LOL Sober

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Last Thursday was 14 years clean and sober for me. Congratulations to myself. Let’s take a moment to observe my greatness.

Ahhhhh, okay, thank you very much. I still really enjoy anniversaries… as much as I like to think I have gotten very, very humble over the years, I’ll take a round of applause for my amazingness once in a while.

I was sitting alone in a hotel room in Los Angeles on a business trip on my anniversary day. But as I have written on here before, I love going to 12-step meetings in other places when I travel. So I found a meeting a half-mile away and went for it.

The meeting did not disappoint. They had maybe 100 chairs set up, and I think less than 10 people showed up. They had a microphone for… well, I’m not sure. There were 8 people in the room. It wasn’t exactly a Springsteen concert.

In the early part of the meeting, the chairperson asked if anybody was celebrating an anniversary. I raised my hand and said, “Today is 14 years.” Everybody started clapping and one man stood and faced me. He pulled a Starbucks brownie out of thin air, lit a candle and the whole room started singing to me. I was completely confused about what I was supposed to do, and the chairperson said into the microphone, “Come get your brownie—that’s for you,” so I walked up, blew the candle out and took the brownie.

I sat back down and the speaker began to share. It was on the Ninth Step (making amends to those we harmed) but he took a moment to say how much he was amused when people from the East Coast come to LA and see how theatrical the Hollywood recovery community was. That was indeed what I was feeling.

He shared for about 25 minutes, and it was fantastic. He was a good storyteller, and pretty theatrical himself.

As he spoke, a guy came in and wandered around the room, over and over again. Nobody really flinched. I found it super weird to have a guy circling the room but it didn’t slow anybody else down. I eventually stopped paying attention until he walked pretty close to me, and I saw that his entire ass was hanging out of his pants. I don’t mean that his pants were riding low and his underwear was sticking out. I mean that his entire asscheeks were out, roaming the room, catching some of that cool Hollywood air. This meeting would have gotten an NC-17 rating based on the intense view of this man’s ass.

He eventually left the room, then came back a few times, then left for good. Just as that excitement was dying down, another dude came into the room and just blurted out his name, which stopped the meeting cold. He said he just got out of treatment, and he was a little bit all-over-the-place so it was hard to understand exactly what his deal was.

Toward the end of the meeting, they passed the basket, which included a Venmo account for the treasurer… who was a pretty famous person. I just thought, “Of course the treasurer is a semi-famous person. It’s Hollywood, baby!”

At the end of the meeting, a few people came over and said congratulations, and I exchanged my number with the speaker, who was a delightful dude with 35-plus years sober.

All in all, what a gift that meeting was. Sobriety happens every day, in every corner of this country and this world. Every community—hell, every meeting—has its own identity, and that’s beautiful. If I lived there, I don’t know that it was quite my style. But for one night only, on my very own red carpet, I felt glad to have a VIP seat at my first Hollywood meeting ever.

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

Show me an alcoholic whose Big Book is falling apart, and I’ll show you an alcoholic who isn’t.

(Credit: AA Grapevine, May 2001, Earl T. from Buhl, Idaho)

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!

A quick programming note: I am writing and recording this entry on Nov. 9, which means you’re probably reading it on Nov. 10. Nov. 10 is my sober anniversary. Hopefully, as you read this, I will have gone another 24 hours without a drink or a drug. I have an interesting post about anniversaries for next week, but I didn’t want to talk about my 14-year anniversary when I actually had 13.99 years sober. So tune in next week!

For today… I was recently talking about Step 3 with a guy I really respect, and he mentioned how important the Actor’s Scenario is in the Big Book.

I’ve read the Actor’s Scenario 50 times, maybe 100. But I never studied it. I always nodded along and cruised right through it. It made enough of an impact on me that I knew exactly what he was referring to when he said the Actor’s Scenario. But I’d never spent much extra time considering it. (Here’s a link; it begins at the bottom of page 60.)

On the surface, it’s a pretty obvious metaphor for the way we try to manage our lives, using an actor who wants to run the whole show as an example. It stays on that example for awhile, about how an actor wants to dictate every line reading, every stage direction, every viewer’s reaction, and on and on. Pretty straightforward comparison with micro-managing every aspect of your life.

But upon further inspection, holy crap, it’s much bigger than that. I should read it every day. It’s so valuable because it is a perfect description of something that trips up so many alcoholics, no matter how much sober time you have. It is presumably aimed at somebody who’s still active in addiction and framed around managing drinking.

That section, though, really applies to me… me when I was drinking, me when I had two weeks sober, two months sober, two years sober, 10 years sober. It’s ostensibly about turning your will and your life over to the care of a higher power, but upon re-reading it, I interpreted it less as pushing you to decide on a higher power and more about pushing you to realize that you are not a higher power. So it’s not about filling the void in leadership but more about establishing that there is a void in leadership because you can’t be it.

