Category Archives: Tent Revival

 

This is kind of a weird month. On one hand, life and work are going well and the holidays haven’t brought with them any unnecessary stress. Our trip back to see my in-laws in Richmond was great, the travel went smoothly, and things are peaceful around the homestead. A very distinct counterpoint to the holiday peace is a sudden influx of death-related events. Thankully, unlike the insane losses in 2009, none of these are immediate family members. I already shared about one…my friend from my wild teen years who went nuts and killed 2 people during my senior year in high school…he died in prison earlier this year and I wrote a post about it a couple of months ago. I managed to find out how he died via info I got from a family friend more recently. Basically, as I may or may not have mentioned in the previous post, as a lifer he managed to climb to the top of the ladder in the state pen’s faction of the Aryan Brotherhood, and one of the benefits was having an unwilling concubine bunked with him. Apparently he was sexually abusing/raping this guy for a period of time before the fellow got transferred to another cell. After his transfer he bided his time, got a job in the cafeteria, and eventually got the opportunity to poison my old cohort. Real HBO Oz series shit there…..poisoned him to death. No BS, that’s the real story. Honestly, I didn’t have any kind of emotional reaction when I heard it, I mean, the only reason I ever checked the Kansas prisoner database was to make sure he never left prison. And in the end, he never did. A violent end to a wasted, violent life. Roll credits.

Then last week I was checking out a cigar bulletin board I used to obsessively frequent for years. I was really, really into cigars for a long time, and to some degree I still am. Real cigar smokers are generally pretty cool and generous people, so I made a lot of online friends and once or twice every year I’d drive or fly somewhere to get together with a bunch of them for some high-end partying. There was one notoriously hilarious guy named Bobby from New Jersey who was pretty much the life of the party every time…..the guy who would make you regret going back to your hotel room at 5am because of the legendary antics that would surely take place right after you left. Jersey guy, gold chains, shiny shirts….connoisseur of fine booze, cigars, “skoon-gee-lee” salad, and an Italian delicacy known as Gordina that I have yet to find anywhere besides from his mother’s kitchen. So a few years have passed since the biggest, most insane parties out on the east coast….where we basically took over a couple of floors of a hotel and the hosts would literally rent out the sports bar for us for the whole weekend….and the main forum where we all used to hang online has turned to shit due to the usual moderator problems. I’ll pass by from time to time to see who still posts in the newly sanitized version of what was once a great online community, and it’s generally depressing, boring, and annoying because the new “community leaders” are the ones who cried to the mods until all of the bad men like my buddy Bobby and many others began to disappear. I mean, when you know what a Photoshop genius a guy like Bobby is, common sense dictates you don’t put stupid pictures of yourself on the site….and if you do, don’t go crying to the mods when the inevitable cock-growing-out-of-your-chin-at-your-daughter’s-graduation pic shows up. So anyway, no mystery where this is headed….I logged on last week to find out Bobby had just died from a long battle with pancreatic cancer. Bam. And that was that. Not my closest confidant, not a family member, but definitely someone everyone I know has heard stories about, as well as one of the few people I’ve ever met who could truly, genuinely, make me laugh out loud at will. His legend was larger than life. And then he was just gone.

Then, following shortly on the heels of the news Bobby had died, came the third story in a series that has to represent some kind of Dickens Christmas Carol-level psychic lesson I’m supposed to be learning. I don’t want to be an egomaniac and think that it all has to have some grandiose meaning for ME, but at the same time I want to glean whatever wisdom I can from each situation and learn from it because, HOPEFULLY, these scenarios won’t continue to play out every damn year. Anyway, I was sitting in the Saturday 8am AA meeting at my hall, which is still one of my favorite weekly events, and sure as hell…..I got some news that was more distressing in many ways than the other two events. When you are in the program, as old-timers will always confirm, you meet people who go back out drinking and wind up dead pretty quickly. Since I started AA, I know of one girl I never met who had just died when I joined. Then last year there was a girl who I’d sat in some meetings with, my wife actually attended her first step during an open meeting, and she sat at our table during last year’s anniversary party. I didn’t know her well at all, she seemed like a sweet kid who really struggled with her sobriety, and while it’s only speculation that alcohol was involved, she wrapped a car around a bridge pylon coming home from a bar in the middle of the night earlier this year. But until this week I never had anyone “I knew” go back out and die. So we were going around the table sharing, and someone mentioned something about “losing Rick” this week….and the way the people who knew about it talked, this was obviously one of the Rick’s with whom I was familiar. His picture was on the bulletin board, and I hadn’t noticed it when I came so I didn’t want to be rude in the middle of the meeting and go up to confirm who it was. In my mind I was really hoping it wasn’t the Rick I was thinking of……a really nice, deep thinking fifty-something guy I’d sat in a million noon meetings with while I was unemployed. He’d obviously been in and out of the program several times from the way he talked, but he seemed really, really solid in his program. Unfortunately, when I went to look at the picture it was the same Rick. In addition, once I found out what had happened to him it was even more depressing because I remembered talking to my wife and to people at work a few days prior about “another idiot on the news who decided to try and cross the highway at I-29 and Barry Road and got killed”. Rick was the guy. Went back out, and never came back.

So where is the meaning in all of this? How does it relate to ME, here in the center of the universe? Who the hell knows. People die. Some in ways they have no control over, and some after they completely lose control. All I really know to do in all of this is try to learn what I can when I can and just live in a manner where I am someone whom I can stand to be around.

There is something very centering and reassuring about having a program that weaves itself in and around all of the good and all of the bad aspects of your life. Reading a lot of comments from a Sanjay Gupta CNN article on “Alcoholics Anonymous and Spirituality”, I’m reminded that many people who have no real connection to AA or actual knowledge of the program think of this reassurance as a “crutch” or “replacing one addiction for another”…..”being too weak minded to just quit, so you join a cult instead”….it’s pretty amazing what you find out about modern society when you read comments from a major blog. All I know is this- I am living a life now that requires me to take a constant personal inventory, and with the help of this program I face the negative aspects in a manner that allows me to grow while changing what I can, and experience the same kind of growth by living with what I can’t. A big part of this inventory requires you to take ownership of the consequences surrounding the people, places and things you negatively impacted with your addiction. I’ve been sober almost 18 months, and I am just now at Step 9….some people go faster, some go slower…I’m thankful to have a sponsor that has pretty much let me go at a pace that allows for a lot of growth without becoming stagnant. The long road to step 5 allowed me to have a “real” life-changing experience when I completed it, so I have approached steps 8 and 9 in the same manner. As I was going through my life thinking of people who had been affected by my addiction, the list never got too long once I understood this wasn’t about compiling every damn instance of stepping on a guy’s foot in a bar…..this is a list of people and situations that “make you pause”. If it bothers you at all, or you have to question whether it should be on the list….it probably belongs on the list. As someone who was more than willing to destroy himself in solitude, I really didn’t carve a swath of destruction that resulted in broken lives, arrests, or any of the really big cliché’s you think of when you think of an out of control drinker. What I did was brutalize a few close friendships with the narrow minded, living-in-a-glass-house selfishness that comes with addiction. I made people who love me the most worry about me, and my level of self-absorption and selfishness kept them from doing anything but managing the situation through denial. While I was a funny drunk and jovial character to people outside my closest circle, I used the fact that “people love me” as an excuse to steamroll over everyone nearest to me. I made people crazy with worry, I took my frustration and self-hatred out on some by burning bridges, and I was generally completely unavailable. The family events and gatherings of friends that were not centered around alcohol were all negotiable in my mind….there was always an excuse to miss a birthday, a holiday, or anything that required me to think that it might really mean a lot to someone just to have me be there. Those are the things that kill you, and you can’t get them back. But what you can do is own it and be willing to make it right. Step 9.

