LOL Sober

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 saw Cocaine Bear this weekend with sober friends, and it was quite a surreal scene. First of all, sober people going together to a movie about a bear on a cocaine rampage… what the hell?

Secondly, an actual movie about a bear on a cocaine rampage exists in 2023… again, what the hell?

Man, it was such a blast. I’ll give you a quick review. If you’re not familiar with this movie, it came out this past weekend and did surprisingly well. It is exactly what it says on the package: a movie about a bear that eats a bunch of cocaine and goes wild in a small town. I’ve heard some people say it is a true story, and that’s not quite accurate. A bunch of cocaine did plummet out of an airplane into the woods in the mid-1980s, and a bear did eat a lot of it. But the movie takes that basic fact and runs with it in a mostly fictional story.

I freaking loved the movie. It doesn’t try to be smarter than it has to be, and just spends 90 minutes trying to meld horrifying violence with dark comedy in a way that I thought worked really well. I found myself laughing and then feeling mortified and then laughing again and then feeling mortified again… it was a great romp.

I think I would have felt that way no matter what. But I also think that my own addiction issues make it extra amusing. I mean, I freaking identified with the bear. The bear got some cocaine in its system and then couldn’t stop. The bear turned into something it’s not, all in the name of getting that next high. Drugs had taken over the bear’s life, and the bear was going to do whatever it had to in order to keep the party going. And guess what, just like I discovered, the bear finds out that for a hardcore user—in the bear’s case, a 600-pound, 8-foot-tall user—there are never enough substances to fill that void.

I never mauled anybody to get drugs or alcohol. But was I capable of that? Maybe. I had gotten increasingly desperate to find more and more painkillers down the stretch of my active addiction, and I was finding it very difficult to get 50 pills from doctors every day. I had resorted to stealing them from peoples’ medicine cabinets at that point, and it was only a matter of time—probably less than a year—till I was desperate enough to go to extreme measures. I sure hope I wouldn’t have ever become violent, but I did think about it when I was still active, and how I didn’t want to get to that point. I think that was a factor in me deciding to rehab.

Spoiler alert: Cocaine Bear did not go to bear rehab. I won’t say how the movie ends, but would suggest you see it for yourself. I have no doubt that you’ll end up laughing, covering your eyes… and wishing Cocaine Bear could find a good meeting and grab a bear sponsor.

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:

OLDIE BUT GOODIE: A little boy became pretty well-versed in AA practices after his old man dried out. One night, the boy greeted his father and said, "I want to show you my report card, but before I do, would you care to join me in the Serenity Prayer?"

(Credit: AA Grapevine, August 2008, by Anonymous)

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 heard someone share recently that “Willingness without action is fantasy,” and I nodded along right away. But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to unpack that phrase because I think it might be one of the keys to the sober kingdom.

So, start with willingness. That’s an easy one—you have to have willingness to get sober! You have to be willing to stop. Willing to seek treatment, either at a facility or with some kind of recovery program. Willing to grow along spiritual lines, as sober literature says. Willing to take suggestions. Willing to do so, so many things to overcome an insidious disease.

I actually like how a lot of stepwork is devoted to first helping you develop willingness before going full-on into the stepwork. In the steps that involve a higher power, there’s a lot of preheating of the oven to get you ready. And with Step Nine—that’s the amends one!—I always find a thorough Step Eight to be essential. Step Eight is about making a list of people you’ve harmed, and becoming willing to make amends. You don’t actually do the amends yet.

Now, the action part of that phrase. That felt profound to me. How many times have I gotten myself to a place of willingness and then… just not really done anything else? I am thinking specifically about Steps Six and Seven over the past few years. I’ve gotten really good at identifying character defects that still cause pain for me and others, and I have talked about them quite a bit with respected sober friends, and I have decided I want them to go away. And—that’s all I’ve done. No real hardcore action.

I’ll give you two examples. One is food. Man, I need to lose about 25 pounds, and the food I eat is pretty shitty, and I eat like an addict. I’ve been saying it for a good two years or so now, and I make half-hearted attempts. But I never really put the medal to the pedal and actually do anything. I have the willingness but I won’t take real action, so my diet is a fantasy, and therefore, my ass remains the size of a barrel.

The second example is being argumentative. I will argue about anything. Obviously a part of me likes it. I think I am pretty good at it. It helps me get what I want sometimes. But, seriously, I’m not sure what the point of doing sports talk radio b******t on my front lawn is. I had a neighbor say one time he thought an NBA trade was a bad trade, and I thought it was a good trade, and we stood there and bickered about it for 20 minutes. Neither one of us was angry. No real harm was done. But neither one of us changed our minds. Neither one of us even seemed like we had any interest in changing our minds. So we just blabbed back and forth about it, and then I walked inside wondering what the point of that argument was.

So those are two examples that occasionally are a waste of time, and sometimes create some tension in my life or those around me. I know about them. I have talked about them. But the action I have taken is minimal.

