LOL Sober

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

I read a really interesting article recently in Mel Magazine, about a study done on people who are bullshitters. It’s a complex story that digs into how propaganda and disinformation spreads, and who spreads it. (Here is the LINK)

But there were a few specific parts that jumped out to me as a recovering addict and alcoholic who is prone to an occasional thunderstorm of b**********g.

One is that the study concludes that the biggest bullshitters in the world are in the United States. Yes! No. 1 again! U-S-A!

The second is that in the fine print of the study, the researchers come right out and say that this study might not have been able to catch expert-level bullshitters—that the real professional liars probably slipped through the cracks.

I won’t lie. I immediately was thinking, “I bet I am so good at lying that I could have fooled this study.” Then I realized that it not something to brag about.

And the biggest thing that stood out to me is that the study concludes that bullshitters are, in fact, quite susceptible to b******t themselves. I believe that is probably true in general, but within the alcoholic/addict community, I feel like we have a pretty good radar for when people are full of s**t and also have a willingness to let people know they’re full of s**t. I’ve found that to be very helpful—I want people around me who are loving but will not let me get away with shenanigans.

But let me add one big, very important caveat to that: I actually think I am very, very good at b**********g myself, then believing my own b******t. It definitely happened when I was in active addiction. I did it all day, every day, just to keep the lie alive that I could manage a life that included drugs and alcohol.

I’d love to say that once I got sober, I started having a better personal lie detector. But I don’t. On a weekly basis, I convince myself of things that aren’t entirely true or sometimes not true at all. The most frequent thing that happens is, I have a passing thought that someone did something a*****e-y, then the b******t machine goes to work and builds that one passing thought into a story.

I’ll give you a specific recent example.

I was at the grocery store a few weeks ago, and a guy pushed his cart to the car, loaded his groceries, then just carefully docked the cart in the middle of the parking lot. He was 20 feet from the cart return. He spent so much time lining up the cart jussssssssst right that he could have just put the freaking thing back.

I’m watching this and getting aggravated. Yes, I am one of those people who thinks you can tell a lot about people who don’t return their carts.

So I am watching this guy and thinking, “What a selfish prick. What happens if the wind starts blowing that cart and it smashes into somebody’s car? Or plows into an old lady walking across the parking lot? Even if it doesn’t, that’s essentially littering! That’s leaving something behind for someone else to clean up!”

As I sat there, I got myself all worked up. I think within 10 seconds I had gotten to the point where I was seriously thinking about knocking on this guy’s car window. I had seen something that I decided was a*****e-ish, figured out that the guy must be an a*****e, and that I was the a*****e corrector who was going to go teach a lesson.

I got out of the car and decided to let it go… then I watched him hop out of his car and come get the cart and return it. Maybe he was warming up his car. Maybe he anted to put something in the front seat before returning the cart. Either way, it was yet another reminder to be careful of the stories we whip up.

Here’s the thing. I’ve been sober for over a decade. I know exactly what a lie is. When I tell one or am thinking of telling one, I have a part of me that starts waving a stop sign. But there’s a reason in court they say the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. You can tell the truth—and throw in some b******t then, too. I got a 1200-something on my SATs, but I’ve noticed my score seems to have gone up about 10 points a year for awhile and is now at 1290. I know I didn’t get a 1290 but my score did have a 12 at the beginning, so what’s the harm in letting it accumulate a little interest over the years?

That’s not a good way for me to be seeing things. I know too much about the slippery slope of being my own editor-in-chief. One teeny tiny fib can become three small lies, which can become one big lie… and on and on. I can’t let my own b******t get past my own b******t goalie. You guys have taught me too much in recovery to let that happen. I know the difference and need to apply that at all times.

Plus… did I mention I got like a 1350 on my SATs?

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

“I don’t know about blackouts, but I had many involuntary naps.”

(Credit: AA Grapevine, October 2007, by Bud T. of Santa Clara, California)

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 time I heard somebody at a meeting say, “Make sure you always forgive the living s**t out of people,” and that saying popped into my head yesterday. Because I needed it.