Okay, this is called “the amends dinner”, so I guess I should talk about that. It was bugging me that I hadn’t had a “real” dinner at my house in a while. And by “real” I mean the kind where I drive myself insane for two weeks ahead of time.  Having some old friends over sounded like fun this time of year, so I went into the wayback machine and picked people who have known me for a long time and have been there during some of the major stages of my life, from ministry to the porn kingdom, to today. No sense in rehashing the amends portion, it would kind of defeat the purpose of doing it to some degree and would mean nothing to anyone besides the parties involved. In this case, both relationships were witness to lots, and lots and TONS of instances where the booze and assorted favors brought out the most hilarious and the most grievous parts of my personality. So hey, now that we’re all grown up and married, on our own solid paths, let’s break bread and share some laughs…..

When I was in Richmond with my wife for Thanksgiving, a friend of ours mentioned seeing a recipe for “bacon jam” on the internet. So of course, the first thing I did when I got back to KC was look it up.  It was pretty much the first thing I put on the menu, and since I know people will want it, here’s the recipe- http://www.notquitenigella.com/2009/10/08/bacon-jam-your-wildest-dreams-come-true/ .  It is insane, and delicious, and as necessary for life as we know it as it sounds. Bacon Jam…you cook a pound of bacon, onions, garlic, spices, coffee, maple syrup, brown sugar, and other goodness down to less than a cup of “jam”.  It isn’t just the deliciousness that gets you, it’s the fact that you wonder HOW IN THE HELL you hadn’t heard of it before, and at that point the real danger begins……the sheer number of practical applications starts to boggle the mind and turn everything upside down. Bacon Jam. It is the shit.  It is why we love food.  Sooo….I had to think of the perfect thing to pair it with, because it’s way too rich and potent to just sit there eating it by the spoonful.  Last year I saw a recipe for herb and cheddar poppers in Bon Appetit that I’ve been wanting to try.  I hate to bake, and they are kind of involved, so it took a major dinner to prompt me to make them.  They really aren’t hard to make….it’s buttermilk biscuit dough with plenty of frozen butter grated into it, then you flatten it out into a square, cover 2/3 of the square with a mixture of cheddar and freshly minced herbs, tri-fold it onto itself, flatten it back out into a big square, and repeat the process a total of 4 times. Once it’s flattened back out, you cut the biscuits into bite sized squares and bake them. Whammo- the perfect foil for the bacon jam. In short, people lost their damn minds. If I haven’t mentioned it yet…..bacon jam. If you don’t make it, I think Homeland Security should investigate you.

Quick shot of the biscuits and jam….



Keeping in line with the pork fat goodness, for the appetizer I decided to try Thomas Keller’s Pork Belly Confit recipe.  It’s a big time involvement, but pretty easy, and insanely cheap for such an impressive dish.  You just take a big hunk of raw skin-on pork belly, brine it for about ten hours in an herb and honey-heavy mixture, bake it for about six hours at 200 degrees submerged in lard. Yeah, don’t back up and read that again…..I said submerged in lard….that’s how you do it or it wouldn’t be “confit”.  Once it’s falling apart tender, you take it out, let it come to around room temperature, cover it with plastic and weight it, then put it in the fridge until it’s a big solid block. When you’re ready to cook it, you cut it out of the lard, slice off the skin, cut it into squares (or thick bacon-ish slices like I did below) and then saute over low heat until it’s good and crisp. Pair it with some texture, some sour, some sweet, bitter, etc…..stuff to lift the fatty richness, because it is A) insanely fatty, and B) paralyzingly rich.  I thought I may have gone too far out of the box choosing this recipe, but once again, people lost their damn minds. 

Paired with various flavors to make you forget you are basically eating crispy seared pork fat…



For the main course, I had this awesome Wagyu beef brisket in my freezer just waiting for an appropriate occasion, so I did it “two ways”.  I took the point of the brisket and slow smoked it for about 13 hours for burnt ends, and then I took the flat and braised it in a mixture of tomato, aromatics and root beer for about 7 hours and used the braising liquid as a base for the sauce. It was accompanied with simple roasted asparagus with good balsamic, and panko breaded and sauteed chive risotto cakes.  This was a good dish, but I was way happier with the burnt ends than the root beer braised flat……but it’s probably because it is just stupid to try and put ANYTHING up against good burnt ends…..

I totally forgot to take a picture, but my wife did a great dessert called Hummingbird Cake, that has a lot of elements you find in a good spice cake and carrot cake. Bananas and pineapple in the batter, and it has a cream cheese frosting. Very good, and in keeping with the over the top food coma theme….

So here we are back to the holidays. Lots of change in 2010, and most of it very positive. Strong marriage, employment, great friendships, new hobbies, and an ever-growing life perspective thanks to the tenets of AA.  I’ve tried to stop over-thinking all of the good and the bad….normally I’d try and put myself at the center of all of it.  But this is just life. It keeps going whether you are onboard with it or not, so the wise choice is to grab onto the good stuff while you can and know it will eventually return when you are facing the bad.  I don’t want this to sound morbid, but most of us aren’t going to be remembered for that much once we’re gone, outside of the lives we’ve impacted and the people we’ve known.  And outside of stumbling onto unexpected money, fame, fortune and cures for cancer, if we don’t leverage “the right now”, we’ll miss out on life while we are waiting for the unattainable cool shit that we THINK will justify our existence.  As I work through step 9, taking credit for all of the bullshit is a big part of taking action. And there isn’t really any way to correctly think of amends in terms of getting it over with and going back to normal….for me, I want people to know this is just a small part of a bigger journey, and that as I take ownership I’m willing to do what it takes to make it right. Saying I’m sorry is great, but without a big shift in thought patterns and priorities, there really is no point. That’s what makes the program tough at times, and what makes it necessary to keep going to meetings and “working it’.  It sounds simplistic and to many very cult-like, but as those who know me can attest to, I’m still basically the person I’ve always been…just more responsible and much calmer.  I will always howl with laughter at some pretty sick shit….like the poster I saw online last night with Anne Frank’s smiling face in the middle and the caption “I love Doritos, but they are SO LOUD!”.  But my juvenile sense of humor aside, when I was in church I never found the kind of day to day peace and calm I’ve found in the program.  Part of that my fault I’m sure, but mostly I believe that fundamentalism trades reflection and improvement of self with hyper-emotionalism and a philosophy of fear-based works and competition. Sure, I meet plenty of dry drunks in AA, but it doesn’t come close to the number of “Christians” I’ve known who profess great faith and works but do not have the ability to grow past their own fear, anger, resentment, unforgiveness and greed. Getting “washed in the blood of Jesus” can be one huge cop-out if the core of someone’s behavior doesn’t continue to change and grow in a tangible, conscious manner.  When something I’ve done “gives me pause” (which is at the core of steps 8 and 9), I don’t want to be someone who looks to the sky and begs for forgiveness and help to change, I want to be someone who takes the most direct and practical action to fix the issue and use THAT process as the connection to my spirituality. 

And with that I wish you all Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, solstice, all the Jew-stuff, you know the drill. Here’s to a happy and fruitful 2011 for all of us. 