You might be saying to yourself, “What action is there to actually take?” Fair question. It’s not like there is a Step 13 about freeing yourself of being a sports talk idiot all the time. But there are things I could do if I ever really set my mind to it. For instance, I could connect with my sponsor and set up some accountability standards. I could seek counseling to work on myself with a professional. I could pray three times a day to relieve me of those character defects. I could do all sorts of things to at least be pushing myself hard and staying focused on getting better with those problem areas. I’m doing zero of those things right now.

But that’s the point of the original sentence, I think: Willingness without action is fantasy. Right now, those two things I mentioned are fantasies. They are things that I kinda, sorta, maybe wish I could snap my fingers and have them be gone. Do I REALLY want them gone? Do I REALLY want to grind and grind and grind to work through them? No, not yet.

Hope that is helpful or at least thought-provoking.

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:

TRUE STORY: My young sponsee, Bobby, not quite twenty-one but with two-and-a-half years' sobriety, called to ask me: "Do you think it will be all right for me to skip the Sunday night meeting for mindless self-indulgence?"

"Doesn't sound like a very good idea to me," I said.

"Aw, c'mon," he said. "It was really hard to get the tickets and it's my girlfriend's favorite band!"

After a web search revealed Mindless Self-Indulgence as a real band, scheduled to play the next Sunday night, I gave Bobby my blessing to go enjoy the show.

(Credit: AA Grapevine, August 2008, from Quin M. of Henderson, Nevada)

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 have been reading a lot lately about the state of friendships in the U.S. these days and… It. Is. Not. Good. About 12 percent of American adults who are polled say they have zero close friends. In 1990, that number was 3 percent. If you add up the numbers for people who say they have two or fewer friends, it’s 32 percent now, which is twice what it was 30 years ago. That’s a lot of people out there on islands.

An important note, in case you’re wondering: That survey didn’t count spouses, brothers, sisters, moms, etc. It makes the case that friendships are great with loved ones, but most humans need other friends besides that category. I have a bunch of amazing loved ones in my life, but for the purposes of this newsletter, I am talking specifically about friends, not relatives.

So those numbers are alarming, and you can read the entire survey in THIS LINK. I don’t think I need to explain the impact of people not having very many close friends other than to say it is really bad. And for the purposes of this newsletter about addiction and recovery, I think it is extremely bad. Loneliness can be an absolute destructive force for so many of us addicts and alcoholics—even when we’re not drinking or drugging any more.

OK, so that was a lot of bad news. But I wanted to focus more on the good news here, which is that I have found recovery to be a beautiful antidote to such an ugly friendship crisis. If I had to answer that question, about the number of friends I have, I don’t even know what I would say. I think I would consider at least 10 sober people in my life to be close friends, and it’s possible that number would be like 25.

I almost can’t believe that number is real as I think about it, but it is. I have a double digit number of sober friends who I would trust to watch my kids, or take me to the hospital, or share something incredibly personal with. I know that sounds like a high number, but it’s true. Trust me, I went through my phone and counted, and I ended up with a number north of 25 but I felt sheepish saying that.

By no means do I think I am unique in that regard. But I do think one of the No. 1 things that has tripped me up before, and tripped lots of other people up, is that I didn’t develop significant relationships with people beyond seeing them at meetings. And I get it. When I got sober, I had zero people on earth who I had been telling the truth to. Nobody knew the real me and what I was up to every day. My life had been like that for about three years. So the idea that I would go to rehab and suddenly be an open book with lots of close friends is ridiculous. I didn’t even know how to be an actual friend, and even if I knew how to be a good friend, I had spent the past three years getting comfortable with no friends and lots of secrets. It was not like riding a bike, where it all came back to me, either. It was uncomfortable letting my guard down with people for a long time.

But eventually I started to open up and connect with people. I wouldn’t count some of those early relationships in sobriety as being close friends, by the survey’s standards. Like, if I never called you and didn’t have your number, I’m not sure that qualifies, and I had a stretch of sobriety where I was seeing sober people all the time at meetings, talking to them afterward, and maybe even grabbing a coffee once in a while. I would consider those types of people to be acquaintances, and those are crucial, too. I only figured out how to move beyond being acquaintances with people by being acquaintances with them first.

If you’re wondering what my point is… I’m not really sure it’s more than making close friends is very important for any human being, and I consider it essential for sobriety. I’m not sure I could stay sober if I had lots of people in my life who I keep at arm’s length. I’ve tried sobriety with no friends, then with one or two, then with lots of close friends… let me tell you, it’s no comparison. The more close relationships I have had, the happier I have been. So get yourself a close friend—or five!—as soon as you can!

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 hated his wife’s cat and decided to get rid of it by driving it 20 blocks from his home and leaving it at the park. But as he was getting home, the cat was walking up the driveway.