We pulled the kids out of school and took them to a Great Wolf Lodge. It’s a hotel with an indoor water park that’s about two hours from where we live. I told everybody the night before that I would go get them Dunkin Donuts in the morning as long as they promised me they’d be able to walk out the door with all their stuff at 10 am because there was a snowstorm coming and I wanted to get out ahead of it. Everybody said they could do that.

So I got back from Dunkin at 9:45, warmed up the minivan, and everybody got in and we got rolling. We got all the way through town and onto the highway when my wife said, “Oh my god, I forgot the bag with all the swim stuff in it.”

I thought my head was full of fireworks and was going to explode. Not the shitty Walgreens fireworks, either. I’m talking about the illegal stuff you get in West Virginia from your uncle’s doomsday bunker.

But I didn’t say anything and I tried to take a few deep breaths. By making it 15 minutes into the trip, that meant I had to drive the same 15 minutes back to the house, then back the right direction another 15 minutes. It meant we were going to be cutting it very close with the storm that I had carefully tracked. My whole amazing plan was going down the drain and somebody was going to PAY!

During those deep breaths, I remembered that saying of “Forgive the living s**t out of people.” That’s a really hard thing even at this stage of recovery for me. Because as much as you don’t want to keep score in marriage or any other loving relationship, it’s almost impossible for me. Those kinds of longterm relationships often involve lots of compromises, stuff like I want Chinese food for dinner and my wife wants pizza, so my wife will say, “Let’s get pizza tonight and Chinese food tomorrow night.” I don’t want to be keeping score… but tomorrow night, we’re getting Chinese food, okay?

This screwup on the way to Great Wolf Lodge was a great test, because I could have easily done some dunking on my wife. I mean, come on, she forgot the one bag we had to have. But she was deeply apologetic and was beating herself up already, and I was glad I was able to be present and notice that. I didn’t have to pile on.

And here’s the thing: Those are the moments where I can really assess my recovery—when I think I have the right to be angry. It isn’t those 50-50 situations where you need some forgiveness, too. It’s sort of like the idea that you can tell someone’s heart by how kind they treat people they don’t have to be kind to at all. I don’t want to be one of those people who punches down in life.

As usual, the morning snafu didn’t really matter. We got there a little later than expected, but it didn’t really impact anything. I’d love to tell you that I took a few deep breaths and let it all go. But I was actually a little grumpy on the entire ride as I worked through it. Eventually I did, and we had a really fun time as a family.

Could I have done a little better at the beginning by not having my head almost explode? Yes, for sure… but hey, maybe I’ll forgive the living s**t out of myself about it.

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 went to a party when I was 17 and the next thing I knew, I was 35!

(Credit: AA Grapevine, November 2007, by Michael K. from Haverhill, Massachusetts)

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 recently watched Season One of the Disney Plus series, Loki. It’s based on the Marvel character Loki, the god of mischief. I’ve never been called a god by anybody other than me, but I have been accused many times of mischief, so I identify with the character on that level.

I thought the show was a little choppy but I ultimately found it to be quite amusing, so I give it a thumbs up.

It’s also a crucial part of where the entire Marvel Universe appears to be headed, which is a multiverse. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of a multiverse, either Google it and spend a month trying to comprehend it. Or, the most concise description would be that a multiverse builds on the idea that perhaps there are parallel universes where versions of us all are running around leading different lives, making different choices.

That concept of the multiverse is why I am talking about Loki on a sober newsletter—because I try to always remember how the life I am currently living is a freaking miracle. If there are many simulations of my life out there in the universe, I think this variant of me, sober and mostly happy, is one of the very small percentage that have a happy ending.

I think if I had to assess my chances in retrospect, I think there is about a 50 percent chance that I didn’t get sober and I died by age 40. I think there is about a 25 percent chance that I would have kept drinking and drugging and ended up in jail or an institution.

So that means I think there is a 25 percent chance I went to rehab and got sober. But I think of that 25 percent of times I didn’t use drugs and alcohol any more, I believe about half of those lives would have been disasters. There is a version of me that got off drugs and alcohol for awhile, stayed off them, but just got dry. I think that version of me might actually be the most miserable, because I think me without drugs and alcohol, and without a program to recover, is still just a huge problem.

