LOL Sober

If you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m not putting anything behind the paywall for a little while longer, so if you choose the free option, you’ll receive everything without paying. If you’d like to contribute anyway, many thanks.

My kids got their report cards a week or two ago, and they all did great. I’m so proud of them.

But I went to a meeting a few days afterward where we read the piece of program literature that says, “In actual practice, we usually find a solitary self-appraisal insufficient. Many of us thought it necessary to go much further.”

It was a good wakeup call that there is a reason that my kids didn’t write their own report cards, and I don’t do my own employee review, and NFL draft prospects don’t write their own scouting reports, and restaurants don’t do their own Yelp reviews. Well, they probably do write their own Yelp reviews, but that’s beside the point…

The biggest thing that clicked into place for me is that I am still a pretty shaky narrator of my own story, which means I am a pretty shaky evaluator on many things in my life. I do personal inventories regularly, but it’s dawning on me that my best inventory work usually involves including another sober person or two.

For me, it all comes back to the concept of “A sick mind can’t fix a sick mind.” I accepted that as 100 percent true when I first got sober—I recognized that I needed a completely new way of living, and I needed to learn it from others because I was someone who two weeks earlier, had been crushing up Vicodin in McDonald’s bathrooms and wiping fentanyl patches in my arm pits “for more effect.”

Fast forward a few years. I’m avoiding McDonald’s bathrooms entirely—not a fun place to hang out when you’re clean and sober, either, it turns out—and my marriage is much better, I’m performing much better as a dad and employee and friend. It was inevitable that I would start to think I can handle evaluating myself.

I do think that the place I’m at is pretty damn solid. I know what I want my ideals to be, and I stick to them most of the time. So I don’t think I’m in a spot where I need to run every email or resentment past a panel of five sober friends. But I do think when I collect a few resentments or lingering bad feelings, I should work through them on my own using the Fourth Step and then do a Fifth Step with someone else. I often find a lot of revelations myself when I plot out why I’m upset, what part of me was affected and then what my role is.

But a second set of eyes and ears can be invaluable. Something tells me this holiday season, I may need that quite a bit. And since my kids aren’t allowed to give themselves report cards, maybe I should stick to that rule, too.

ALCOHOLIC/ADDICT JOKE OF THE 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: 

OVERHEARD AT SEA

In the dining room of an ocean liner, a lady asked, “Who is this Bill W., anyway?”

“I don’t know,” replied her friend. “But I’ve been on six cruises, and he’s been on every one!”

(Credit: AA Grapevine, October of 1994)

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 not putting anything behind the paywall for a little while longer, so if you choose the free option, you’ll receive everything without paying. If you’d like to contribute anyway, many thanks.

I had a plan for what I wanted to say on Thanksgiving. Something about gratitude, and family, and blah blah blah.

Don’t get me wrong. I do feel some of that. But I need to be honest and call myself out on what has been a pretty grumpy week for me.

I went away for a few days, so I had my own hotel room and plenty of silence. I could eat what I wanted whenever I wanted, watch whatever I felt like and I didn’t have three kids barking at me. It was quite peaceful… but I also missed them a lot.

Then I went home and it was chaos. I was definitely dealing with some HALT—hungry, angry, lonely, tired. I’d gotten to one meeting in four days and made a bunch of phone calls. But my spiritual gas tank was a little low, for sure.

And I felt it. I’m at that point in sobriety where I don’t think I am particularly close to drinking. But the world record for emotional sobriety is also 24 hours, so my spiritual clock resets every morning. That means I ended up having a pretty hard time with my family on the first night back. The sober term I hear a lot is “squirrelly,” and I was squirrelly. I still am.

That’s the big message I would pass along. “To thine own self be true” means I call myself out when I am squirrelly and then I am responsible for doing my damndest to get unsquirrelly. I am one of many people who already find the next six weeks or so to be especially tough because it’s easy to drift a bit. Even if I do 10 percent less program stuff… that means I’m probably 10 percent off. And that means, out of every 10 nasty reaction thoughts I get in my head, maybe one of the 10 slips past the goalie and suddenly I am telling my kids they suck and I want new ones for Christmas.

I actually feel pretty thankful for that realization. I’m one of those people who has an unbreakable bond with God that constantly comes and goes, but maybe this is one of those higher power moments where I had a bumpy Nov. 22 so that I won’t have an ugly Nov. 25 or Dec. 25 or Jan. 1. Maybe it’s a little stocking stuffer in advance to remind me what an a*****e I can become with just a tiny slip off the beam.