Now, most people (including me!) get hung up on the magnitude of that kind of God conversation. I get that—almost everybody would agree that they can’t be their own higher power. But it’s the next few levels of that internal dialogue that have really resonated with me. I get hung up almost every day on being the CEO of my company, the mayor of my town, the president of 12-step meetings, etc. Just think about all the times you say or think, “Oh, they’re doing x, and they should be doing y.” I do that more than I thought I did.

I’ll give you one example from a few years ago. I used to attend a meeting that had an annual anniversary party for itself—basically, the meeting celebrated being 20 years old, 21 years old and so on. In the month before the anniversary party, the chairperson would pass the basket at the actual meeting to collect money for the Seventh Tradition (which states that every meeting ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions). But for the month leading up to the anniversary celebration, they’d pass the basket a second time.

I was bothered by that and started an anti-celebration campaign for the following year. I thought you shouldn’t pass the basket twice, that if you want to have an anniversary party, awesome, vote on it at the monthly business meeting but only if you had extra funds and the group approved. One thing I love about 12-step programs is that, in my experience, they don’t push very hard for money, and they use the funds appropriately for rent, books and other essential things. Anything left over usually gets kicked up to area, district and world groups. This felt like we were bilking people.

I went to that first year’s anniversary, and it was very fun. I even volunteered to pick up the food and deliver it to the meeting. There were so many success stories that day, and I began to see how important this meeting had been over the years.

However… I still thought we shouldn’t pass the basket a second time the following year. So I advocated on behalf of not passing the basket around a second time, and that if we didn’t have any extra money, we didn’t do any special party requiring a bunch of funds we didn’t have.

I got trounced at the business meeting. Nobody agreed. The vote was like 15-1 with a few abstentions. The group wanted the party, and they didn’t object to rounding up funds. I took defeat about as badly as I usually do, which is not well.

But somebody grabbed me afterward and said they thought I had made an admirable, principled stand that many people in recovery would probably agree with… but the group conscience was different than my conscience and I needed to accept that.

I haggled a little bit and he eventually put his hand on my shoulder, gently, and said, “Hey, last I checked, nobody had voted you president of sobriety, right?”

I had to laugh. He was right. Was I president of sobriety? Nope.

Should I be? Hmm, yes, probably.

Was I the actor trying to manage every millimeter of the show? Yes, I was. Lesson learned… though like I said, I should probably read the Actor Scenario once a 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:

You’re probably an alcoholic if you think spilling beer is alcohol abuse.

(Credit: AA Grapevine, May 2001, Dave S. from Ithaca, New York)

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 turned 45 years old last week, which means I am basically dead. Just barely hanging on at this point.

My birthday is always an interesting experience for me, because my 31st birthday, in 2008, was right when I was at the very bottom. That means I had about 10 birthdays in a row where everybody was very nice to me and got me gifts… and I knew none of them knew the real truth about me. And honestly, if you had given them all lie detectors, they probably were putting on a one-day show of love and affection that dropped off a bit the next morning. I was pretty toxic for that decade.

Now contrast that with my past 14 birthdays. They’ve been fantastic, and my birthday always offers an interesting moment for introspection about how far I’ve come.

More specifically, I always think about how I got sober in 2008 right after my second daughter was born. So she turned 14 in April, and I’m about to turn 14 if I stay sober for a few more days. Throughout the duration of my sobriety, I have watched her learn to stand and then walk and then run and then talk and then learn how to read, and on and on… and it’s always struck me how much I basically had to learn all the same things at the exact same moments she did.

It’s not a perfect parallel, I know. I had a driver’s license and a job and all the trappings of what an adult looks like on paper. But figuring out how to actually adult? How to talk to people in a healthy way? How to process anger without blowing your stack? How to be sad and still be functional? How to show up for stuff you said you’d show up for on days when you just want to watch TV?

Yep, those are things young kids and teenagers battle with, and so do I. I have a very close-knit relationship with my 14-year-old, and I think it’s partly because we have similar personalities and partly because we basically grew up together. Whenever she has a blowout over a nothingburger, I totally get it. I am still trying to figure out that crap, too. When she moans and groans and sleeps in till lunchtime on Saturday, I get it.

It hit me hard on my birthday this year because she’s now on social media, and she posted a goofy picture of me and poked a little fun at me… but she also said I was her biggest supporter and her best friend. I guess somewhere in my heart and my head I felt that way and thought maybe she did, too, but I didn’t expect to see her verbalize it.

This is one of those posts that doesn’t exactly have sober suggestions or a lot of humor, but I do think hearing sober people tell stories like that is important. Long-term sobriety can be a slog, and you don’t see big results every single day after a certain point. There are plateaus where everything is fine—but just fine. But it’s a long game of chopping wood and carrying water, and it is worth it. I sometimes struggle with the idea that I think I get maybe .1 percent more spiritually fit every month, and I want it to be much higher.