The next day, he decided to drive the cat 40 blocks away. He let it out of the car and headed home. Driving back up his driveway, there was the cat!

He kept taking the cat further and further and the cat would always beat him home. At last, he decided to drive a few miles away, turn right, then left, past the bridge, then right again, and another right, until he reached what he thought was a safe distance from his home and left the cat there. Hours later the man called home to his wife: "Honey, is the cat there?"

"Yes," his wife answered. "Why do you ask?"

Frustrated, the man answered, "Put the cat on the phone. I'm drunk, I'm lost, and I need directions!"

(Credit: AA Grapevine, August 2008, by Terry B.)

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’m almost a year behind, but I finally watched the movie Elvis, which was released in June of 2022. It is up for eight Oscar nominations and is back in some theaters near my house, so you will be hearing more about it. The star of the movie, Austin Butler, is up for Best Actor, and the movie itself is up for Best Picture.

As you would expect, there is a lot of drugs and alcohol in the movie. That’s why I am reviewing it here. As I have done in the past, I will give it a standard movie review that is similar to reviews you might read elsewhere, but I also try to assess the way addiction and recovery are shown in the movie. In this case, there is no recovery. I hope I’m not spoiling anything here for people, but Elvis Presley died a pretty ugly death at age 42, on his bathroom floor. The official cause of death was cardiac arrest, but multiple studies of the lab reports over the years have said that drugs were a significant part of what killed Elvis. One lab found 14 different drugs in his system, according to Wikipedia.

Okay, so the movie itself: I was pretty underwhelmed. It’s glitzy and does some very cool visual things. I also think Butler is quite impressive as Elvis, including his performances. As I watched it, I couldn’t imagine another human being on earth doing a better job than what Butler does. Tom Hanks is in the movie, playing Elvis’ controversial manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Hanks has mostly gotten big thumbs down, and I was thrown off the entire movie listening to his strange accent that seems to come and go at times. But I didn’t hate his performance as much as some people did—to me, it was more bad casting than anything else.

But the story is often times a mile wide and an inch deep. Director Baz Luhrrman made the decision to try to tell Elvis’ entire life in this movie, rather than one chapter, so it speeds through Elvis’ life, and that makes all the supporting characters along the way cardboard cutouts of real people. I do wonder what kind of movie we might have gotten if the entire film was centered around, say, the making of his infamous Christmas album, rather than his four decades.

Now let me address the addiction part of the story. I really thought they portrayed addiction in an accurate, affecting way. The tendency with Hollywood is to simplify addiction stories down to very 1+1=2 stories. Scriptwriters will take one traumatic event—loss of a loved one, a sexual assault, a painful divorce—and then voila, an alcoholic or drug addict is born. In my experience, addiction is usually a lot more complicated than one singular bad thing that caused it all. I get why writers do that. It’s a clean, easily-explained thing you can point to as the thing that changed the person, but in my life, I have seen addiction to usually be a complex mix of factors that all swirl and team up to cause the spiral into addiction.

With Elvis, the movie shows him with some alcoholism around him as a kid, and then we see him turn into a big star who needs the adoration of crowds. The crowds fill him up, and his manager weaponizes that throughout the movie. He needs people to love him, to fill that bottomless pit inside him. But, as is usually the case, the bottomless pit can’t be filled up with anything external. Elvis starts in on hardcore drugs, uppers and downers around the clock, and that doesn’t work either. He also has all sorts of affairs, and that doesn’t fill the void, either.

I really identified with that idea that so many of us addicts try to feel complete. I wasn’t exactly Elvis Presley, but I always thought if I could find the perfect combination of drugs, alcohol, love, professional success and so on that I would feel content in the world. When I began to go overboard on drugs and alcohol, I started to think if I could be good at my job and have a great marriage, then maybe I wouldn’t need the drugs and alcohol any more. It was a cloudy mess in my head, because it was a cloudy mess of substance abuse and overrating what romance or professional success could ever do for me. Trust me, I know now that if I had a perfect marriage and was the absolute best in the world at the perfect job… it wouldn’t have mattered. I had a spiritual pit inside me that had to be filled with spiritual things.

Unfortunately, Elvis never got a chance at sobriety. He died at age 42, and he was suffering by the end. I can’t say I loved the movie—let’s give it a C for a grade—but I did think they did an impressive job capturing the concept of more not being better. And because it was Elvis Presley, a king in so many ways, with so much money and adoration and success and material stuff and people who loved him, that really was a boost to my recovery. It’s a reminder that there is no amount of fame or fortune or romance that can ever make me complete. It’s an inside job.

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:

"I have to do things that get my mind off myself and out of the center of the universe. It's too crowded, anyway."

(Credit: AA Grapevine, by Jim F. of Tasmania, September 2008)

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 remember during my worst stretch of active addiction thinking to myself, “Even if I managed to get clean and sober, how could I possibly not drink and do drugs during the Super Bowl? How?!?!?” I couldn’t even imagine.