Jerry

Ok, my answer to a comment from my last post was running so long that I said the heck with it…..I’m too lazy to post lately so this will have to suffice.   I know you’ll all be shocked, it’s more church vs. AA rambling…

Chaz, thanks for the thoughtful post. Dammit man, you are so much nicer than me!  I could go on and on forever about this subject because it’s such an easy and obvious target.  My new word… “sanctionimosity” comes to mind, pomposity, a grating level of piety….and I do agree that it can pop up in AA just as easily as church.  I have a certain level of guilt when it comes to avoiding business and group conscious meetings at my hall, but man…I spent so much of my life dealing with the negative side of the politics in church and it’s all the same thing. Plus, my education in organizational psychology would be more of a millstone around my neck, a total distraction…personalities and group dynamics would be too much of an issue. I know my limitations.

Long story short… for a culture that could benefit from so many of the traditions and organizational aspects of AA, the evangelical world is completely closed to change. Being a pastor is an easy career move disguised as a calling (much of the time, not always), and the level of control and guilt used to keep order is mind boggling. As you mention, true personal growth and change is glossed over in lieu of how to act, how to fit in, go through the motions….it’s more of a process of socialization than spiritual growth. All of my ego and sarcasm aside, it’s all about the lack of humility and honesty. Chances are, a dickhead who is washed clean of his sins is still a total dickhead, and the “discipleship” that takes place after his salvation goes back to the socialization.  And the absolute same can be said for AA….newcomer comes in, quits drinking, gets ecstatic about it…but he doesn’t put in the work, and he disappears.  Keyword: WORK. If it doesn’t feel like a job and it doesn’t take daily reflection and initiative, you aren’t doing it right.  In church, unless you’re “feeling the spirit” you aren’t on track, so the emotion that comes along with “feeling the spirit” is manufactured when it isn’t present. 

False humility is a cornerstone of the mega-church world.  It’s an ego-fest.  There is talk of humility in reference to the greatness of God, but the spirit of the whole thing is arrogance…like the guy who is fasting for ten days and can’t shut up about how he’s fasting for ten days.  And I have all of those tendencies in me to an exponential degree, no question.  What I do to keep it in check is work the program…I have to recognize it, accept it, be willing to change it, and take action.  There is no ecstatic “WASHED IN THE BLOOD!!!!” moment, but there is a kind of serenity and peace I can’t really even communicate. Everybody wants it fast….they want to be washed of their sins and then run with it a million miles an hour….and evangelical Christianity is right there to make it happen.  Then once you’re saved, it’s a sign of failure, weakness and lack of faith when you’re not “on fire”….and the abuse of scripture  to back all of that up is unforgivable.

Anyway, like I said, I can ramble myself into an egomaniacal rampage……but for me, right now, today, where I’m at at this moment with the program is- amends. I’ve worked the steps, grown in faith, found countless moments of serenity, faced my defects of character, became willing to change them, and with God’s help and am now at a point where I have the courage to make real amends to those I have wronged.  The easy ones, the scary ones I hate to think about, total honesty with myself in order to even contemplate it. My burning bush moment on how to accomplish this came to me as I was driving home from golf today. In my experience with the pentecostal world, there was never an avenue for that…it was more about “look how much I believe in Jesus, you should too!” instead of spiritual growth based on honesty and the acceptance of your humanity. There isn’t anything “grand” about this thing, no chance for car salesmanship, it’s real work and so simple that it’s threatening. Growing up, AA was always described as “pure secular humanism”, and at its core it really is about knowledge of SELF.  But what people don’t realize is unless you are giving back you aren’t working the program.  Your power comes from surrendering instead of sharpening your skills at being on the offensive, and the whole world isn’t our goal…it’s all about one person at a time.

In church you get a lot of credit for the things you do. Accolades are a big part of the culture, and so is getting into various “inner circles” depending on the size of the church.  AA takes more of a monastic approach, and if you get bent out of shape because you don’t get credit for something, someone is going to put you in check.  The Anonymity part of AA is something I truly love. To some degree I can see how it’s viewed as a “clique”…but it’s a clique you get into because you have completely fucked up your life.  I talk to people in every meeting who are probably “kind of a big deal” out in their little part of the world, but that shit is left at the door. And what is said in meetings stays in the meetings.  A prolific author or world renowned brain surgeon might show up early to vacuum or clean a toilet, and the sponsor who has most influenced them and helped them could be a Wal Mart greeter.  I love that. It’s so simple and strips away the caste-system dynamic found in most organizations. Real diversity and equality, things are broken down to their simplest state. Long story short, church folks can’t come to AA unless they are alcoholics, but there are so many positive things about the program that could be implemented in church.  I said all of this other stuff just to say that. As it stands now, this trend of evangelical Christianity peppered with the tenets of Manifest Destiny is simply not sustainable for a long period of time.  The logical conclusion of what the politically conscious evangelicals are after is exactly what pissed Jesus off enough to violently throw the money changers out of the temple. To paraphrase Jeff Foxworthy: If you’re a born again Christian who rejoiced when the Republicans took back the House, you might be someone Jesus would boot out of the temple.

So anyway, this is my lazy post…..a response to Chaz’s comment that I’m using as a way to not feel horrible that I don’t post as much as I used to.  Honestly, I’m just in a great place right now.  I’m working, playing golf, working the program, hanging out with my wife, and I do a LOT of introspective work that would be even more boring and Jerry-centric to read than what I’ve been spewing lately.  I’ll feel very good that I’ve actually posted something prior to leaving for Thanksgiving with my wife and her family in Richmond, Virginia.

First trip on a plane since I got sober……and I hate to fly, a fact that has been chronicled on here more than once I’m sure.  I’ll have an emergency Trazodone on me in case I get too freaked out, but I will not have my usual quart bag full of mini-bottles of bourbon to dump on top of the four or five Manhattans I already drank in the terminal, in addition to however many drinks I can get the flight attendant to sell me before cutting me off.  If nothing else, flying will be a shitload simpler without micromanaging THAT monster. I did get that book Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man to read on the plane….I just can’t get myself to read very often. Grad school cured me of any desire to ever read another book, but so far I’m liking this one.  Reminds me of a period of my life that you’d only ever hear me talk about in the safety of a meeting.

Off to make dinner (scallop and fresh asparagus risotto with sauteed brussel sprouts), and contemplate how to put my plan for amends into action.

Everyone have a Happy Thanksgiving. I’m still here. For better or worse I’m never going to stop showing up here and typing something out. It’s a permanent part of my life, but I let my life dictate when I pop in and what I write.  It’s never going to be as insane as it once was, but it’s also never going to be  gratuitous.  Quality over quantity and progress instead of perfection.