And as I’ve said many times, there were some moments early on in rehab where I was so, so happy to be clean and sober… but I thought maybe I didn’t need a longterm program for my sobriety. I had some good friends who’d cleaned up their drugs and alcohol, their lives improved, and they managed to stay that way without going to four meetings every week and working the steps. That sounded good to me!

So if you’re following along with my math, I think there is maybe a 10 percent chance that I end up in the place I am now: with an active sobriety program, a wonderful family, lots of good friends, a toolbox to handle the bumps in the road, enough money to pay the bills, and so on. That is an incredibly small percentage, and as I was thinking about this topic, I kept going back and forth about whether 10 percent might be too complimentary toward me. If you told me the actual chances of me getting sober and living this life were 1-in-100, I wouldn’t argue with you.

I ended up watching Loki and feeling tremendous gratitude for my sobriety. It was a really unexpected way to remember that I caught lighting in a bottle when I put the bottle down. There are lots of days where my mind wanders a bit, feels some self-pity for stuff, wish for a better life with more money and nicer kids and less a******s… then I watch a TV show and realize that I’m being the a*****e. This whole freaking thing is a gift. Let’s call it my lucky Loki life.

In case you missed it, I put together a fun mini comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes. Check it out HERE! (It’s behind a paywall)

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:

An alcoholic sought help about his drinking from his doctor. The doctor's advice was, "Whenever you feel like taking a drink, have an apple instead."

The drunk protested, "Who could eat that many apples?"

(Credit: AA Grapevine, from Anonymous, November 2006)

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 walked into the middle of a conversation between my wife and daughter. They were discussing how my daughter had mixed feelings about a situation—how part of her wanted to be angry and hurt about it, and the other half wanted to move on and find happiness.

I wandered in and of course tried to drop some BRILLIANT wisdom into a conversation I wasn’t invited into. I mentioned the “two wolves” story, which I have heard many times over the years in the rooms of recovery.

In case you have’t heard it, it’s an old parable, supposedly having Native American origins, in which an older person is talking to a child about how there are two wolves living inside of each one of us, fighting every day.

One is the worst human instincts: angry, fists balled up, ready to lash out, envious, greedy. The other is joyous, peaceful, content, forgiving.

The child asks, “Which one wins?”

And the elder says, “The one that you feed.”

So the basic point is that whatever part of you that you nourish, that’s the part that survives and grows and wins the fight. The other one starves.

So I started in on that story and my wife immediately says, “Hey, keep your two wolves b******t to yourself,” and we had a good old laugh. It’s a running gag at my house. Everybody loves and respects the program that I have, and I hear my wife and kids constantly doing and saying things that were injected into our house because I brought them home from sober friends and meetings.

But—and this is a big but—I also sometimes overstep my bounds, and I think it’s perfectly fine when somebody calls me on it. Because the truth is, my program works for me, and that’s the only person it has to work for. There are parts of my program that my friends and family don’t want or need. For instance, not everybody wants to list their character defects and work through them with somebody else. Not everybody wants to seek out old boyfriends and girlfriends to apologize for wrong doing. Cool, totally fine, you do you.

And as I think about this, sometimes my recovery wisdom might not even be welcome by other recovery people, either. That’s totally cool, too. Nobody has to have the same journey I took, and that’s actually encouraged quite a bit in our literature—we all find different brands of sobriety, and that’s perfectly fine.

So if I hit you with my “two wolves” b******t at the wrong time, feel free to tell me to go get eaten by a hungry wolf!

In case you missed it, I put together a fun mini comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes. Check it out HERE! (It’s behind a paywall)

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

I asked a newcomer how long she had been sober. She said, "Today would have been 30 days, but I drank last night, so now I only have 29!"

(Credit: AA Grapevine, October 2006, by Dallas B. of Fort Smith, Arkansas)

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!

Somebody asked me recently why I don’t drink nonalcoholic beer.

There are two main reasons, one of which is obvious, the other one not so much.

The obvious reason: It’s my understanding that most nonalcoholic beers have alcohol in them. It’s very trace amounts, but it’s some. I need to be a zero alcohol person. If there can be negative alcohol in stuff, sign me up for that. I’ve been told newer nonalcoholic beers might have 0% alcohol. I’m not sure if that is true, and I’m not even interested in finding out because of Reason No. 2.

