LOL Sober

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According to the Hallmark Channel and every commercial on TV right now, this is the happiest time of the year. And some days, it does feel like that. I have a great life. I love my wife and kids. My job is awesome. I live somewhere that has a vibrant recovery community that helps me keep myself out of trouble—most of the time, anyway! So it is nice some days to have the holidays approaching.

But the longer I’ve been sober, the more I realize how tricky this six-week window is. From Thanksgiving through New Year’s, it has to be the most intense combination of outside factors that all conspire and can really wreck sobriety. I know that’s not exactly a novel idea—I remember people as far back as my very first meeting in November of 2008 saying to be careful during the 1-2-3 punch of Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Year’s.

I’m not even talking about physical relapse, though this is a very difficult time for that. I certainly think about that every day. But I’m also thinking about how you can do 11 months of work on building up your spiritual forcefield and then watch as it gets eaten away by the season.

Think about how many potholes we’re dealing with in the world during this time period. There’s a bunch of obvious stuff. But then there’s a few things that just sneak up on you and cause all sorts of less obvious issues.

Let’s start with the obvious.

—Traveling is hard. No explanation is necessary.

—Structure disappears. As much as a 9-to-5 job and kids in school all day can be unrelenting for the other 46 weeks of the year, there’s a certain rhythm to it where you at least have some guardrails. The holidays? Not so much.

—Money. Anybody else spend too much and end up with your fists balled up as you look at your bills rolling in during December? Yeah, me too.

—Drinking. I don’t have a ton of parties and drinking in my life any more, even during the holidays. But there’s definitely more of it around this time of year. Usually it doesn’t bother me. But on the wrong day, it ain’t very fun to be around a bunch of booze.

—A dip in meetings. I do a pretty good job of staying active in recovery throughout the holidays, but there’s no question my meeting attendance dips a bit when I am traveling over the holidays. It’s inevitable. And when all those things I already listed are happening, and I get to 3 meetings in a week instead of 4 or 5, you can imagine how that works out for me.

Now let me talk about a couple of things that I find to be stealthy disruptors.

—Darkness. It freaking gets dark at like 4:30 pm right now. I know it is a very old man thing to bring up, but literal darkness isn’t great for the soul. And when you’re two hours out from dinner and the sun is already gone for the day, there’s no way it doesn’t play a tiny part in my mood.

—Cold. I actually prefer cold weather to hot weather. But 19 degrees Fahrenheit in the darkness of 4:45 pm isn’t exactly a mood booster, ya know?

—The calendar. There’s something about the end of the year and the beginning of a new one that can feel like one chapter closing and a new, fresh one starting. That can be exciting and a good opportunity for growth, which is probably why so many people make New Year’s resolutions. But there’s also something to the idea that about 23% of people bail on New Year’s resolutions in a week or less, which is what one recent study found. That has been the case for me. What I find is, the end of a year can end up being an ugly moment to sit down and think about how much you suck, how your diet sucks, you don’t work out enough, you didn’t tell your loved ones you love them enough, and on and on and on. If that sounds like inventory work a lot of people in recovery do on a regular basis, I agree! I don’t need an extra moment to take stock of my shortfalls!

—Sloth central. Speaking of a sucky diet… I find myself easily turning into a slug around the holidays. It sounds great to cut it loose a bit on the diet, stay up late and wake up late, watch a bunch of sports with no work obligations and so on… but I actually think it can be too easy to morph into a slob around the holidays. And the last thing I need is six weeks of me time. I end up feeling so excited about the idea of sitting on a couch all day and relaxing and watching football and the NBA…. but it never plays out that way. I usually wind up feeling like a turd, and my kids are sitting around going nuts and yelling at each other, and it is pretty miserable.

I’m not really sure this post has much of a point other than awareness. I think it’s worth saying out loud that the deck is stacked against recovery people this time of year, and I guess my suggestion would be to consider that and then act accordingly. For me that means loading up on meetings, even if most of them are on Zoom, and make phone calls, and then make more phone calls. If we’re all scuffling a little bit this time of year, why not do some service work by checking in on a fellow drunk?

Then maybe go be a slob on the couch for four hours, then make a few more phone calls. That seems like a good recipe, huh?

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:

One night, a man goes to a party and has too much to drink. His friends plead with him to let them take him home. But he refuses, explaining that he lives only a mile away.

Five blocks from the party, the police pull him over and ask him to get out of the car to walk the line. Just as he’s about to give it a try, the police receive a call on their radio about a robbery taking place down the street. “Stay put,” one of the officers tells him. “We’ll be right back,” and off they run up the street toward the robbery.

Well, the guy waits and waits, but since the police don’t show up, he decides to drive home. When he gets there, he tells his wife he’s going to bed. “Tell anyone who might come looking for me,” he instructs her,” that I’ve been in bed with the flu all day.”