So let me leave you with a Happy Thanksgiving, and thank you for helping me stay a little more sober today. Remember, even if you might feel really spiritually fit today, maybe somebody else in your sober network could use a phone call from you more than you could.

ALCOHOLIC/ADDICT JOKE OF THE 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: 

A one-dollar bill met a twenty-dollar bill and said, "Hey, where have you been lately?"

The twenty answered, "I was on a cruise ship for a while and hung out in the casinos, then I came back to the States and flew out to L.A., went to a couple of baseball games, out to dinner, took in some of the new movies, that sort of thing. How about you?"

The one-dollar bill said, "Oh, you know, the same old thing—meetings, meetings, meetings."

(Credit: AA Grapevine, September 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 not putting anything behind the paywall for a little while longer, so if you choose the free option, you’ll receive everything without paying. If you’d like to contribute anyway, many thanks.

Oh man, I had a wild weekend I want to tell you about.

I went to an NFL game in a city I’ve never been to. I have gone to lots of NFL games over the years, so I am well aware of the drunken hellscape that can occur in the tailgating areas.

But this was something else. The day before the game, I had lunch with a friend who’s also been to lots of NFL games over the years. She was adamant that this particular team had especially rowdy pregame drunkfests. “You’re gonna see some s**t,” she said.

Well… she was right. It was insane.

Luckily, though, I knew what I needed to do before the game. On Saturday night, I found a 12-step meeting close to my hotel and went to it. I am so glad I did.

I love going to meetings when I am traveling. I love seeing recovery in different communities all over the country because they all have their own local flavors. It’s a little like food—and some places are saltier than others.

This place was pretty salty. The meeting had a lot of tough blue-collar people, which I identify with. I’m definitely more of an indoorsman these days who has no idea how to put up drywall or fix a car. But in my soul, I feel like I am a grinder from out in the woods, who has deep respect for people who build things.

I got so much out of the meeting, even though I don’t love crosstalk. This meeting had a lot of direct comments and suggestions, which isn’t really my thing. But it felt like that was the pulse of this particular meeting. I just listened for the first 56 minutes of the meeting, and then the chairperson called on me.

I shared how grateful I was that I spent all of 10 seconds looking on my handheld computer to find a meeting, then clicked a button that provided directions to the meeting. What a technological gift. Then I found 15 people on Saturday night trying their damndest to get sober and stay sober.

And it was a gift. I went to the game the next next and whoo boy… I saw at least 1,000 very drunk people, doing very drunk things. It’s mostly amusing to me at this point, but I gotta admit, it is still a little uncomfortable. Because every person who I saw walking sideways because he or she couldn’t go forward without stumbling… every guy I saw propped up between slightly more sober friends carrying him down the street… every obliterated person who had that glassy-eyed look of somebody who shouldn’t have had those last five shots… those are versions of me at every single event I went to for years. I am so grateful that I don’t have to live like that any more.

ALCOHOLIC/ADDICT JOKE OF THE 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: 

I dialed the number of a newcomer and got the following recording: "I am not available right now, but thank you for caring enough to call. I am making some changes in my life. Please leave a message after the beep. If I do not return your call, you are one of the changes."

(Credit: AA Grapevine, October 2006, by Richard M. from Golden, Colorado)

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

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

If you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m not putting anything behind the paywall for a little while longer, so if you choose the free option, you’ll receive everything without paying. If you’d like to contribute anyway, many thanks.

For a 44-year-old, I watch way too many internet videos. Quite a few of them are from people talking about sobriety… but that might also be me rationalizing the fact that I also watch a bunch of dumb TikTok dances and Twitter kitten videos.

The other day, I saw an Instagram video where a woman was dancing and shouting out all the different reasons getting sober was awesome for her.

She talked about feeling free, about repairing damaged relations, about keeping a job for the first time—all the basic immediate improvements that recovery can provide—and then she said two things that really made me pause and think.

She said that she didn’t have hangovers any more, and then she said that her looks came back.

For the first one, I had an instant feeling of gratitude. I forget sometimes how freaking terrible it felt to drink till 2 a.m., pass out, then try to scrape yourself out of bed in the morning. I remember being very over-tired, perhaps a little drunk still, and then trying to get a shower and drive into New York City for work. Those mornings were horrrrrrrrrible. I could barely function.

Now throw in the fact that I did that almost every day for several years… oof.

It helped to think about that because I catch myself grumbling sometimes that I went to bed too late and “only” got seven hours of sleep. Or that my cats started fighting in the middle of the night and I had to get up to break it up.

Uh, hold on a second. I used to pass out with my face in my own puke and wake up four hours later to clean up and drive through the Lincoln Tunnel along with 5,000 angry FedEx drivers. I’ll take the cat fight breakup scenario.