It’s days like this most recent birthday where you see the dividends of getting .1 percent better every month, month after month, year after year, and you realize that the people around you are benefitting too. So I might be halfway dead, but at least I am getting a little healthier as I approach an eternity of living in the dirt.

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 guy goes into a bar, takes a seat and orders five pints. The bartender gives him an odd look since the guy’s all by himself, but he lines up five pints on the bar.

The guy downs them. One, two, three, four, five. He finishes the last one, and calls to the bartender. “Four pints, please, mate!” The bartender serves up four pints and lines them on the bar.

The guy downs them. One, two, three, four. Then he belches, sways on the barstool, and orders two more. He quickly knocks them back. One, two, three.

“Two pints, mate!” he calls, and when the bartender places two pints in front of him, down they go. One, two.

The guy slams the last one down, puts the empty glass on the bar, and says, “One pint, mate.” So the bartender fills the glass.

The guy sits there, staring at it for a moment, trying to focus. Then he looks at the bartender: “Y’know, it’sh a funny thing, but the less I drink, the drunker I get.”

(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

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 great meeting recently where the topic was finding faith in sobriety, and someone shared the old slogan that “the opposite of faith is fear.”

I found myself nodding along, because I do find that when my faith is strong, my fear is weak. When my fear is strong, I usually am struggling with faith. Usually, I can have one or the other, not both.

But a few minutes later, somebody gently disagreed, saying he thought the opposite of faith was despair—nothingness. His point was that you can be faithful and get scared in this world, so technically you could feel both. I guess that’s true if you’re very faithful and go swimming in the ocean and sharks start chasing you, you probably paddle like crazy. So maybe there’s some truth to that.

He made the point, though, that you can’t have faith and also despair. He said he thinks when you feel despair in the world, it means you probably don’t have faith of any kind. So his opinion was that despair is the opposite of faith.

I found myself nodding along because he made some good points. I didn’t quite think that on a spectrum with faith at one end that despair would be the polar opposite, but his rationale was interesting, and I always try to be open-minded about the whole faith thing.

Then someone else gently disagreed with both fear and despair as the opposites of faith, and he said he thought the opposite of faith is certainty. His point was that when you are absolutely certain of anything, you squeeze out the possibility of faith. He said something I have always believed, ever since somebody said it to me, which is that one of the most valuable phrases in life is “I don’t know.” And yet, I am often afraid to say that, because I want you to think I have all the answers, and I want to believe that myself.

I think what I like the most about envisioning faith at one end and certainty at the other is that that gives me a reassuring feeling about faith. I like being around people who have strong faith and lots of questions, because I’m not sure faith in anything can ever be said with 100 percent absolute surety. Some of the people who have turned me off the most over the years are those who say that their religion is the only answer, and that there is a book that was written 1000 or 2000 years ago that should be my handbook—and my only handbook—on how to live.

Early on in recovery, I’ll never forget I was explaining to someone with a lot of sober time what I liked and disliked about 12-step programs, and I was talking fast. This dude just calmly listened and at the end he just gently said, “This is just a suggestion, but I want to tell you a phrase you might consider using more often. I’m not sure you have ever used it before. It goes like this: ‘I. Don’t. Know.’ You should try thinking that and saying that more often than you do.”

I was offended by that but I slowly accepted his point. The more certain I am, the more I need to throw a penalty flag on myself and investigate why I’m so sure. I’ve found myself talking a lot lately, offering lots of opinions that weren’t requested, spewing nonsense about football games and what restaurants are good or bad, and all kinds of other stuff that the world just doesn’t need. I’m better off listening and contemplating, and only giving you my opinion when you ask for it.

And honestly, what exactly do I know in life? How to get sober? Maybe, but I really only know what works for me and that’s what I should stick to.

Raising kids? Come on, give me a break, I’m not sure anybody quite knows the perfect way to raise kids.

Football? A friend asked me to help him with some NFL picks recently, and I follow the NFL at an intense level because it’s both part of my job and also something I enjoy. I can tell you injury statuses of almost every team in the league. I know the statistics of pretty much every good player. I have watched every single team play at least one game this year. I listen to hours of podcasts and TV shows featuring former players and other experts about the NFL.

And when I pick NFL games… it’s a coin flip whether I get it right or not. In fact, if you took my picks and went with the opposite of them, you’d probably do better than me.

A conversation about faith that ends with discussing NFL picks might sound silly, but I think it’s quite powerful. It’s a reminder to me that even the things I think I know inside and out… I still am better off starting from a place of uncertainty… which is the opposite of certainty… which I now think is in the conversation for being the opposite of faith.

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:

YOU KNOW YOU'RE AN ALCOHOLIC WHEN. . .

Your job interferes with your drinking.

The back of your head keeps getting hit by toilet seats.

The parking always seems to have moved while you were in the bar.

(Credit: AA Grapevine, February 2004, by Diane M.)

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!

