LOL Sober

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube.

I go to a few meetings right now where we read the Set Aside Prayer at the beginning. And every time, I am glad I hear it.

As a refresher, here it is:

God, today help me set aside everything I think I know about you, everything I think I know about myself, everything I think I know about others, and everything I think I know about my own recovery, so I may have an open mind and a new experience with all these things. Please help me to see the truth.

Here’s how I boil that down: God, please help me to be as dumb as possible.

That’s a little blunt, but I love the general idea that the less I think I know, the more I want to listen and learn. That’s been a common theme of my recovery.

One time, when I had about 30 days off the sauce, I was telling a sober friend that I liked the steps but I had a list of tweaks I thought the 12-step founders should have considered. For instance, I didn’t like Steps 2 and 3, and I didn’t ever really hurt anybody but myself, so Steps 8 and 9 seemed unnecessary. And if you don’t believe in God, how can you pray?

He listened patiently before eventually telling me it sounded like I wanted to work a 7.5 step programs instead of a 12-step program. “And… I think you might need all 12,” he said, with a smile on his face.

I pushed back some more before he eventually laughed and said, “Dude, you better get stupid in a hurry.”

That’s one of the most important things anybody has ever said to me. I got a little pissy right afterward, but the next day, I asked him what he meant. He explained to me that the more I thought I had it all figured out, the more closed off I was going to be. He then jokingly said, “I want to introduce you to three words you might not have ever used for. They might be a foreign concept to you at this point but here they are: I don’t know. Have you ever said that in your life?”

I laughed and said of course I had used that phrase… but I couldn’t remember the last time I said those words. I spent a few minutes talking to him about why that might be. The answer is something along the lines of me, as an active addict, having to be a fast-talking scam artist who had gone to any lengths to keep my big con going. If you do that long enough, you have to always have an answer warmed up, ready to serve.

Somewhere in that conversation, he referred me to the “contempt prior to investigation” concept. That really hit home for me. The truth is, I did well in school, read every book I could get my hands on and had a quick enough wit to be a good member of the debating society. I really did not dust off the phrase “I don’t know” very often.

Like most suggestions in early recovery, I thought to myself, “What do I have to lose?” I decided to just do what the program told me to do for awhile and see what happens. So I did all sorts of things I hadn’t planned on doing—saying prayers, trying meditation, attempting to connect with a higher power, listening more than talking, restraint of pen and tongue.

It was awesome. My life got so much better, so fast, that I’ve never stopped believing in the idea that I just need to follow good orderly directions from my recovery programs and I will be okay.

Am I perfect at that? Nope. I still remember sitting at a work seminar a few years ago where the presenter put up a slide that was just a big red circle with a tiny black dot in the middle. He said the huge red circle was all of the information ever compiled in the history of the world. The small white dot was the amount that a typical person could know. I remember him saying, “You want to be the kind of employee who knows you’re the white dot and that the amount of stuff you know is much less than what you could know.”

My immediate thought? “I think my white dot is a lot bigger than what’s up there on the screen.”

I think about that story every time I hear the set aside prayer. It helps remind me to shut up, listen and learn. Oh, and that “I don’t know” is a very valuable phrase I should continue to use.

ALCOHOLIC 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. Here goes:

When you drink vodka over ice, it can give you kidney failure.

When you drink rum over ice, it can give you liver failure.

When you drink whiskey over ice, it can give you heart problems.

When you drink grain alcohol over ice, it can give you brain problems. 

Active alcoholic’s moral of that story: ICE IS REALLY BAD FOR YOU.

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.

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

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube.

As I type this, I am sitting in a hotel room, on my second solo trip away from home in the past 16 months or so.

I’ll be honest: The idea of alone time has always been very exciting to me, and a year-and-a-half of being cooped up in a pandemic cage match every day in my living room didn’t diminish my desire for some time to myself. It’s my own little fortress of solitude and I’m planning on coming out of it feeling like Superman.

Sounds pretty normal, right? Well…

I have a complicated relationship with alone time. I love it. I absolutely love feeling free to sleep, or meditate, or call into a 12-step meeting, or lift weights, or run, or stare at a wall and think about next year’s NFL Draft, or whatever else I want to do.