All of my past church experiences aside, I really don’t have anything against going to church. I’ll go to church, I’m not afraid of it, it doesn’t freak me out, but I generally don’t want to associate with the type of churchgoers who measure your spirituality by your church attendance in the same way people judge your patriotism by whether or not you belt out the national anthem at whatever redneck professional sporting event is plaguing the community that day. In short, after years of hemming and hawing and trying to think of a way to put it nicely, I just tell anyone who asks about my church attendance….”my only real requirement other than a very basic new testament message is that it’s not a church where people raise their hands”. In my extensive experience, you weed out a vast majority of the dipshits and spectacle seekers that way. People who truly believe that the founding fathers meant for us to have a Christian government, or who think the earth is only 6,000 years old, or that prosperity doctrine is legitimate theology, or that Jesus probably would have been a Republican….. all of those people go to churches where your raise your hands. For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about….a sure sign that you and your church are balls-out sold-out and radical for Jesus with particular attention paid to the 2nd chapter of Acts and all things Holy Ghost, is when people raise their hands when they sing, praise, worship, pray, etc. If you’re reading this and you’re someone who loves to raise your hands in church, I’m not singling you out, do your thing…I’m just saying that in my life of experience with evangelical/pentecostal culture, this show of emotion is generally pretty fleeting and shallow and is used more often than not as a tool to “set us apart” from believers who aren’t quite as dedicated to Christ. It’s just not as fun and exciting (or entertaining) to be Presbyterian or Methodist. Even though there is zero correlation between the highly emotional, er, I mean spiritual, outpouring that goes on in evangelical churches and any significant rise in attendance over the past ten or so years in comparison to all of those “dead” churches, it surely is the way Jesus meant for us to be worshipping. The praise teams, prayer teams, those cool plexiglass boxes around the drumsets, those cool plexiglass pulpits and wireless microphones, monster schvantz sized sound systems complete with multimedia presentations where the resident dude who knows Powerpoint flashes the song lyrics for you…..low volume, high volume, slow tempo, fast tempo, build up, slow down, build waayyy up, then slow down fast……yes, I can see that the teary eyes and raised hands have absolutely NOTHING to do with emotional manipulation and EVERYTHING to do with the fact that the Holy Trinity loves to rock the house. Then you do a miniature version of the same thing prior to the offering (bigger if there’s a 2nd offering going to an evangelist or visiting missionary) as well as the altar call…..repeat that every week and insist that even though your overall attendance isn’t really any higher than it was 20 years ago, this is REVIVAL!

Now, I’m NOT saying that if you’re “saved”, that the whole thing is bullshit and it was some emotional lie. I’m saying that I believe salvation and faith are real things, but that everything that goes along with the hand raising can bring with it a very easy escape from thoughtful and meaningful growth. I spent half my life filtering all of my experience through that pentecostal holy ghost filter, and it never gave me a chance to experience or practice real faith. Faith meant you didn’t have to think too much or question anything, because there was always some preacher who was generally ill equipped to make a living in the real world ready to give you the simplest answers to life’s biggest questions. And to question him was to “touch God’s anointed”…a major no-no. Once I got a different perspective that proved to me that there was life outside of that safe charismatic cocoon, at first it turned me into an animal. Many people think that “Bible college can ruin your relationship with Christ”, but that attitude does nothing but reinforce the laziness in thought and spirituality for the person who says it. If I didn’t experience a paradigm shift that completely destroyed my worldview and forced me to rebuild it over time, I don’t think I could have experienced real faith vs. the “take my word for it” type of faith that is a cornerstone of evangelical philosophy. It took a while for me to resolve the worldview I was born into and still hold on to the basic tenets of my faith…and while I realize that makes me lost, or a backslider, or lukewarm in the eyes of the charismatic emotion chasers, I’m happy to be in a place where I prefer the wisdom that comes with my quieter no-hand-raising growth versus the fast food culture revelations that raise the roofs of the mulitimedia and demographic savvy temples where it’s purely a numbers game. I had to go through a period of anger, and zero faith, in order to learn about faith. That’s pretty much at the core of being an “unsaved loved one”… in the eyes of the hand-raisers I’m damaged goods, and while my views are generally politely tolerated there is always this patronizing tinge of hope that “I’ll come back around” and get back on that Holy-Ghost-Upper-Room Train. But when I see what has become of the church today, with the inbreeding of politics and religion, and the tendency to create a definition of faith that has been shaped in response to pop culture issues, I’m happy to have taken the beatings to get where I am today instead of choosing such an easy path that is built on a completely contrived and non-scriptural theory that faith can be built from the perceived martyrdom and victimization that comes from “standing up for your beliefs” in today’s world. All of those dramatic trappings are attractive….they make for good sermons, they are topical and get customers in the door. And while I can’t write off an entire sub-culture for that one hugely misdirected tendency, it’s a false, false, false direction to take because it has absolutely nothing to do with real faith. It has more to do with socialization, how to react to the secular world…”club building”…than it does with getting someone on a path where they can honestly and internally grow in their faith.

As human beings, I truly believe it is in our nature to seek the easier “happy path” based on the worldview in which we grew up. You take that emotional tie to whatever that belief system is and you run with it….filtering the world and your experience within it through that system and that system only. I’m not attaching morals and right and wrong to it at this point…I’m just saying it is what it is. You want to stay within that worldview because anything pushing you to go outside of it causes fear and uncertainty, and part of staying safely where you are at involves linking yourself with those who have that same view. I know I’m making this too retard-level, but I like to keep things as simple as possible and go from there. When it comes to evangelical/charismatic/pentecostal, whatever you want to name it, culture…people get it. They get the fact that you are saying a belief in Jesus is mutually exclusive, therefore it is the one and only way to get to heaven. That’s your happy path. And with modern communication, it comes through loud and clear, and your every thought as you filter modern society through it is pretty well understood….mainly because you have constructed a re-branded version of everything that already exists in the name of this belief…from action films to exercise programs. But here’s the rub…with very few exceptions, nobody outside of this narrow, specific worldview gives a shit. And they shouldn’t because the point of reference you are providing totally sucks. And instead of heaping their disdain upon your shoulders like a martyr, and finding ways to subvert the system and make this a nation “under God”, or in some profoundly perverted way actually believe that your warnings of hell constitutes witnessing…take some time to learn about your relation to your own faith before you expect ANYONE to listen to you long enough to question THEIR happy path worldview. You are asking a hell of a lot from people, but you are too wrapped up in yourself to think about it….even your “selflessness” comes across like it’s just for show.

What I’m saying is- You can school me on the scriptural proof of why Obamacare is evil, go to every length to prove to me that the founding fathers meant for this to be a Christian nation, but you can’t tell me about the most basic kernel of your faith in an unscripted (meaning NOT “testimony style!”), honest way. I can poke your belly and have you regurgitate a million scriptures for a million different answers, but your intent rings false because you make it all sound like some kind of contest where the objective is to simply wear someone down….which makes it all about you and your ego. The plain truth is what makes you YOU is what you do when nobody is watching…and the more you rattle on the more you reveal about that person…and it makes your dishonesty way easier to see, and the belief you are trying to sell becomes more and more unattractive. Finding faith is finding that honest person, that true, bare bones, defective person that you are, accepting it and going from there. But the easy, hand-waving faith says don’t do that…and you go and hide in your dramatic and spectacular misunderstood version of grace with people who will never challenge you. When you hit the altar, shed some tears, and become that brand-new-washed-in-the-blood-hand-raising person, you miss out on a lot if you don’t build your faith based on its relation to your shortcomings and how you constantly have to craft yourself as a human being to live up to that high standard WITHOUT becoming so perfect that you’re unwilling to admit you are still deeply flawed. That is real growth, and it doesn’t happen quickly. It’s not loud, or a spectacle, and it goes completely against the tendency to take the easy, bright and shiny path strewn with every manner of Christ-branded entertainment or pseudo-intellectual pursuit. It doesn’t make for exciting traveling evangelist sermon material, but it does get to the root of why the current manifestation of the church is failing miserably. When you get to the guts of what your faith really means, it will change the way you live and the way you communicate with others. Modern Christianity has severely over-complicated things, when it all really is as simple as John 3:16 and the great commission. When the most stripped down, pre-school version of your faith becomes profound in its simplicity, then someone might give a shit about whatever it is you have to say about it. Or maybe they won’t. And that’s okay. Just stop judging your level of spiritual victory by all of the things you do to entertain, placate, impress or out-do the people who already think exactly like you do.