The other thing from the video was about looks. I never had much in the looks department, so I don’t really identify with that as “I used to be good-looking, drank too much and looked like Jason Voorhees without the mask, then I got sober and looked good again.”

But there’s no question whatsoever what drinking and drugging did to my body. Oh my god, when I started thinking deeper about it, I remembered a bunch of other things.

I’m not going to get into anything bathroom or bedroom related other than to say… I think we all have drunken horror stories from both of those places, and so do I. I’ll spare you having to hear mine, though. Just think of your own terrible drunken McDonald’s bathroom story in my honor.

I will throw a few out there that I just remembered after contemplating the looks idea.

One is basic medical care. During the last few years of my active addiction, I stopped going to my regular doctor, my optometrist and the dentist. So during my worst 3-5 years of treating my body, I had no actual medical care.

The second one is diet and nutrition. I did no exercise whatsoever and ate painkillers nonstop on many days, while balancing a chronic pain situation with my feet. Somedays I would be so high that I would eat one or no meals. Then the next day I would eat fast food three times.

It was a total health disaster. At one point, I had someone comment to me that I had lost so much weight that she thought there was something seriously wrong. The look in her eyes was, “Do you have cancer?”

A third thing is any sort of therapy. I went to a psychologist for awhile but I wasn’t honest, so it was a waste of time—his and mine. I’m grateful for being able to make up a lot of ground when I got sober. But I think about how if I had been sober, I would have been able to use professional mental health treatment to work through some of the tougher moments of a young adult’s life—my chronic pain situation, getting married, becoming a dad for the first time, sorting out financial issues.

Oh well, the point of this post is about how much gratitude I have for where sobriety has lifted me, not where addiction dragged me. And sometimes the most basic memory—like, not being hungover for 13 consecutive years—is enough to really sneak up on me and remind me for at least a few hours that not drinking and drugging is actually the easier, softer way.

ALCOHOLIC/ADDICT JOKE OF THE 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: 

A cop was patrolling his beat when he came upon a drunk, trying to shove a key into a lamp post. "It's no use," the cop joked. "There's no one home."

The drunk replied, "Ah, you're wrong. There's a light on upstairs."

(Credit: AA Grapevine, Oct. 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 not putting anything behind the paywall for a little while longer, so if you choose the free option, you’ll receive everything without paying. If you’d like to contribute anyway, many thanks.

The modem at my house is just okay. I somehow have no issues with dropping out of Zooms or getting booted off the internet. But my kids and my wife apparently do.

So it has been a nonstop source of frustration for them, and they continue to gameplan how to get better Wifi. That has brought us to an interesting crossroads for me and them.

I’m content with what we got. They keep coming to me with deals to save lots of money and get better service, to add this and subtract that, and bundle x, y and z… and they all sound dubious to me.

I also am not seeing the issues they’re describing, so I usually end up feeling like we might be thinking the grass is going to be greener by replacing what we got.

Their viewpoint is that we pay a lot of money for our cable, phone and internet, and that the modem should be better than it is. Our bill is high enough that my wife thinks it’s worth haggling over the price, too. She ended up on the phone with the cable company for several hours the other day, and it was a little combative. So she was aggravated that afternoon, even after she hung up.

She booked a tech person from another company to come out and assess our layout, and when she told me that, she said, “What’s the harm?”

There really isn’t any harm. But I found that an interesting question for me at this stage in my sobriety. I understand the case for haggling for the best price possible and for calling out bad service. I think I understand exactly where the rest of my family is coming from in this instance.

However… I don’t quite see it the same way. For me—and again, this is just me—I pay a spiritual price when I get locked in on that feeling of somebody getting something over on me. I shared a few weeks ago about how much it irritated me to get zapped for $50 for my EZPass supposedly not working once, even though it worked 20 other times before and after the alleged missed toll.

So my answer to “What’s the harm?” is actually a lot. I find three or four hours devoted to saving $10, and MAYBE having slightly better internet than what I already think is fine, to be a waste of spiritual energy. I’m also an addict, so I spent lots of time during active addiction and even now not being able to just enjoy what I have. Addiction is a disease of more for me.

So I try to avoid a lot of that stuff. I don’t want to drain that spiritual bank account. Despite what I am describing here, I’ve tried it many times and continue to try it, but pushing for something that might be better has been mostly a waste of time and emotional energy for me.