It’s a weird thing to circle on the calendar, even for a super sports fan like me. I mean, I watched Super Bowls from about 2005-08 completely by myself, barely conscious. It’s not like those days were even that much fun. But for some reason, I chose the Super Bowl as my biggest barrier to entry into sobriety.

Holy s**t, what a moronic thing to have believed. I had a whole list of holidays and special occasions that were right behind the Super Bowl, too, and none of them were any fun for years. My birthday? I can’t even remember one during the last three years of drinking and drugging. Christmas? Pretty hazy.

So it was total b******t that the Super Bowl actually represented anything really important to me. Those were just excuses to not do the hard work of seeking help.

Part 1 of that delusion was that those days require a drink in your hand because that’s what everybody is doing. Part 2 of the delusion was the idea that on special days, whether it’s the Super Bowl or your wedding day or your best friend’s wedding day or the day you get promoted or whatever, you deserve to make a good day a little better with mood-altering substances. I’ve heard that one a lot over the years so I know I didn’t invent that concept. But it was a real thing in my head, and it still is sometimes. If something is good, maybe I could do something to make it even better!

For example, maybe a sports game will be good as its own thing… and what if I also eat a bunch of crappy food that I love? And what if I bet on the game? A good sporting event, plus donuts, plus guaranteed wealth after I beat the sports books… now that is an addict’s delight!

But here’s what I have realized. One, I can’t gamble. At all. Secondly, I can eat a donut or two, but I need to be careful about trying to use food as a way to change the way that I feel. And last but not least, the Super Bowl is a helluva lot of fun if you’re not puking in your basement trash can by yourself. I watched the first half of this year’s game with some sober friends, and it was awesome. Then I watched a very good football game conclude at my house. I remember what happened in the game, and where I parked my car, and who I was going to wake up next to. It was great!

I’ve been sober since 2008, which means I have double digit sober Super Bowls under my belt. Same with birthdays and Christmases and parent-teacher conferences. And the myth of needing a mood boost to enjoy those things is exactly that, a total myth. It’s actually the opposite—the idea of nodding off and potentially pissing my pants in a dark room by myself and missing the entire Super Bowl isn’t exactly something I ever miss. Turns out, the best way for an addict and alcoholic to enjoy the game is sober. I couldn’t imagine it any other way at this point.

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:

"Happy Hour for me is now a nap."

(Credit: AA Grapevine, September 2008, by Tommy H. of Baton Rouge, Louisiana)

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 at a meeting recently where the topic was the importance of anonymity, and woo boy, it was so interesting to hear people give both their opinions and their experiences. Because guess what? Not everybody has the exact same opinion about the definition of anonymity, and the idea that that’s okay is one of the coolest parts of being in recovery. I’ve heard people say it’s a cult, or brain-washing, and I just don’t see that. I see a bunch of free-thinkers involved in a program that is all suggestions, no enforcement, and that leaves a wide range of opinions on any given topic—including anonymity.

So what I thought I would do is throw out five scenarios in a pop quiz-like format. I’ll tell you my thoughts on each, and I would love to hear yours. But again, just to double down… these are just my opinions, not anybody else’s. So if you disagree, that’s fine, I speak only for myself, not for any program.

Another thing: I completely made up these scenarios, and I used fake names. If I use the name Frank or Heather in here, it’s not based on an actual human being named Frank or Heather.

Scenario 1: Some clown starts an anonymous newsletter about sobriety.

My thoughts: Uh, that’s a clear violation of all recovery principles.

Just kidding. I’ve talked about this before, but when I was considering doing a newsletter, I spent a month or so soliciting opinions and reading recovery literature about the definition of anonymity. The decision I reached was that I could publish a newsletter, without using my real name, but that I should avoid talking about specific 12-step programs. As I’ve said in the past, I actually have participated in four different recovery programs, some of which were 12 steps and some that weren’t, and I also have participated in therapy over the years. So my experience on sobriety is actually a combination of lots of things, anyway.

Now, did I reach the right decision? I honestly don’t know. I argue with myself about it sometimes because I am talking about sobriety in a public forum. It’s tricky to know what the right answer is.

Scenario 2: You’re friends with Frank. A new guy, Biff, comes into recovery and you and Frank both befriend him. Biff is sober for a month, then relapses and gets arrested. One day, you run into Frank and he says, “Hey, have you heard from Biff? How’s he doing?”

My thoughts: This pops up quite frequently in sobriety. One of my favorite things about recovery is forming awesome communities, which means we look out for each other and we communicate frequently. But that also opens the door to things that are either gossip, or close to it.

In this situation in the past, I’ve always feel a pang in my stomach about how to answer. One pang is because I didn’t want to be a dick and say, “That’s none of your business; you’ll have to ask Biff.” I also didn’t want to tell somebody else’s story for them because of my basic interpretation of what anonymity means. So I used to say, “Well, Biff’s not doing great. You should give him a call.”