But there is such a thin line between solitude and isolation for me. I’m not somebody who can sit in a hotel room by himself for very long before I am unplugging entirely from anything that is spiritually nourishing. As I sit here, I am watching mindless TV and can see bags of gummy bears and dirty socks beginning to sprawl out across the room. Gimme a couple more days and it’ll look like a flophouse in here. Luckily I am heading back home tomorrow morning.

I experienced this battle—between solitude and isolation—a bit from about 2015-19. Every summer, during my busiest work time of the year, my wife would pack up the kids and drive around the East Coast visiting family. I counted down the freaking days every year. I couldn’t wait to have some me time. I was going to get to meetings, go out to dinner with guys from the program, stay late at the office if I needed to, clean out the garage. I had big plans.

And I did none of that. I sat in a chair and ate Cool Ranch Doritos for breakfast and Cocoa Pebbles for lunch while I binge-watched TV shows and sports. I told myself I’d get to a meeting the next day. Within 36 hours, I was shirtless in my recliner, blinds drawn, eating horribly, just banging out TV in a dark living room. If that sounds a lot like what an active addict’s living room would seem like, you’re not wrong. It was eerily similar to my days of drinking and drugging by myself, on the loose. Turns out, the problem with me time is the “me” part.

But here’s the thing: a part of me likes the discomfort. Even when it gets uncomfortable. I can be selfish and non-spiritual and do whatever I want, whenever I want, without many repercussions. In Step 5 of the 12 and 12 book, there’s a line that says, “Almost without exception, alcoholics are tortured by loneliness.” That’s when I’m 10 miles past replenishing solitude and am instead deep into the woods of isolation.

The good news is, my sober time has taught me that there’s about a 48-hour max on how long I can go until I have no choice but to plug back in. So for the first four years she did that with the kids, I’d limp into a meeting on Day 3 or 4, caked in honeybun icing and reeking of Liam Neeson revenge shoot-em-ups, and I’d get back on track.

For that fifth year, I vowed to do it different, and I did. Did I still load up the car with an over-the-top amount of glee as I warmed up the van—in July—to get everybody on the road? Yes, I did.

But I went to nine meetings in seven days, made about 25 phone calls and dialed it down on slamming Netflix, Diet Coke and Taco Bell. I managed to find solitude—a nice balance of the spiritual, with some junk food on the side. It was beautiful week.

It’s a good reminder as I sit here in my hotel room that, to put it in caveman terms… isolation, bad. Solitude, good!

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.

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

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube.

As I’ve mentioned before, I am a big fan of Just For Today, a short daily reading for addicts. (You can subscribe to the daily emails here.)

I was struck by the May 21 reading (called “Keep coming back!”) that digs into the importance of meetings. And that reminded me of an old standby in the rooms of recovery, “Meeting makers make it.”

It’s just always really hit home for me. I’ve found that on weeks where I go to more meetings, I am more patient, understanding, calm and spiritually fit. On weeks when I don’t get to enough meetings, I am the opposite of those things. That’s just how it is for me. I am a 4-5 meetings per week person, even with 10-plus years of sobriety.

Do I feel cravings for alcohol if I only go to 2-3 meetings? Nah, I usually don’t. But I do start to run into problems where I am more “dry” than “sober.” And that’s not good for anybody!

That May 21 reading discusses how critical meetings can be, and I regularly catch myself wondering, “What is it about meetings? Why do they help me so much?”

I think the answer, for me, is a few different things.

I love seeing people before and after meetings, hugging them, checking in. I love quietly sitting together in a room, with no TV on in the background and no fantasy football boxscore updating on my laptop.

I also didn’t realize how much I love saying prayers with fellow 12-steppers. It’s nice to say them together, in unison. I have been at a few Zoom meetings where 30 people say a prayer and are at 30 different spots in the prayer, and it’s just a big ol’ beautiful dog pile of voices.

I love the last line of that May 21 reading, which says: “Just for today, I will attend a meeting to remind myself of who I am, where I’ve come from, and where I can go in my recovery.”

I especially was captivated by that last thought, about where I can go. I almost always find great role models sitting across from me in the rooms. I want to be sober in an aspirational way, where I don’t rest on yesterday’s recovery and that I am constantly trying to grow. So it helps to constantly be able to find people a little farther on the sobriety journey who I can try to learn from. And guess what? I don’t find those people sitting in my backyard—I need to go to meetings.

