A lush like me, I’m always looking for loopholes.
I’ve been sober for 22 months & can’t imagine making it one-day-at-a-time without dark chocolate & darker coffee & admit to occasional pangs of “I’m-really-getting-way-with-something” guilt about it.
Only recently, a friend was really digging this chocolate bar during a meeting, & I asked him about it later. It’s in the literature, he informed me.
This prompted me to re-read one of the more brilliant sections of the “big book” Alcoholics Anonymous (okay, who I am kidding, the first 164 pages are all brilliant) that reminds us of some sage medical advice (beginning on the bottom page 133): “[A]ll alcoholics should constantly have chocolate available . . .”
The last few pages of “The Family Afterward” are a manifesto against misery, a tempting template for being “happy, joyous, & free.” Here, we find everything from cigarettes to sex (for many, sobriety promises “a finer intimacy than ever”). Now, I’m not going to take up nicotine again, but these few pages purge my greatest fears about recovery: that leaner living in the light would make me a mean-spirited monastic, a sinless ascetic, a pious grouch. It just isn’t so.
Before I test new varieties of prayer & abstinence for my Lenten journey that begins tomorrow, I decided to pen this edible Mardi Gras meditation for my clean & sober friends: do a shot of coffee, chow down on some chunks of chocolate cupcake, cheerfully celebrate the luscious indulgences advised in our primary literature! Live and Let Live!