Now I say basically the same thing, but with 10 percent more anonymity. I try to just say, “I talked to him yesterday. Give him a call. He can update you.” There’s not a huge difference between those two things, I know. I just try to go overboard on protecting your story. It is YOUR story, after all, and unless you’ve asked me to be your spokesperson, I’m not going to be.

Scenario 3: Biff stays sober for six months, and posts a picture of his anniversary coin on Facebook and he thanks his specific 12-step program.

My thoughts: This is a very thorny issue based on recovery literature that I have read. As a reminder, the 11th tradition states that: “Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films.”

OK, there’s a lot to unpack and chew on with this scenario.

The first thing is that I would say that social media didn’t exist when these programs were created, but I would guess that Facebook, etc. would be considered under the spirit of the definition to be press, radio and films.

The second thing that stands out to me is that it definitely seems to apply to publicly stating you’re in recovery. I re-read the 11th tradition in the 12 and 12 book not too long ago, and it was pretty hard-line about anonymity. Like, hard-line in a way that it actually seemed like a sober newsletter might be going against the principle in some ways. I obviously felt differently or else you wouldn’t be subjected to reading this or listening to this right now!

The third thing that I couldn’t help but think about is that maybe the most important thing to ever happen to 12-step recovery was a national magazine story. Bill W. let a Saturday Evening Post writer into the world of recovery in 1941 and fully participated in a story that became a national sensation and caused a huge spike in people seeking out 12-step help. I am including a link HERE from the official web site where Bill’s enthusiasm for national press coverage is pretty obvious. So, I sometimes have a hard time contrasting that key early moment with the guidance that was passed along later.

OK, so my final answer here is… I don’t have a problem with anybody posting their sobriety date. I like seeing it. It helps me. I think it helps spread a little hope. And you earned a small victory lap, I would say. I personally don’t do it but that’s because I mostly try to avoid social media for other reasons. The only thing I have seen that I definitely think is not cool is when Biff posts he has six months sober, then thanks 15 people from recovery who helped him get there. I just don’t think that Biff’s roster of sober friends signed up for that public acknowledgement.

Scenario 4: You’re at a party and someone offers you a drink. You say, “No thanks,” and they ask why. What do you do?

My thoughts: What’s interesting is how few times this has actually happened in real life, versus how many times I have heard alcoholics and addicts worry about it happening in life. I just haven’t run into it much. I have mostly found that nobody really gives a s**t if you’re drinking, what you’re drinking, etc.

But I have had it happen a few times, and my response always is, “Nah, I gave up drinking.” Nobody has ever asked me a single followup. I guess if they asked why, I would say something like, “It’s just not good for me. I tend to drink a little too much, and the next day, I always regret it.” Something like that.

Looking at this solely through breaking anonymity to another person, I think that lies with every individual person. If you want to say you had to go to rehab and now you participate in 12-step recovery, I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I am pretty open about it myself. But some people aren’t, and I think that’s fine, too. I wouldn’t recommend going door to door at your office Christmas party saying what a raging alcoholic you were. It’s probably not worth it. But I do think if you’re comfortable saying, “I quit drinking because I realized I was an alcoholic and I needed help,” go for it.

Scenario 5: You run into Biff at the grocery store. He’s with somebody you don’t know. You are excited to see your sober friend, Biff, so you rush in for a hug. Cool or not cool?

My thoughts: So I actually had this scenario happen to me. And I love seeing sober people out in public. It always is a little mini boost to my sobriety in the moment, and a reminder that we carry our principles out into all of our affairs.

When I began to head toward this dude for a hug, he gave me a wide-eyed look that signaled, “Leave me alone.” So I did. I was aggravated, though. What was Biff’s problem? Are we not friends any more? Screw him, what a jer…

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!

About once a week, my 14-year-old sends me a meme or a YouTube video of a kid complaining about their parents for giving them a hard time about something. It’s always something like “My mom yells at me for having old food in my room, while other kids are out doing drugs and getting pregnant.”

I get where she’s coming from. I used to think the same thing every time my parents gave me a hard time for something that I deemed a small thing. Why don’t they let this one thing go because of all the more important good things I have been doing? They probably had the same gripe about their parents. It is a tale as old as time, I’m sure.

But as I usually do, I told her, “That’s not how things work at our house. Just because I don’t kick puppies doesn’t mean I deserve a statue. We have high standards around here.” She rolled her eyes and groaned, and honestly, it was well deserved.

I think her point is worth considering. And I think the point I was making is true… but I also think I’m full of s**t a lot about this idea. For many years when I was in active addiction, I would find loopholes about why I had a problem… but not a HUGE problem. I would always find one person who was a bigger trainwreck than me, and say, “Well, at least I’m not as bad as so-and-so.”