Does that mean I get taken advantage of sometimes? It might. I’m not aware of any serious situations, but I bet once in awhile I am a sucker. I know one recent example where a lot of people would probably feel differently. We got a $75 dinner order one night, and one item was missing and another didn’t have everything in it that was supposed to be in there. We all had a fine dinner but the rest of my crew wanted to call and ream the place out, put up a nasty Yelp review, etc. I get that.

But I felt like that wasn’t worth it to me. For me, I said I was fine with just not going back to that restaurant. It didn’t feel like a gift card or a $15 refund was worth even five minutes of my time. I didn’t feel the need to drive back over there and demand what was missing. I was ready to move on.

My point on all of this isn’t that you should feel the same way I did, or the same way my family did in any of these circumstances. I just think “What’s the harm?” is a good question to always ask. And if the answer is “It will harm my serenity”… well, it’s worth working through that and making sure that’s what you want.

Or… you could just follow my example and find a loved one who’s willing to do the spiritual haggling for you!

ALCOHOLIC/ADDICT JOKE OF THE 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: 

A speaker at a meeting introduced himself: "Hi, I'm an alcoholic. My name is irrelevant."

So everyone replied, "Hi, irrelevant."

(Credit: AA Grapevine, June 2005)

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 not putting anything behind the paywall for a little while longer, so if you choose the free option, you’ll receive everything without paying. If you’d like to contribute anyway, many thanks.

Nov. 10, 2008 is my sobriety date. So yesterday was 13 years clean and sober.

(Long pause to allow for lots of clapping…)

Man, I can’t get over that number—13 years! That’s a longgggg ass time.

I always get a little funky right before and right after an anniversary and this year was no different. I ended up wondering, Why?

I think it’s because that day has such messy strings attached to it. It’s like a funeral and a birth at the same time—the days leading up to it were the worst of my life, and the days afterward are the start of the most important comeback story in my life. So yeah, it can feel like I am alternating between the salt shaker and sugar packets.

But ultimately that date is like a beam of light shooting up from the ground. That’s the day I found a new way of life. In the beginning, that new way of life was just freedom from not being plastered all the time. I try to never forget that it was really freaking hard to get drugs and alcohol… consume the drugs and alcohol… hide the drugs and alcohol… try not to throw up the drugs and alcohol… get rid of the evidence of drugs and alcohol… attempt to function so that people didn’t know I had consumed so many drugs and alcohol… and then, start plotting to do it again the next day.

Whew. I have a friend who says, “Being an active addict was a full time job—and I already had a freaking full time job.” That was my life, too.

So not having to do that seven days a week was very nice early on.

But recovery is like one of those infomercials for spatulas—"But there’s more.” In this case, the “more” was what happens when the cravings calmed down. It took about three months, maybe a little longer, but I started to look around and realize that I had stripped away a lot of the bad parts of me—the lying, the stealing, the hours of drinking and drugging. That was all gone.

But what was left? I was 31 years old but I found myself asking, What do I want to be when I grow up?

That’s about when I got to the Fifth Step, and it happened at the perfect time. I shared a very intimate Fourth Step with my sponsor, and at the end he said, “Great job. I love you.”

I was caught off guard and awkwardly blurted out “I love you, too.”

But then I said, “Uh, I feel like if we’re going to love each other, I should know your last name.”

He laughed, told me his last name and made a joke about how this wasn’t a one-night stand.

Something clicked that day about recovery: I had a choice. I could go to a few meetings every week, make a call or two and probably not drink or do drugs. That would probably keep me physically sober.

But what about emotional and spiritual sobriety? What would my life look like with that?

Here’s the thing I figured out about that: It wasn't that hard to make sobriety a lifestyle rather than a side hobby. I didn’t need to become a monk, or even go to a meeting every single day.

I started spending time outside of meetings with sober people. On weekends, I’d read recovery literature even though nobody told me I had to. I started looking at hitting recovery picnics and other gatherings. I started making more phone calls to sober people.

And that’s when things really began to turn for me—because I loved it. There’s the old joke about how there are two parts to sobriety, getting your marbles back and then getting to play with them… well, I felt like I was finally getting to the place where I could play with my marbles.

I’ve heard some people say that recovery programs are like joining a cult or something like that. Hey, I get it, we all stand around at the end of meetings and hold hands and say prayers, so… sure?

It reminds of one time, early in recovery, after a meeting. I had a guy many years ago say, “I don’t think 12-step programs are for me. It feels like brainwashing.”

Another sober friend was standing there and didn’t say it directly to the guy. But later, he chuckled a bit and said, “I don’t know about anybody else, but I think my brain could use a little washing.”

So on this glorious day for me, a day that really is the first day of a new chapter in my life, I am still thinking about that. Recovery didn’t brainwash me—that’s a little strong.