I guess a lot of this rambling thought comes from the fascination with the hatred of AA I grew up hearing from the pulpit, and the irony that AA helped me get to a point where I can resolve my faith. But church isn’t AA and AA isn’t church…and the whole “it’s secular humanism because they’ll let you make a door knob your higher power” comes from a place of incredible ignorance. Church desires control over a person, AA does not. BUT left to their own devices, if a person works the program correctly they will generally come back to a point where, if they started life with a Christian worldview, much of the time it will come back to them. But it doesn’t always happen, and AA isn’t going to force it to happen….AA is about dealing with the spiritual aspects of overcoming alcohol without being specific. And that’s the problem the church always had with it…despite the glaringly obvious fact that if “their” program was truly effective their numbers would grow exponentially…but they don’t. It’s loosely organized, doesn’t weigh-in to outside social or political issues, there are no appointed leaders…but a whole lot of people are getting better because of it. And people like me are able to intelligently and thoughtfully come to terms with that “higher power”. And of course, saying you are an alcoholic and will always be an alcoholic cuts right at the heart of what it means to be “saved and sanctified”…even though all of the baggage and issues that created the alcoholic still exists under the surface no matter how “sanctified” a person is. There is a whole lot of pride and too much needless work involved in “looking good in front of company”, which makes it easier not to talk about some things, ignore and deny others completely, and focus maintaining an attractive spectacle.

Anyway, just some of what I’ve been thinking about recently. I’m not saying it’s the gospel, or you’re an idiot for not buying into it, but I don’t go to church where people raise their hands. And that cuts out a lot of churches, so I thought it was at least worth explaining myself. I’ve been wanting to write about my take on the much bally-hoo’d November elections, but this came up first. You just see a lot of “people of faith” showing their true colors with all of the political angst of late…without realizing they are the money-changers who should be beaten over the head. Sooooo…it’s fall again, I’m three years out from surgery and need to lose more weight, the farmers markets are about to close and it may be too cold for golf soon….so we’ll see how this all goes.





Last month was my big one-year anniversary celebration at my home group. Prior to that I did my speech back at the hospital, but as I mentioned before, that was a totally different animal. Your one-year speech for your fellow AA’ers is more of a…drinkalogue. You get to tell your story and use the majority of the allotted one hour meeting time limit. I had three other people celebrating with me, all with several years of sobriety, and they all told me the same thing…”first year people take a long time,don’t worry about it”. Obviously, I’m no stranger to public speaking, and I have my methods down when it comes to limiting my time, building a crescendo, working the crowd, etc. I just didn’t realize how much crap I had to pack in there, and I think I took around thirty five minutes. But it was a good thirty five minutes…I know how to work it.

The overall theme of an anniversary speech is “what we were like then, what happened, and what we are like now”. For newbies, there is more of a focus on “what we were like and what happened”, because although you get to know people and you share a lot around the tables, only a handful of people know “your story”. Well, it was sometimes raucously hilarious, sometimes sad, and generally well received as I launched into my journey that began with my uncle getting me high when I was about three, to me standing in a puddle of my own shit in my kitchen at 40. On the surface you have the bizarre dichotomy of a one-time pentecostal minister turned porno dealer turned IT schmoe….but below that there is a ton of interwoven activity and intrigue that can only be shared anonymously in the hall. I know I’m “anonymous” here, but some things can be more damaging than others when committed to the printed word. But trust me, as some details were revealed I got a healthy amount of “street cred” from some of the folks in the program who have spent more time on the periphery of the law than others. My wife and I joke that, when it comes to many of the ladies down at the hall, I must be the embodiment (on the AA scale) of the love child of George Clooney and Brad Pitt….that is to say, I was spared the majority of the darker repercussions of addiction…I got out sooner than many. And all joking aside, I am grateful for that fact every single day of my life. But hey, here’s me, got a job, a house, a car, nice skin, nice teeth, an education, no criminal record…..I’m fuckin’ English Bob. So when I got into some of the real meat of “what we were like then”, it underscored the facts that A) I am incredibly lucky to be alive, and B) boy do I ever belong in this program.

As per usual, the first paragraph or two of my ramblings are but a lead-in to what I’m really going to talk about. This being no exception, I will say that the mystical timing and graphic subject matter of my one-year anniversary was not lost on me when I got some news about an old friend last week. And as per usual, I will mention that in my blog, unless I am OBVIOUSLY writing bullshit, I’m really telling the truth. And the truth here is…. when I look back on my life there are two very distinct, dangerous, and graphic events that have taken place that, at their worst would have killed me, and at their best would have altered the path of my life to a degree that, if I did live this long, I probably would not be able to vote, buy firearms, or get hired for any type of reputable job that required any level of real responsibility. Somehow in both instances, I ended up getting Door #3…a free pass with fair to moderate lifelong psychic trauma.

As far as the trip in the wayback machine….when I was a youngster in high school I had to make a conscious choice between either being the fat kid who did the nerdy crap he really wanted to do like theatre and D&D and suffer through five years of torture at the hands of the other kids….OR I could go the 80’s metal route, get into drinking, drugs, firearms and explosives and be the fat kid you didn’t fuck with. That’s the path I chose. And it was one awesome fucking path. And I will add here that if went to a “real” high school in Wyandotte County vs. the college prep magnet arts and science school I attended, the tough kid thing would have lasted for about a week before I got the shit beaten out of me enough times to go back to Chess Club or whatever nerd paradise awaited me. As I am in all things that interest me, I was an overachiever. And it was the mid-80’s….a different world than it is now. The shit that my Napoleonic partner in crime and I pulled would absolutely be considered “domestic terrorism” by today’s standards. Looking back some of it is just hilarious, but also chilling when I realize that it’s a miracle I have my eyesight and both hands. We researched, built and field-tested every item we could from every old military survival manual we could get our hands on at gun shows….we knew how to make napalm, we could construct working silencers that fit onto the barrels of the homemade guns we manufactured…but we didn’t have to mess with homemade guns that often because his family was from the hills of Virginia and they stockpiled guns WAY before it was the “cool” militia-style thing to do. In short, we blew shit up and burned shit down, and funded our hijinx by manufacturing and selling ultra-explosive M-80’s (we had our own recipe for the flash powder, and we would triple sift it with loving care for that bigger “bang”) as well as bigger, badder versions that used PVC pipe instead of the cardboard casings.

My buddy had a 1970 Camaro with all of the hot-rod crap in it….the four barrels, fiberglass hood…I’m not a car guy so I won’t keep talking about it and sounding stupid, but I’m telling you, this car was badass, and had we not been the equivalent of Lardass from the movie Stand By Me, and Ratso Rizzo, all of the accoutrements of white trash bad-assdom would have gotten us laid to the point where the free clinic had penicillion on stand-by for us 24X7. BUT if we were getting laid all of the time we would not have been able to perfect such fine weapons of mass destruction.

