LOL Sober

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I traveled to Virginia this week, and I was driving in a small town one afternoon when I got to a red light. There was a sign clearly saying “No turn on red” but a big truck pulled up behind me. It was completely clear to turn if I wanted to.

I looked back and did the calculus where I somehow figured out that that guy would be annoyed if I just sat there and didn’t turn. I’m still a people-pleaser, even when it involves random unknown drivers I’ve never met and never will.

So I turned right on red, even though I’d seen the sign. As I drove down the narrow street, a guy had to wait to open the car door until I drove past. For 10 seconds as I drove up to and past him, the guy just glared at me, and then looked back at the intersection. I felt like it was clear he lived in the area and knew I’d just made an illegal turn.

He just kept staring at me as I got closer and closer, and that’s when I noticed a shiny policeman badge on his waist. He wasn’t getting into a squad car but it was clearly an unmarked cop car. I got some butterflies in my stomach as I drove past, because I felt like he was glaring at me, then looking at cars coming up and down the street, and he sure seemed to be assessing whether it’d be worth pulling me over.

As I passed him, I kept looking in my rearview mirror and I watched him gawking up and down the street for another 10 seconds. I thought it was a coin flip whether I’d see flashing lights in my near future.

But that didn’t happen. I kept driving and did not get ticketed for illegal people-pleasing or illegal turns or improper afternoon aggravation of a plainclothes officer. I chuckled a little bit for the rest of the drive because I really did get away with one.

I’m sharing this here today because I mostly do follow the rules, especially when I’m fully on the spiritual beam. But if I miss a few meetings, don’t catch up with other people in recovery, skip reading from our literature… it’s remarkable how much I start to think maybe some rules don’t apply to me.

The roads can be especially problematic. I do routinely bend the road rules a little bit toward whatever mood I’m in. If it’s late at night and not many cars on the road, maybe 65 MPH actually means 75. Maybe “no turn on red” actually means, “Hey man, you’re in a hurry. Look both ways and just go ahead and keep rolling.”

And there are other areas I need to watch out for, too.

I’ve been charged less than I should have been at the grocery store and started to think, “You know what? They make lots of money over here and I’m a good customer. Don’t they kind of owe me a free iced tea?”

I’ve also gone to the office supply closet before and seen a bunch of cool pens I didn’t really need… but my kids might love! I grab a few and chalk it up to one of the perks of the job.

I’ve had a few things with my kids where they didn’t land in a class or on a sports team that they wanted, and I’ve thought, “Let me see what angle I could work here to get what I want.”

Many of these things all sound relatively harmless, right? Lobbying for your kid to be with a friend on a team? Snagging a free pen or two? No big deal!

But here’s why that’s a problem for me: I rarely have ever been able to stop my brain from talking me into other things, too. Suddenly I am working against my own principles and I am starting to slide. I think about that word a lot, because I haven’t had that one moment where I’m cruising along and I start lying, stealing and drinking one day. No, it’s always a gradual erosion and I start to slide back into being the same person who used to do all sorts of things I don’t want to do any more.

So my close encounter with a $100 illegal turn fine really was a good nudge toward making sure my goal is to follow ALL appropriate rules that society puts in place, not the imaginary ones that might make a rando in the truck behind me happy, but is illegal.

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 man walks into a bar and orders a drink. He takes a sip of his drink when he hears a voice saying, “That’s a very nice tie you have on.”

He looks around but he doesn’t see anybody else in the bar except for the bartender, who is reading a newspaper at the other end. 

The man takes another sip of his drink and he hears, “That shirt is a good color for you.” Again the man looks all around and sees nobody. He calls the bartender over.

“I must be cracking up,” he says. “Every time I take a sip of my drink, I hear voices.”

“It’s that bowl of peanuts,” the bartender says.

“The bowl of peanuts?”

“Yes,” says the bartender. “The peanuts are complimentary.”

(Credit: AA Grapevine, September 2000, Mick K.)

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.

Let me start this with a question: What is the definition of being a great person?

I was watching a TV show the other day where one character is a rich CEO type who thinks his future son-in-law is a loser, and he tells him so. He talks to the guy about wealth, running a company, hiring and firing people, having tremendous power, providing for his family, and lots of the other standard ingredients we often think about when it comes to describing success.