And that’s really what meetings ultimately do for me. You guys are my people. There are so many people that I have met along the way who have been impactful in my life… and I have almost nothing in common with them other than alcoholism and a passion for recovery. But our literature does tell us that sobriety is about the exact nature of our disease, not exact details.

So it doesn’t really matter what you do for a living, where you were born, how much money you make. Like, do you want to stay sober together? Cool, let’s do it… we’re on the same team!

When I think about the number of places I go to in life—could be work meetings, could be doing standup comedy, could be at the grocery store—where nobody’s really rooting for me, where it’s survival of the fittest, I am always reminded of the one place I feel most comfortable in the world… at meetings.

What beautiful gift.

ALCOHOLIC 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. Here goes:

A drunk is stranded on an island with no food or water. But he finds a lamp and rubs the dust off the top. Suddenly a genie appears and offers three wishes.

The drunk doesn’t even hesitate. “I want a bottle of vodka that never runs out.”

Poof, a bottomless vodka bottle appears in the man’s hand. He drinks half the bottle in one big gulp, but watches in disbelief as the bottle immediately refills to the top with vodka.

“Do you know what you would like with your second and third wishes?” the genie asks.

Lifting the bottle into the air, the man yells, “Yes… I want two more of these!”

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.

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

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube.

This is my fifth post of the week, so… sorry? I don’t anticipate being that active most weeks, but I got into a little bit of a spiritual groove the past few days and kept rolling. And here we are, with me blowing up your inbox again with a lot of extra posts.

I’ve been thinking about that word—“extra”—a lot because I heard it used recently in a different way and asked my kids about it. One of them had said, “Oh yeah, my teacher is a little extra.”

“He’s extra? What does that mean?” I asked.

They explained it to me that “extra” can be used to describe somebody who’s a little over the top, a little much to handle. A handful, in other words.

“For instance, dad, you can be a little extra sometimes,” I was told.

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? Me? No way. I am a picture of mental health. Serene. Peaceful. A joy to be around.

Okay, fine, I admit it… maybe I can be extra. I’m willing to own that. So in my case, what that means is taking small things and making them big things, hearing some constructive criticism that I somehow turn into a catastrophic insult that cuts to my soul, those kinds of extra behaviors. I can definitely blow things out of proportion.

The good news is, I have gotten a lot better about being calm and measured, even in trying moments. And I believe I’ve gotten a little better, week after week, ever since I first got sober in 2008. As we say in the rooms, it’s about progress, not perfection.

One thing that has helped me is an exercise I did a few years ago, where I picked out three states of being and tried to constantly be at least one of those at all times. My picks were (1) patient, (2) calm and (3) nice, so I would repeat that to myself over and over again throughout the day. “Patient, calm, nice,” I’d say.

In general, if I could just be one of those things, I was okay. So I do think I grew up a bit and could be a pretty steady person to be around. I’m proud of that—it’s real growth as a human being. I think when I was, say, 30 years old, I was someone you just didn’t want to include in any kind of adult situation. I was a big child with drug and alcohol issues. Oof. Who wants that guy involved in any decision-making?

Fast forward to 2021, and I haven’t had a lot of slammed doors or screaming matches. What a gift of the 12-step programs. I hope I can keep that momentum going.

Now let me address an area I could definitely use improvement in—when I interact with other “extra” people. The truth is, I ain’t the only one bringing extra-ness to the party.

I told you my goal already: patient, calm, nice. If somebody wants to blow their stack about something, I can usually just listen and be of service that way.

But it happens just enough to be a problem where someone brings their extra to the party, and I dust mine off, too, and suddenly we have dueling extras colliding. That. Is. Never. Good.

The truth is, there are plenty of extra people out there in the world other than me. I always have to remember, that’s their stuff, not mine. I have enough extra on my own, don’t you think?!

I have two things that I try to do in response (full disclosure: I’d probably give myself a C+ for actually practicing what I am about to preach).

One is, I do everything I can to not be extra myself. I have to fill up the spiritual gas tank as much as possible using meetings, meditation, prayer, literature and my biggest weapon—the phone. On days when I feel a little squirrelly, I try to call three program people who are usually more serene than me. Because I have found that as much as being extra can be an infectious disease, so can stoicism and calmness. If I call three people like that, it usually rubs off on me and I am better equipped to let stuff roll off my back. Funny how that works.

