch four NFL games on a Sunday and eat snacks all night and stay up till midnight because the Sunday night game went into overtime? Yes. It is. A lot of fun some days, actually.

But it’s also pretty hollow. I’m not sure how I expect to live the values I aspire to—humble, serene, patient, understanding, forgiving—if I do 10 hours of activities that are none of those things. To keep the gym/diet comparison going, it’s a little like eating junk food all day and then expecting to be healthy. In this case, I’m talking about my spirit, not my body, though.

You might wonder, what should I be doing instead? Well, my plan is to do all the things I mentioned earlier every day instead of some days—get to a meeting, connect with my sponsor and my sponsees, call 1-3 recovering alcoholics and addicts every day. And then I need to find pockets where I meditate as much as possible, pray as much as possible, maybe read instead of watch TV, talk less, take on another service commitment or three, make sure I check out some of the daily recovery readings that are available. Basically, I need my spiritual diet to be something that boosts my recovery activities.

Maybe then, as my gym friend says, will I be able to match my spiritual diet with my spiritual workouts.

This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:

After the husband’s fifth trip to the host's bar for refills, the wife asked, "Aren't you embarrassed to go back so many times?"

Hubby: "Nope. I keep telling them it's for you."

(Credit: AA Grapevine, May 1971)

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe

If you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces right now, but paid subscribers do have access to monthly premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!

I had two things pop up recently in recovery that made me sit back and say, “Holy s**t, thank God for our sober founding fathers and mothers.”

First, I read “The Vicious Cycle” out of the back of the Big Book the other day, and it was written by one of the original 12-step members, Jim B. He tells a good story, and I identified with him quite a bit—in my experience, alcoholics in 1940 sure did think a lot like me in the 2000s. It’s crazy sometimes how similar the thought processes are.

That story has some bonkers things in it. First of all, he picked a sponsor who had three weeks sober! But that was pretty normal back then because recovery was a new concept—three weeks was a long time with the pioneers of 12-step recovery. In Jim’s case, he writes about how his sponsor relapsed and died of this disease. Who knows how many other people had similar situations? I feel so grateful that I have met people who have 10, 20, 30, 40, even 50 years of sobriety to choose from as a sponsor.

He also writes about going to meet with a woman who needed help… and he ended up dating her and marrying her. Again, that is wild. My guess is, the phrase “13th-stepping” didn’t exist back then. I’m glad that in the decades since, we’ve learned how harmful that can be, and many members are aggressive in squashing inappropriate advances.

The other thing that jumped out at me was the way he described how contentious early meetings could be, and that he and others often were aggressive in taking other peoples’ inventories. It’s so funny to me how brazen he was about some stuff that wouldn’t fly these days because we have learned so many hard lessons over the next 80 years or so.

The second big thing that popped up for me at meetings was the concept of resentment being the No. 1 offender—that resentment destroys more alcoholics than anything else. Think about that for a second. Our literature doesn’t say that deaths or cancer diagnoses or anything else is the No. 1 thing to watch out for. It doesn’t say that resentment is one of multiple things that trips up the most alcoholics. It flat-out says resentment is No. 1.

When I think back on how bold that statement is, I ultimately spend a few moments thinking about how many people tried to get sober and failed, then tried again and failed, and just kept trying, just kept tracking their progress, just kept laying out what the biggest potholes were to look out for. In my mind, that means a lot of people fell down so that we could stand up, and for that I am so, so grateful. I cannot imagine a life where 12-step recovery wasn’t a tried and true method available in every corner of the United States. What a gift.

This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:

A bouncer threw my drunk buddy out of the same bar 5 times in a 10-minute span.

I patted the frustrated bouncer on the shoulder and said, "I think you put too much backspin on him."

(Credit: AA Grapevine, September 2004)

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe

If you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces right now, but paid subscribers do have access to monthly premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!

I was talking to someone who I used to hang out with during my first year of sobriety, and one of the things he mentioned to me was how bumpy my entire life had been back then. That wasn’t his opinion—those were direct quotes from me at the time.

I remember what he was talking about. I had gone to rehab and everybody in my life was cheering me on at first. But after a few weeks, the rubber met the road. My credit cards had to be paid. I had to show up for work. My family needed me to be a dad and a husband, and to mow the grass and be honest about some of the stuff I had been up to.

It was around that time that it felt like the world was closing in around me. I always think about that scene in Star Wars where most of the main characters are trapped in a trash compactor and the walls start smushing together. That’s how it felt.