Which is that alcohol wasn’t just a thing that I did in a vacuum. It had so many rituals attached to it. So did my drug use.

Here’s what I mean by that. In my early days of drinking, before I drank all day every day, I started drinking two beers every day with two cigarettes. I did it at the end of every day. Not some days, or many days. I did it every day. I would tell myself I had a hard day and my feet really hurt, so what was the harm in a couple of beers and cigarettes?

Oh man… so many harms, actually. First of all, my girlfriend (who is now my wife) didn’t like smoking. So I had to hide that part it. I also didn’t want her seeing me drink every single day, so I’d ditch the cans. So that got me started, slowly, on the idea that a little secret here or there was no big deal.

The second thing is, it became woven into every day. It was like putting on pants and brushing my teeth in the morning. It was something that I did, and I did it at the end of the day, and I did it every single day. It was a ritual: long day, cold beers, cigarettes out front of my apartment complex.

This was 20 years ago, back before I got into hardcore drinking and drugging. So at first, I would drink two beers over the course of an hour or so, right after dinner. I would put them in the freezer for about 20 minutes so they were absolutely as cold as possible. I’d put one in for 20 minutes, then pull it out and put the other one in the freezer as I drank the first one. Then I’d drink the second one 20 minutes later.

You can guess how this story progresses. I started drinking the beers closer together to keep the same level of buzz going. Then I started thinking, “What would be the big deal if I had three beers every night instead of two?”

And on and on and on for almost a decade. I added other rituals that always had drugs and alcohol associated with them, like watching football with friends or going to holiday parties. More, more, more. More drinking, more secrets, more rituals… then my life became unmanageable and I become powerless over what happened to me after I had a sip of alcohol.

So that brings me back to nonalcoholic beer. I just can’t do it. I think within two weeks, I’d be having my nonalcoholic beer at the end of the day, and I would be overly excited about it, then I would be drinking two nonalcoholic beers every day, and then I would drink a few extra during big football games... it just wouldn’t end well.

How do I know that? Well, I just do. I see it happen with other addictions. I have worked through a pretty nasty soda habit during the pandemic, where I was drinking an obscene amount every day. It started as one Diet Coke, then it was two, then it was two back-to-back to maximize effect. I would have them at the same time every day, sitting in the same chair with my laptop on my lap. So it became ritualized, and it was hard to break, just as alcohol and drugs were. I found that when something is woven into your life like that, whether it’s soda or TV or alcohol or drugs, it’s hard to unweave.

So let’s talk solutions. One is a no-brainer and applies to the nonalcoholic beer thing—I just can’t do it. At all. So the solution is to never start the ritual at all.

OK, well, that’s often easier said than done because I think most people, including me, don’t realize something has become tattooed into their lives until it’s already in there. For me, that has included chewing tobacco, soda and quite bit of other food issues where I found myself doing unhealthy things that were once-in-a-while and no big deal, then became something unhealthy and problematic for me.

In that case, I did not have success in just quitting. I did, however, have some success replacing the ritual with a healthier ritual. I’ll give you an example. I used to hang out with some friends and watch sports and drink and drug and smoke cigarettes all night. When I got sober, I still wanted to hang out with them, but had a hard time sitting in the same seat at my friend’s house and watching UFC fights, where the only difference was that I wouldn’t use drugs and alcohol.

So I started inviting them to my house instead, and I found it broke some of the mental associations I had been doing.

I think I am going to have to deploy something like that in my life in the near future when it comes to eating crap at night. Will bad eating every evening kill me? Nah, it’s not the same as boozing. But I do feel gross afterward and want to change. So I’m going to maybe have to overhaul my post-dinner cookie slamming myself. I’ll let you know how it goes!

In case you missed it, I put together a fun mini comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes. Check it out HERE! (It’s behind a paywall)

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

“The more I work the steps, the nicer everyone gets!”

(Credit: AA Grapevine, October 2006, by Vivian W. of Tucson, Arizona)

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 went on a road trip to another state recently, and one of my favorite things about traveling is finding a local 12-step meeting of some kind. I love doing it. I love seeing how other places do sobriety, because there really are a lot of flavors in this country from state to state.