We went trick-or-treating last night with my 8-year-old. My two older kids are too cool for Halloween now, so that’s kind of a bummer. But my second-grade buddy had a blast going as a snow leopard.

By the end of the night, she was exhausted and overdosing on KitKats and ring pops, as usual. But eventually she went to bed, and I repeated my Halloween ritual of trying to figure out the maximum amount of candy that I could eat that she wouldn’t notice in the morning. A lot, it turns out!

It reminded me of my last drunk Halloween, which was one of the lowest points of my life. It was October 31, 2008. I went to work all day and promised I would be home a little early so we could have dinner and go out trick-or-treating as a family. My kids were very little (I think my oldest was 4 and my youngest at the time was 2), but very excited. It was the first Halloween where they were old enough to go out together on Halloween.

Yeah, sure. I hustled all day rounding up and consuming painkillers and was absolutely annihilated by lunchtime. I came down a bit in the afternoon when I started pestering a friend who had recently had surgery, begging for whatever pills she might have. I was never above board about my addiction, so I leveraged my chronic pain and Halloween (“How will I be able to take my kids out trick-or-treating if my feet hurt?” I would say) as the reason why she should maybe throw me a few pills. I really used to lay it on thick to guilt trip people into caving in and saying, “Well, okay, I guess you can have a couple of these but be really careful, ok?”

Remember, I was asking for controlled substances from people who had prescriptions. What if I was allergic to that medication? If I drove home from work high and got into an accident, they might have gotten in trouble, too. It was not cool. I cringe when I think back on it.

So she eventually felt bad and gave in and said she only had muscle relaxers. I had never taken muscle relaxers before, but I figured they were worth a try. I needed something to enhance my Halloween experience. I couldn’t just go and enjoy it with my kids, could I? And really… on Halloween, is it essential first and foremost that I have a great time? Or that my kids have a great night?

Anyway, I get home a half-hour late and the kids were already dressed and pacing the house, ready to go. I snuck into the bathroom and popped 4 muscle relaxers (that’s twice what you were supposed to take, for the record). I was already coming down from taking somewhere around 50 Vicodin earlier in the day. I washed down the muscle relaxers with a beer, too. Yet another very healthy day.

Well, I woke up two hours later. My wife was gone. My kids were gone. I must have just passed out on the couch, and missed pretty much the whole night. By the time I darted out the front door, they were rounding the corner for home.

At first, my wife was really irritated with me but I eventually spun it around. I blamed my feet and an exhausting work day “busting my ass for this family.” Besides, she didn’t wake me up. How rude was that? By the end, I had gaslit her into apologizing to me. Just despicable behavior.

The worst part of the night, though, was my kids’ reaction. They were nonchalant about the whole thing. They had barely noticed I wasn’t there. I had gotten to be less like a caring dad and more like an uncle who popped in and out once in a while. They didn’t even really know I was missing, because I was always missing. That hurt. A lot.

A week-and-a-half later, I went to rehab and I have been sober ever since. This was my 14th sober Halloween, and I loved every second of it. This year, I dressed as a schlubby middle-aged dork… but it was a sober schlubby middle-aged dork.

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

Heard at meetings:

“I always wanted to control everything. But as an alcoholic, I realize I’m uniquely UNqualified to rule the world.”

(Credit: AA Grapevine, June 2000, Dan S. from New York, 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!

At a meeting this week, we read from the Big Book appendix called “Spiritual Experience.” If you haven’t read it, I’d encourage you. It’s about a page and a half long. It pops up as an asterisk in multiple places through the Big Book, so the founders of 12-step recovery must have thought that it was a critical supplemental piece of reading for us alcoholics. I put a link to it in the written version of this newsletter (HERE).

When I first got sober and started reading about the importance of spiritual experiences, I had a very specific idea of what that must mean. I thought it was something that must happen once, and it would involve bright lights, and the clouds parting and unicorns flying down from the sky, and me riding on the unicorns. In my head, that was what a spiritual experience was, and when it happened, my life would change forever.

That hasn’t quite played out yet for me. I’ve yet to ride a unicorn, and I’ve found spiritual experiences to be small, steady signs of transformation, sometimes noticeable in the moment and sometimes not—I’ve had multiple times when I’ll be driving home from work or from a family get-together and say to myself, “Huh, I’ve never behaved that well or gotten along with people like I just did, and I didn’t even need alcohol or drugs to do it.” That’s a spiritual experience, in my humble opinion.

Or I’ve gotten a promotion at work and had a celebration, but it’s usually an ego-based celebration—look at me! On top of the world! Give me all of the praise, please!

It’s a week or two later that I think to myself how I had 10 years of my life where I was virtually unemployable, let alone being considered for more responsibility and more compensation. That’s a spiritual experience, too!

So when we read it the other night, I took note of every word carefully, and sure enough, there’s no mention of the clouds parting or unicorn rides. It’s mostly about the changes that happen within us, not to us. It uses the phrase “of the educational variety,” not the money variety or sex variety or being named CEO variety.