The other thing that I find very helpful on days where there is a lot of “extra” being lobbed my way is to simply shut the hell up. Like, don’t talk so much. Seriously. I just try to listen and limit my opinions/suggestion/hot takes to the moments when people specifically ask me to chime in. I’m always surprised how few times I am actually asked to provide an opinion, versus the times I just pipe mine in.

Hope everybody has a great weekend!

Correction: Hope everybody has an EXTRA great weekend!

ALCOHOLIC 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. Here goes:

A man in a hot air balloon waves frantically toward a man on the ground.

“Can you help me? I don’t know where I am!” he yelled.

The man replied, “Sure, you’re in a hot air balloon, 41 feet off the ground, 4.3 miles out of town, with 17 MPH out of the west pushing you toward the lake.”

“Wow, you must be an AA sponsor,” said the man in the balloon.

“I am. How did you know that?” the man on the ground said.

“Well, everything you told me sounds right,” he said. “But I’m still lost and you may have delayed my trip with all that information.”

The man on the ground smiled. “You must be a sponsee,” he said.

“I am, but how did you know that?” the guy in the balloon said.

“Well, you don’t know where you are, where you’re going or what to do about it. You have risen to where you are because of a lot of hot air. You’re expecting other people to solve your problems and your situation is getting worse and worse by the moment. Yet somehow, it’s my fault!”

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.

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

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube.

It’s NBA playoff time! I’m excited… and staying up wayyyyy too late to watch games.

I love sports. It’s probably my favorite recreational thing to watch on TV, and I’ll always be appreciative of what being an athlete did for me. I played high school sports in an area where athletics were both important and played at a very high level. Then I played two years of tennis in college at a small school.

As a junior in college, though, I got very sick and almost died. That led to some amputation procedures that put a long pause on any kind of athletics, even at the intramural softball level. It’s a long story that I will share about some day soon.

The constant surgeries started me on painkillers, and I began to abuse alcohol, too, and you know what that ultimately got me: a front row seat at rehab.

Throughout most of my life, I really had a profound sense of appreciation and 100 percent positive feeling about what sports did for me. There were sooooooooo many reasons to be grateful for what sports taught. I learned how to lose and try to come back, how to fight and be mentally tough, how to claw back from injuries, how to push myself, how to never quit… all the good characteristics you can probably imagine.

But when I went to rehab, it hit me that sometimes those same characteristics don’t play well in the sandbox with what I was going to need to do to get sober. As I detoxed, I still had those voices in my head.

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

“Second place is first loser.”

“No mercy, sweep the leg…” oh s**t, hold on, I’m just quoting from Cobra Kai at this point.

In all seriousness, you get my point. I heard former NFL quarterback Ryan Leaf talking recently about how much sports did for him but also how hard that then makes it to fully surrender to recovery. I get that. In athlete terms, surrender is a terrible thing. It means losing. Giving up.

But that’s what I needed to do. I had to say things and admit things that the athlete part of my brain just wasn’t equipped to do. The idea of surrendering to win? Asking for help? Acknowledging fear? Those were foreign concepts, and it felt very uncomfortable to start to think that way at first.

Early in recovery, though, I also heard an MMA fighter who was asked about the idea of getting submitted in a fight. Some fighters refuse to ever tap out—they’re willing to get their leg broken or completely choked unconscious rather than admit defeat.

But this fighter was like, “Hey, if I know my arm is about to snap in half, I am tapping out. I don’t want to be in a cast and unable to fight for four months. It’s a stupid jock idea to let your pride get in the way of doing the right thing. I’d rather tap and live to fight another day.”

So I’m trying to embrace that concept, even today, with some sobriety under my belt. Live to fight another day!

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.

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

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube.

I have an issue in my life right now that has been going on for over a year now, and it’s really spiritually draining.

Part of the reason it’s been spiritually draining is because I am allowing it to be. I could not let go. I would not let go. And I did not let it go. Deep down, I didn’t want to let it go.

I kept telling myself, “I’ll figure it out. If I gameplan this enough, I can get what I want.”

That’s why I have been thinking a lot about the idea of “Let go and let God” and “Let go or get dragged.” I just got dragged for a year before I finally let go.

It reminds me of when I was a kid living out in the woods. My family had lots of animals—rabbits, horses, goats, sheep—and I was in charge of our goat, Nanny. (That’s quite the creative name for a goat, isn’t it?)