This one… was not my flavor. The chairperson announced that group conscience for that meeting was to make a special statement about not allowing cross talk at the meeting… then he himself cross-talked over and over again throughout the meeting, which seemed to contribute to other members in the room making some snarky comments and blurting out feedback as other people shared. At one point, the chairperson was reading a passage that mentioned sex, and took the opportunity to fire off a quick Viagra joke.

Yeah, no thanks. I’m a pretty big goofball who sometimes inserts humor into conversations when nobody asked for it, but I try to really observe the principles of the 12-step programs when it comes to behavior at meetings. I want to try to contribute to the safest place possible for people who are either new to the program or just struggling with sobriety in general and need a space to sit for 60 minutes without jokes about impotence.

But the reading also featured two sections that helped me that night. One was a few paragraphs about sober people not being a glum lot—it made me wonder, am I being a little bit too damn serious right now?

And the second part of the reading that stuck with me was the serenity prayer. I spent a few minutes toward the end of the meeting considering approaching the chairperson and saying something about the tone he’d set for the meeting. As we read the serenity prayer, I tried to really have some heart behind it, to really ask God to grant me the ability to know what I can and what I can’t change.

When the meeting ended, a woman approached me and introduced herself. I’d raised my hand and said I was new to the meeting and visiting from Connecticut, and she said she had moved from Massachusetts to this state. I forget exactly how she phrased it, but she mentioned something about the vibe being a little rowdier at that Saturday night meeting.

It was then that I felt like the message from my serenity prayer was obvious in this instance: This is their meeting, with their group conscience, that voted for that guy to be the chairperson. So I didn’t say anything, and went and jumped in my rental car and headed for the hotel.

On the drive, I felt quite a bit better than when I had walked into that meeting, which is what I was looking for. So, mission accomplished! I also tried to unpack how I felt during the meeting, whether maybe I overreacted, and what I wanted to carry with me after that.

And my takeaway was ultimately this. That meeting wasn’t my kind of meeting. I wouldn’t go back.

But it also boosted my spiritual condition for that day. And hey, I’ll take that—we always say take what you need, leave the rest. I happened to leave more than usual in that church rec room, and that’s fine.

As I really played back the meeting in my head, I realized it was a pretty big meeting, with lots of people who raised their hand to indicate this was their home group. That means it’s their meeting, not mine, and that maybe that meeting works really well for the people in that area—just not for me. Guess what? That’s perfectly fine.

Does a part of me still think deep down the recovery world would be better off if I was elected king? Um, yes, probably so. And that means I still have some work to do.

In case you missed it, I put together a fun mini comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes. Check it out HERE! (It’s behind a paywall)

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

After spending the evening at a bar, a woman was in no shape to drive, so she left her car in front of the bar and headed home. Stumbling along the street, she was stopped by a police officer.

"What are you doing out here at 3 A.M.?" asked the officer.

"Going to a lecture," slurred the women.

"And who is giving a lecture at this hour?" the cop asked.

"My husband," said the woman.

(Credit: AA Grapevine, January 2006, from Shirlene R. of Greensboro, NC)

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 went to my local airport the other day, and, as usual, all the signs outside the parking garage said it was full. But there’s always at least a few open spots on the top level, so I ignored the signs.

Then I got to the front of the actual entrance, and there were four cones spread out. It was clear at that point that the airport meant it this time, that the garage was off limits. But then I noticed one of the cones was knocked over a bit, and there was a car up ahead that had squeezed through.

I paused for a moment because it was quite obvious that the airport did not want people driving into that parking garage. In the distance, I saw the guy ahead of me pull up, get his ticket and drive into the parking deck. Clearly he wasn’t supposed to be doing that, so the right thing to do was to follow directions to the nearest lot.

And I… well, I followed the guy into the garage. I found about 25 open spots as I drove around, so I used that to justify that the garage should have been open. I pulled into a spot and went into the airport. No harm, no foul, right?

Except, I have to be verrrrryyyy careful in situations like this. I know it sounds small, but every bad thing I’ve ever done in life started small, with me saying, “Well, I am justified because of x, y and z.” And I always found reasons why my behavior was okay. Always. That’s dangerous, and it is an infectious disease. Once I am breaking a rule, why not bend that other rule, too? Pretty soon, I have rationalized a bunch of bad behaviors.