A few hours later, the police knock on the door and ask to see Mr. X. “I’m sorry,” says the wife. “He went to bed with the flu and has been there all day.” Without blinking, the police produce the guy’s driver’s license and ask to see his car. So she shows them the way to the garage, opens the door and… there’s the police car, lights still flashing.

(Credit: AA Grapevine, December 2000, Manning P. from Richmond, Virginia)

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!

The other night, I went through my family’s finances at midnight. For an hour, I realized over and over again how sloppy we’d been for a month or so, and most of it was on me. I didn’t spend all of the money, but I’m the family accountant and either gave a thumbs up to something, spent it myself or just didn’t pay enough attention. As a family, we don’t buy new cars and obvious stuff that you could point the finger at. It’s more of the “I went to Target for contact solution, and 19 extra items later, I walked out with a bag full of $132 worth of stuff.”

So I climbed into bed around 1 am knowing I had to have a tough conversation with my wife about finances. I was quite aggravated. I was mad at her because she did buy some of the stuff, and I was frustrated with myself for not being on top of things. I realized in the moment that our financial issues are as much a communication issue as anything else.

And I am writing about this on a sobriety newsletter because I have been thinking a lot about a character defect that I continue to think about, pray about and talk about… but I still have ups and downs with. That character defect is sloppiness. I am an “F— it, let’s go to New York City right now” kind of person, and most of the time that is fun and unpredictable and helps the part of me that tries to stay present and let go of yesterday.

But… I gotta be able to pay my freaking bills at this stage of life, and shrugging my shoulders for a month as we spend twice as much on Christmas presents as we planned isn’t what I want to be doing. So I went to bed stressed, and I actually considered waking up my wife to unload on her. If I had to break down my resentment, it was 80 percent against me, 20 percent against her. But as is so often the case with resentments, I think deep down I did not want to own the 80 percent that was mine, so my brain started coming up with ways to ship that 80 percent to other people (like my wife!).

So I tossed and turned for an hour, obsessing over how to pay off everything before I finally fell asleep. I then spent the next six hours asleep having a horrific dream about my wife coming to me and telling me that she finds one of our family cats, Captain Cuddles, very annoying and wants to put him down. I said no way, we can’t kill Cuddles just because he tries to eat everything in the house and then barfs it up (which is true, by the way). She was insistent, and then somehow my mother-in-law suddenly appeared in our kitchen and also advocated to murder the cat.

In my dream, I eventually told her I was moving out, that I could not bear to kill Cuddles. I was going to take him and find an apartment, and I said a bunch of nasty stuff to her as we prepared to break up.

Oh my god, it was ugly. I woke up half laughing at the ridiculousness of it, but also aware of what was really going on. I went to bed with a resentment coursing through my veins, and that thing settled into my subconscious overnight and turned into a monster in the middle of the night, culminating in an attempted cat homicide of my family pet.

So I think I learned a few things.

First is, don’t go to bed angry. Seriously. It’s a bad idea. It’s a cliche, I know. But cliches usually have a lot of truth in them.

The second thing is that financial stuff around the holidays is probably better digested at 12 pm than 12 am. My wife and I did have a very cordial conversation about it the next day, and we both agreed to clean up our sides of the street and try to do better, so that’s good.

The third thing is that I probably should do a quick fourth step resentment check-in if I ever lay down at night with something burning me up.

And the fourth thing is, I gotta protect Cuddles. You know how sometimes you have a crazy dream and wake up and realize it’s an insane dream… but some of it still sticks to your brain a bit? That’s definitely the case here. I think my family loves him and that dream was an absurd projection of anger onto him. But still, I will be keeping a close eye on the safety of my furry body for awhile!

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:

Two men walked into a bar.

You’d think the second one would have swerved.

(Credit: AA Grapevine, November 2001, Fritzi J. from Conyers, 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!

On Sunday night, we started getting some snow where I live in Connecticut. My older kids all of a sudden turned into local meteorologists, charting the snowstorm’s path and analyzing projections of total accumulation. At first I thought it was cute to see them as teenagers still have that little kid excitement about snow.

Then I realized that it had nothing to do with childhood exuberance about possibly playing in the snow and making a snowman—they just didn’t want to go to school. And I get it. I spent my childhood looking forward to those beautiful moments when your school’s name came across the bottom of the TV screen and it said, “Closed.” And yes, back in my day, you did not get phone calls and emails from the school district—your ass had to sit in front of the TV and pray for 20 minutes as every school name in the area rolled across the bottom.

I also got a little giddy yesterday when I saw the first snowflakes because I had a meeting I was planning on getting to in the afternoon. I still occasionally have that first feeling of, “Oh cool, I can’t get to a meeting. I guess I will watch football in my sweatpants while I lay on my warm couch!”

Luckily, that feeling passed almost instantly yesterday, which I was glad about. I can always tell how my recovery is going by how many excuses I start coming up with to prevent me from doing anything recovery-related. And make no mistake, my brain usually tries some shenanigans almost every day. It could be the weather. It could be a kid activity. It could be that some work is piling up. That bad voice in my head can always come up with something.