Let’s just say Nanny did not miss many meals. So she was a big goat, and I was a skinny 10-year-old who weighed about the same as Nanny. When Nanny got out, I would approach her with great trepidation. Sometimes she’d just walk behind me and go back in her pen. Other times, she wasn’t ready to have her parole revoked, so she would either come at me or run away.

I’d have to catch up to her and then grab her by the collar and try to put her back in. I loved her, so it was never rough or anything. I’d finally get ahold of her collar and then… that freaking goat would drag me all over the yard like I was water skiing behind her. I’d hang on and just eat turf for 10 minutes. I can distinctly remember my waist line would be this weird dark shade of green from grass burns, and the top of my pants would be stuffed with the lawn.

I’d hang on and eventually she’d tire out. I’d scrape myself off the ground and walk her back to her pen, close the door and go put on clean pants.

That came to mind because unfortunately, that’s what it takes sometimes for me to get tired of hanging on so tight to things—I need to be flat-out dragged around the neighborhood a few times.

And that’s what happened recently during the situation I described earlier. I know enough to share with sober friends when something is puncturing my spiritual tires. Somebody told me to pray like crazy and make sure I keep an ear out for God to respond—to make sure it was a two-way conversation, not just me asking for something.

I gotta say, it worked. I don’t have it completely resolved yet—not much has actually changed, if I’m really looking at it honestly.

But my spiritual condition changed, and that can be critical. At the end of the day, the only thing I can truly change is me. I certainly could have gotten to the point where I didn’t get dragged around so bad, for so long, but I’ll take what I have been feeling recently as a gift and a learning experience.

And hey, it’s kind of awesome that I didn’t need an angry goat to drag me around town this time!

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.

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

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube.

This weekend, I had a few people tell me they like what I am doing here and asked how they could help. If you feel similarly, I’d say the biggest thing you could do is tell somebody to find it (NelsonH.substack.com) or hit the purple “Share” button at the very button.

Which is a good transition to what I wanted to talk about today.

I’m a huge fan of sobriety literature from the 12-step programs—any 12-step program, really. I do identify as an alcoholic and an addict, so I enjoy a lot of the neighborhoods in the addiction community. I personally have participated in four different 12-step fellowships during my time in recovery, and all four played a part in helping me get sober and stay sober.

So I wanted to reference one piece of recovery literature that I love: Just For Today. It’s similar to Daily Reflections, but aimed at addicts, not just alcoholics.

What I love about it is, you can put in your email address on the JFT web site and start getting them emailed to you every day at midnight. They’re around 100 words long, and they almost always give me a really good little micro dose of recovery.

I get them at around midnight, so I can either read them when I wake up in the morning… or while I am up way too late watching an NBA playoff game. (Wanna guess who’s planning on doing that a lot these next two months?!)

I recently read the May 14 entry of Just For Today, titled “Oops.” It’s about mistakes, and there were a couple of points that really hit home for me.

A big one: We all make mistakes. Doesn’t matter how much clean time I have, how many meetings I’ve gotten to that month, or how much college I’ve got under my belt… I still screw up things, and I probably always will.

The second thing that jumped out at me is a line that says “Many of us feel that our entire lives have been a mistake.” 

Whoa. At first that hit me as a little grandiose and harsh—our whole lives? Isn’t that a little much?

But the more I sat with it, the more I realized that I did spend a good 30 years feeling really bad about myself, mostly because I did bad stuff all the time. No matter how much your parents or spouse love you, if you behave like I did, there’s no way you can feel good when your head hits the pillow.

So there is that part of me that just feels like a damaged can of corn at the grocery store. It gets thrown on the clearance rank, and then if nobody wants it at a discount, it gets tossed in the garbage.

The third thing from the reading is that mistakes are actually vital to growth. There’s a line that says addicts are hard-headed people and mistakes are sometimes the best teachers for us. Wow, that is so true for me. I don’t like messing stuff up, but it does take that for me to learn. That happens a LOT.

And it always has: I didn’t quit drinking and drugging because it was the right thing to do, or I saw a powerful movie, or somebody explained that I was an addict and needed help. No way—I only took my hand off the stove when it was on fire.

The fourth thing that stood out to me is from the final two lines of the reading, which said this: Just for today, mistakes aren’t tragedies. But please, Higher Power, help me learn from them.