The implication was that he, the father-in-law, was what people should aspire to be. “You’ll never be a great man,” he tells his daughter’s boyfriend. Ouch.

It hit me because I took a moment to think about how I used to define greatness, and how I define it now. I grew up thinking along the same lines as that dad in the TV show. I started out wanting to be a great athlete—I wanted the fame and adoration and money and fancy cars. I also liked the idea of winning over other people in a very direct, public way. Maybe then I would feel complete.

But I went to a very good sports high school, and it quickly became apparent during my teenage years that I wasn’t even the 10th best athlete in my class, let alone the world. So then I started daydreaming about acting, or standup comedy, or writing—I wanted something that came with all the trappings of how I defined a successful life—big house, important job, fame, adulation and, ultimately, validation. I would have made it. I would be a great man, then.

Except that’s mostly a fairytale. I’ve met rich and famous people in my life, and I gotta say, not all of them seem content. The rich people often think they should be more rich. The famous people always know full scouting reports of the more famous people—I’m always surprised by how many say stuff like, “I only need 82,000 more Instagram followers to get to 1 million, and then I’ll only be 400,000 behind so-and-so.” It sure sounds like a bottomless pit for an addict like me. How many dollars until I feel fulfilled? How many likes and retweets would it take to make me smile and believe I’d made it?

To get back to my sobriety, I do think I still had warped ideas about greatness when I went to rehab. I thought maybe I would stop drinking and drugging and then get back on track to getting rich and famous. I thought that was still a cool goal for me to pursue.

I don’t think that any more. I think if I somehow ended up rich and famous, that’d be a nice byproduct of what I actually need to do. Which is this: I need to live a spiritual life. I need to be of service. I need to find things to earn money that I believe are of benefit to others and also drive me toward a recovery life.

That whole “great man” thing? That’s probably not even a phrase I want to kick around in my head too much. What is a great life? A good life? A bad life? I don’t know, and I don’t need to establish any metrics for defining that.

I can say this, though. The times in my life when I have felt the best, like I am doing some real good in the world, haven’t been when I have a lot of money or are on national TV or anything like that. It’s been speaking at a rehab, or driving a guy to a treatment facility, or hugging somebody when they have one year sober.

In my home life, it’s been seeing my daughters do well at dance or soccer or in school. It’s when their teachers say, “Holy crap, your kids get good grades and all, but they are so kind to others!” Man, those are the things that have actually made me smile in a way that let me be present and feel gratitude.

I don’t know if that makes me great, but it sure feels great. And I’ll take that.

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. 

They say that alcoholics have three kinds of memory loss: short-term, long-term, and convenient.

(Credit: AA Grapevine, August 2000, Peter M. from Putnam, Connecticut)

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.

As I write this, a hurricane is bearing down on New England, and the town I live in looks like it will be hit very hard.

So I spent last evening hustling around our backyard, putting stuff in the garage. It took an hour of hard work, and I was moaning and groaning the whole time about Hurricane Henri. Then I stood back and stared into the mountain of crap I’d just lodged into the garage and realized that I would probably have to unpack it in a few days, too. Great.

But toward the end, I came in and had dinner, and as I sat there, I thought about what a gift it was that my family could rely on me during a hurricane now—that’s only because I am sober. Actually, during any emergency-type situation over the last 12-plus years, I was available.

And we’ve had a few. Two of my kids fainted from dehydration over the years. My wife had our third child during my sobriety—that was my first sober childbirth. And there have been quite a few storms where it must have been nice to have me not drunk in case anything went haywire.

That sounds like such a low bar, doesn’t it? Hmm, I wonder if Dad is functional today?

But it’s also entirely how things did NOT used to be. For two of my wife’s childbirths, I was obliterated in the delivery room. For the second one, I was in my final year of addiction where I could have died on almost any single day. I was to the point where I was either going to die or get help. During that childbirth, I was barely able to speak or stand up, and spent quite a bit of time in the bathroom puking in the sink. Imagine having to rely on THAT guy for anything. Sheesh.