These days, I usually have that second voice that says, “Nah, get to that meeting,” or “You can watch football later—call that sober guy back.” So that’s good. I think it’s because I now have a recovery community of meetings and people that doesn’t feel like school. I wouldn’t say it is necessarily fun in the way that a movie or a party might be. But most of the meetings I go to, I look forward to going there. I don’t have to beg myself to get up off the couch.

And I would encourage people to find the right mix for themselves. If you have a meeting that you don’t like, or a meeting that uses a piece of sober literature you despise, or a meeting that has a format you don’t like, there probably are some other options that might get you a little more amped up to go. I had a meeting a few years ago that read a step every week, but you weren’t allowed to share at the meeting unless you had worked the step with someone who called that meeting their home group. I thought it was so narrow and non-inclusive, especially for the struggling guy who’s coming back from a relapse, or that person who’s at their first meeting. I thought about going for awhile and raising some hell at the next business meeting.

But I talked to a few guys who go to that meeting every week, and they all said that was the group conscience for that group, over and over again. They wanted the meeting to be challenging and push people to work hard to get involved in the steps. I agree with that instinct, but it’s not for me. So I didn’t go back. I know for a fact if that meeting was a part of my weekly routine, I’d be waiting for a few raindrops to tell myself not to go. That’s not good. I don’t want that.

So I went to my meeting on Sunday and enjoyed the hell out of it. I needed a meeting, too. On the way there, I remember that first voice slipping into my head again saying, “Hey, at least it won’t be a long meeting. It’s snowing, so it’ll probably only be you and one or two other guys. So you can get done and get home and watch football!”

Well, the meeting was packed and it was great and I didn’t get home any earlier than usual. The topic was total acceptance—the idea that we control maybe 1 percent of our lives, and we need to accept the rest. And as I shoveled my driveway, on a day where I yet again had that voice in my head telling me maybe I don’t need a meeting, I couldn’t help but think that topic was quite fitting.

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

“Alcoholics are the only people I know who need a pole vault to get over an anthill.”

(Credit: AA Grapevine, October 2001, Chuck I.)

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 we read the part of the Big Book where Steps Six and Seven are introduced. Those are the steps that deal with character defects, and I almost always shake my head in disbelief because it’s only two paragraphs long! It’s the one section of sober literature where I really wish the founders had stretched their legs a little bit and given us more.

Because character defects are COMPLICATED to deal with. I’ve found them really hard to get my arms around because character defects can rise and fall and disappear and come back. That’s why I am a big fan of the 12 and 12 book, which devotes a full chapter to each of those two steps. And I also love the book “Drop the rock,” which is about 125 pages long and deals with Steps Six and Seven in really digestible but important ways. There are about 40 anecdotal stories in there from people that are all relatively short, and each contributor brings up how a specific character defect affects them. I found it to be an awesome supplemental piece of reading about a crucial topic that is—in my humble opinion—a little underserved by our core literature.

What I really ended up meditating the other night was the idea of, What is a character defect, exactly? Because I bet my list of things that cause me enough pain to want to change is different than lots of other people, and I bet I have some things on my list that will rotate on and off.

The specific example that came up at the meeting the other night was swearing. Is swearing a character defect? If you pay attention to this newsletter, you can safely assume I would answer no for me personally, that it’s not a character defect because I do it all the time. I actually like it. I find it funny. I find it the most authentic way for me to communicate. To not swear is inconsistent with who I am.

And yet… I got sober at a meeting where the group conscience was to not swear. The chairperson of the meeting was to jump in if someone swore and ask them to not swear—we had a laminated sign on the wall and everything. I originally thought it was because we were in a church and the church had asked us to curb bad language. Not true. I asked about it, and the secretary for the meeting said the group had discussed it before—many times, actually—and decided that they believed that serenity and swearing didn’t go together. So, no swearing.

I abided by that rule for awhile, and I found myself liking it. I believed that I had this lower urge to drop f bombs and sprinkle in swear words just for the effect, and by eliminating it for an hour every day, I felt a little more serene. So I started trying to not swear at all for the other 23 hours every day, and I got pretty good at it. I realized that I didn’t need to swear. I felt fine without it. It didn’t really hinder my ability to communicate. I’m not sure anybody ever noticed, but I did feel like not swearing gave me a confidence and a command that might have brought me a little more respect in professional settings.

Also, not for nothing… when you’re raising kids, you gotta clean up your language around them, too. So during that period of my life, not swearing wasn't this thing that I bottled up for short periods of time and then I exploded with s**t-ass-f**k-and so on. It was a lifestyle change.

