Fourthstep

Hello, my name is Anonymous, and I am an alcoholic, an addict, and an asshole. I am a liar, cheater, and thief. I am a prideful, ambitious, glory-seeking workaholic. I have made agreements and broken them. I have not lived by natural laws, God’s laws, or even the laws of my horizontal, consensual, and non-hierarchical agreements with lovers, family, coworkers, and friends.

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 church of Dionysus, invoked the holy trinity of sex and drugs and rock and roll and gave myself to a life of pleasure and hedonism.

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 “13^th 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 90^th Day

From Jim Morrison Drunk to Mohandas Gandhi Sober

Seventeen gatherings into my

Tennessee journey of

discovery & loss,

we've said goodbye to so many &

hello to so many more.

The ancestors sing

the brain stretching

spirit retching

queen kvetching

holiday season of

debauchery divine

lechery sublime

sodomy's glory

charting another story.

My game to get sober

from alcohol

gets challenged to the core.

Surrounded by drunken magic,

they're drinking tequila, bourbon, or cabernet

straight from the bottle.

Shameless Jim Morrison excess

exists with the axiom of Baudelaire

on the axis of Rimbaud

& taxes the soul.

I need a new drug,

a miracle drug,

an herbal remedy,

a permanent rehab

that begins in the soul.

Stone cold stupid

from blackout drunks &

parties I missed because

I was passed out plastered.

Another sacred new year &

another sacred dance--

we released some shit

into a shitty brown hole.

The compost of compost

brings the spring bloom.

I enter a different room.

(With posts taken from my journals, I will include the day into sobriety & the date written.)

(Day two, 5/3/09)

My blog of recovery

As often as I find the time, I will be posting thoughts, feelings, reflections, discussions, research, analysis, & testimony about my path to & through recovery from alcoholism.

Posts will include essay-like meditations, poems, journal excerpts, playlists, & more.

With the first piece already posted, I use the term "drunk without alcohol" in the positive sense of what one friend describes as a "boldly intoxicating" in terms of risk & vision, not in the negative sense of the "dry drunk," although I am well aware of this latter construct & its dangerous challenges.

Drunk Without Alcohol?

Very recently, I decided to quit drinking alcohol, and I want to talk about it. Just as I have written or journaled extensively about getting arrested and going to jail for peace, or becoming a father, or living on the road, or starting a commune, or attending festivals, I want to chronicle the changes in my life marked by a sudden shift in my attitude toward addiction. Just as I have sought to understand the underlying meanings of war, economic injustice, genderism, racism, and homophobia to ultimately undermine and undo these forces, I've begun a ravenous study of my alcoholism, hoping to own and overcome my disease at the personal and spiritual level as well as to grasp its greater context on social, economic, and political terms.

Having flirted with moderation and failed miserably, I chose cold turkey, stone cold sober, radical recovery replete with regular meetings, rude awakenings, and spiritual reckonings. Before I could get here, the last bender began in beauty. I was at a gorgeous party, a gregarious festival, a green ritual, a grand ceremony. At first, the wine and whiskey made me sing and shout, but when day turned night and my soul soured, the final binge made me cringe and doubt.

Just as I can imagine with pain and power the day I quit, I remember the day (more than a decade earlier) that I decided to start drinking more vigorously with the subsequent lush-minded logic that fueled more sloppy choices: to consume alcohol socially or in solitude but always in vast quantity; to imbibe daily as others might pray or exercise; to precede multiple beers with a shot or more of whiskey and to follow the whiskey with glass upon glass of wine; to risk drinking and driving; to keep a flask in my satchel; to siphon wine into water bottles; to intentionally lose count, so I didn't have to lie, if asked, about how many shots, cans, bottles, or glasses I had chugged.

Oh how I remember―but I also choose to forget because forgetting is a friend of the alcoholic brain. Yes, some things were already blotted out while others were simply too embarrassing or shameful or stupid to even try to remember. Two decades of drinking culminated with several years of drunkenness, a lush litany of moonshine memories, blazing blackouts, intoxicated epiphanies, plastered strolls, salacious orgies, dangerous escapades, stupid stumbling, missed concerts, interminable excuses, determined denials, of passing out and passing the buck inside my sinister and soggy brain.

I didn't quit sooner because I didn't want to get sober. I liked to get drunk. The stereotype that sober people were boring, uptight, and self-righteous provided words, however wrong-headed, of warning. Teetotaling would be tottering on the edge of emotional terrorism, I told myself. What am I going to do? Go to AA? I was convinced that AA comprised a creepy religious cult where lonely road dogs and lonelier ex-wives huddled in church basements, smoked cigarettes, and waxed sentimental about their wilder days. How in the world could I end up in a boring old life like that, where every sentence or story would be preceded by the self-abominating phrase “I am an alcoholic”?

But here you find me: I am in recovery, and I do go to meetings. My story is my story, and while I may endorse AA, AA does not need my endorsement and by principle would never endorse me or many of the statements or arguments I might make in this blog. AA remains autonomous and focused in its work, seeks to protect the anonymity of its participants, and promotes no cause outside its core mission to aid and support the sober alcoholic.

By the grace of God and the power of a program, I may never drink again. But to be clean and clear of alcohol does not mean I have ceased to seek enlightened and sometimes heightened states of consciousness; now, I just hope to approach these possibilities more cautiously, more carefully, and by less toxic methods. I take the title of this blog―Ecstatic Sobriety―from an essay/pamphlet written and produced around 2003 by the CrimethInc. ex-Workers' Collective called Anarchy & Alcohol: Wasted Indeed; How the Fiends Came to Be Civilized; Addiction Culture: Strategies for Sobriety; Civilization and Booze. This elegant and ambitious treatise―aimed at the anti-authoritarian activist and punk rock communities―offers a lot that other audiences could appreciate and learn from, from sober rockers and ravers to reformers and radicals of every stripe. As I embark on a hopefully joyful jaunt of being without booze, the calls for an engaged sobriety speak to my activist soul.

The anonymous authors of the pamphlet describe a “false dichotomy between puritanical self-denial and life-loving, free-wheeling drinkers.” Ignorantly (and I thought innocently), many drunks describe their drinking as an expression of freedom and see anyone who might interfere with such intoxicated reveries as repressive tyrants. Such rationalization turns out to be a trick. The CrimethInc. writers explain it this way: “These partisans of Rebellious Drunkenness and advocates of Responsible Abstinence are loyal adversaries. The former need the latter to make their dismal rituals look like fun; the latter need the former to make their rigid austerity seem like common sense.” Rather than these, “ecstatic sobriety” is offered as a thoroughly inspired third way to battle both, “the dreariness of one and the bleariness of the other―false pleasure and false discretion alike.”

Similar sentiments can be found in The Cup of Fury by Upton Sinclair, a prolific writer most famous for The Jungle―his courageous, century-old indictment of the meat-packing industry. In Cup of Fury, Sinclair chronicles the unfortunate demise by drink of his friends and colleagues, some of the greatest writers of 20^th century. A writer myself and a fierce admirer of party-monger journalists like Hunter S. Thompson and Lester Bangs, I believed the notion (explained in The Thirsty Muse) that “a writer requires the liberating infusion of whiskey in order to reveal the nature of the world around him.” While I don't expect this proposition to linger long during my drier days, it sat central in the world of my wasted weeks. Sober all his life, Sinclair singes any such liquored-up lie. And who can deny the “other kinds of intoxication” he suggests, such as “looking at nature, reading great poetry, listening to music”? Like Sinclair, I now want to be “drunk without alcohol” and in love with the universe he describes as “one vast mystery story, fascinating beyond any power of words to tell.”