I also was a constant source of complication for everybody around me. Some days I complained of extreme foot pain. Some days I complained that the medication was making me sick so I needed to lay in bed all day. I had regular injuries involving my feet. Some were real, some were fake, some were a combination of real and fake. I know the lying was exhausting and tiresome for me; I can’t even fathom how it felt to be on the other side of that. Oof.

My life is different now. If one of my kids passes out, or somebody finds a spider in their bedroom, or a hurricane is coming, I can be counted on. I mean, yeah, I’ll whine and try to get out of carrying stuff into the garage for a few minutes. But eventually I’ll do it, and at least I won’t be puking in the sink!

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. 

Two men walked into a bar.

You’d think the second one would have swerved.

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

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

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

If you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m 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 was in a rut on Wednesday night with a writing project that I am working on, and it followed me into Thursday morning. I woke up and tried to get rolling… but it just wasn’t happening. Sometimes with writing, it pours out of you. Other times, there’s nothing to pour.

By about 9 am, I was pretty grumpy, barking at my kids and traipsing around the house with my fists balled up. But then something incredibly helpful happened: My basement flooded. We had a steady downpour outside, and we had about six inches of water in the basement.

Now I was really livid. I was doing that thing where I kind of looked up into the heavens and wondered, “Why me, Higher Power?”

My wife and I started busting our asses to lug the water out of the house and into the backyard. Our neighborhood was practically a pond. It was bonkers. At one point, some neighbors down the street were rowing a boat down the street. Not exaggerating—an actual boat cruising the streets.

For a half hour, I went up and down the stairs with empty cat litter tubs full of stanky basement water. But we eventually cleared the whole basement out. I went back upstairs for a work call, covered in sweat and flood water, and I realized… I somehow now knew what I wanted to write. It had clicked into place.

I immediately thought, “Wait, what just happened?” Then I had to laugh. What I wanted was to sit in a chair—the same chair I’d sat in all day and come up empty on the words to put on the page—and hope that the writing would somehow just kind of happen.

What I got was carrying water and breathing hard and… well, what is that thing we say all the time in recovery? Move a muscle, change a thought. That’s exactly what happened. Isn’t it funny how if you’re trying to live a sober life and do the next right thing, sometimes the universe hands you exactly what you needed—even though it’s something you never would have thought you needed. No way would I have come up with, “Hmmm, hey clouds, could you please dump five inches of rain on my house this morning? I need to lug 50 gallons of water out of the house to get my brain cooking.”

And yet that’s how it played out. It’s a good reminder that when I pray, I probably shouldn’t be asking for specific things that I think I need. Because I’m never right about what is best for me. I should be asking for guidance and for assistance on becoming aware of what my will should be.

And yep, sometimes the answer might be: Chop wood and carry water. Or in my case from this week, just carry A LOT of water.

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. 

Several years ago, my wife and I took a vacation in Las Vegas. Sandy, our 65-pound boxer, came along. The motel allowed pets, and everything went smoothly until the manager asked us to take the dog out in the afternoon so the maids could clean our room.

My wife had made the plans to go shopping, and I wanted to make a meeting. But the temperature was in the mid-90s, and we couldn’t leave Sandy in the car. So I got the number for the local AA clubhouse, called, and explained the situation. “Could I bring my boxer to the meeting with me?” I asked.

The man who answered the phone was silent for several seconds. “Sure,” he finally responded, “as long as she doesn’t talk more than a few minutes when it’s her turn.” 

(Credit: AA Grapevine, October 2001, Pat O. from Indiana, Florida)

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

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

If you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m 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.

Stop me if you’ve seen this movie before…

I did a bunch of stuff with my family yesterday, so I pushed off some other work and personal obligations. And as the emails and errands piled up, I began to get a little edgy and panicky about all of the things I had to do that I wasn’t currently doing. By late afternoon, I was pretty unpleasant to be around.

So when I got home around dinnertime, I started having that thought so many of us addicts have: I could probably use a meeting… but I’m sooooo busy. I have a meeting that I love, that I find very spiritually nourishing, and yet, I convinced myself around 6 p.m. that I needed that hour for other things. “I’m too busy,” my brain told me.

That’s the part I bet many people can identify with. It’s a legit thought some days. I’m not going to sit here and tell everybody that there aren’t moments in a busy sober life where you have to maybe skip the meeting on Tuesday and try to get to one on Wednesday. Or that you should always skip your kid’s parent-teacher conference or soccer game for a meeting. I’m not going to do that.