I think he was one year older than me. Both of us had pretty insane reputations at school, and I really cannot paint a picture of how gloriously low-rent our classic 80’s existences were on the weekends…we were bad kids who hung out with people older and much scarier. Drinking red grape malt duck and smoking Thai stick while flying down the road in the camaro, Ted Nugent’s “Great White Buffalo” in the tapedeck, on our way to the drive-in to get even more fucked up and at some point during the evening I can practically guarantee a firearm would be discharged and everyone would scatter. We’d go hang at the lake or at one of the many parks where our kind congregated….on the badass scale in THIS group of people, with the “always shirtless but wearing jeans” guys being the alpha-males, we were somewhere in the middle of the pack, but only because the we knew about a hundred ways to blow you up. In the grand scheme of things we were pussies. So we had to be extra crazy. But at the end of the day, when we were back at his grandmother’s house where I spent practically every weekend, we were still kids…wondering about the deeper mysteries of the opposite sex as we strained to see further into the cleavage of Elvira: Mistress of the Dark.

I don’t remember exactly when, but one day I met his older cousin. If I was fifteen or sixteen at the time, he was probably about 21 or 22. At that age he was already on his second marriage. His first wife had died of a brain tumor, and the son they had together died from some type of sudden infant death syndrome. His wife when I knew him was a couple of years younger than him and they got married after she got pregnant and had twin daughters. He and I hit it off pretty quickly. I was old for my age, and while I was a drinking and drugging hellraiser I wasn’t one of the average idiots from the neighborhood. At first we got together so he could teach me how to play guitar, but eventually we built a friendship as strong as is possible with the age difference. Now I should say, as far as the crazy scale goes, he was the type of guy who could round up about three of the shirtless alpha male ‘dotte dwellers and systematically cut them in half. “Normal” fun for me and his younger cousin was driving up and down a main street in KC shooting out the windows of brand new cars in several of the local car dealerships, torching an abandoned car, or putting a half-stick of dynamite in a mailbox…and Tim scared the living shit out of us on many levels. He was just the kind of redneck crazy you didn’t want to cross. BUT if he was your buddy, you could count on his rage to keep you perfectly safe in any number of questionable circumstances. So as he and I became better friends and spent more time together, I spent less time with his cousin….something he took to heart since it was HIS cousin, but on many levels the kid just wasn’t right. Sure, I was an arch-criminal for my age, but he was the type of kid who would hurt animals, and he lacked a level of maturity that would allow anyone to take him seriously. I knew how to clean up and act right….he didn’t have that switch to flip. So Tim and I were like peas and carrots…soon I ended up spending pretty much every weekend at his place, and one evening the rising tension with his diminutive cousin came to a head and the kid basically wrote us both off after his parents had to step in. I’m leaving out a lot, but trust me, I’ve got about five million stories from back then, each one more awesome than the next.

Oh here’s one I can’t leave out…. the thing that really “sold” Tim on how cool I was is pretty funny. As pure white trash and rednecks, we took revenge seriously. Long story short, an old family friend was making life hard for his wife and so he wanted to fire a warning shot over their bow. So we whipped up a simple baby food jar bomb and were going to drive by their house and toss it in their front yard in the middle of the night. Big boom, but as long as nobody was standing near it there was no real danger of death or damage. Well I shit you not, this was a family affair…..he drove this huge white Mercury of some kind, and it was me, him, his cousin, his wife and 2 daughters and at least one other person I can’t remember. I know, the kid thing. Weird, isn’t it? The logic was sound though….it was his wife being victimized so she deserved to come and see this, and coming up with the money for a sitter or explaining the NEED for a sitter at 2am weren’t options. So I’m in the back seat ready to witness an awesome explosion, but because I had a window seat and the house was coming up on my side, I was the lucky one who got to throw the bomb. I’d done this kind of thing a million times by that point, so I wasn’t worried about it, but I’d also done it enough times to know just how difficult it is to time your throw from a moving vehicle if you were planning on getting close to any kind of target. I had no target other than the huge front yard, but being nervous to make a good impression on “new people” I threw it a second too soon and the damn thing rolled right under a car in the driveway. There was stunned silence as we slowed down a block up to watch it go off, and more stunned silence after it went off…underneath a vehicle. It’s not like the movies, cars don’t just burst into balls of flames, but I promise you this….that car wasn’t going anywhere ever again unless it was hooked to the back of a tow truck. The stunned silence soon turned to laughter and pats on the back as we high-tailed it out of there….everyone thought I had done it on purpose, and they were incredibly impressed. I played along, and began getting very close to people who would greatly alter the course of my life. I realize this is some real criminal behavior to be putting into words, but I feel okay with that because I was way underage at the time and nothing can really come of it, and for a much bigger reason that will become obvious soon enough.

Ironically, with all of the crazy shit that we did, in the big scheme of things, Tim ended up being a calming force for me, and I got into a HELL of a lot less trouble because of him. I guarantee it. He’d actually get me to go to church, threaten to kick the shit out of me if he even suspected I was doing hard drugs, and spending time with his wife and daughters had to be better for me than the riff-raff I was used to with his cousin. I was a decent enough person, I was just deep into the role I decided to take early in my adolescent career. And most of the time, he was just an everyday guy, but his emotional and mental makeup had sustained grave injury way before I ever met him. We were good buddies for a couple of years.

He never called me the night he ended up going to jail forever. I was the closest thing he had to a best friend, but I heard from another friend of mine he said he “couldn’t get Jerry involved in this”. In the weeks leading up to it, he was having more trouble in his marriage, and they were planning on getting divorced. He was getting more and more agitated and distant, and by that point in time I was a high school senior and I was spending less time with him and more with my high school friends. We were getting ready to graduate and go to college, and we spent a lot of time in the local library, fucking around and pretending to study. One night when another good friend who knew Tim came to pick me up he told me about a phone call he had gotten from him. He was planning on doing something to his wife and another friend of mine who was living with them who he suspected of her messing around with….and that was the thing in which he said he could not get me involved. But his young cousin, who had forsaken us two years before, was eager to get back into Tim’s good graces by taking him over to the house where he was going to do whatever it was he was going to do. Obviously, in hindsight, we had enough information to call the police…..but we were kids, and we knew what MIGHT happen to THEM would definitely happen to US if he got wind of our involvement….that’s just the way it was. Plus, as crazy as he was, he talked a ton of shit, so the chances of anything really happening was slim. We called over to the house to talk to his wife for a while, and everything sounded totally normal. We breathed a sigh of relief and went about our evening in the library.

When I got up the next morning for school, I went through the usual routine…turned on the TV to watch Good Morning America, and when it came to the top of the hour and they broke away for local news, there was Tim’s house with the coroner’s van parked in front, two gurneys being wheeled out to it. I should say it’s what “looked like” Tim’s house….there were several tortured hours of not being sure since no names were being released, so I went to school like everything was normal. I think I got to third or fourth hour before the guy I was calling at the tv station would confirm the victims were Tim’s wife and another friend of mine, and at some point they called me to the office when my dad showed up to pick me up after hearing what had happened. It must have been an hour or so after we talked to her, but apparently Tim came home when she was on the phone with another friend and killed them both. I heard rumors about how vicious it was, but they weren’t confirmed until years later when I went to see him the single time I ever visited.