Our literature also does not say that the spiritual experiences are giant. Far from it. There’s no mention of lightning bolts striking us and one chapter of our lives ends and another begins right in front of our eyes.

Last but certainly not least, I also noticed for the first time that it doesn’t say anything about spiritual experiences being only good or bad events. It indicates that we all should seek out spiritual experiences, that they are important growth generators. But it doesn’t say that the change always come from positive events. Sure, job promotions and child births and weddings are probably awesome moments to detect transformations in ourselves.

But I’ve learned more in my sober time from things I never would have chosen for myself than the stuff I want and get. There’s a lot of growth that happens from pain, and I have certainly found that.

I still remember about four months into sobriety, my life had turned around. I was going to at least four meetings a week and making tons of phone calls and working closely with my first sponsor. It was a miracle.

Then I hit a rough patch at work. I tend to be one of those people who works really hard—too hard sometimes, admittedly—and that means I don’t delegate or act like a good teammate for others on projects. In basketball, you’d call me a ball hog, trying to take every shot.

Well, I had a big work project involving a bunch of people, and I was the lead grunt on it, but we had a supervisor who I was unimpressed with—let’s call him Biff. I felt like Biff was swooping in and out of the project, nitpicking here and there, but mostly just coasting along as we busted our asses.

And I started having mini passive aggressive behavior around him, talked some s**t within our group, and generally just took on a nice-sized resentment against this guy. When we finally had it near the finish line and some of his bosses’ bosses started weighing in with criticism, my head exploded when my boss on the project said, “Yeah, they’re right. Why are we doing it this way?”

My immediate reaction was, “You know? Go f— yourself. If you thought we should be doing it that way, why didn’t you say anything the first 52 times we discussed it? Now you’re throwing us under the bus in front of your bosses to escape blame. You son of a…”

I didn’t say any of that, but I did make a few snippy comments, and I definitely had my anger on my face. I remember we were sitting in my boss’ boss’ boss’ office, and at the end of the meeting, he said, “All right, looking mostly good here. We’ll meet again two weeks from now,” and everybody started to file out. He made eye contact with me and indicated to stick around.

“What was that?” he asked.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Well, I saw…” he paused for awhile before finishing. “I saw the old you in that meeting. Very thin-skinned about gentle pushback. You seem very aggravated with Biff. It’s just not the same person that’s been working here for the past four months.”

He knew my situation. He’d encouraged me to go to rehab. I respected him and cared about him, because he bent over backwards to get me launched into recovery. I send that guy a note every year on my sober anniversary to say thank you, and I always will.

But he wasn’t going to meetings or doing stepwork with me. He just saw the end result every day in the office, and he was blown away for four months. Well, three months and 29 days, I guess. What he was actually saying without knowing it was that he had seen a sober person in recovery for awhile… then a dry person at that meeting. That worried him.

That was a spiritual experience for me. It wasn’t pleasant at all. I wish it hadn’t happened. But it was a critical moment that I vividly remember because it introduced the concept of carrying these principles into all our affairs. My recovery shouldn’t be something that happens four times a week, for an hour each, in the basement of churches. It should be happening when I am driving, when I am at the playground with my kids and yes, when I am working with the Biffs of the world.

So I am looking forward to my next spiritual experience. It might not be huge. It might not have the unicorns. It might even be a piece of bad news. And it might involve Biff again. Who knows? I just have faith that it’ll be a good growth stimulator.

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

HEARD AT MEETINGS

I don’t want my ego to be the first thing people see when I walk into a room.

(Credit: AA Grapevine, November 2000, Shawn)

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 day, one of my kids was on a real heater. She thought every person she interacted with—including me—sucked, and she let you know it, too.

I knew right away what I should be thinking, which is that she’s having a tough day and is in a bad mood, and everybody has those, and everybody deserves the right to blow off a little steam around loved ones (within reason, of course).

Yeah, that’s great and all… but that’s not what happened. I immediately decided, without actually thinking about it, to fight fire with fire. It’s almost like my default setting is, “I see your level of assholery and I would like to double the amount of a******s in this conversation right now.”

So I did. She sniped at me, I sniped back at her, she sniped back at me a little louder, I returned fire… this went on and on until eventually I realized how silly it was to fight fire with fire. You both end up on fire—not a great outcome!

Back when I was drinking, I often did one of two things, neither of which was good. If someone was barking at me, I would either say nothing and retreat… or lash back out in such an aggressive way that it would borderline ruin relationships. It was totally fight or flight, and both were really bad reactions.

In sobriety, I’ve gotten a little better at navigating people who are on emotional benders. But I also have pride and an ego, and I occasionally find myself thinking, “Hey, I don’t deserve to be treated like that. I’m going to stand up for myself!”