But I will say that I always try to treat that voice with a lot of skepticism. Is it true? Am I too busy for a meeting? If the answer is yes, fine. If the answer is maybe, or “I’m not sure,” then it’s worth a little more investigation.

So for me last night, I thought I actually could use that hour to catch up on things. But I also kept kicking the tires on that thought, because there’s an important followup question I need to ask. Which is, am I better off over the next, say, eight hours, if I use one of those hours for an injection of serenity and recovery? Or am I better off using all eight of those hours to dive into the stuff I need to do?

Because in my experience, taking that hour breather to reach for some peace and sobriety often times makes the other seven hours more productive than eight hours of edgy, aggressive catchup work.

I often make sports analogies, and I’ll make another one here: In an NBA game, when the other team goes on a 10-0 run, sometimes the best immediate action to take is to burn a timeout, sit down on the bench, drink some water, breath, and collect yourselves.

To carry that analogy further, my brain in those moments is telling me to hustle the ball up court, try to get a shot off, don’t waste any time, we need points! But as often seems to happen in a basketball game, you end up taking a rushed, bad shot, and suddenly that 10-0 disadvantage is 12-0 or 13-0, and you get the ball back and are breathing out of your mouth even worse, hustling to take another bad shot. So meetings can be a valuable timeout.

You probably already guessed where this story was heading. After dinner last night, I did go to that meeting. I didn’t raise my hand to share. I thought I could use the hour to listen, to be quiet, to breath (out of my nose!), and try to remember to turn my will over to something bigger than me.

The topic of the meeting was mostly Step 10, and that made me smile. Step 10 is about taking a daily inventory and when wrong, promptly admitting it. I read that a little differently this time, though. I always associate the “when we were wrong” part to stuff we did earlier in the day that we need to consider making amends for. But when I contemplated it this time, I interpreted it as me taking my inventory at 7:00 p.m., realizing I was headed for making a bunch of mistakes that night and into the next day, and promptly admitting it by immediately taking corrective action.

And I did. The meeting really helped. I went home 50% more calm and peaceful, and I think I caught up on everything I needed to, despite “losing” that hour.

The truth is, I didn’t lose anything. Except, of course, the myth of the “I’m too busy” part of my brain! I’m sure it will come back again soon—maybe even tomorrow. But for today, I’m not too busy for some serenity.

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. 

One day a skid-row drunk collapses on the street and a large crowd gathers around him. They all try to be helpful.

“Give him a drink of whiskey,” says one lady.

“Stand back and give him some air,” a man shouts.

“Give him the whiskey,” the lady insists.

“Call an ambulance!” someone yells.

Suddenly the drunk sits up and hollers, “For Pete’s sake, shut up and listen to the lady!”

(Credit: AA Grapevine, October 2001, Dick L. from New Westminster, British Columbia)

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 meme about recovery on Instagram the other day that really hit me at the perfect time. It said: “It takes as long to get out of the woods as it took to get in.”

I spent a lot of time as a kid wandering the woods, and I learned to track time that way. As in, if you walk for 14 minutes into a forest, you’re looking at 14 minutes out if you take the exact same path, and 28 minutes total for that adventure. A wrong turn or two means every added minute is actually two.

So I spent countless hours as a kid lost in the woods, losing track of my bearings and whipping my head around in frustration, trying to find my own trail to get back to where I came into the forest. I still remember the first time I saw the Blair Witch Project and had 37 flashbacks to various times as a kid when I got all turned around for hours in the woods.

I’m so glad that meme brought that all back for me. I’ve been sober for awhile and done a ton of recovery work, but I still have moments almost every day where I think, “Geez, shouldn’t I be further along than this? Shouldn’t I be more serene than I am? Shouldn’t I not be petty, or judgmental, or gossipy?”

I bring up this topic quite a bit because it’s where I’m at 12 years into sobriety. I think I have really come a long way, but I only got there because I relentlessly took hard looks at my attitudes and behaviors. I hold myself accountable, and that’s not always easy. I catch myself sometimes looking at people who screw up and just move on with no apology, no resentment chart, no prayer and meditation… and I think, “Oh man, that must be awesome.”