There’s the bad reputation you get being the insane, violent pyromaniac metalhead….you work for that one and you craft it lovingly and proudly. Then there’s the bad reputation even you don’t want anything to do with when your best friend butchers two people with whom you are close. So that was a bad time. Two funerals, and figuring out what, if anything, to do about his cousin who drove him over there to do it and went around bragging about it after escaping charges by testifying against him. I was never friends with him again, and from what I understand his life was never good….he would pull shit like get some scumbags he knew to go to his grandparents house and rob it, splitting the money and goods with him. I’d hear stuff through the grapevine, but my dad called me about five or six years ago to tell me he saw his name in the obituaries. It ended up he had some really rare type of arthritis…his parents had to put him in a nursing home where he eventually died from it. I went to his wake to pay respects to his family, but didn’t even recognize him when I saw him. The disease had his head bent completely down against his shoulder. A bad end to a wasted life.

So Tim went to prison for life, and I went to therapy, then to college for one year, then ministry…..all of that has been chronicled in here at some point. I think it was about 1992…five years after he went in that I finally decided I’d go and visit him. I probably would have before that, but it wasn’t until I ran into his mom at church and she got my name on his visitor list that I was able to do it. To make a long story short, my visit with him started with him asking if I went to the funerals. When I said yes, he asked “were they open casket?”. When I told him they were, he said “I guess I didn’t do a good enough job”. Most of that two or three hours were spent listening to the graphic details of exactly how he butchered my friends and how long it took, the people he had hurt or even killed in prison, and the people he was going to kill when he got out. I wasn’t on the list. But his cousin was, and nature ironically beat him to that punch. I knew in my heart there was no way he was going to leave prison, and after speaking to him I hoped that was true. He had gone completely insane, and from the stories I’ve heard and people I’ve talked to, he made a hell of a reputation for himself up in the “lifer’s club”. For the next twenty three years I was living some of the biggest ups and downs in my life he sat somewhere in a Supermax in southern Kansas and then finally in Lansing State Penitentiary.

The version of this story that folks heard at my home group was, needless to say, abbreviated. Hell, even this version is abbreviated. But it was strange to share something that has always been one of the biggest terrible events of my life, and revisit that “permanent psychic trauma” that I mentioned earlier. For whatever reason I avoided injury, imprisonment and even death during that phase of my life. I have managed to piece together quite a patchwork of varying experiences, but those days of my youth come back to me often…whether I’m telling the story about catching myself on fire making napalm for the hundredth time, or suddenly remembering I hadn’t checked up on Tim in a long time. My one year speech really got the old stories rattling in my brain, so last week I did what I generally remember to do once or twice every year….I went out to the Kansas Offender’s Registry to make sure Tim was still in prison. That’s the permanent psychic damage at its best…to this day I know that if he got out of jail I’d have to be ready to shoot him if he tracked me down, thinking he could either get something from me for old times sake or in some bizarre world, stay with me. Not logical, but I guess it’s a carryover from that insane time. There is a surprising amount of information on the Kansas website…I’ve always been able to see where and when he’s been transferred between facilities, how many times he’s been put in the separate housing unit for assaulting a guard or another inmate….lots of stuff. But mainly I’ve always just made sure he’s never leaving prison and is never up for parole. When I looked at his status on the website last week, it had been changed to one word- deceased. He died at the end of March of this year, and how he died is maybe the one thing they don’t list out in detail.

So I can talk about a lot of the things we used to do as kids. We raised some hell that would have the media outlets lining up to speak with us through the thick glass these days. I can talk about them because I was a minor when they happened, and now I can talk about them because I am now the only person who was around to see any of it who is still alive. That’s a strange feeling….a very dark and inadvertent “tontine”…with me as the final keeper of all of those crazy memories. A different sort of nostalgia that makes me even more thankful for what I have and the people who are in my life now….I have a million reasons to be grateful for what things are like now, chief of which is that I lived through what it was like then.

So the one year sobriety birthday came and went without any great fanfare or epiphanies, which is exactly what one year of meetings and twelve-stepping should prepare you for. No sudden wisdom, no mariachi bands, no parades, no great rewards for finally learning to live your life like a normal human being…it was just Monday. Not only that, I was home sick from work. It was one unremarkable day.  Unremarkable enough for me to sit and contemplate how easy it would be to take a drink…nothing new, nothing grand; just the knowledge that the meetings never stop, you will never be normal, you will always have to work your ass off for this…so what is the point of all of this work?  Why not just say fuck it and go after some pointless fun? 

Now, I didn’t sit there contemplating all of that shit, I’m just saying it was unremarkable enough of a day IF I wanted to do that.  I was actually pretty happy and content with where I’m at, and had some good reflective chuckles about how differently AA’ers talk to you about your anniversaries than sober people.  Don’t get me wrong, a year is great, I’m grateful beyond words to have this and everything it has given me, but when it comes down to it…yay, hooray, you aren’t drinking until you shit yourself or re-enacting the most gaunt and spasmodic moments of Leaving Las Vegas.  And THAT realization and the comfort you have with it ONLY comes from working the program and relying upon the support that comes with it. It’s kind of like doing a masters program for a year with the sole purpose of FINALLY comprehending a single thought such as “keep coming back, it works if you work it”.  If you are looking for soulful illumination and intellectual profundities beyond that…you seriously need to let go of some shit because you are setting yourself up for epic failure.

I won’t do my home group one-year speech until August 6, but last week I had the opportunity to do something that I think was far more critical, which is actually going to be the focus of this post.  On Thursday I went back to speak to about twenty people and their families in the outpatient treatment program, back at the hospital where I did my stint last year. I invested a lot of time and emotion into that program, because I really wanted to turn things around, so I’ve spent a lot of time since then wondering “what will I say when I go back for my one year coin?”. The focus of my daydreams on that speech changed dramatically over the past twelve months; going from “yay me!” in the beginning, to the “if you aren’t already working a program by the time you graduate from IOP, you are in grave danger” theme that dominated Thursday night. So this is going to be a write-up of all of THAT…probably long as hell by the time I get done, but I really think it will be one of the only things of TRUE value I’ve managed to contribute to this blog…

When I was in the five week intensive outpatient treatment program last year (after my stay in detox), I do remember different people coming up to speak to us and get their six month coins.  I don’t remember hearing any one-year speakers, but plenty who had six months…funny how that works.  I probably wasn’t alone in the fact that I kind of felt sorry for them…they all had AA in common, and I figured they they must have lacked the initiative or the magic that I was feeling this early in my sobriety if they were still needing something like AA after six months. They were totally stuck. Looking back, this was just a simple sign of the greatest delusion shared by all addicts….the thing that many say is much deadlier than the drugs or alcohol…what ends up killing us is our “terminal uniqueness”.  Or as I also refer to it- the “Unicorn Syndrome”. It’s easy for us to believe the science of treatment….the meds, the schedule, the group sessions, everything about the neuroscience of the disease….but when it comes to AA, we think “whooaaa….WHHOOAAAAAA!…they are taking this shit too far….that cannot be for me”.  Each of us believes there is something in our intellect, our physiology or our sheer drive and determination that makes us unique enough to figure out an easier, softer path.  We ignore the scientific fact, proven by decades of research, that we have a 90% chance of relapse (usually within 6 months) if we are not in a regular program after we first get sober.  Even Russian roulette has better odds.  We’re the Unicorn. The one who FINALLY gets this recovery thing in a way that does not require the tedium of a lifelong program centered on the indisputable FACT that we have a disease that will kill us unless we are able to find a way to abstain 100% from all mood altering substances. 