As my old friend described that to me, I also got a warm and fuzzy feeling about what sobriety people were able to do for me at that moment of my life. They hugged me, told me I was doing great, that they had gone through similar stuff, and that it had worked out okay for them. Some of them said everything turned out fine but that it was bumpy and they relied upon sober people to steady them. So I tried that, too.

I remember thinking that that sounded like sober people could be my lifeguards. Think about lifeguards. When they jump in to save somebody, they probably don’t know the person. They just have a job to do it and they do it, with a singular focus of helping somebody out of the deep water.

That’s what sober people were for me back then—lifeguards. I remember that nobody gave me any solutions about how to pay my bills better, or how to improve my marriage, or hire an accountant for tax season. They just loved me through it all. Granted, their love was unconditional because there were no conditions—they weren’t married to me, and I didn’t owe them $10,000, and they hadn’t hired me. So they didn’t have any strings attached.

But still, what incentive did they actually have other than it was the right thing to do? The answer is both nothing, and everything. As the old saying goes, to keep what you have, you have to give it away, and that’s what they were doing. They were helping me because it helped them.

That is worth thinking about now for me. I have an obligation to be a lifeguard whenever possible, and also to remember that when I hit a pothole in life, I still have lifeguards and I need to use them. It sounds so simple, but I catch myself getting farther and farther into sobriety and being less willing to be vulnerable sometimes. I feel a little embarrassed to pull a sober friend aside and admit I am walking around arguing with anybody I run into, or that I sent a petty email, or that I gossiped too much. I feel like I should be better than that, and I don’t want to admit it.

But the old phrase “you’re as sick as your secrets” applies to small secrets, too. It’s so easy to get swallowed up by the idea of “That’s not big enough to call my sponsor about.” Meanwhile, I am getting closer to a drink when I do that.

So I am going to try to do a better job of waving at my lifeguards to dive in and save me… even if I am swimming in the kiddie pool sometimes.

This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:

A counselor asks a detox patient: "Tell me, does alcoholism run in your family?"

The drunk slurs, "Run? Hell, most times my family is so drunk they can hardly walk!"

(Credit: AA Grapevine, by Donny B., August 2004, Wurtsboro, NY)

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe

If you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces right now, but paid subscribers do have access to monthly premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!

I had a pretty wild weekend, at least by 45-year-old sober guy standards. My wife and I took the kids back to our college, which is a massive football power school. It was Homecoming weekend, so there was an emphasis on people like me coming back to their old stomping grounds. And that meant that lots of people like me were getting absolutely hammered on every street corner and at every tailgate.

The game was fun but the weather was brutal. It was about 45 degrees and a steady rain that didn’t let up for about 36 hours. By the time we sat down in our seats, we were soaked, and then we plopped down in puddles at every seat. Within five minutes, it felt like my ass had numbed itself and then left my body.

Right around the time I felt the most soggy and shivery, four guys sat down in the row in front of us. Their gameplan for this miserable rainy day didn’t involve umbrellas or ponchos or extra warm clothing. No, they appeared to each just decide they would drink 25 beers each and be so obliterated that they stopped feeling cold.

I found myself shivering and looking at them and thinking, “Man, they look so happy. That was a smart plan.”

Well, in situations like that, I always need to remember three things. One is, maybe they are heavy drinkers who can handle that, and I am not. Secondly, who knows how their nights ended? I can say I saw quite a bit of stumbling and bumbling, and it was 4:15 pm, so I can’t imagine the next 8 hours went well for them. Third, getting hammered isn’t exactly the wisest decision to stay warm outdoors.

That point lingered with me late into the evening, when we made what was a pretty wild decision: Instead of staying overnight, we decided to drive back to Connecticut. One of my kids had a soccer game she didn’t want to miss, and my two older girls both had homework that was giving them a headache trying to do away from home. So we went for it.

It was a six-hour drive beginning at almost 10 pm after a long day of hustling around a college campus.I had a cup of coffee before we left, and I felt great for about the first 45 minutes. Then the coffee started to wear off, and I felt a little woozy by around 11. So I hit a rest area and bought two Diet Mountain Dews, and then I felt peppy again for a good 60-90 minutes. Then I started getting woozy again.

It wasn’t woozy like I was going to fall asleep. I felt tired but not sleepy, which meant I was okay to drive but my cognitive skills were rough. It took me 5 seconds to process stuff that would have taken me 1 second normally. I was slow and sluggish, and it was a little alarming.