So it can be hard to hit the bar that my recovery program asks me to hit. But it’s worth it. I don’t want to go back to the verrrrrrrry relaxed standards I had 13 years ago.

To go back to that meme, I love that idea. I behaved one way for 30-plus years of life. The last 10 of that 30, I devolved every single day into a darker and darker place. So yeah, I was DEEP in the woods. It’s going to take that long, maybe longer, to get out of that forest. And that’s okay. I like that meme because it gives me a peaceful sense of where I’m at on the recovery highway. I am right where I should be, as the old recovery cliche goes.

And here’s the really cool tweak I would make on that meme. I don’t actually even want to return to the same place I set off into the woods. That would be a disaster. I cannot be the same person who went to rehab at age 32, even without the booze. That person couldn’t process any feelings (good or bad), held onto resentments, was a reckless danger to everybody around him, and didn’t know how to properly be accountable for bad behaviors.

I need to be grateful for the spot I’m currently in, because it may be deep into the forest, but it’s also headed for a clearing on the other side. I may never get there—recovery isn’t really one of those things where you get a masters degree and move on. It’s a ride I hope to be on for the rest of my life, one day at a time.

So it actually is a little bit like the Blair Witch Project, I guess. I can see daylight up ahead, but I’m okay with being on the journey more than finding the destination. And yeah, I think some ghosts and witches might shake my tent at night sometimes and terrify me and make me a little nuts. But as long as I keep walking in the right direction, even with a few missteps along the way, I know I will be okay.

My god, I think I got lost in the woods with that metaphor about getting lost in the woods…

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. 

You know you’re a recovering alcoholic if:

--1: Emails from your friends say HALT in the subject header.

--2: Your idea of a smooth opening line is “I really liked what you shared.”

--3: You don’t know the last names of most of your friends.

(Credit: AA Grapevine, July 2001, Anonymous)

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

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

If you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m 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.

On the way home from a meeting recently, I stopped at a gas station near my house. I immediately flashed back to 2013, when I had five years sober, and I stopped at the same gas station with my two oldest kids in the car… and I almost punched a guy.

It was an eye-opening moment for me because it was the first time I really felt pure rage since I had stopped drinking and drugging. And even though I had a pretty strong program at the time, I still got sucked into it. Bear with me, let me cook a little bit here. This story gets me pretty riled up.

Okay, here goes.

I took my kids to the beach for the day by myself. They were 3 and 5 years old at the time, so it was a hectic six hours or so. With kids that little, with open water involved, there is a lot of chasing. By the time the sun started to set and it was time to head home, I was out of gas, figuratively, and my feet were really bothering me. I think I was hungry, too, so that is pretty much all of the H.A.L.T. (Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired) acronym that we so frequently cite in recovery.

About a mile from my house, I decided to fill up my gas tank. The girls whined they wanted a drink from inside, so I eventually pulled my car away from the pump and into a regular parking spot. That’s when the trouble began.

My 5-year-old threw open her car door, and it dinged the Nissan Sentra beside us. I looked and saw that the door had left a mark, and I quickly began to try to figure out how to scoot inside before anybody noticed. Not cool, in retrospect—that was the old addict part of my brain going right to how to take care of the coverup.

I didn’t see that the driver was actually in the car, and he hopped out and got right in my face. He was a smallish guy, maybe 50 years old, and at first, I felt no physical intimidation. But he was PISSED.

“Look what your kid did to my car!” he said. He wasn’t yelling but he wasn’t quite talking in a regular voice, either.

The serene part of me made an appearance, at least briefly. “I’m so sorry, it was an accident,” I said. I meant it, too.

“She put a huge dent in my car! I love this car!”

He pointed at the car and then the dent. This is when things started to go a little sideways for me, because I looked at him and then the car and thought, “Uh, it’s a Nissan Sentra, not a 1967 Corvette. Gimme a break, bro.”

But I apologized again. “I’m so sorry, she really didn’t mean to hit your car. She just got a little too excited getting out of the car.”

The guy was shaking his head, livid, and he moved closer to my daughter’s window. I’ll never forget her head sticking up, halfway hiding, halfway curious about the dispute unfolding in the parking lot.