I did that for maybe a year, and then I started to drift. I’d let my potty mouth back into the conversation, and it didn’t really cause me any pain. And then a few years later, I started doing standup and let me tell you, people laugh at swear words. They just do. You drop in an f bomb in the right spot, at the right amounts, and the crowd roars. So that increased my bad language.

I eventually decided to try to use minimal swear words during comedy shows, and it was quite hard. But I tried and had some success. Then one night I was bombing on stage with a PG-13 act, and I felt the flop sweat under my pits, and I started to speed up to compensate… and I just went full R rating. With every joke, I added in a flurry of words that would make Marines cover their ears. And it worked. I got more laughs than I would have with a cleaner set.

I’ve been away from the stage for about a year now, so I’ve settled into a comfortable level of swearing in my life. I still think I could lop off 20 percent fewer bad words and feel a little better about myself. Maybe I’ll work on that.

So is swearing a character defect? My answer would be, it depends on the f*****g day.

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:

Three signs you might be an alcoholic:

--1: The convenience store clerk asks why you have grass on your back.

--2: You keep the dry-wall repair guy on retainer.

--3: You believe that you’re receiving the equivalent of a college education watching Court TV.

(Credit: AA Grapevine, October 2001, Tom L. from Orlando, Florida)

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 an old YouTube interview with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson about the art of “getting over” in pro wrestling. By “getting over,” he meant that he had won over the crowd to either love him or hate him—either one works in pro wrestling.

It made me laugh because when I first got sober, I was living in New York City, and that phrase, “getting over,” was mentioned constantly at meetings. But they weren’t using it in a pro wrestling context. In this case, they were talking about how addicts and alcoholics have to “get over” on people around them and keep their active addiction alive along with the lies that come along with it. In other words, getting over means you convince people to buy your b******t.

Man, the act of getting over really sucked. It didn’t suck back then, because it meant survival. If I could spin my wheels and confuse you and sucker you, then I could keep going. I can’t say I am proud to say this out loud, but early on, I found it pretty exciting. I wouldn’t say it was a fun, pleasurable kind of excitement. But it was not boring. It was like juggling knives, and eventually it just became so goddamn tiring and impossible to maintain.

I had a rude awakening once I got sober because I realized I didn’t even know who I was, or who I wanted to be. Everything about me had become a used car salesman. I had always clung to the idea that I was a decent human being who’d gotten run over by his addiction, which caused me to tell a lot of lies and b******t. I wasn’t a liar, I thought. I was just someone who told lies.

What a crock of s**t that was. If I tell lies every day, guess what? I’m a liar. And when I became a liar, I became very good at reading what people thought of me, so that I could tell who was onto the b******t and who wasn’t. I then had to either get over on them however I could, or cut bait and try to avoid them. Again, it was an exhausting lifestyle.

When I did stop using alcohol and drugs, I stopped telling lies. I literally had people who noticed the shift and would goof on me and ask me tough questions because they knew I wouldn’t lie.

But to go back to that liar thing, it wasn’t enough to just stop blatant lies. I found that there were so many layers to my version of “getting over.” Exaggeration. Fabulism. The truth… but not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

I’ll give you an example that turns my stomach a little bit when I think back on it. In my first six months sober, I was hurting for money. As in, tens of thousands of dollars in debt. And it was overwhelming. I was not paycheck to paycheck. Not even day to day, actually. It was hour to hour if I could pay bills. And I told my sponsor about it, and then told him that I was going to bring a chunk of my baseball card collection into the city and try to make a few bucks to pay the bills.

That was not exactly the truth. I did look up a baseball card shop in New York City and contemplated going over there. But the angle I was actually working was to get my sponsor to buy the cards from me, or just flat-out give me money. He seemed like he had money, and I hoped he might swoop in and hand me an envelope of cash.

And guess what? He did offer me money. He asked me what I thought I could get for the cards, and I said, “Hopefully like $1,000.” He said he would give me that money and would take the cards, but if I wanted them back later, I just had to pay him back. Looking back, I am pretty sure he was onto me.

Did I lie to him? No, I don’t think I flat-out said something untrue. But was I working him over? Yes. Was I holding back on some things, like that I wanted him to give me the money? Yes. Did I actually think I could get $1,000 from a card dealer for my cards? No… but I carefully had said, “Hopefully $1,000.” Uh, yeah, sure, hopefully I live to 200 years old, too. I was being very manipulative.

Luckily I had just enough sobriety under my belt to feel icky as he offered me the money outside my office building in New York City. Something came over me where I just said, “You know what? Let me hang onto these for now. Maybe I am being too panicky.”

I don’t know how I ended up paying whatever bill I had to pay that day. But I must have figured out something. And as I walked into my office that day, I realized that stopping the lying wasn’t enough. I had to stop trying to get over on people. Getting over wasn’t for me any more. I needed to leave it to the professionals—like The Rock!

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:

Asked by her third-grade teacher to spell the word “straight,” Susie, the daughter of an alcoholic, stood up proudly and said, “S-t-r-a-i-g-h-t.”