But sobriety has scrubbed my mind a bit, made the bed, emptied the trash can, sprayed a little air freshener. Let’s call it a brainscrubbing instead of brainwashing. So with that in mind, I have never been happier to be brainscrubbed than I am right now!

ALCOHOLIC/ADDICT JOKE OF THE 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: 

OVERHEARD AT MEETINGS....

"I don't know what I want, but I want a lot of it."

(Credit: AA Grapevine, December 2005)

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 not putting anything behind the paywall for a little while longer, so if you choose the free option, you’ll receive everything without paying. If you’d like to contribute anyway, many thanks.

I’ve never been able to process when people think they’re better than me.

Actually, an important correction to that statement: I’ve never been able to process when I ASSUME that people think they’re better than me.

It dawned on me recently that I don’t think I have had a single person ever actually say that to me or about me. So most of that feeling is just me, picking up scents that might not exist.

In sobriety, I’ve spent a lot of time working on that. I still don’t quite understand why my back goes up when I detect that maybe—maybe!—you’re looking down on me.

I remember as a kid getting into massive arguments about why my favorite sports teams were better than another kid’s teams, and then being devastated to go to school on Monday if my team lost to the other kid’s team. I took it so personal.

And I basically kept going like that. The sports team thing is pretty ridiculous, so I got over letting my self esteem ebb and flow based on how the Giants played on Sunday. But for everything else in life, I really had a hard time with it.

Exhibit A was dating. Nothing was harder than dating. Everybody takes rejection badly but I found myself devastated when someone didn’t like me quite as much as I liked them. I knew people that went on a few dates and then a relationship fizzled out and they just moved on. Not me. I took it as a deep blow to my psyche.

It wasn’t just dating, though. I couldn’t handle a single snarky comment without thinking you declared war. It was so petty and a very good window into how many insecurities I had in almost every area of my life.

Now factor in what 10 years of active addiction did to me. I spent many, many days—a few thousand, by my count—knowing deep down that I was doing awful things, that I was lying and stealing and living a fake life. So that hair trigger reaction of immediately feeling like someone is looking down on me got even worse… because I looked down on me, too! If you have terrible self esteem, it’s pretty easy to think people don’t think much of you!

Well, good news. I got sober, and I don’t have to live like that any more. I still don’t react great when someone is condescending toward me, but I take it a lot less personal. During the 12-step work I’ve done, I learned to figure out my part of things and then let go of the rest. Often times, when somebody is a jerk toward me, it’s hurting them way more than it’s hurting me. Being a jerk ain’t a great lifestyle choice over the long haul, in my humble opinion.

I’ll give you one funny example, though, of how I am still a work in progress. The reason I chose this as a topic is because of something that happened the other day with my daughter’s boyfriend. She’s in high school now, and I’m determined to be the kind of parent who does the best they can, then trusts his kids to go make their own choices. I don’t want to be micromanaging their lives and helicoptering over them because I personally don’t think that’s what will serve them best. I tried that early on in fatherhood and I didn’t think it actually worked. I mean, I can’t go on every date they ever go on, or to every party they’re ever invited to, right?

That is hard—I really need a higher power and a belief in the universe that everything will be okay. I learned a lot of that through sponsorship, and how I can’t lock people in a closet at my house and make them get sober. Same with my kids. I am here for support at all times, but I can’t make good choices for them.

So back to the boyfriend story. For the first time, I dropped her off at the boyfriend’s house the other day. My daughter’s a great kid, and so is he. And I spoke at length with his parents, who seem like wonderful, attentive people. I felt really good as I got ready to leave their house.

I was standing on the front steps, talking to his mom. We were winding down our conversation and I was about to leave when I saw my daughter and him walk behind the mom and start going upstairs. As they went up the steps, he turned and made eye contact with me. He didn’t smirk or make any weird looks, but my first thought was, “This son of a b***h is just rubbing it in my face… he thinks he got one over on me. Let me show him.”

But before I could blow the whole thing up and tell my daughter we’re leaving, I caught myself. If I were an old-school VCR, my best button would be the pause button. I always need to take a breath and think through my gut reactions, because they’re usually pretty bad. So I paused for a second.

I don’t know what he was thinking. I doubt it was what I projected onto him. I ended up smiling, waving and leaving. I trust my kid, and now more than ever in my sobriety, I trust my own process of working through feelings. I have a much better radar now for what I can control and what I can’t.

Did I still have a few moments the rest of the afternoon where I snarled for a second thinking about that look? Yes, I did. But then I laughed and moved on.