And when I got to rehab, I thought I absolutely belonged… until I heard a dude share about how he’d recently been arrested and sent to treatment because he got coked up and tried to rob an Amtrak train. I remember saying to my sponsor, “You know, I have robbed zero trains. So maybe I don’t need recovery.”

Luckily, I stuck around, and began to understand that all bottoms are different heights. Mine might have been a little higher than some others as far as losing things like a marriage or a job, but I had lost all my dignity, all my control, all my self-esteem. So my bottom was pretty ugly, even if it looked okay on paper.

Now that I have been sober for awhile, I still catch myself acting like an a*****e at work or with my wife or kids, and I’ll say to myself, “Well, hey, at least I am present, and I paid all our bills last month. So I am doing okay.” That’s kind of the mentality of my kid when she sends me those memes—“I did the really, really important stuff and didn’t do anything terrible, so why are you giving me a hard time?”

The truth is, I want my kids to learn good habits. Yes, that includes not doing drugs as a teenager and avoiding unwanted pregnancies. But there’s also room for not having maggots eating last Tuesday’s dinner on your bedroom floor.

That goes for me, too. I can’t act like a dick and then shrug because I have a job and am sober. I need a higher standard than that. So I guess my suggestion to anybody reading or listening to this is to find a grumpy teenager, and have them bombard you with memes and videos about how much you suck for pushing them to do better. It’s a great motivator!

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:

The octogenarian AA was having a check-up and the doctor asked her, "Have you ever fallen and couldn't get up?"

"Yes," she replied.

"What did you do?" the doctor asked.

Responded the 85-year-old: "I quit drinking!"

(Credit: AA Grapevine, September 2008, Deanna S. of Canton, Georgia)

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 listen to a podcast called The Rewatchables, which is dedicated to movies that the hosts deem rewatchable. So it’s not always Oscar-winners. There are a lot of Sylvester Stallone action movies, and plenty of Tom Cruise films. It’s right up my alley.

Well, they recently spent a good two hours talking about the Tom Hanks classic, Big. I loved that movie so much as a kid, and I still watch it once a year, maybe more. I found it so heart-warming and an endorsement of the idea that you never want to lose the kid in you.

However, as the podcast touched on quite a bit, it’s a little problematic as an adult to watch because of how weird a concept it is to have a 13-year-old in an adult’s body, having an adult relationship with a 30-year-old woman. And—spoiler alert for an old movie—it is even stranger to watch it now and see how nonchalant Elizabeth Perkins’ character is when she finds out the truth. Which is that she had been having a lot of sex with a 13-year-old. Doesn’t seem to bother her as much as you’d think it would.

But as I listened to the discussion of Big, it really hit home for me about my sobriety. One of the most startling things to me about getting sober was the “hole in the donut” problem, which I have discussed 400 times on this newsletter. To recap, it’s the fear that many newly-sober people have—including me—that by getting rid of drugs and alcohol, and then avoiding people, places and things that caused us to drink and drug, and then working through resentments, and then praying, and then getting rid of character defects… I remember wondering, “What will be left of me? I’ll just be a blank sheet of paper.”

In my experience, it did kind of break out that way. The good news, though, is that a blank sheet of paper can be a beautiful thing. It was for me. It’s an open road to figure out who you were, who you are and who you want to be.

There’s definitely growing pains, and I felt those. I worked really hard for a few years after I got sober to get rid of the bad parts of me, and I got to a place where I was pretty happy with those results. But I also struggled to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. In a weird way, I felt like I did when I was 16-17-18 years old, meeting with guidance counselors and touring colleges to figure out what path I wanted to take in life. This time, I was in my mid-30s, already was married, already had kids, already worked a full-time job. But who did I want to be?

I didn’t know, and that was scary. Did I want to be more reserved? I’d read about the power of stoicism, and that sounded very cool. Did I want to do my current job? Did I still love sports the way I used to? I honestly wasn’t sure about a lot of those things, especially when it came to my personality. I always have been a goofball, pretty immature for my age, but I kind of liked that, and I think other people did, too. I really believe life is a mix of joy and pain, and if you don’t have the joy in there, it’s just 100 percent pain and bitterness and suffering. Who wants that?

So that brings me back to Big. One of the things that makes Josh Baskin so appealing to adults he interacts with is that I think he is a version of an adult that most adults wish they could be. But the older you get, the more you realize that people might look down on your if you seem immature. You start to get self-conscious about singing karaoke because people might think you’re not good at it. How many of us don’t take any chances whatsoever because we’re worried what other people think?

Basically, insecurity floods in as you get older. So most adults cave in and let their inner child die off. Or worse yet, they keep that inner child locked in a cage inside them, and that’s painful, too. In Big, Tom Hanks’ character just lets it fly, and you can see other characters start to be drawn in by that because they wish they could do that, too.