In that airport situation, I couldn’t help but laugh and shake my head about the role of the other guy. I’ve had sooooo many times in my life where I’ve kind of wanted to do something I shouldn’t, but once I saw somebody else do it, well, hey, everybody’s doing it, so I can too!

In my addiction days, that meant I always just found somebody else who was slightly more out of control with drugs and alcohol and used that person to help normalize my behavior. As long as I had at least one constituent, I was in the clear.

In sobriety, it’s less terrible behaviors, but it’s still the same justification. The worst day-to-day example is gossiping and s**t-talking. If you start railing on Biff from accounting, I will think in my head, “Don’t get sucked into this, it’s not good for your spiritual condition and it’s not nice. You don’t want to be that version of your self.”

And then I immediately join in dumping on Biff. “What. An. A*****E. And the other day, his fly was down and his shirt had a grease stain on it. What is he doing, smashing Taco Bell on the way to work?”

Listen, I understand that nobody ever had to go to rehab for goofing on their neighbor. But I also think a lot of people at rehab started out with some minor spiritual transgressions and progressed to medium-sized bad behaviors and then large bad behaviors, and lots of those people found examples of other people doing worse as a justification. I know I did. I started abusing painkillers right at the beginning of the opioid crisis and kept seeing headlines and thinking, “See, this is totally normal. Everybody changes dates on prescriptions and steals painkillers from their wife after she gave birth. I’m fine.”

I was going to end this by saying that I need to be careful about caving to peer pressure. But that’s the wrong way for me to look at it. That guy in front of me at the airport parking garage didn’t tell me to follow him. I told myself that, so that’s not really peer pressure, is it? That’s me finding an a*****e that will help me be an a*****e, too. I should probably not be doing that!

In case you missed it, I put together a fun mini comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes. Check it out HERE! (It’s behind a paywall)

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

"When I was 16, I was trying to act 44, and when I was 44, I was trying to act 16. I am not sure how, but alcohol made both possible."

(Credit: AA Grapevine, from January 2006, by David B. of Peoria, Arizona)

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.

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I saw a story earlier this week from the New York Times about a surprising spike in the number of car crashes the past two years. Researchers were stunned because serious car crashes had steadily been going down for decades, and the assumption was that there would be a significant drop because of less people leaving the house during the pandemic.

Instead, they found the opposite: The past two years have seen the biggest increase in traffic fatalities since World War 2.

The story cited two primary reasons that both hit home for me. One is drug abuse, specifically opioids. I drove my car many, many times when I had enough painkillers in my system that I was a danger to everybody around me. So I certainly felt a pang in my stomach as I identified with that.

The bigger problem, according to the researchers in the story, is aggressive, angry driving. That’s something I have never, ever been guilty of…

Of course I am kidding. I get it. It’s pretty easy to lose your mind on the roadways some day. Luckily, I am at a place in life where my road rage is usually just mild aggravation. So I haven’t had issues myself with road rage in many years, but in my experience, angry driving is usually an obvious sign that I am not spiritually fit, and that stuff is coming out sideways for me. Every time I’ve seen any kind of angry driving incident, it has felt like there was something else going on with the person—that some other thing in their life was causing emotions to spill over on the roads.

And don’t mistake me saying I haven’t had a road rage problem with me thinking I couldn’t have a road rage problem. Because I absolutely could. I find myself simmering behind the wheel from time to time, and it’s always because there is an underlying issue that has nothing to do with driving.

I also have all sorts of other places, besides the roads, where I see fear and anger pop up in sober life. It’s usually with my family. I’ll get a shitty email or have a bad day of foot pain or something else that has nothing to do with my family, and the easiest way to blow off some steam is to ream out one of my kids, or my wife, for nothing. It’s just so easy to let ‘er rip, and there aren’t always repercussions like there probably should be. They love me, so I know they’re not going to kick me to the curb. Not right away, anyway.

So what’s the solution? I always start with feeling anger and then immediately saying, “What am I REALLY angry about right now?” It’s almost never the thing on the surface that I initially think I’m angry about. I find anger to be like a rock in a creek—you lift it up and all sorts of weird s**t scurries out from under there. When I have gotten mad on the road, it’s rarely about that guy who didn’t use his turn signal.