ALCOHOLIC/ADDICT JOKE OF THE 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: 

A drunk was complaining about his marriage all night at the bar. "You know, I think God speaks to us through our spouses," his friend said.

“Wow," the drunk said. "I didn't know God used that kind of language."

(Credit: AA Grapevine, December 2005)

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 not putting anything behind the paywall for a little while longer, so if you choose the free option, you’ll receive everything without paying. If you’d like to contribute anyway, many thanks.

Yesterday was my birthday, and my sober anniversary is coming up, too. So I always spend the first part of November thinking about where I was, where I’m at and where I’m going.

I’m old enough now that I try to not think too much about the future. I’m pretty freaking old, in physical years. In coolness years, though, obviously I am much younger and fun, with a very bright future!

I’m also a sports fan, and I think often about how quite a few media outlets now run simulations on a sports season to see how a computer sees things playing out. The number of simulations I usually see is 20,000. So for the NFL, they’ll plug in rosters and the schedule and all the available data, and the computer spits out that the Chiefs might have won the Super Bowl 4,000 times, and the Buccaneers 3,500 times, and the Cowboys 2,200 times, and so on.

I’m bringing this up because I always stare extra long at the very bottom, where the worst teams in the league—teams like the Jaguars and Lions—each somehow win three Super Bowls. I stare at those because I end up thinking about how you could have run a simulation of my life right before I went to rehab and the life that I have right now was the Lions and Jags—the miracle, 3-in-20,000 how-the-hell-did-that-happen? scenarios that defy the underlying data.

Because I think if you ran 20,000 simulations of my life, you’d have ended up with something like this:

8,000 times: dead of an overdose

9,000 times: in jail/in an institution

2,000 times: in and out of rehab, in and out of sobriety

800 times: no drinking but am a white-knuckling mess

200 times: get sober

I made all of those numbers up, but I think they’re pretty close to actually how things might have played out.

I think I was overdosing on a regular basis, including alcohol mixed with fentanyl, and could have died many, many nights. It was probably only a matter of time.

If I didn’t die, there was a good chance I would have gotten arrested or injured someone else or hurt myself.

If I didn’t die or get locked up, I think there’s a version of my life where I kept bouncing between addictions, rationalizing that pot isn’t so bad, or that alcohol isn’t as bad as opiates. I could see a lifetime wasted as I mixed and matched substances and was a total disaster but somehow managed to not die or get arrested.

And then there’s the life where I go to rehab and maybe hit some meetings but decide the God thing doesn’t work for me, or that I’m bad BUT NOT THAT bad and I manage to not drink and move on with my life. Oof. I shudder thinking about that one, because I think that might be the most miserable way my life could have played out. I was physically an addict in 2008, for sure, but I was also a spiritual and emotional mess. I needed more help than just getting off the sauce.

And then there are those Lions and Jaguars versions of my life, that tiny fraction of times where I catch lightning in a bottle and I get clean and sober, I work a program, my life improves, I am a decent dad, husband, worker and sober friend… basically, how my life has actually gone.

The point is that on my birthday, even as my body yells at me that I am somebody now who might get injured taking a nap, I like to sit back and feel grateful for what has transpired. It didn’t have to be this way. It could have been so, so ugly.

I went to rehab in November of 2008, right after another hopeless birthday, and I haven’t drank or drugged since then. Not only that, but the rooms worked for me.

So now, as I sit here watching my age go up another year and I think about what an old-ass man I am becoming, I have such gratitude. I still struggle with the higher power thing—finding the right fit for a God of my understanding and then staying close with that God. But when I look at the full picture of my sobriety, I realize the true divine nature that I got out of the drug and alcohol game when I did.

I think I have a strong will when it’s headed in the right direction, and I think the 12-step programs are beautiful, and that my sober friends have carried me on countless occasions. But I also am not so sure that was quite enough. I came into recovery at the right time, met the right people at the right meetings, had the right support network in my life, had the right ups and downs of sobriety at the right times… that’s a lot of coincidental data points that all broke in my direction to help me get sober and stay sober. So I do need to factor in my higher power in all this. I believe I needed that extra boost from the universe, too.

I’m sure I am 10 minutes away from honking at some bad driver, or crushing six KitKats from my kids’ Halloween baskets because I still try to eat my feelings. But for this very moment, I am so grateful that I am the Detroit Lions, living in one of the very few parallel universes where I eat KitKats, not painkillers.

ALCOHOLIC/ADDICT JOKE OF THE 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: 

An oldie but goodie:

Q: How many alcoholics does it take to change a light bulb?

A: Only one, but first he has to admit he’s powerless.