Man, that is a dangerous thought because on the surface it makes so much sense. After all, we’re told in sobriety that we can work a good program, turn our lives around and not have to bow before anybody. But if you think about somebody having a bad day and giving you a hard time because of it, what’s the spiritual answer to that? Is it “Hey, go f— yourself, nobody talks to me like that!”

Or is it the quiet realization that there’s a lot of sickness and suffering out there in the world, and sometimes it comes out sideways for people, and that maybe I can provide a sounding board and a little grace as this person ranting and raving in front of me works through their stuff?

I think the second option is much better for a sober life, though, as I admitted earlier, I didn’t do that recently for my daughter.

When I did realize what was happening and my role in it, I dialed down my reactions and just listened, even as she blew off some serious steam. And what I found was, five minutes later, her volume was way lower than before, and she seemed to have worked through her stuff. Turns out, she had a very difficult day and had a little outburst because of it, and by just letting her throw fastballs at my head and not reacting, we both got to a better place.

I also spent some time thinking about all the various shitty attitudes that I sometimes experience from others… then adopt myself. It’s a lot.

Somebody’s angry, I sometimes get angry too.

Somebody is doing the “Oh, poor me, the world sucks” self-pity thing, I take that on.

Somebody is firing off gossip, I dig into my gossip war chest and look at how I can contribute.

That’s a pretty shitty way to go through life, and it usually means my spirituality is pretty flimsy and susceptible to melting down. When I know who I am and my worth to the world, I am much less likely to join you in s**t-talking Biff from the accounting department.

I’d like to think that interaction with my daughter was maybe an important lesson that got hammered home yet again. But… I guess we’ll see. Something tells me if you show up outside my house and start complaining about the traffic, I will join in within 3.7 seconds.

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:

Friday night at the convention, two police officers watched as thousands of alcoholics streamed toward the stadium, singing, laughing, and shouting.

“Isn’t AA marvelous?” exclaimed the first officer. “Here are all these alcoholics, and not one of them is drinking!”

“Yes” replied the second, eyeing the crowd a little nervously. “Let’s just hope it keeps working until Sunday.”

(Credit: AA Grapevine, October 2000, Anonymous from Minneapolis, Minnesota)

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 stumbled upon a recent study from the National Institute of Aging where researchers concluded that prolonged isolation has the same health implications as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Wow, lots to unpack with that (check out the link here).

First of all, I have smoked 15 cigarettes a day for extended periods of time in my life. I also have had prolonged isolation for extended periods in my life. I think I may have had some periods where I was in prolonged isolation and smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Lemme tell you, none of those times was particularly pleasant.

In all seriousness, I do see the connection between loneliness and overall health. I’m not going to pick apart the science of the study or the organization that did the study—as a middle-aged guy who takes naps and somehow wakes up injured some days, I don’t want to think about aging any more than I have to. I accept the basic conclusion, though, that loneliness is a significant health risk factor.

I am including this on a sober newsletter for what I think are obvious reasons—loneliness and isolation seem to go hand in hand with addiction. They certainly are siblings in my life. In my worst moments of life, both in active addiction and sobriety, I was usually lonely. In my best moments, I was usually not lonely—I was connected.

The second big thing is how loneliness is defined in the accompanying article. I always struggle with spotting the difference between solitude and loneliness. Solitude can be a beautiful thing—it means you have peaceful alone time but you are still connected. Loneliness can be by yourself, for sure, but you can also be lonely in crowds of people. Solitude is good for me, and loneliness is bad—like, 15 Marlboro Reds bad. I can’t let myself drift into loneliness.

The study also shone a light on the uptick in loneliness that people have felt during COVID and also after. The new norm of working from home, Zoom meetings, reduced travel, etc. is a nightmare for some people, including me. And when I say nightmare, I mean that it is bad for us… but we do it anyway because loneliness and isolation is a default setting, something that the addiction part of our brain wants.

Hope you all found that interesting and perhaps thought-provoking. It certainly kicked up some dust in my brain, and it specifically reminded me of a funny story I’ve told on this newsletter before.

For a few years in the mid-2010s—probably like 2014-18—my wife would pack up the kids and drive down to the Carolinas to visit her family. She always did it around my busiest work time during the summer, and she seemed to really like the adventure of an all-girls mom-daughters bonding trip. So she enjoyed the idea of me staying home.

And so did I. Too much, in fact. I remember warming up her van once on the day she was leaving and she was like, “Uh, it’s July and it’s 89 degrees outside. I’m not sure the car needs to be warmed up?”

For the first year or two, I waved goodbye and ran inside and did a little dance. This was going to be awesome! I always had a list of TV shows and meals and other activities that I was going to do in their absence, just me, living my best life for a week.

That never happened, though. I went inside, started eating shitty food, watching shitty TV, slacking on work stuff, NOT going to the gym, skipping all those meetings I had been excited to attend. By Day Three, I found myself calling sober buddies while I laid on the couch in my underwear, with Cool Ranch Doritos stuck in my chest hair.