As I listened to that podcast, I realized that at some point, probably in the last five years, I decided on what I wanted to be for the rest of my life. I want to be sober—that’s first and foremost—and that comes with a certain amount of spirituality and pause and restraint that I want to keep. But No. 2 on the list is that I want to be what I am—which is a total goofball who seeks out the joy in life. I’m going to abide by societal norms for acting like a clown as a 45-year-old, but I feel secure enough in myself that I am going to be who I am and be pretty comfortable about that. That led me to try standup comedy, which is the ultimate test of whether failing will affect you self-esteem. I mean, even the best comedians you’ve ever seen have gotten on stage many, many times and eaten s**t so hard it would break a lot of other people. And I had my share of s**t sandwiches when I was doing standup on a regular basis. I tried my best and worked very hard on it, but I would walk off stage after totally whiffing and I’d go home and I’d be fine. I credit sobriety for that, and I specifically credit recovery for letting me tear everything down and build it back up. So here I am, a 45-year-old semi-responsible child.

So sobriety has been so cool in that regard. I figured out what I couldn’t be any more, then I figured out what I didn’t want to be, then I figured out who I wanted to be.

I’ll give you a good example of what I mean. The other night, my older daughters drove to Target at about 9 pm. When they got home, they needed me to pull my car into the driveway so they could park on the outside. I did that, then I stood beside the driveway and waved them in. As they pulled in, I ducked down and went around the back of the car. We’re pretty playful about chasing each other around the house and trying to scare each other, and they giggle and run away. It’s one of those goofy family things that only makes sense if you see it every day.

So I was hiding back behind a running car—always a great idea, I know—and they were both gawking their heads around to see where I was at. I could hear them in the car going, “Ahhhh, where did he go?” Eventually I jumped up on the passenger side and made a growling noise, and I could see them in the car laughing their asses off. If you’d have been watching this scene from next door, you would have bought a straightjacket on Amazon and had it delivered to my house.

But eventually they shut down the car and got out, and we all walked in together. My 14-year-old said, “You are the biggest idiot on earth,” and I nodded. Yep, I am, and I’m fine with that.

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:

"I really want to thank you for sticking with me through all the years of drinking, and the first five years of my sobriety," said the AA to her spouse on her fifth-year anniversary. "But I'm curious. If I started drinking again, would you still love me?"

After pondering the question for just about a tenth of a second, her husband responded, "Of course I would still love you. I'd miss you, but I would still love you!"

(Credit: AA Grapevine, September 2008, by Richard M. of Golden, Colorado)

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!

When I first got sober, I lived in New Jersey and worked in New York City. So I started out going to New York meetings in the afternoon every day of the work week. But I also traveled a lot, so I’d end up in Pennsylvania or Florida or some other state for five days, and I was so used to only going to NYC meetings that I would struggle without my meetings.

That’s when somebody told me that I should find a meeting wherever I am because it was worth it. I’ll never forget him also saying, “And hey, it’s pretty fun to hear new people in a new place at a new meeting talk about how they got sober. It can be pretty amusing.”

That has been one of the most helpful things anybody said to me. The truth is, road trips of any kind are pretty jarring. I’m talking about family trips and vacations, but also any work-related trips, too. Think about all the ways you’re out of whack. You’re not sleeping where you are comfortable. You’re eating different stuff—probably crappier food, if you’re anything like me. You’re probably at extreme levels of isolation or togetherness—by that, I mean you’re probably either crammed into Grandma’s guest bedroom with your spouse and kids, or by yourself in a hotel room. It’s intense, either way.

So all of that adds up to really throwing off even the most sober people. It certainly does that to me. So I recognized that that guy was right all those years ago, and I started trying to hit a meeting every time I am out of town. And sure enough, I got a lot of spiritual nourishment out of it and they kept me sober… but I also got to experience different and unusual ways for meetings and sobriety to happen, and that was so cool.

All right, that is a long setup for my most recent road trip, out to the great state of Wyoming. On the flight in, I couldn’t believe the mountains and the snow and the hundreds of miles of openness on the ground. Then I couldn’t believe the wind, because our plane started blowing around like a tumbleweed in the sky and it scared the living s**t out of me.

But we landed, and I immediately looked up local 12-step meetings. I found a group that met twice a day that was about one mile from my hotel. What a gift, right? I always end up in places where my first thought is, “Hmm, I wonder if they even have alcoholics out here?” The answer is yes. It’s always yes. We’re everywhere.

I checked into my hotel and hit the evening meeting up the street, which I am pretty proud of. Like I said, I always try to make a meeting in the place I am staying. But if I can, I go to more than one. Why not be as sober as possible, versus doing the bare minimum? On this trip, I stayed for four days and hit three meetings.

The first night, they were celebrating anniversaries, and this meeting had a bunch of them. One woman was celebrating 35 years sober, and she was asked, “How’d you do it?” She shared for about 10 minutes and it was great, and one of her points was that as she looked out around the room at the birthday celebrants, she noticed yet again that there were long periods of sobriety and short periods of sobriety… but not a lot of mediums. And as the other celebrants announced their sober time the rest of the meeting, I noticed that she was right. There were people celebrating 35 years, 28 years and 15 years, and then lots of three months and six months. But there weren’t any three years or six years.