That hit me for a few different reasons.

One is just the idea that mistakes aren’t tragedies. Send a dumb email? Okay, fine, make it right, move on. Say something mean to your kids? Apologize, move on. Maybe you were in traffic on the highway the other day and a guy in a sports car tried to merge onto the highway but darting in front of you, and his lame music was so loud that it drowned out your VERY COOL 90s grunge from your car, and maybe you sped up a bit to make sure he didn’t get in front of you… okay, that is a super-specific example that may or may not have happened the other day.

You probably get my point, though. When I screw up, I can bounce back. It is not a tragedy.

I need to keep saying that: It’s. Not. A. Tragedy.

It can be hard to break the pattern of converting oopses into tragedy, though, and that’s where that last line comes in regarding mistakes. “Please, Higher Power, help me learn from them.”

ALCOHOLIC 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.

From a sign outside a 12-step meeting:

NOTICE: Elevator to sobriety out of order…

Please use the steps.

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.

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

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about my motives. Am I doing the right thing because it’s the right thing? Or am I doing the right thing because I want something in return? The answers to those questions are usually a good window into my recovery.

I’ve made so much progress, for sure. When I think back to my drinking and drugging days, I had one motive ever: Get me what I want, when I want it. Nothing else mattered. That was the motivation for every thought, action and reaction, for every minute of every day.

Everything in my life was built to feed my addiction, including my personal relationships with people. If you weren’t willing to enable me, I found a way to shove you aside. I talked lots of people into enabling me and I got really, really good at it. It makes me cringe just thinking back on those days.

But guess what?

That motive-based mentality didn’t just go away when I put down the beer and pills. It’s something that hung around with me for a longggg time. In fact, I’m still someone who lets his hand hover above the tip jar just a bit because I NEED TO KNOW THAT YOU KNOW I AM AN AMAZING CUSTOMER AND A GIFT TO HUMANKIND.

I’ll give you a more insidious example of what I mean, and I’m glad I can laugh about it now because I did learn something. Here goes:

Around 2014 or so, I had five or six years sober and I was doing pretty well. But I still felt sneaky sometimes—at rehab, they always called it “getting over” and I knew exactly what they meant. It’s that skill addicts like me develop to figure out what your buttons are, how to push them, what makes you laugh, what makes you feel generous toward me. Then I’d weaponize that information.

I was like a freaking FBI profiler, even with some clean time.

So back to the story… I drove through a busy intersection and saw what looked like somebody’s wallet that exploded all over the street. There were credit cards everywhere.

My first thought as I drove past was, “Geez, that sucks for that guy.”

But then that good angel voice that you sober people taught me announced inside my brain, “What would you want somebody to do if that was your driver’s license and credit cards laying on the road?”

Damn it, I thought. So I pulled over and went back and ran out between red lights to gather up the stuff. The wallet was from a woman who lived in the area—her whole identity was laying in that intersection.

I made some calls and eventually tracked her down, and she said she’d meet me at a nearby gas station. When I got there, she was incredibly grateful. Her and her husband profusely thanked me over and over again.

I found myself saying stuff like, “No big deal!” and “Happy to help out.”

Before she left, I’ll never forget she shook my hand one more time and said, “You deserve for something really good to happen to you.”

My first thought was, “Yeah, how ‘bout you give me 50 bucks, lady?”

So as you can see, my motive wasn’t being of service… I wanted some good s**t out of this good deed!

I caught myself, though. I reached out to some program friends and told them what happened. The good news is, I called myself out on it. The fundamental thing about motives for me is, to thine own self be true—I’d say 90 percent of the exaggerating, lying, overhyping and rationalization happens inside my own head. A friend of mine always says, “My brain is a b******t factory. One half manufactures it, and the other half buys it.” So my b******t factory can fire up at a minute’s notice.

The kicker to this story? About a week later, I found a letter in my mailbox. It was from the lady whose wallet I returned. It was a beautiful handwritten note to me, plus a copy of a typed-up letter sent to the CEO of my company. She told him she knows the company will always be successful because they hire people like me.

And… there was a $50 gift card!

I had a good laugh about that, and I used the $50 to take my kids out to eat at a very classy establishment (Moe’s Southwest Grill). Before we ate our food, I took a minute and told them the story, and I told them the moral of the story, which is that I gotta do the right thing because it’s the right thing, not because it will get me stuff.