“She needs to learn to not be so reckless. She could really cause problems with that sort of behavior.”

Okay, now I felt my back going up. I grew up choosing to fight way more than I should have, so my fists started to ball up.

“Listen, man, I’m not sure what to tell you other than we’re really sorry. I’ll take your information and I can pay for the damage…”

“You absolutely will pay for destroying my car door…” he fired back, waving his hands right near my daughter’s face.

My serenity was gone. Destroying his car door? That’s when I dusted off some lyrics from “Mother,” the classic Danzig song from 1988.

“If you yell at me or my daughter one more time, you’re gonna find hell with me!” I barked at him.

I started moving toward him at the same time, causing him to back up. I must have looked like I was going to throttle him because he dialed it down and moved a few steps away. But I kept moving toward him and he put his hands up to indicate he didn’t want this to escalate.

I really was out of line. Yes, not cool to try to intimidate me or my kids. But I should have just let the guy blow off steam.

Good news about sobriety: I have a much better radar for my own behaviors now, so I caught myself at that moment and was able to quickly course correct. Guess what? I need to not be getting in fistfights, especially when my kids are sitting there watching! Not great that I came close that day. But I am proud that my temperature dropped a few degrees in a hurry.

We exchanged information, and he eventually drove off. I still thought he’d made too much of it, and I didn’t love how shaken up my daughter was. But I was able to talk her through it, that we gotta be careful opening up car doors but that it wasn’t a big deal, that I was going to take care of it, that that guy was being a little bit of a jerk. And we moved on.

Well… the kids moved on. The next week, I connected with the guy and he had gotten three estimates for the ding in his car door. One was for $600, one was for $1000 and one was for $1100. I said, “Great, I will mail you a check for $600 right now.”

He quickly said that was not acceptable. “I believe you owe me the average of those three estimates.”

My teeth were grit so hard I thought I’d chip them. I haggled with him for a bit but then something came over me where I remembered that part of A Bronx Tale where the wannabe gangster kid starts chasing another kid who owed him money. Chazz Palminteri pulls him aside and asks him if he likes the teenager who was running from him. The kid says no… “But he owes me money!”

Palminteri says to him, “Look at it this way. You got a kid you don’t really like out of your life for $20.” I always think about that sometimes when my pride is getting all wrapped up in something I could just take a loss on and move forward in life.

So I sent the guy $900 and sure enough, I never heard from him again. It was over. That guy takes up no space in my head at all.

All right, I’m full of s**t. I still think that guy has an extremely punchable face, wonder what kind of dolt gets three estimates on a car dent on a freaking Nissan Sentra, and then how does the concept of averaging three estimates to get a dollar total even make sense as a compromise? You’re not going to pick the $600 place and give them $900. You probably can’t go to the $1000 or $1100 place and tell them you averaged the estimates and, “Here is $900.”

Okay, deep breaths. I may need to think about doing some resentment work on this, huh?

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. In this case, it’s three dispatches from The Grapevine’s “Heard at meetings” feature.

HEARD AT MEETINGS

“I’ve spent my share of nights in jail. Thank God, nowadays, the only thing being arrested is my physical, mental and moral decline.”

(Credit: AA Grapevine, March 2001, Kevin J. from Evanston, Illinois)

“An alcoholic is someone who wants to be held while isolating.”

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

“Drinking didn’t drown my problems, it irrigated them.”

(Credit: AA Grapevine, April 2001, Dick L. from New Westminster, British Columbia)

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

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I took a run a few days ago through a residential neighborhood, and about three minutes in, I saw something moving on the ground ahead of me.

When I got closer, the thing lifted its head and opened its mouth, and I realized it was a snake. A very badly injured snake.

I stopped and stood beside him for a minute, and he laid his head down and stopped moving. I waited for a little while, trying to figure out whether to move him into the grass, call somebody, do SOMETHING.

I leaned down to try to scoop him up and move him into the grass. But I wasn’t sure what kind of snake it was. I grew up out in the sticks but my snake knowledge is pretty much limited to, “Try to stay the hell away from snakes.” So I left him where he was.