“Very good, Susie,” said her teacher. “Now, can you tell us what it means?”

“No ice,” Susie answered.

(Credit: AA Grapevine, August 2001, Kevin O. from Hastings, Nebraska)

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!

One thing I wanted to mention because I haven’t in awhile… Nelson H. isn’t my real name. It’s a pen name that I use for this newsletter. And I sometimes change some details to protect others’ identities, and sometimes I combine people or anecdotes to make a larger point. I think the larger points within this newsletter are always true and based on real events and situations. But if you and a gang of fact-checkers examined this newsletter, you would find that sometimes I will say something happened years ago but it was actually more recent than that. However, like recovery is sometimes described, the exact nature is often more important than the exact details.

Right before Thanksgiving, I was walking out of a meeting with a guy who said he always tries to remember around the holidays that, “A grateful heart never drinks.” I love that phrase now. But I didn’t always love it.

You hear that quote a lot in 12-step meetings and from sober people, and I used to shrug my shoulders at it. I don’t think I’d ever spent any time truly contemplating the relationship between gratitude and not drinking. And to be honest, early on in recovery, I bristled at anything that seemed like hippy-dippy b******t. I was too cool for that, ya know? What a mistake by me.

In recent years, I did quite a few gratitude lists and I began to realize that gratitude is a room clearer. By that, I mean that if you bring gratitude into the room, everything else clears out. I would make this list at the end of every day with 5-10 things I was grateful for, and the reality of my life would sink in. I was healthy. My wife and kids were healthy. We’d paid all our bills, so the cars were running and the lights were on. I had a job—a job I really love, too. My cats were great. Dinner was very good. My neighbors were awesome.

Anyway, you probably get the point that when you zero in on all the good things, it really pulls life back to a treetop view. The non-treetop view can be petty and dopey and lots of little tacky-tacky annoyances and resentments that feel like a big deal but aren’t.

So I would try to get a grateful heart, and it often worked. To go back to my thoughts on the phrase “A grateful heart never drinks,” it was true in that instance. But what also was true was, a grateful heart didn’t have space to be mad about that work email, or s**t-talk another parent from the playground, or mock somebody at Target, or yell at a driver who cut the line in a traffic jam. There wasn’t room for bad habits when my whole head and heart were filled with gratitude.

It’s interesting how much of an antidote gratitude can be for anger. For the sake of this conversation, let me define anger as a complex emotion that includes resentment, fear, ego and a bunch of other things. I’m almost never angry just because I’m mad. There’s usually something else going on. For example, take a situation where I am angry at somebody for, say, not including me on a work email. It’s not nearly as simple as not being included on a work email.

It’s me wondering a bunch of things that all collide and turn into fear and ego and eventually anger:

Did they purposely exclude me?

If they accidentally forgot me… how is that possible? I should have been the first person they thought of!

Is there a work group that is getting close and I am not involved?

Should I reach out and give them a hard time about it?

Maybe I should not invite that person to the next work meeting?

I could keep going, but you get the point. Humility drains out. Conspiracy and fear enter the chat. Patience and grace are nowhere to be found. At the end, it’s just that I am pissed.

Let me go back to that antidote idea. Sometimes when I am in one of those ruts where I got left off an email or something else that is petty in the grand scheme of things, I will run through a gratitude list, and the amount of gratitude quickly pushes all the other crap out of the room. By the end, I’m no longer livid that I was forgotten, and I don’t feel the need to write—and rewrite—a scathing reminder that I BELONG IN IMPORTANT WORK MEETINGS, A*****E.

Instead, I’m just sitting there thinking about how I have a good life, good family, good house, and on and on. And that is a better place to be than plotting out scathing reminders.

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

“When you make a mistake, make amends immediately. It’s easier to eat crow while it’s still warm.”

(Credit: AA Grapevine, June 2001, Susan C. from Richmond, Virginia)

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!

There’s soooooo much good stuff to read about sobriety, and how to get sober. I find all of the 12-step program literature to be incredibly valuable, and it’s good writing, in my opinion. I routinely am at a meeting where we’re reading something written in 1942 or 1955 and it’s hard to fathom that the founding members of these programs had such brilliant vision for solutions to addiction.

But recently I was at a meeting where we read the first half of “How it works” from the Big Book one week, then the second half the next week. I gotta say, it’s hard to beat that stretch of 13 pages. And as someone who has been sober for a little while, I found the second half—pages 64-71—to be such a good way for me to examine where I’m at in recovery. My kids have standardized testing to evaluate how much they have learned and how they’re applying it. If sober adults had standardized testing to evaluate ourselves, it might be based on pages 64-71.

The first chunk of “How it works” introduces the steps, then zeroes in on Steps 1, 2 and 3. That’s essential reading, in my opinion, and the foundation for which everything in my recovery program is built.