She ultimately made a broader point that it is pretty easy for sobriety to get stale. She said she uses that word carefully, because she doesn’t think it has anything to do with sobriety getting stale. She said it’s when we get promoted and married and have our first kid and pay off our bills and life is pretty good… we start to think we know what we’re doing. We’re not as teachable. We’re too busy to work with others. The steps become tools we used to use, not tools that we use on a daily basis.

I found myself nodding along, because that’s been one of the biggest landmines in my recovery. I got sober because I was absolutely broken and desperate. So it makes sense that the minute that my ass isn’t on fire I would start to think I figured it all out.

That lady’s share really helped me, but I couldn’t help looking at my phone clock as she got to five minutes, then eight minutes, then 10 minutes. I was looking around the room at the other 30 people and thinking, “Geez, lady, wrap it up and leave some time for the rest of us to speak.” But then I remembered that nobody elected me the new president of sobriety in Wyoming, and that if this meeting allows anniversary celebrants to share as long as they want, I should shut the f— up and listen.

And it also made me chuckle a little bit because while she was sharing about how it’s usually not good to think you have it all figured out… I was 15 minutes into my recovery time in Wyoming and thinking I had it all figured out for this meeting. Oh well, live and learn. Thanks to my sober friends in the wild, wild sober west for getting me through a visit!

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 TRUE STORY:

A woman at my meeting told us about leaving another meeting the other night and discovering that her car had a flat tire. She called her auto club to come and fix it. Knowing that it might take a while for the service to arrive, some of her friends from the meeting stayed and waited with her.

She called her husband to let him know what was going on, and he asked, "How many alcoholics does it take to change a flat tire?"

(Credit: AA Grapevine, December 2008, by Jean M. of Export, Pa.)

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 saw a very funny meme on an Instagram account named Alanoneofyourfuckingbusiness. (Great name for a social media account, by the way!). Here’s a LINK.

It’s two cartoon photos stacked on top of each other.

In one picture, a cartoon guy is standing in front of a crowd and asking, “Who wants serenity?” Everybody raises their hand.

In the second photo, the same guy says to the same crowd, “Who wants to work the steps?” Nobody raises their hand.

I sooooooo understand this. I absolutely want serenity. Do I want to pay the price that it takes to achieve? No, not really. As it was with drugs and alcohol, I want a quick fix, and I don’t want to pay anything at all.

And when I say “pay the price” it costs for serenity, what I mean is that I work the steps. That I go to meetings every week. That I have a sponsor and I sponsor people. That I read basic recovery literature books at least once a year.

If that all sounds pretty reasonable as the cost of serenity, it is. I have done all of those things for pretty much my entire recovery. But I also have some experience with what I would call the recovery drive-through window. That’s a version of sobriety where I don’t work the steps for a year, sometimes longer. Or, I had one stretch where I did not have a sponsor for a few months. Or, I have a span of about five years where I didn’t go to meetings where we read sober literature, which meant I didn’t read some of the key guidelines of the program for a longgg period of time.

Even this year, I was talking to a guy who mentioned he was sponsoring a bunch of people, and he asked me how many people I was working with, and I said, “One.”

He immediately said, “Dude, that’s not good enough. You have a lot to offer as a sponsor. You gotta get your hand up at more meetings and offer to work with others.” He was right.

And when it comes to the steps, I have gone through the steps a few times formally and a few times informally. I’ve also been working the steps with sponsees. That meme indicates that the path to serenity is through the steps, and I think that’s true. I have found the steps to be an essential in jumping up a few levels in recovery.

As with most things in recovery, though, I think there are people who probably did the steps once when they got sober and then just did spot-checks later on. Or maybe they did the steps themselves once, then worked the steps with sponsees after that. There are so many different ways to get sober and stay sober.

But maybe it’s time to kick the tires on me going through them again. It’s an interesting question that I don’t think the founders of 12-step recovery directly answered, which is, How many times do I have to do the steps? I definitely don’t think it’s like a high school diploma, where you do it once and you are done. I think the answer is that the steps—for me—are tools to use all the time, not once every 10 years. I have found tremendous value over the years in doing micro-stepping, like where I will work a strong fourth and fifth step for a week, or focus in on character defects by reading Drop the Rock with other sober people. I’ve definitely gotten a lot out of that.

So I guess the bottom line is, there might be a way to serenity that isn’t a direct line through doing the steps over and over again. I’m not really sure I want to wander around the woods looking for it, though. I’d rather take the straightest path possible… which sure seems like 12 steps.

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:

“Now that I’m sober, I no longer wake up in the morning, roll over and introduce myself.”

(Credit: AA Grapevine, June 2002, Anonymous)

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