So I made another stop and loaded up on a big coffee, which helped for another 45-60 minutes. That ultimately was enough to get us home.

I bring all of this up because it was a terrible reminder of the days when I used to get hammered, try to cover it up with caffeine and other substances, then try to get myself clear-headed enough to start doing drugs and alcohol again. It was downers, then uppers, then downers, then uppers again. I knew at the time how bad that was for me—getting extremely high and then pounding down a bunch of Diet Mountain Dews, then getting extremely high again and taking an Ambien to fall asleep is a recipe for death, not fun.

But doing it sober was eye-opening. It was horrible, and it didn’t really work, by the way. We got the whole way home without any real trouble. But I wasn’t myself. If you had given me some sort of reading comprehension test or a math quiz for a third-grader, you’d have wanted to hold me back for another year. Which means, I am very lucky to have not had any wild road situations that required fast thinking.

I need stuff like that sometimes. Because both parts of this story—the drunks whose plan to stay warm was 30 Miller Lites, and staying awake through Diet Mountain Dew, coffee and a prayer—remind me of how bad it used to be. Sometimes the most helpful thing for my sobriety isn’t some new meditation or reading that will open my eyes to something. It’s just seeing idiocy at work out there in the streets, so I can skip the late afternoon coffee, not drink booze or do drugs, and go to bed at a normal time.

This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:

When the panhandler collapsed on the street, a crowd gathered and began offering suggestions.

"Give the poor man a drink of whiskey," a little old lady said.

"Give him air," advised several men.

"Give him a drink of whiskey," repeated the little old lady.

"Get him to the hospital," someone suggested.

"Give him a drink of whiskey," the little old lady said again.

Slowly the victim sat up. "Will you all shut up," he demanded, "and listen to the little old lady?"

(Credit: AA Grapevine, January 1961)

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe

If you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces right now, but paid subscribers do have access to monthly premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!

I’ve written many times about HALT—Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired—and its impact. I have found it to be a very valuable series of things to ask yourself when you are sober but feel a little off. It’s not always the answer. But I love HALT as a starting point.

So I came up with something that I found quite helpful the other day. I’ll call it an autopsy of HALT.

In my recent sobriety—let’s say the past five years—I have found that when I am a little squirrelly, I can often chalk it up to one of those HALT components. It’s probably in the 30-40 percent range. So HALT is significant in my life these days… but again, it’s not the answer to all of my problems.

But anything that is responsible for 1/3 of my headaches is worth sitting with and examining. So I decided to break out each of the four letters and see how I stack up. It might be valuable to anybody else out there to do a deeper dive on HALT, too. I’m going to carve up HALT by percentages, so if I think anger is half of my HALT issues, I would put it at 50 percent.

Here goes.

Hungry: This is close to 0 percent for me. I’ll put it at 5 percent for now. I used to have moments early in sobriety when I would be walking around with my fists balled up and part of the solution was that I eat a sandwich or a candy bar. Not so much any more, especially if you saw how tight my jeans are fitting these days. I’ll put it this way: I ain’t missing many meals. In fact, when I thought about this category, I thought maybe I have the opposite issue these days—I often am having a bumpy afternoon and think three KitKats might be the answer to all my problems. (Psst… it’s not.)

Angry: Huge problem. I’ve gotten way better at working through resentments to the point where I don’t think I ever am walking around irate. I actually think I manage to not quite get to a place where I would even use the word angry. The bigger issue for me is being annoyed. Annoyed at drivers, annoyed at people who don’t return their carts at the grocery store, annoyed at my kids, annoyed at the line of people in front of me at Target, annoyed at the people who don’t return their carts at the grocery store… wait, I may have mentioned that one already.

But being annoyed is one step away from anger. Like, if angry is Diet Coke, then annoyed is Coke Zero. I do get annoyed on a regular basis, and that usually means several times a day. That’s not much better, I have to say. And I have found that if I stack up enough instances in a day where I am annoyed, I will drift into angry. As often say in recovery, if you hang out long enough at a barber shop, you’re going to end up with a haircut, and that’s what I find with being annoyed all the time.

On the percentage scale, I’d put this at about 50 percent of all my HALT issues.