(Credit: AA Grapevine, December 2005, by Mark T.)

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 not putting anything behind the paywall for a little while longer, so if you choose the free option, you’ll receive everything without paying. If you’d like to contribute anyway, many thanks.

I have kids, and a job, and a marriage, and chronic pain, and bills to pay, and disagreements with friends, and I’m an addict… but nothing quite makes my stomach tighten up like traffic tickets. Especially when I was, obviously, very, very, very not guilty, you a******s.

This is coming up for me right now because I made a long drive through Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey recently. I think I went through roughly 25 EZ Pass toll lanes. I’m a driving veteran, so I know to slow down, make sure the EZ Pass is visible, all of the basics of paying tolls. As evidenced by the fact that it apparently worked 23 of the 25 times.

But I did get two violations in the mail, both for not paying the toll. They hit you for the tolls, which were only a dollar or two. Then they ding you for an administrative fee of $50. So my two toll violation bills were for $52.50 and $51.45.

I was boiling hot right away. Like the kind of pissyness that sounds funny right now but is legitimately problematic. Was I going to drink over it? No… but physical sobriety and emotional sobriety are two different things for me on many days. And if my emotional sobriety is a mess, it means I am a jerk at work, overly mean to my kids, too hard on my wife and I might not pet my cats when they try to lay beside me. As hilarious as ranting about the New Jersey transit authority might be, it’s not good for staying sober and ACTING sober.

So I appealed those two tickets online. My case was that my EZ Pass clearly works, as shown by the 23 paid tolls from that weekend. I had to do one at a time, and the first one immediately accepted my appeal and charged me $2.50. Great. I moved onto the second one.

I wrote the same appeal and it was rejected with a message that you can only wipe out one administrative appeal per year. So I still owed the $51.45.

I thought lava was going to start shooting out of my ears. How. Dare. They. I spent an hour mentally building my case. I was going to take this to court—THE SUPREME COURT IF NECESSARY—because of how unfair that rule is. I was really reaching for my rationale, too. At one point, I was working single moms and struggling truck drivers into my case for driving to New Jersey and fighting this thing.

My solution was that I mailed a check for $1.45 and said I refuse to pay the administrative fee. I wrote some holier-than-thou b******t about the principle of not listening to an appeal on something like this flies in the face of the Constitution. Yes, I dragged our Founding Fathers into this.

Well, guess what? Whoever got that letter must not have loved it. I got a note a week later from a collections agency for the full amount. I was still pretty pissed—my back literally went up, I think.

So I actually started planning to go to New Jersey and take this to court. I started cycling through whether I needed an attorney, and when I might be able to go down there for a day or two. I told my wife how annoyed I was by it and she had the perfect response.

“Uh, I get it… but I kind of don’t get it,” she said. “It is pretty aggravating to know maybe the toll booth machine malfunctioned or a bird flew in the way or whatever happened. But wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to swallow your pride a bit here and pay $51.45 instead of the $500 or so it might take to drive to New Jersey and argue about a ticket?”

She was right. I cooled down. I mailed the check, with great hostility still coursing through my veins. But I did it. Sometimes taking an L is actually a win, and that was the case here. I still think it’s pretty outrageous to have a blanket rule about something like automated toll booth violations. But I also don’t want to empty out my sober gas tank to fight it.

If you’re wondering what toll booth violations has to do with getting sober and staying sober, you might have a point. But I do think the “life on life’s terms” phrase we use applies to a wide swath of things that happen on this long road of recovery. I used to think “life on life’s terms” applied to really epic rough moments in sobriety, but I actually think it’s more relevant to those supposedly small things that drain our spirituality out of us. Those can be disputes with neighbors and lost packages and long lines at the grocery store and a guy not using his turn signal. Those are the moments where I decide they’re too small and embarrassing to discuss with a sober friend. “I can take care of this,” I tell myself. And I often do, with mixed results.

Here’s a funny kicker to that story. I had to go on another very long drive a few weeks later, and probably went through another 10 toll booths and was especially careful to make sure I didn’t get flagged for not paying one of them.

Sure enough, a few days after we got back, I get a letter from NJ EZ Pass again. I open it up and it is a toll booth violation. This time around, I had learned my lesson—sort of. I did not go online and try to appeal. I wrote a kind appeal note where I said my EZPass had been working and I had paid a lot of attention to making sure I was under the speed limit. Then I included a check for the toll, but not the $50 administrative fee, and I mailed it back.

Guess what? That check was deposited and I haven’t heard anything about the administrative fee. So being calm and gentle in responding might actually have worked. I’ll try that going forward.