You know how I know that for sure? Because I don’t get angry every single time somebody doesn’t use their turn signal. Some days, it burns me up. Some days, I just keep chugging along. That means the spiritual axiom definitely applies to the road: Whenever I am disturbed, there’s something going on with me.

Once I identify that there must be something else going on, then I have to ask, What is it? What is the thing beneath the surface making this come out sideways? I’m always surprised at how often the answer is the H, L or T from H.A.L.T.—I’m hungry, lonely or tired. The answer often is that I either need a sandwich or a nap, and sometimes both. So I know I need to lay down in bed with ham and cheese on wheat bread and doze off.

The rest of the time, when I notice something coming out sideways, there is a clear answer if I sit with it for a little while. It’s always something else going on in my life. Sometimes I still am a little fired up with whatever is happening in front of me, but that sober approach of pausing and analyzing it for a minute usually relieves a good 75 percent of the anger. Which is usually enough to keep me driving below the speed limit.

Well, okay, fine, it’s enough to keep me driving a few miles per hour near the speed limit.

In case you missed it, I put together a fun mini comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes. Check it out HERE! (It’s behind a paywall)

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:

Any old drunken bum can get into AA. But to get into Al-Anon, you've got to know someone.

(Credit: AA Grapevine, from November 2004, by Anonymous)

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

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

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

When I was in sixth grade, the entire class of kids—about 200—all got herded down to the gym for an all-day session. We all had to sit on the floor and listen to about six hours of speakers tell us about the terrible dangers of the world: Drugs, alcohol, smoking, sex.

One after the other, adults got up in front of us and basically scared the s**t out of us. They put up pictures of cancerous lungs, livers of alcoholics and terrifying statistics about premarital sex. I remember they even had some cops show up to chime in on the dangers of drinking and driving and using drugs.

If the goal was just to put the fear of God into us about all of those things, mission accomplished. I remember grabbing two good friends afterward and making a pact that we could NEVER drink and do drugs. I remember specifically saying, “And that sex stuff? It sounds disgusting!”

So I left that day thinking I would steer clear of drugs and alcohol forever, and so would my two good friends. Well, I think you know how that turned out. I ran into those two guys not too long ago, and it turns out, all three of us have been to rehab.

I’m telling you this anecdote because I got an email from my kids’ school principal the other day about how they’re seeing an uptick of drug use among kids, specifically opioids. The email had a list of tips about drug education, and it mentioned two things. One was talking to your kids about it and not relying on the hope that someone else does. The second was when talking to your kids about drugs and alcohol, make sure you do it in small doses, over an extended period of time. It recommended short conversations, rather than an infrequent lengthy sit-down to discuss.

I had to laugh comparing that recommendation with my own marathon session from sixth grade. Did that actually matter in the grand scheme of things? Nah. I think the length of the conversations about the dangers of drugs and alcohol wasn’t the problem—I think the problem was me. I think I was born an addict. And even if I wasn’t, I’m not sure launching a full investigation and figuring out the perfect duration of drug and alcohol conversations with a younger person of me wouldn’t really help me stay sober going forward, anyway.

I’ll say this about recovery from drugs and alcohol, too: As I tried to get sober and stay sober, I’ve definitely had both lengthy education sessions and short, sustained conversations.

In my recovery, I think it has been more beneficial when I am working steadily, in short doses, on sobriety, rather than all-day skull sessions. Those have been good for me, too, but I tend to gravitate more toward sustained bite-sized sobriety. I find that that helps me turn it into a habit, more so than binging on sobriety.

So with my kids, I am going to jump in and out of those conversations. I think it will help remind them that I care and keep an open dialogue going. And if that doesn’t seem to be working, I’ll have to look up those old state troopers from my elementary school to see if they’ll come up and show them some pictures of rotting livers and lungs and scare the s**t out of them and see how that goes!

I’m kidding. (I think.)

In case you missed it, I put together a fun mini comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes. Check it out HERE! (It’s behind a paywall)

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:

"We're invited to a cocktail party," a wife informed her husband.

"But I've been dry for three whole months!" he exclaimed.

"That's probably why we're invited," she said.