Lonely: I’ll put this at 20 percent on my HALT-ometer. I am married with three kids and have a full-time job. So by the traditional definition of lonely, I don’t have any days—and usually no hours—where no one is around and I am looking for someone to talk to. I get to tons of meetings, I talk to at least 2-3 alcoholics and addicts every day and I don’t ever feel alone. I will say, though, that I can sometimes be pretty good at sitting amongst many people and somehow retreating emotionally out of what looks like a busy scene. It’s not uncommon for me to feel a little isolated even though I spoke with 50 people that day.

Tired: So the main reason I wrote about this newsletter topic is because of the concept of sleep. I have struggled my whole life falling asleep. My brain would get going, I’d start chewing on things that happened earlier in the day or things that might happen tomorrow, and I just used to lay there, tortured by my own brain. Then drinking came along and I immediately liked how it helped me slide into sleep better.

Of course, the myth of “having a beer or two at night to take the edge off” is that a) I would often drink 10 beers, not one or two and b) I have read quite a few reputable sources over the years that mention how getting drunk or buzzed to fall asleep often leads to bad quality sleep. I certainly used to find that. I’d wake up at 4 am after having passed out for four hours, and the booze will have worn off, and I felt like I had never even gone to bed. It was a mess.

Fast forward to sobriety, and I of course realized within a few weeks of being sober that I had built sleeping into an insurmountable reason to keep drinking… and it wasn’t quite true. I had a bumpy first few weeks learning to sleep again without any kind of mood-altering substance. But it ended up being fine.

Now fast forward to the past few years, and I find that being tired is less of an issue than ever, and it’s because I have grown to like sleep. Is it because I am old and decaying and my husk of a human body collapses every night mostly due to being a geezer? For sure, that’s part of it.

But I also think that there’s a point when you get a little older where you make better, healthy choices about sleep just because you’ve matured. In sobriety, as recently as a few years ago, I would go to bed at 10:30 at night on a Friday, stay up till 1:30 am to watch a UFC on a Saturday, go to bed at midnight on Sunday, then go to bed at 10 pm on Monday. I was all over the place.

Not so much any more. Again, being a 45-year-old with a 900-year-old mummy’s body certainly cause me to run out of gas and hit the mattress earlier. But I also choose to do that because it seems pretty wise to consistently go to bed earlier and wake up earlier, and also to sleep at roughly the same time every night. I’m not exactly a sleep doctor but every study seems to indicate that you gotta try for 7-8 hours, at roughly the same times every night.

So I would put this number at about 25 percent for me on my HALT list, and I do think that that number has declined every year for awhile. It’s significant and worth bringing up because I can’t believe how many alcoholics have mentioned to me over the years that sleep is an issue for them. I absolutely catch myself sometimes acting badly and I know that a 30-minute nap is the answer. or that the problem exists because I decided I had to watch Saturday night football, Sunday night football and Monday night football and skimped on sleep.

Those are my thoughts on HALT. I’m tired and forgot to see if they add up to 100 percent…

This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:

“Do you realize," said a man in a cafeteria to a drunk across the table, "that you are reading your paper upside down?"

"Of course I realize it," snapped the drunk. "Do you think it's easy?"

(Credit: AA Grapevine, July 1959)

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe

If you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces right now, but paid subscribers do have access to premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!

My wife said something interesting to me the other day.

She said, “Every time I tell someone that you were really irritated about something, they can’t believe it.”

I laughed and said, “I guess I fooled them, huh?”

She then proceeded to tell me how that is actually true, that I do sometimes get really aggravated and upset about things.

So I left that conversation thinking about a few things.

First of all, the good news... It’s good news that people don’t see me extremely angry very much, and in fact, they find it hard to fathom.

Secondly, and this is also good news: I think I actually am pretty hot and bothered quite a bit out in public, but I think I “fake it till I make it” pretty well.

Thirdly, and this is not-great news: Fake it till you make it has its limitations, in my experience. While I am glad that people have a hard time believing that I get my feathers ruffled very much, I also don’t think pretending is the best strategy. I still think I need to improve my actions and my thinking. If I am seething inside and smiling on the outside, it’s only a matter of time until I act out in a way I don’t want to. The better phrase that I have heard at meetings sometimes is, “Fake it until you become it.”

The fourth thing that got me thinking is bad news. What if she’s right? What if the truth is that I do a good job of keeping cool with everybody else, but am constantly irritated around her and my kids? That is not something I want to be—somebody who can dip into his emotional sobriety with strangers but lets it go with loved ones.