I waited for 30 seconds, unsure of what to do. Finally I realized he was dead. I just stood there and teared up a little. I don’t know if he was actually a he, but he was a living creature and he died in front of me, so I don’t want to say “it” over and over again. I even gave him a name: Frank the Snake.

It was a weird but powerful moment. I kept thinking, Why am I sad right now? There’s a part of my brain that gets insecure for being sad about things that other people might not find sad. That part was whispering to me, “Hey, it’s just a snake. There was nothing you could do, anyway.”

But I was sad. It wasn’t guilt: I’ve always loved animals, so I don’t have any deep down shame about past transgressions against nature.

I ultimately landed on this—that I was sad because it was sad. That deep down, loss of life, any life, matters to me now. I came too close to dying so many times in my life that I have great respect for the miracle it is that I am still walking around. That is a gift of sobriety.

Part of me wishes I could be a little more cold. I’ve found in sobriety that empathy is a double-edged sword. It’s great to feel things, to really be able to absorb when a person or a cat or a snake is in pain. But it also hurts in a way that can be uncomfortable. I think an earlier version of me, before I got into recovery, would have shrugged and said, “Oh well, it’s just a snake.”

But it stung me for awhile afterward, and I thought about that snake the next day, too. I’ll also say, though, that when empathy can be aimed in the right direction, it’s also a beautiful thing. Before I went on that run, I found myself a little irritated with my kids. The past year and a half have been hard on families that are cooped up in close quarters. You just get sick of each other.

By the time I got back from the run, though, I felt 10 percent less aggravated about something that just wasn’t a big deal.

So I like to think I carried that snake with me. I was a little less grumpy the rest of the night with my family, and I hope they realize the debt of gratitude they owe to my old friend, Frank the Snake. RIP, Frank.

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 sponsor and prospective sponsee meet to talk for the first time. After describing his many bouts with the bottle, the would-be sponsee finally asks, “So, what do you think?”

“I think you’re going to go far in this Fellowship,” the sponsor says.

“Wow!” his young charge replies. “Why do you think that?”

“Because you have such a long way to go,” the sponsor says.

(Credit: AA Grapevine, February 2001, Bob M. from Bellingham, 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 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 to drive up to New Hampshire this weekend, and it was my first time ever in the state. I was only there for about a half hour, but it was an eventful 30-minute ride.

Traffic was rough, so I ended up hitting the state border going about 10 MPH on the highway. That meant I could check out every sign at the edge of the road, and here are the first three I saw:

Sign No. 1: Welcome to New Hampshire. Live free or die.

Sign No. 2: This portion of the highway is cleaned up by a local casino.

Sign No. 3: Next exit: New Hampshire liquor store. Lottery tickets available. Open on Sundays.

And then when I passed the actual liquor store, it was a pretty giant, multi-floor barn that was apparently full of booze.

Without even thinking about it, my brain immediately started riffing. “Damn, this is a badass state. Hit the casino, then the booze barn, get yourself some scratch offs and LIVE FREE OR DIE—on Sundays! How awesome is this place?”

That’s the alcoholic part of my brain speaking to me. But I’ve noticed that the disease part of my brain doesn’t tell me any more, “You should go do that.” I’ve been sober a long time and I love it, so that argument hasn’t worked in 12 years.

Instead, my inner voice now starts from a place of telling me how much fun it must be for other people to live free and get blasted and buy lottery tickets. That’s one neighborhood over from imploring me to do it, but I think that devil on my shoulder wants to ultimately drive me to that spot.

The good news is, all the delusional thoughts about drinking or drugging last one or two seconds in my head, then they’re gone. But they’re still in there. On the New Hampshire trip, I was laughing five seconds after that first thought, because deep down, that alcoholic/addict part of me still exists. It didn’t die just because I got sober. Its voice is diminished but it still can be heard. And I heard it briefly.

I had a good chuckle about it, though, because I know the truth. The truth is, God knows what would happen to me if I tried that gauntlet of vodka and roulette and $25,000-a-week-for-life lottery tickets. The sober part of my brain reminded me of what the local New Hampshire newspaper’s headline might be four hours after I went on that run: “Connecticut man dies in tragic fall from top floor of liquor barn.”

Or: “Connecticut man projectile pukes in multiple slot machines, arrested for disorderly conduct.”