Then we devoured some burritos and I didn’t feel like such a scam artist.

Well, for one day, anyway.

ALCOHOLIC 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. And I’ll warn you, this one is definitely rated R…

An alcoholic is sitting on the couch one afternoon, half plastered, when his wife says, “Somebody needs to take the dog for a walk.”

The man quickly volunteers and walks two blocks to the nearest bar, where he ties the dog outside and goes inside for a drink (or five). After a few minutes, a police officer walks in and announces, “Hey, whose big dog is tied up outside?”

The drunk raises his hand.

“Did you know your dog is in heat?” the cop asks.

“What? No, I tied her up in the shade,” the alcoholic says.

“No, no, no, I mean, the dog wants bred,” the cop replies.

“Bread? I just fed her before we left the house!” the drunk exclaims.

The irritated cop leans in close to the alcoholic’s face. “I’ll say it very plainly: Your dog wants to have sex!”

The drunk thinks for a second and finally says, “Well, ok then, go for it. I always wanted a police dog.”

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. If you’d like to contribute anyway, many thanks.

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

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

This past weekend was Mother’s Day, and I found myself fondly remembering one of the first meetings I ever went to. I’d raised my hand and said I only had two or three days sober, and a guy came up to me afterward and said, “Make sure you stick around for awhile, for the cash and prizes.”

I was like, “Really? What kind of cash and prizes?”

He smiled and told me to keep coming, then walked away.

I was brand new, so I distinctly recall thinking there must be some sort of raffle or lottery for people who stay off the pills and booze. “This program is so cool,” I thought. “Not only do people help me quit drinking and drugging, they also apparently help me pull in a few extra bucks!”

A few weeks into hitting 12-step meetings, though, I started to realize what he meant. I celebrated an alcohol-free Thanksgiving and Christmas with my family for the first time since I was a kid, and on both holidays, I was Present—with a capital P.

I hadn’t gotten anybody a real gift for Christmas in years. I was one of those people running through the aisles of pharmacies on Christmas Eve looking for gift cards and candy to give people. If you got a gift from me—and that was a big if—it probably came carefully wrapped in a Walgreens plastic bag.

Now here I was, clean and sober, putting actual thought into things, and people didn’t know what to do!

That’s when it started to hit me what the cash and prizes were—that I’m sober, I am re-engaged in life, enjoying family and friends, giving and receiving love, exchanging gifts, and everything else that comes with being a real live human being.

Listen, I won’t b******t you, some of the prizes have fine print at the bottom, the same way winning lottery tickets inform you on the back that that $10 mil you just won probably ain’t gonna actually add up to $10 mil.

So yeah, there’s some tough parts to actually be present. Like last night, one of my kids had some serious complaints to air out. The house was chilly, dinner sucked, she needed a new phone, there’s nothing to do and this is so boring and why can’t we have more TVs and blah blah blah.

Then she said, “Dad, can you go get me ice cream at the store?”

Oh yeahhhhhhhhhhh, please allow me to rush right over to the grocery store and take care of that. And while I’m gone, here’s a customer complaint box for you to continue to fill up, then I’ll reward you with some Cookies N Cream as soon as I get home.

The “cash and prizes” in that scenario is what I didn’t say or do. What I told her instead is that I would be more likely to listen to her requests if they weren’t preceded by such a long string of gripes.

She said, “Sorry, didn’t mean to hammer you, I had a long day and I’m tired.” Brief pause. “Now can you go get me ice cream?”

She is an awesome kid and she was right that she had had a long day. She works really hard and deserves a momentary vent session. So I said yes, I’ll get you some ice cream. If there were a parenting report card every three months, I don’t think I’d get straight As… but I also don’t think I’d have any Fs. That’s cash and prizes, too.

So with only moderate levels of annoyance, I went and got the ice cream, and she was very appreciative of that.

I ain’t gonna lie, I was still a little annoyed on the drive over there so I smashed a bag of gummy bears on the way home in a way that would bring me great embarrassment if you saw me doing it. Luckily, there were no paparazzi trailing me, though, so I got away with it.

R.I.P., gummies!

ALCOHOLIC 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.

What’s the difference between a sponsor and a therapist?

Every time a sponsor uses the word “closure,” it’s immediately followed by “your mouth.”