I will be a little forgiving in this case because the idea that I have any kind of reputation with anybody for being kind and patient is a gift. I strive for that, and it appears to be happening. I’ll take that. And I also am grateful that if I need to vent a little, I have people like my wife who are willing to let me throw some fastballs around them.

I guess the trick going forward is… don’t throw those fastballs AT them!

This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:

A man went into a bar and ordered a martini. He drank it, chewed up the bowl of the glass and threw the stem over his shoulder. He repeated this six times before he noticed the bartender staring at him.

"I guess you think I'm crazy," he said.

"I sure do," the bartender said. "The stems are the best part."

(Credit: AA Grapevine, September 1958)

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I caught myself recently using the words “always” and “never” pretty freely when I was describing people or things. By that, I mean saying “You always do x, y and z” to someone. Or, “You never listen when I tell you stuff.”

I noticed it because I was at a meeting where we were reading about character defects, and there was an emphasis in the literature to make sure we aren’t saying “I’ll never get rid of that.” That made me think of all the places in recovery literature where the authors are telling us it’s fine if we don’t believe in God, or don’t want to change a character defect, or don’t have any interest in not being angry. The literature often says to just leave the door ajar a bit, to not have contempt prior to investigation on anything. In other words, be open-minded.

When my wife and I were going to marriage counseling, our therapist often would say that those words—always and never—are two of the most damaging thought patterns to have. She said thought patterns because even if we don’t say out loud to our spouse that she never listens to me or always ignores me, it’s not much better to constantly think that. Her point was it still influences how you talk and behave if you’re just bottling up this extreme idea of your partner never or always doing something.

Here’s the thing, too: Always and never are always wrong and never right. When I say there is always traffic on that road, or that a restaurant never gets an order right… is that true? If I went to that shitty taco place across town 100 times, would they get the order wrong 100 times? Probably not, right? When I say that that road always is backed up with cars… am I sure? Or am I exaggerating?

I’ve been using those words a lot lately, and it’s because I have a tendency to be overly dramatic and want you to think the thing that I am dealing with is the biggest and baddest thing ever. Even describing that just now, I went for the most over-the-top description possible. But one thing I know is, the more clean and serene I am with my recovery life, the more I am building into every word and thought that there are grey areas in this world, not absolutes.

So as silly as this sounds, always and never are always immediate signs that I am a little wobbly. Maybe I need to always realize that and never do it again?

This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:

DRUNK RUSHING up to a bartender: “Was Joe in here an hour ago?"

Bartender: "Yes, why?"

Drunk: "Was I with him?"

(Credit: AA Grapevine, October 1953)

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe

If you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces right now, but paid subscribers do have access to monthly premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!

I read Step Six at a meeting the other day. Step Six says “Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.” I noticed within a few sentences, there is a line that says “any person capable of enough willingness and honesty to try repeatedly Step Six on all his faults—without any reservations whatever—has indeed come a long way spiritually.”

A few things jumped out at me.

One thing is that “without any reservations whatever” is in italics. Any time in recovery literature that italics are used, I always think, “Holy s**t, they’re serious about this.”

In this case, it’s the idea that you wholeheartedly ask something beyond yourself for assistance in removing all character defects. I fall into the trap of asking my higher power to take away something that is causing me pain… and then I take it back six hours later.

The second thing I noticed is the word “repeatedly.” I actually sat up in my seat a little bit when we read that. I like its honesty. I had this idea—and still have it sometimes—that the steps are like college credits, where you do them and you get a certificate and you move on. You did it! I never contemplated the idea that you do the work and find some relief… and then you do the work over and over again. You have to find the relief repeatedly.

I should have sat with that earlier in my recovery, because I often find many of my character defects and resentments are not new. I have a notebook that I use for Fourth Step work, and I have flipped back and seen that a year ago, or three years ago, I was working through the same issues with my wife or kids or work. I would get disheartened by that because I still cling to the idea that some of my character defects will just… poof!!! away into the universe.

The truth is, that word, repeatedly, is key. I have found that when I work hard on a character defect, I find some serenity and do less of it. But then I start to slide because I let off the gas. I am not remembering the “repeatedly” part of things.

I’ll give you a good example. Once a month, I get overcome by a feeling that I talk too much. I don’t think I am obnoxious—you’d have to ask my friends and family if that is actually the case—but I like to chop it up. I like to hear about your life and tell you about mine. I tell myself that that is good, that I am an open and honest person, that I can’t be as sick as my secrets if I don’t have secrets.