I had been excited about the idea of solitude, but then created loneliness instead. It was so stupid… and I did that exact thing one year later! Maybe this time will be different, I thought. Uh, no. It wasn’t.

I learned my lesson, though. For the past two or three times she left, I immediately found a meeting or two and made a few phone calls. Then I went home and ate a few more Doritos than I probably should have. But they were solitude Doritos, not lonely Doritos!

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:

On New Year’s Eve, Judy stood up at the local pub and told a crowd of alcoholics that it was time to get ready.

“At the stroke of midnight,” he said, “I want everybody to be standing next to the one person who has made your life worth living.

The bartender was nearly crushed to death.

(Credit: AA Grapevine, March 2000, Dave S.)

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

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

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

I’ve been thinking about the seven deadly sins recently. I was at a meeting a few weeks ago where some people mentioned the seven deadly sins, and there is a reference or two to the seven deadly sins in our sober literature.

I’ll be honest, I don’t love the moments when 12-step programs overlap with organized religion—I’ve mentioned before that I don’t say the Lord’s Prayer at meetings and choose to do a silent meditation of my choosing. But I also don’t get angry when people introduce religious stuff at meetings, as long as it’s within reason. And I think the seven deadly sins are within reason because it’s a pretty good list of things for me to watch out for, regardless of whether I go to church or not.

So I am going to define and rank the seven deadly sins. Before I rank them, though, I wanted to provide a quick little life hack. I can never remember what the seven sins are, until I heard a guy say at a meeting once that he uses the acronym PAGGLES to remember them: Pride, Anger (technically, it’s wrath but anger and wrath are pretty interchangeable), Greed, Gluttony, Lust, Envy, Sloth. Paggles!

I decided to rank them by the amount of harm they’ve done in my life. One big thing that jumped out to me is how much overlap there is. I don’t know exactly where the line between greed and gluttony is, and I rarely have anger that isn’t directly related to pride or envy or lust or any of the other ones. They all kind of play in the same PAGGLES sandbox together.

All right, here are my rankings, along with a quick definition of each one. I did use the Wikipedia page for the seven deadly sins, and we all know Wikipedia is always 100 percent right. But I read the entire page (it’s a pretty interesting read, by the way) and felt comfortable with those definitions.

I’m starting with the sin I think has caused the least amount of damage. I will say, though, that as I ranked these and settled on greed as No. 7, I did make a note that all seven have been really painful and bad in my life at various points. So this feels a little like breaking all your arms and legs and deciding that your broken left arm is your best broken bone of the four. They all are pretty bad!

—7. GREED: This is an unhealthy desire for things, and usually it is material goods. There’s probably some greed in wanting six or seven girlfriends instead of one, but that starts to drift into other sins, I guess.

I am greedy but not in a way where I want lots of clothes or cars or even money, so I put this last as the least problematic sin in my life. It was actually probably the easiest call on this list. The next six were a lot harder.

—6. ENVY: Envy is described as an insatiable desire, like lust and greed, and it involves coveting things from others. It can be their house or their spouse, but also can be the traits, abilities or rewards you see in others.

I definitely have some envy almost every day. But the Wikipedia page goes on to describe envy as a malicious desire for those things. I think I am more like someone who says, “Damn, that is an awesome boat. I wish I had a boat,” and that’s the end of it. I don’t find myself spending too much time wanting to be someone else or steal their wife or have all their stuff in a way that is more than a passing thought.

I will say, though, that I love the sober slogan about finding people who have what you want… but I chuckled about how that is pretty much envy, isn’t it? I actually find it to be helpful envy, if that makes sense. When I think about that phrase, I think about getting close with people who have what I want, in a spiritual sense, and how beneficial that has been for me to learn from them and try to model those positive behaviors in my life.

—5. WRATH/ANGER: This can be defined as uncontrolled anger, rage and sometimes hatred. And yes, to get to PAGGLES, you kind of have to cheat and sub in anger for wrath.

My first thought was to put this one pretty high, because I always have a rival or two (or 15) in my head who needs to be taught a lesson. And I do sometimes think that might involve slugging somebody. But I don’t actually do it. I don’t get to a place where I feel rage or hatred or want to actually stuff somebody in a locker. So I put this a little lower because it’s more of a passing thought than an actual thing in my life.

—4. GLUTTONY: This is overindulgence or over-use to the point of waste.

This one could have been any number on here. In active addiction, this was No. 1. I could not drink one beer or take two pills. I would sometimes have a night where I didn’t drink because I only had two beers in the fridge, because what is the point of two beers? I wanted to get blasted. It was either zero or 25, nothing in between.

I put this fourth, though, because I don’t have nearly as much gluttony these days. My food habits aren’t great, that’s for sure. But in the grand scheme of things, eating too many cookies every night isn’t the most pressing sin any more in my life. And recovery is really good at helping you know what’s too much in any aspect of my life. I’m not shy any more about going to my sober network and saying, “I’ve been drinking two 2-liters of Diet Coke every day for the past few weeks. Is that bad?” (The answer is yes, by the way. Turns out, a s**t-ton of soda is not the most physically healthy or spiritually fulfilling way for me to go through life.)

—3. LUST: It’s often associated directly with intense sexual desire, but it can also apply to anything you become obsessed with in an unhealthy way. So, alcohol, drugs, sex, money, power, promotions at work, etc.

I’m not going to get too deep into the sexual part of this—nobody needs those thoughts about me dancing through their heads today on that topic! But yes, lusting after things, from people to professional success and lots of stuff in between, is a huge problem. In my head, I associate this with being absolutely obsessed with something or someone, where you know you’re out of control but you can’t unplug from it. And that’s definitely been a part of my life and continues to be.

—2. SLOTH The definition of sloth was pretty muddy and hard to boil down. But in one spot, I saw it defined as a failure to do things one should do. I liked that. I always associate it with procrastination and being lazy, which also seems close to the right way to think about it.

I put this second but I also think I have lots of days where this is No. 1. I catch myself saying, “Nah, I don’t want to” about work stuff, or calling somebody back, or even getting out of bed at a reasonable time. I settled on second just because I have a good job, I do a lot with my kids, I go to the gym almost every day, I hit four or five meetings a week… so I have a pretty full life and rarely blow off important things any more. So I think when I say I am slothful, it’s more like I have a lot of sloth thoughts but actually usually work my way into doing them.

—1. PRIDE: Do you know what is most often considered the worst of all sins? Yep, pride, and it’s No. 1 on my list, too. In fact, there are lots of references over the centuries to people who consider pride to be the mother of all sins, and I found that in my own life. It’s hard to think about lust or sloth or gluttony and not see pride wrapped up in there somewhere.

Pride is sometimes described as the opposite of humility, and that really stood out to me. I think it’s probably impossible to have 100 percent humility and 0 percent pride, and I actually don’t think I want to even try to have no pride. I’ve had moments where taking pride in something is important, and also moments when someone oversteps and my pride is wounded and it’s important for me to stand up for myself.

But mostly, pride is the incubation lab for pretty much all m…

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 the TV show Andor, which I discussed last week, a character used the phrase “The axe forgets, the tree remembers.” He was using it to make the point that people who hurt others go about their business after causing pain, and the people who got hurt never forget that.

It’s a pretty profound statement. The idea of an axe chopping away at things over and over again, then moving onto the next thing to cut is a strong visual. And so are the trees that absorb those blows that change them forever. It’s a very visceral, in-your-face way to think about the impact we have in this world.

I tried to find where it originally came from, and it’s apparently an old African proverb, and also the title of a poetry book. So I’m not sure who first said those words, but they’ve stood the test of time and are now appearing in Star Wars spinoff shows.

That saying is a perfect one to unpack for a sober person, because I think a huge part of my problem in active addiction was either causing pain and trying to live with it, or hanging onto it and then trying to numb it. And I think in sobriety, I still spend an inordinate amount of time either saying something hurtful that I regret, or stewing over something that someone else said or did.

So which one is better to aim for, the axe or the tree?

Well, I don’t want to be the axe. In fact, I can’t be the axe. Sometimes I start thinking about how I want to be someone who doesn’t take s**t from anybody, who gets in your face if there is a problem, somebody who is relentless and intimidating and speaks his mind. Then I realize, I can be some of those things without causing pain. I can be persistent about getting charged twice for a refrigerator repair without causing pain. I can stand my ground without being a total a*****e.

So… I do not want to be an axe. Maybe a butter knife. But not an axe.

So that leaves the tree, right? Well, when I thought about it, I’m not sure the tree is a healthy place to land for me in sobriety, either. The tree represents something that got hurt and survived but will never forget it. It’s important to note here that I am thinking more of the day-to-day pain that people tend to cause, not horrific, traumatic pain that is impossible to easily escape. If someone purposely burns your house down, by all means, you’re welcome to hang onto that for a bit and also not invite them over for S’mores.

But most of the pain I encounter these days is not earth-shattering hurtful things. Those are the things that are small enough that I tend to not do any work to process them, but big enough that I tend to collect them and form a nice pile that is extremely problematic. I don’t want to be the tree, either, most of the time.

What I do want to be is a very healthy tree. I want to be a tree that an axe might chop into a bit, but I absorb the pain, process it and move on. Maybe I even regrow some of the bark that got hacked away. That might mean I put up a boundary where I don’t let that axe come over by my tree stump. But if I am hanging onto everything that happened that caused pain, it’s a disaster.

So I am going to do my damndest to be the healthiest tree in the forest!

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 woman approached her sponsor and asked, “What do I do when I finish with the Steps?”

And the sponsor said, “Lie very, very still—because you’re dead.”

(Credit: AA Grapevine, Jan. 2000, “Ham on Wry,” by Jim 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