But then from 64-71, we get into resentments, and the book makes the case that resentments are the most dangerous thing in sobriety. One paragraph flat-out says, “Resentment is the Number One offender. It destroys more alcoholics than anything else.”

That is a lot to digest. What about all the other things that can trip up someone’s sobriety? A loved one dies… you get laid off at work… cancer… divorce. Nope, we’re being told resentment is No. 1 on that list, and I think that’s right. During my roughest patches of sobriety, there’s always been an undercurrent of resentment.

Somebody shared a similar belief at the meeting when we read that section, and also made the point that some of these other things that can derail sobriety—losing your job, for instance—probably include quite a bit of resentment packed in there, too. It can be a one-two punch.

I also really like the Fourth Step chart that’s in this reading. It’s big and clunky and weird to read out loud at a meeting, but I have found it to be the single most specific, most beneficial piece of instruction in recovery literature. I think we get lots of good guidance and suggestions for all the steps, but with Step 4 in the Big Book, it’s very meticulously mapped out, with examples and everything. It’s a perfect blueprint for how to sort through a resentment.

Last but not least, I focused most of my thinking on the phrase “It is plain that a life that includes deep resentment leads only to futility and unhappiness.”

First of all, there’s a lot to unpack around the idea of resentment versus deep resentment. The way I interpret that is that resentment is a normal part of the human condition and something that everybody has, and that everybody has to work through. But deep resentment is its own special category. To me, deep resentments are the ones that sit in your stomach for long periods of time and eat away at your spirituality. A lot of those probably have some justification… but they’re all poison.

I also like how that sentence doesn’t come right out and say that if you have deep resentments, you will drink. You certainly might. But that sentence says deep resentment leads to futility and unhappiness. I have had moments of sobriety where I did not drink or do drugs and I did not even want to get drunk or high. But I start spinning my wheels. I’m miserable and I am causing misery with my attitude and behaviors because I’m running on resentment. It’s a terrible way to live. It is, as the book says, futile and unhappy.

In my life, I recently spent a few days with in-laws and it was bumpy, to say the least. Long drive. Lots of people. Lots of conversation. Lots of unwanted political fishing. But it wasn’t terrible, and it didn’t have that much to do with them. It was me and my resentment-filled perspective. Nobody had a Stage 4 disease of any kind. There was lots of laughter along with the raised eyebrows during some weird stretches.

It was probably 50-50 good-bad, but I had started to collect resentments. Which, for me, means I don’t see a 50-50 good-bad situation as 50-50. I see it as 60-40 bad the first day, then 75-25 on the second day, then by the end, I am questioning my relationships with loved ones because I am seeing it as a 100 percent debacle full of terrible people.

All b******t. The truth is that there was some bad behaviors but also lots of good ones. Lots of love exchanged between my kids and their relatives that they don’t get to see too often. Does one of the people think that the theory that the moon landing isn’t real and that the moon itself isn’t real? Maybe. But I have to let that go and walk away with the good portion of the trip. There’s a version of this situation where I hold onto a deep resentment and it just rots out my insides, and I can’t do that.

I’m so glad I read that section of the book at a meeting. It really brings everything into focus and I can move on from a bumpy road trip without any deep resentments. In fact, now I have plenty of time to read up on how NASA might be faking the existence of the moon…

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

“At first I thought the ‘God thing’ was a crutch. Turns out to be stilts.”

(Credit: AA Grapevine, May 2001, Mark)

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!

Well, the holidays are officially here. Good luck out there. It has been my experience that the hype around the lethal holiday trio—Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s—is real. In my sober time, I’ve never had a physical relapse during those times, but I have had bad behaviors that I guess you could call an emotional relapse. And those are not pleasant.

I decided to put together a list of five suggestions that have helped me in the past. I think any one of these might brighten up the holidays a bit, and I plan on implementing some of these myself… especially the last one on this list.

Start a 45-in-90

Listen, I’d love to do 90 meetings in 90 days once in a while just to get a good reboot. But that’s usually not realistic because of my life these days. However, 45 meetings in 90 days is doable, and the holidays are an excellent time to start. That pace is one meeting every two days, and I think for 99 percent of people who are telling the truth, that is probably doable. Is it hard? Well, it ain’t easy. It’s getting to a meeting on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and then one day over the weekend most weeks.

The trick is that week where you only get to a meeting on Monday and Thursday, and you fall way behind the pace of 45-in-90. But the last time I did it and ran into that issue, I found myself unexpectedly getting competitive and eventually catching up. It gave me a specific goal, and I respond well when I feel challenged.

One caveat to this suggestion: If I did it again, I would make sure at least 30 of those 45 meetings are in person. I don’t consider listening to five Zoom meetings on a long driving trip to be going to five meetings. For me, I’d want to make sure I have quite a bit of in-person meetings on my 45.

Carry your most recent anniversary coin with you

You worked really hard to get that coin, right? Let it work for you now. I put mine in my pocket so I end up reaching in there and touching it. I find the anniversary coins to be a quick reminder of the places I have been and the places I want to go. That’s the key—it serves as a reminder for what my goals are. I want to be serene. I want to be patient. I want to understand more than be understood. I want to process resentments, not stockpile them. I want to have as much grace as anybody I am in a room with. I don’t want to argue with you about sports or politics or movies or which dessert is better.

When I brush my hand against my anniversary coin grabbing a $5 bill, it’s almost like a quick prayer. It connects me with a higher power that sometimes isn’t even God—that list of things that I put above, that’s a list of things that are bigger than me, that I need help finding every day. My anniversary coin reminds me of that when I feel it.

Get your headphones ready

My last 10 road trips in the minivan with my wife and three kids have been about the 10 best I’ve had as a dad. Why? Because I realized that half of the battle once we arrived was that I was in a good or bad headspace from the four hours of traveling right before that. In other words, if I was miserable from the four hours of driving, then there was zero chance I wouldn’t be miserable for the next four hours at my family’s house.

So I started stacking up podcasts and songs to listen to on the drive. My wife and I agreed to a deal that I would drive the whole way if she could police any bickering in the bar between the kids. She said yes. So I put in an AirPod and listened to some fun stuff as I drove, and I found myself about 75 percent more pleasant when we arrived. Huge difference.

Go for a walk

I used to be the “hide in the bathroom” guy. I’d go into the bathroom for 5-10 minutes at a time when things were getting hairy at a holiday get-together. My version of “hairy” usually has something to do with excessive peopling—too much hanging out, too much arguing, too much noise, etc. But my bathroom plan didn’t go great because people started asking me if I was in there blowing up the bathroom. I didn’t want a reputation for exploding on the toilet five times every holiday, especially since I was in there meditating, of all things.

So I started going for walks outside, and they were really great for me. The air was brisk and cold, so it kind of jolted me out of any haze I was feeling. And it sounds a little hippy-dippy when I say it, but sunlight is genuinely good for me (and apparently for all humans, by the way. It’s pretty commonly accepted science these days that a certain amount of sunlight every day is great for people).

And not for nothing… sometimes I eat an obscene amount of dinner and dessert, and then a walk helps me not go into hibernation for 16 hours. Do I come back and realize I have created room for more pumpkin pie? Yes. Yes, I do.

Try the STFU plan

I’ve talked before about trying to make sure every word out of my mouth is truthful, useful, kind and timely. Not one of those four things—all four. Yeah, that limits how much you talk, huh?

But a slightly different tact to take over the holidays is just shutting the f— up. Like, try to not speak unless spoken to.

Your brother-in-law wants to rant about politics? Shut the f— up, Nelson.

Your uncle wants to talk about how his football team is better than yours? Shut the f— up, Nelson.

Your kids want to complain to you about how they don’t like the food? Shut the f— up, Nelson.

Don’t argue. Don’t try to set the record straight. Don’t teach any lessons. Just listen and nod your head. If somebody asks how you’re doing, don’t be rude. Say you’re doing fine, then ask how they’re doing. If a conversation keeps going, ask questions and listen. Just shut up and try to understand, not be understood. Trust me, it might save you some headaches.

So those are my five tips. Hope you have a great holiday. If you do struggle, just know that there are roughly 350 million other people scuffling, too, and there’s probably somebody headed for a meeting near you that can identify. I said it at the beginning and I will say it again to close: Good luck out there.

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

“It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”

(Credit: AA Grapevine, February 2001, John G.)

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 Matthew Perry out on the book hype tour recently, and he seemed to be well on the road to recovery. The book is called “Friends, Lovers, and The Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir.” I don’t think I will buy the book myself but it sounds like an interesting window into addiction and sobriety. Personally, I did not like that he took a few pretty mean swipes at Keanu Reeves, who has a 100 percent approval rating at my house and will not be bad-mouthed under any circumstances.

But man, his story is brutal and powerful. He talked about having had more than 10 surgeries, and going to rehab at least 10 times, and he says he has been to 6,000 12-step meetings in 20 years of trying to get sober. He says he’s clean and sober these days after battles with both alcohol and opiates over the past quarter-century.

In the interview I saw, he told a wild story to Bill Maher on his HBO show about going to open houses in Hollywood and raiding medicine cabinets. Bill Maher was blown away, but I found myself saying, “Uh, yeah, I’ve done worse, and you hear stuff like that at every other 12-step meeting. Why are you so stunned?” But I guess because it’s a part of my world every day, it starts to feel a little normalized. It’s definitely not normal. So it was helpful to see a normal person process that information and see his jaw hit the floor. My stories are funny and mind-blowing now, but that’s only because I processed the shame of what’s pretty shameful behavior.

He also told a story about his colon basically exploding from the years of opiate abuse. And when he was in pain after the colon surgery from opiate abuse? He wanted opiates. Addiction is a real b*****d of a disease.

That story was a great reminder to me about the physical damage that alcohol and drugs did to my body, and it gave me a tremendous sense of gratitude. As far as I know, I have no liver damage, no brain damage, and no exploding colon. In fact, I think I might be in the best shape of my adult life right now.

As Perry and Maher discussed on the show, it’s a testament to my body’s ability to recover along with my mind and spirit. I also said a little prayer of thanks to my higher power, too, because I easily could have a bad liver or kidneys or 10 other ailments due to severe alcohol and drug abuse. And I don’t. So, thank you, higher power!

The other thing that jumped out at me was the sheer math of Perry’s addiction. I’m not going to get into the 6,000 meetings number because I’m calling b******t on that one. That’s about 300 meetings a year for 20 years, with stretches of active addiction mixed in… that number felt a little inflated to me but who am I to be fact-checking the dude’s meeting count?

I will talk about the surgeries and treatment centers, though. Having 10-15 surgeries and going to rehab 10-15 times is among the highest numbers I’ve ever heard… but I can’t say I think those are Guinness world records or anything. I’ve had 5-plus surgeries in my life, and met lots of people who needed somewhere around 10 trips to treatment facilities.

I don’t really have a point here other than the idea that it takes what it takes. Sometimes that’s one trip to a psychiatric hospital. Sometimes it’s one trip to rehab and 90 days in jail. Sometimes it’s five surgeries and one divorce. I need to remember that next time somebody new is struggling and I am pulling my hair out trying to help them. Their bottom is their bottom. Hopefully it’s not as high as the guy who played Chandler Bing, but if so, at least Matthew Perry is a good example of somebody who never stopped trying.

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

The trouble with staying home alone and isolating is you get a lot of bad advice.

(Credit: AA Grapevine, December 2000, David F. from Manhattan, 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 read an interesting piece recently about how many of us lost certain levels of friendship during the pandemic. So I went searching for how experts define the various levels of friendship. I found some disagreement but the five most accepted terms for friendship seemed to be:

* Strangers

* Acquaintances

* Casual friends

* Close friends

* Intimate friends

The piece I read was making the point that many of us kept our intimate friends during the pandemic, and we kept some of our close friends, too. But then when it came to casual friends, we lost lots of them, and then we had almost no acquaintances or strangers in our lives.

At first, I thought, “So what? If I didn’t know your last name, or even your first name, what’s the big deal?” But the article made the case that we need all five types of friendships for our emotional health and development.

I found myself nodding along at certain points, because I did miss some of the people I only ever saw once a week at the office, or the grocery store worker I’d say hi to once a month. Those people brought some light to my life, even if it was only momentarily. And in the isolation of the pandemic, all that light was gone.

And more specifically, I started to think about how I really missed that level of friend within the recovery community. I had my sponsor and other members of my closest inner circle, and I stayed in touch with them for the duration of the pandemic. Same with most of my close recovery friends—I’d say I have about 20-25 sober men that I talk to on the phone once a month or more.

But then there was a huge drop-off in casual friends, acquaintances and strangers. And I felt that. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I felt it. There were so many people I missed from occasionally bumping into them at in-person meetings.

Let’s start with casual friends. I’d consider them people you see regularly at meetings and you might have gotten their number once, but you never called it. I had a bunch of people like that, that I never pulled the trigger on that next level of friendship and just enjoyed seeing them once a week at a meeting.

Then there’s the giant group of acquaintances. I consider these to be people you don’t exchange numbers with but enjoy seeing at meetings. For me, I subscribe to the idea that for the most part, if you are attracted to women, you stick to working closely with men in recovery, so a huge chunk of my favorite acquaintances are sober women. Most of those relationships were developed from seeing each other at meetings. I had almost zero contact with really awesome acquaintances during the pandemic.

And then at the bottom was the strangers level. Zoom was great, but it didn’t open up a lot of good opportunities to pull a newcomer off to the side and introduce yourself and strike up a conversation. Since in-person meetings have been back in my life, I’ve remembered how awesome it can be to meet a guy on the walk into or out of a meeting. Sometimes I don’t ever see the person again, but it was a pleasant introduction and a few good sober thoughts between two people who aren’t going to be best recovery buddies.

Since live meetings are back in action these days, I’ve really noticed the difference in bringing back all of my interactions with people in those last three categories: strangers, acquaintances and casual friends. I don’t know their full name, don’t have their number, and might not ever see again. But they’re sober. I’m sober. And they might be able to help me stay sober, and then they leave and we’re both sober.

Geez, that sounds like a sober one-night stand that doesn’t involve sex, huh? Well, I certainly was involved in not-very-healthy one-night stands when I was drinking, so I’ll count the healthy ones in sobriety as an important part of my recovery life.

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

“If you’re not getting mad at meetings, you’re not going to enough meetings.”

(Credit: AA Grapevine, May 2001, 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