However, I get bummed out about that occasionally because I catch myself losing spirituality the more that I talk. The more I talk, the more likely that I am going to say something I shouldn’t have, to brag, to gossip, to trash talk someone, to get into an argument, to say something that hurts someone (accidentally or otherwise), to step into some issue that I didn’t need to, miss something important that you said to me, and so on. It is a slippery slope from being a chatty person to just being a loudmouth who has spirituality draining out of him like there is a hole in my soul.

So the issue here is, I need to take action every single day, sometimes every single hour, to reverse that. It is not just going to vanish. There is no Genie in a lamp that I can ask to grant me a wish of shutting the hell up. I need to do it repeatedly, and without reservation.

One thing that I find helpful is actually writing it down. I write down on a Post-It that I will see every day that I want my words to be truthful, useful, kind and timely. So every word out of my mouth has to be those four things.

Do I actually nail those four things? No. Do I do better when I attack it repeatedly? Yes, I do. Do I still wish for that Genie to come along and shut me up? Yes… but the Post-It helps for now.

This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:

A DRUNK POPPED HIS HEAD into, the Hollywood AA group meeting at the writers' roundtable in the Hollywood hotel.

"Is it true," he hiccupped, "that you guys ain't got any names?"

(Credit: AA Grapevine, June 1946)

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe

If you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces right now, but paid subscribers do have access to monthly premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!

During the pandemic, I hit a lot of Zoom meetings that were official 12-step group meetings. But I also joined a few small groups of 10-15 sober friends that would be classified as unofficial sobriety groups. We would read from recovery literature and say the serenity prayer and most of the things that you’d see at a normal meeting. But they weren’t formal 12-step meetings.

At one of those meetings, we had about 8 people show up. The chairperson for the day brought a reading from sober literature and read it. Then it was her turn to share, and she said she was having a hard day, in the middle of a hard week, in the middle of a hard month, in the middle of a hard year. She was having a hard time.

She said, “I kind of just want to scream. Does anybody mind if I scream?” Nobody said anything on camera. A few people gave a thumbs up, and she just let out a scream. It was about a 7 out of 10 on the scream scale, so she wasn’t going to get hired by any haunted houses this Halloween.

But she let out the scream, and then she started laughing. Everybody did. We could all relate. When it was my turn to share, I said I wanted to scream, too, so I let one out myself. I’d say mine was like a 4 out of 10. Pretty weak.

I was thinking about that this week because sober people can often be the only audience where I can really let it rip with whatever I am feeling. You can’t really call up your boss and say, “Hey, mind if I start today’s meeting with a scream?” I don’t really want to scream at the family dinner table, and I definitely don’t want to do it at the gym or when I am picking up my kids at school.

It’s not so much what people will think of me, though there is a part of that that is true—you don’t want to be known at your company as the person who screams at meetings. That is not something to put in your end-of-year employee review!

It’s mostly that sober people are such a safe audience, and I think that’s mostly because good sobriety usually means you are constantly looking for ways to identify with others, not feel inferior or superior. So that’s why when someone says they’re losing their s**t and want to scream, 7 sober people nod their heads—they get it, and they understand that they have wanted to scream many times themselves. I rarely feel any kind of judgment.

Now let me say, I don’t know that I would scream at a big recovery meeting in front of 50 other people. But I would definitely gather around 3 or 4 friends afterward and give them a big ol’ scream if I needed to. I always say that having sober friends is an incredible, incredible gift that we have for any number of reasons, and now I can add a new one: people to scream with.

This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:

Walking his beat in a big city park one moonlit evening, a policeman noticed a stooped-over drunk teetering perilously on the edge of a small lake. The drunk seemed to be admiring his reflection. "Hey," warned the Law, "stand up from there!"

The inebriate didn't raise his head.

"You," said the Law, "get away from that lake."

Slowly turned the drunk. He pointed at a face in the water. "Offisher, who's zat feller?"

The constable moved alongside. "Him?" he asked. "That's you. Now, see the cop? That's me."

Enraptured by the beauty and poetry of it all, the drunk clapped his hands. "S'wunnerful," he exclaimed. "And who izzat feller with the pale, round face? See 'im? He's peekin' over bur shoulders."

"That," sighed the gendarme, "that is the moon."

"Moon?" marveled the drunk.

"Moon," firmly insisted the copper. "Luna."

Suddenly, a great truth dawned. "Wheee!" shouted the stew, joyously, "Ain't we high up!"

(Credit: AA Grapevine, January 1948)

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe