I have lived a self-centered, self-obsessed, and selfish life where I always tried to get what I wanted when I wanted it, without fail or compromise and fuck the consequences. Instant gratification had been my religion. I went to the
Even my sincere acts of love and service to others touched a root of attention-seeking insecurity. I wanted to be loved, worshipped, and admired by my peers at the cost of humility, health, and basic notions of balancing rest with activity.
At the same time, I am a believer in justice, the inherent joy and worth of all living things. I am practitioner of love and peace and poetry and community and spiritual inclusion. I speak for causes that support the earth, the end of war, and social equity around issues of economic parity, gender inclusion and fairness, marriage rights for non-traditional relationships, a socialism of desire not duty—the gift economy or what radical Christians call “Sabbath economics.”
Unfortunately, addiction to self and selfish things along with addiction to work and sex and porn and shopping and cigarettes and alcohol and a strong appreciation for marijuana, mushrooms, and acid—all of these were interfering with my ability to focus on love and justice, activism and service.
I performed my duties and did my chores, but I often did them drunk or did them as a precursor to getting drunk. Getting drunk kept me from prayer. Getting drunk kept me from running, swimming, and working out at the gym. Getting drunk helped me become overweight and unhappy with myself. Getting drunk inspired me to lie to people I claimed to love. Getting drunk got me in trouble, and I am grateful that it did not get worse than it did.
I resent the fourthstep. I resent its implied or rigid morality of good behaviors and bad drunks. I resent having to do a fourthstep, having to admit that my decisions brought me here, from the 20+ years of alcohol use and abuse to the last three months and first three steps.
I resent the firststep because I thought I was a powerful player, a wise young sage, a badass motherfucker. The first step proved me a fool.
I resent the secondstep for reminding me of mystery, of majesty, and of magic. Higher powers, hocus pocus, gods of your misunderstanding. I resent the firststep and secondstep for turning the logic of this world on its head once again and making the last first and the first last.
I resent the thirdstep for requiring not only my abject submission to God and my absolute abstinence from alcohol and other mind-altering drugs but for asking me to act on and from these admissions and submissions to move in a direction of radical change within myself. What a deluded dude I’d become, trying to change the world but fundamentally unwilling to change my own suicide and self-destruction!
I resent monogamy, and I resent polyamory. I resent work, and I resent leisure. I resent conservatives, and I resent radicals. I resent being born into such a cruel fucking world run by autocrats and hypocrites, power-hungry cretins and creepy bosses, teachers, and preachers. I resent God and Satan and all their stupid angels. I resent self-righteous atheists and humble saints.
But I don’t resent Gandhi or Ginsberg, Rumi or Martin Luther King, John Lennon or Julian Beck. I don’t resent them mainly because they transcended resentment, and they are dead, sometimes killed by all the things I resent. But if they were alive, I would probably have to resent them too.
I resent resentment, and I resent that asshole Bill Wilson for creating these stupid steps and thinking I would be a better person for writing down all these stupid fucking resentments. I especially resent Bill W. for not living up to his own program, for being a famous cult leader despite AA’s brilliant refusal of leaders. I resent Bill W. for getting to trip on acid with Aldous Huxley and pleasuring the “13th step” with lots of women besides his wife. If I am honest, part of me wants to keep psychedelics and random sex in spite of my post-drinking days. If Bill W. could do it, why can’t I?
I resent all the people who loved my poetry but had to remind me that it lost its potency when I was “drunk off my ass.” I mostly resent myself for not having any control whatsoever. I wanted to master booze and instead became its bitch. I resent that my only two choices were hopeless and stupid addict and alcoholic or are sober, recovering teetotaling fanatic. If I am honest, I love the latter and miss the former with equal intensity.
Now, I resent all my friends that still drink. It’s surreal to walk into a room of drunks and be there but not be there. It’s spiritually chilling and life-changing to walk into a room of sober, recovering, and recovered drunks and feel right at home.
Late in the drunken years, my conscience tortured me. When Jim James wailed “Listen! Most Of Us Believe That This Is Wrong” last summer at the Riverfront, and I was tripping my face off, I was sure he was singing to me. I was wrong. I was living in a hell of my own making. I was already dead and the devil was gladly feasting on my soul.
To me, sin is the conscious decision to harm yourself or harm others with no regard for personal health or emotional respect. Lying, cheating, stealing. Non-consensual fucking. Blame, shame, and anger. Violence to self or loved one. Verbal or physical violence. Any act that promotes “power over” at the expense of “power with” and “power within.”
I do not resent death for letting me cheat its grip so many times. And when I get on my knees and empty my eyes and my heart, I can no longer resent God. Without grace and pace, there’s no way I’d still be here to write this step.
I want to learn the four agreements and twelve steps and practice them in all my affairs. I want to ask God to remove my character defects. I want to confess this fourthstep to any who might ask and seek out my friends and my God to petition for forgiveness. I want to go to the river and get baptized. I want to wash my sins—and sin itself—away and start with the clean slate of redemption.
30 July 2009
My 90th Day