I used to have a harder time accepting that I would have those ideas at all. I remember one time sharing with a sober friend that I can’t believe I still have drunk dreams or that my mouth sometimes waters when I see a beer commercial during football season. “When is that going to go away?!” I wondered.

His response has stuck with me for years.

He said something like, “Why are you beating yourself up for the first thought? That’s what we do! We are alcoholics and addicts. We think about drugs and alcohol. Just because you got clean and sober doesn’t mean you’re purged of the idea for the rest of your life.”

I nodded along. It made sense to me. Then he said the most important part: “What matters is what happens next. If that thought comes in and takes a seat and stays awhile, that’s on you. You know what to do to make sure your second thought doesn’t come in and pull up a chair, too.”

That’s the part I always think about—the idea that I’m not responsible for that first instinctual thought, but I am responsible for the next one. I have tools now. I can pray, get to a meeting, call a sober friend, read recovery literature, meditate for five minutes… something other than continuing to stare longingly at a barn of Smirnoff and Busch Light.

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 skeptical newcomer just couldn’t see how the first drink could get her drunk. A seasoned old-timer helped out. “When you get run over by a train, which kills you—the locomotive or the caboose?”

(Credit: AA Grapevine, January 2001, Anonymous)

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

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

If you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m 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 longggg day earlier this week, and I had to hit the grocery store at about 9 p.m. I was grumbling about having to yet again sprint into the store right as they were trying to lock the doors at closing time because my kids wanted this or that for their lunches the next day.

As I was hustling through the store, I ended up right behind another guy who was motoring around at 60 MPH in a 25 MPH zone.

But then, from 10 feet in front of me, he stopped. So I stopped.

Then he started moving again, and I started moving again. Then he stopped again, so I had to stop again.

He kept staring to his left and then walking a step to the right, then halting and looking back to the left. It looked like somebody had a DVR and was hitting pause, then play, over and over again.

After a few seconds of that, I looked over at what kept drawing his attention. It was the alcohol cooler. All that White Claw and Mike’s Hard really seemed to be calling to him.

I don’t know the guy. Don’t know what was going through his head. But I recognized the pull of that cooler. I recognize wanting to walk the other way and trying to flee the scene… but having to stop and listen as my own inner voice attempts to talk me into it.

Maybe I should.

Ah, I probably shouldn’t.

But maybe I could tonight? Just a few?

But I probably shouldn’t.

I bet I could.

No, seriously, don’t.

I’m just going to take a look.

(Two minutes later: Walks off with two six packs.)

Oof. How many times did I do that whole conversation in my head? 500 times? 1,000 times? And I’d say I almost always caved in to my own rationalizations. It was like the Death Star tractor beam, pulling me in as I tried to hit the gas pedal to go the other way. But I rarely ever got away.

The guy in the store eventually pivoted three or four times before ultimately going over to the cooler and opening the door. I didn’t even want to see if he got anything; it didn’t matter.

What did matter is that I cruised right on past. I felt no pull myself. What a miracle. For all the other ups and downs of recovery, of piecing your life back together, of trying to figure out how to lead a life without mind-altering and puke-inducing amounts of drugs and alcohol… the most basic gift I have been given is the freedom to not get stuck in quicksand in that one aisle of the grocery store.

Did I perhaps buy a peanut butter cupcake and two Reese’s Big Cup peanut butter cups and almost overdose on peanut butter at 10 p.m. last night? Yeah, maybe I did. But I’ll take that over the way most of my nights used to end. I’d much rather be hesitating in the candy aisle than the beer cooler, that’s for sure.

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.

Nervous about hearing his first Fifth Step, a young priest asked an older priest to sit in on the session. After the AA member had described a few of his experiences, the older priest motioned the young one to step out into the hall.

“Cross your arms over your chest and rub your chin with one hand, like this,” the older priest directed him.

The young priest tried it.

“Good,” said the older priest. “Try saying, ‘I see. Yes, go on.’ And, ‘I understand. How did you feel about that?’”

The young priest complied.

“Now don’t you think that’s a little better than slapping your knee and saying, ‘No way! What happened next?”

(Credit: AA Grapevine, November 2000, Shirlene H. from Bountfiful, New Hampshire)

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