I’m probably lying when I say that. It wouldn’t surprise me if it happens again that I end up wearing a suit, sitting outside a New Jersey courtroom with an entire law firm at my side, to battle to avoid paying $50. But it’s progress, not perfection, so I will keep coming back!

ALCOHOLIC/ADDICT JOKE OF THE 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: 

OVERHEARD AT A MEETING

“I’m on a whiskey diet. I’ve already lost three days!”

(Credit: AA Grapevine, January 2005)

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 not putting anything behind the paywall for a little while longer, so if you choose the free option, you’ll receive everything without paying. If you’d like to contribute anyway, many thanks.

I saw a tweet the other day where a guy said he had just gotten sober a few months ago and he asked on Twitter, “Hey, anybody else out there who got sober and suddenly was worried about stuff they never worried about before?”

I laughed because my answer is absolutely yes.

I went to rehab in 2008 and my life immediately improved. Like, a lot, in a short amount of time. Everybody I cared about was cheering me on, and then I was going to meetings where I would announce I had been clean and sober for 24 hours and then 30 days, and everybody there cheered and hugged me, too. I felt like Jack in Titanic, hanging off the front of the ship yelling, “I’m the king of the world!”

And then reality set in: I couldn’t believe the amount of adulting that being sober requires. There had been a childishness that active addiction allowed me to do. If I was too hung over to go to work, or forgot your birthday, or got too drunk at Christmas—well, sorry, get over it. I was so numb all the time that I didn’t feel the damage I was doing.

By the time I had 90 days sober, I had begun to realize some shocking truths about sober life.

One is that you are supposed to pay bills on time. My old bill paying policy, which was to pile the unopened bills in a plastic bag and put the bag in the corner out of sight, wasn’t going to fly any more.

Another shocking truth: You have to feel things. Like, actually feel them. I cried more in my first 90 days than in the previous five years combined. I cried over good things and bad things. I still remember when one of my cats died, and I couldn’t leave the vet’s office. I was just a puddle of tears. I called my sponsor and shared with him that I didn’t even know what to do with myself, that the sadness was just a big lump in my gut that wouldn’t go away. He was gentle about it, but he basically said to me, “You’re actually feeling things for the first time in a lonnnggg time. It’s gonna be bumpy some days.”

A third shocking truth: I wanted to be a responsible person, but that apparently requires you to be responsible. That meant showing up at 4 p,m. if that was the time I was supposed to be there. Not 3:22 p.m. or 4:59. But 4 p.m. I used to have a policy of plus or minus 59 minutes from the start time was perfectly fine.

Guess what? People freaking hate a******s who do that. Now, I was supposed to be the kind of human who does what he is supposed to do, and that wasn’t easy.

To come back to that tweet, which used the word “worry” twice, I did also start to worry about things like I hadn’t in the past. My kids were at the top of that list. One specific example is that I used to be so drunk and high all the time that I’d take them to the playground and just nod off in the background as they hung from sliding boards and jumped off the swings.

Now that I wasn’t face down/ass up on the park bench, I realized quite a few times that I was pretty worried watching them do dangerous stuff. Holy s**t, what a realization, huh?

But ever since then, I have worried about my kids in a much different way. And I have found worrying about my kids to be the toughest kind of concern to wrestle, because I have truly needed a higher power to work through it. Even when I am doing the helicopter dad thing, there is only so much I can do. The kids go off to school and whatever happens, happens. If the kids go to the movies with friends and somebody hands them cigarettes or a beer, I have virtually no control over what happens. I have to trust the universe and hope I did an okay job. The rest is out of my hands.

So yeah, I do worry about more things than I did before. A lot more. But I also have quite a few tools to work through the stuff I worry about. So even though a good sober life has given me lots of stuff to worry about, I think I might actually be pretty good at processing it. So that means I might spend less time worrying than ever.

And that is such a beautiful, beautiful thing. You could almost say that I feel like I am king of the world!

ALCOHOLIC/ADDICT JOKE OF THE 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: 

A newcomer was told to begin her mornings with a prayer on her knees. "Oh, I'll never remember to do that."Sponsor: "Are you a smoker?" Newcomer: "Yes."Sponsor: "Put your cigarettes under the bed so that when you get out of bed, the first thing you'll do is reach under the bed for them—you'll already be on your knees, so just begin praying."The next morning, she woke, hit the floor with a thud, and stuck her head under the bed, grabbing frantically for her smokes. Roused from sleep by her frenzied search, her annoyed husband shouted, "I already threw that bottle out!"

(CREDIT: AA Grapevine, December 2004, by Sherry O.)

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