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.

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

Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack, Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.

I was at a meeting recently where we read the April 21 passage from Daily Reflections, one of my favorite recovery books. It’s an awesome little 60-second jolt every day (check it out here). If I’m having a rough day, sometimes I’ll scroll through a couple of them, and it helps.

In that April 21 passage, titled “Cultivating Faith,” it mentions the word practice. Repeatedly. I latched onto that concept, because I need as much practice as possible. And yet… who likes practice?!?! Can’t we just play the games?

But the truth is, I don’t roll out of bed wanting to do the things I need to do. I’m still an alcoholic who catches himself staring at beer commercials jussssssssssst a bit too long. I still am inherently selfish and self-centered, with a tendency to BS people (including myself).

So yeah, my factory settings aren’t great. And that means I need to practice.

I have found the best indicator of whether I will do the next right thing at 1 p.m. is if I did the right thing at 10 a.m., 11 a.m. and noon. That’s practice.

And when it comes to those really difficult, unexpected things that can pop up out of the ground and throw me off… I REALLY need to be on a winning streak of spirituality. It’s a little bonkers of me to think that I can have a few days, or a week, where I am ranting and raving and being judgey and gossipy and sugarcoating and people-pleasing and short-tempered… and then just be ready to wrestle with something truly threatening to my sobriety. It doesn’t work that way for me.

I think about Tom Brady—that dude still shows up at practice every single day. He’s won the past, what, 31 Super Bowls? He’s got MVP trophies. Super Bowl rings. He knows how to play football, knows the playbook, knows his teammates, knows the rules. And yet he still shows up at practice, presumably because the best way to set yourself up for a great Sunday game is if you have a great Friday practice.

I need to have that kind of momentum in sobriety. And as daunting as it may sound, I have to make sure I do everything I can to never lose that momentum. I’ve tried taking breathers from recovery work and it doesn’t work for me. I remember hearing somebody say at a meeting that recovery is like walking up a down escalator and oh boy, I get that.

One specific area where I need to practice and practice and practice: humility. It’s so easy to think “I’ve got this figured out” or “I’ll figure it out,” and that goes beyond sobriety, too. It’s just a dangerous phrase for me because it indicates that I am relying upon myself more than something spiritual and outside of me. I at least need to invite my recovery program into situations like that.

I had a recent reminder of that as I watched my youngest daughter kick butt at soccer. She loves playing and is getting quite good. It’s a real blast to watch her out there scoring goals and chasing down kids on defense. Perhaps a little TOO much of a blast, I found out.

When the pandemic began, we started playing soccer in the backyard. The whole family was involved, but I also played a lot of one-on-one with her. At the beginning, I was too big and strong, so I could be emailing people and still keep the ball away from her. But she kept working and working and working, to the point where I basically didn’t mow the grass back there all summer—that’s how much turf we chewed up with our feet practicing soccer.

And she got really good. It started showing up this year on the field—she’s scoring 5-10 goals per game right now.

The good part of that is, it’s a beautiful gift of sobriety to see your kid do well at something they care about and know you were a guest star in that movie.

The bad part of that is when you, uh, start planning for the World Cup and the inevitable Dad of the Year ceremony in your honor.

I had a moment at a recent game of hers where she was doing her thing, it was awesome to watch and I was feeling a little braggy deep down… when my foot caught and I just about ate it in front of 50 people. I caught myself before I completely went face down in the grass but I had to get a little jog going to steady myself.

I took a quick look around and was thinking, “Nobody saw that, right?”

Rest assured, EVERYBODY saw it—50 people in masks and lawn chairs, looking at the Dad of the Year biff and do an impromptu stumble-jog to try to cover it up.

I’m at least able to laugh and recognize those moments for what they are, which is a humility reminder. Do I wish I didn’t need to visit Humiliationville to get to Humility Town? Yes, I do. But I’ll take whatever guidance the universe can give me, and that feels like I may need to keep practicing!

ALCOHOLIC 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 her sponsee are stranded on a deserted island. They come upon a wishing well, and the sponsor drops a rock down into it and says, “I wish I were back with my homegroup.”

Poof! She disappears.

The newcomer sponsee pauses for a moment and thinks, “What should I wish for? Money? A mansion? Oh, what do I do? I wish my sponsor were here.”

Poof… 

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.

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