(Credit: AA Grapevine, May 2005, from Anonymous in Wichita, Kansas)

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

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

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

When I got to rehab back in 2008, every group session began with each person saying when their sobriety date was. As I recall, everybody in the room had a week, or 13 days, or 25 days, and I remember a few people eventually got to a month or two, and we celebrated like we’d won the Super Bowl. The idea that anybody could get 30 days sober seemed so unfathomable that I remember smiling ear to ear and thinking that person was a superhero.

And then one day when I had about 20 days sober, a guy named Lenny (not his real name) showed up. When it was his turn to say his sobriety date, he said he’d been sober since July. I remember being perplexed, because it was mid-December 2008 at the time, which meant Lenny had five months without drugs and alcohol. He basically had more clean time than the entire room combined. We were all quite mystified.

As the days went on, he was very quiet, and I still didn’t understand why he was there. So I did what any gossipy, shoulda-been-minding-my-own-business newbie at rehab does… I launched a full investigation. After all, I had been sober for, what, 10 minutes? Obviously it was time for me to start figuring out other peoples’ problems now!

I tried fishing with our counselors, and they gently emphasized the concept of patient privacy and also that maybe I ought to concentrate completely on my own life rather than other newly sober people. I asked other addicts if they knew anything, and they all shrugged their shoulders, too. Lenny was a big mystery.

But over the coming weeks, Lenny shared some at group sessions, and I got to be friendly with him, and he eventually laid out why he’d been sober so long and was still back in treatment. It’s one of those stories that I am so glad I heard, at that exact moment. It feels like fate when I look back on it.

He basically told me that he’d been a hardcore opiate user, but he drank every day, too. Then he went to rehab—this exact rehab—and sobered up. He’d stayed sober for a few more months before he ran into trouble—but not drug and alcohol trouble. He said he’d found himself eating bad, behaving bad, lying a lot, smoking more cigarettes than he ever had, watching too much porn, and a bunch of other bad habits.

That’s when he busted out the old recovery cliche, “If you hang out at a barber shop long enough, you’ll eventually end up getting a haircut.”

I remember looking at him, confused, and saying, “Wait, are you saying you have been getting too many haircuts, too, and that’s why you’re back at rehab?”

He got a big ol’ laugh out of that, and he said, “No, my point is that if I am living a life that is the exact same way of living I had been doing, just without the drugs and alcohol, I’ll eventually use.”

I still looked a little perplexed, so he tried a football analogy on me. “You ever watch a football game where a team drives down the field every series but doesn’t score for awhile?” he asked me.

“Uh, sure,” I said.

“Well, eventually if you’re in the red zone over and over again, you are going to get into the end zone. So in my life, that meant I was at the 2-yard line, very close to using again even though I hadn’t. So I checked myself back in here,” he said.

I pushed him a bit, because I thought it might have been easier to just go to some more meetings or something else that didn’t entail checking back into rehab.

“Listen, man, let me tell you something you should always remember: If you’re looking for the easiest, softest way to stay sober, you are already in trouble,” he said. “You have to go to any lengths to chase sobriety. You have to fight and scrap for recovery the same way you fought and scrapped for drugs and alcohol.”

He went on to say that a reboot of sobriety seemed like the right thing to do, to take no chances messing around inside the 5-yard line, to put himself back in a lockdown facility and try to build back up.

I’ve thought about that ever since. I haven’t gone back to rehab, but I’ve gone to pretty extreme lengths when I feel like my sobriety is running low. I remember when I had five or six years sober, I made a commitment with another scuffling sober guy to hit 60 meetings in 90 days. It was pretty hard, but I did it and it worked. I acted like a newcomer again, and I felt the benefits of the gift of desperation.

So thank you, Lenny. I am so glad you showed up in my life at that point in time, and I am so glad that I tried to be Rehab Sherlock Holmes for a bit to get to the bottom of it. Because what I found there is something that has stayed with me for 13 years now.

In case you missed it, I put together a fun mini comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes. Check it out HERE! (It’s behind a paywall)

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:

While talking after dinner with his sponsor, an AA member mentioned that he had had a really rough childhood.

His wife added, "Yes, and a very long one, too!"

(Credit: AA Grapevine, April 2005, by Robert 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