 I know the twelve step thing seems too simple, it is boring and sounds like total mouth-breather retard level bullshit.  It really is pretty stupid when you stop to think about it, because there is no way it should be successful for anyone besides the types of losers who sit in those meetings and yack ad nauseum about their eleventeen broken marriages and batallions of estranged children.  I’m an ex-minister who used to have such a hatred of all things higher-powery that when Timothy McVeigh blew up that building my first thought was “I wish he’d parked that truck in front of a church on Sunday morning”….so this generic twelve step shit should definitely not work for me.  But it does work.  And how I know that is I haven’t had a drink or drug in over a year.  So I know it works, and I know that the chances of you being pissed off just reading this if you’re currently struggling in that dysfunctional dance are very high.  If it’s too much for you to handle, go find the easier softer way to get a year under your belt…just try not to kill yourself or anyone else before you end up at your next bottom. They never, ever, ever get any better the more of them you have.  If you want to be successful with a program like AA all you really need to know are these five things:

 #1– Don’t worry about the God shit.  I know, you’re an agnostic or an atheist, or you are just so sick of organized religion and what it has done to you, the world, or both, that you fall under the category of “found the easiest loophole to prove I’m too unique for this program”.  When I first started, all my higher power consisted of was my newfound ability to actually have the smallest inkling of concern for another addict or alcoholic because I knew how they felt and I wanted them to get better. It’s no more complicated than that….but you don’t even have to have THAT. Honestly, the higher power thing in no way matters at this point, but if you’ve got an idea of what yours is….bonus.

#2- Don’t worry about the steps. It will be a little while before they really matter.  The most important thing to remember is the ONLY requirement is the desire to stop drinking/using.  If you want to quit, and you are willing to go to any length to achieve it, at some point you’re going to engage with the steps.  But I know, right now the steps sound ridiculous, generic, too involved, insurmountable, etc.  You’re going to need to make things a lot simpler for yourself, and right now that starts with one thing…do you really want to quit? Maybe you just don’t want to quit yet…that’s a pretty natural reaction.

 #3- AA vs. NA vs. CA and on and on…. if it has “anonymous” after it, it’s all basically the same program. Alcohol is only mentioned in the first step, so whether you’re drinking, smoking foils or chewing oxy’s…you are covered.  I realize, especially at first, that you want to be around people with the same problem…but after you’re in the program for a while that matters less and less. The thing about AA is that it has infinitely more meeting times and locations…and it is critical that you get to meetings regularly.  The easiest excuse in the world is “the only Narcotics Anonymous meeting within 25 miles of my home..and it meets at noon when I’m at work”.  Long story short…bullshit excuse.  Go to an AA meeting. And if they happen to be in the extreme EXTREME minority of “old timey” AA’ers who tell people to stick to alcohol-talk only…just say you’re an alcoholic. Trust me. It’s all the same program, your issue is not unique enough for you to skip out due to the EXTREMELY UNLIKELY CHANCE that it is even going to come up.  Yes, it sucks to constantly go to meetings…some are miraculously lifechanging, some are just so-so, but once I’ve gotten off my ass and made it to one I have not regretted it….not one single time.  How hard did you work to get fucked up and stay fucked up?  Enough said.

 #4- 90 in 90, Temporary Sponsors, The Crazy Old Men, etc….. There are several generations worth of urban folktales surrounding AA culture… you have to go to 90 meetings in 90 days, don’t leave your first meeting without having a temporary sponsor, the crazy old men just waiting for you to mention drugs in an AA meeting so they can yell at you…the list of things people use to talk themselves out of meetings is endless, and most are not based in reality. If I got hung up on 90 in 90, the first meeting I missed would have been my excuse to drink.  You don’t really need a temporary sponsor….at your first meeting you’ll get a card with a lot of phone numbers on it….use them. Seriously. And sure, you’ll run in to crazy old men from time to time….this is a club where ruining your life was pretty much the standard before you joined…the lunatics are easy to spot. What you want to do is “stick with the winners”. They are also easy to spot, and one of them will make a good permanent sponsor.

 #5- Stop Googling AA Statistics…yes, there are programs out there other than AA, and way more people fail in AA than remain sober in the long term. That’s just the nature of the disease….if it wasn’t, recovery wouldn’t be a multi-billion dollar business.  Drunks and addicts are the most egomaniacal and selfish people on the planet, and they are, ironically, also the most self-loathing and self conscious.  They have a disease that feeds their ego by telling them either it’s not really a disease, or that they can learn to use responsibly….and in today’s culture of Dr. Phil’s and self-help sound bites, there are a million different programs willing to take your time and money and get you to believe your ego. You are too unique for what AA has to offer you. The label of “alcoholic” is too extreme and demeaning, and preaching a lifetime of abstinence is unrealistic. It is not in our nature to live the rest of our lives at odds with what our addiction keeps telling us…it takes a level of maintenance that forces us to live that life at odds with our ego. STOPPING THE BEHAVIOR is the easiest thing in the world…you make it past that initial detox and you’re on your way.  It’s living sober that’s the issue.  And there isn’t any easy way to do it other than one day at a time.

 Basically, if one year has taught me one thing, it’s that you need to keep things as simple as possible. If you are just finishing an inpatient/outpatient program, the work that you do right now determines your success a year from now. And the work that you are doing needs to focus on a couple of things-

 BRUTAL HONESTY– honesty is a pretty new concept for most of us, and it starts with the question….do you really want to quit? Are you really done? Or, do you have some more field research to complete before you make that decision? You don’t have to tell me or anyone else, that’s a question you have to ask yourself…and chances are good that you’ve never even let yourself be that brutally honest in your own head. When you no longer have fantastical substance-driven delusions to bullshit yourself with, the type of honesty you are stuck with is scary as hell.  And you either do whatever it takes to escape it, or you do whatever it takes to deal with it. There’s really not a door #3 here.

RECOVERY IS REAL WORK– that’s basically the whole story. It’s like having another job in addition to everything else you do in your life. It requires maintenance for you to be successful…because you are just as susceptible to relapse after twenty years of sobriety as you were at one year. Just ask any of the people who go back out after five, ten, even twenty or thirty years of being sober….the one thing they have in common is that they quit working the program. This job never stops. And no, it’s not fair. It’s life. And living that life in sobriety, without that immediate chemical escape, is too much for your brain to comprehend…so you keep it simple.  This is the genesis of that AA cliche “one day at a time”.

 Upon entering the program you will discover very quickly that AA is nothing like it is portrayed in the movies or on TV (with very few exceptions)…not every meeting is a speaker meeting, people don’t just sit around talking about how much they used to drink and exchange battle stories …when you first start going, chances are good you have no idea what in the bloody hell people are even talking about.  But don’t let that make you feel self-conscious. Just say whatever you’re thinking, or say nothing at all. Not a big deal either way. We expect to hear some disjointed tales of excess from you, but short of your story including selling dirty bombs to Al Quaeda to support your black market organ harvesting empire and white slave trade…which were all sparked by your addiction to meth that started at the age of 18 months…whatever you have to say isn’t even going to peg our radar. We are exactly like you, we know how it all feels.

I guess this is the point at which I interject “The Matrix” references….  When I talk to newly sober people and recognize the resistance, disbelief and disinterest in their faces when talking about AA, the only thing I can compare it to is “taking the red pill” in The Matrix.  The initial relief and sudden rush of wisdom and reflective thought that comes with sobriety can bring with it a false, and dangerous, sense of self-confidence.  In reality, the journey hasn’t even begun. The psychological and spiritual changes needed in order to successfully live sober are so vastly different from anything experienced up to that point in a person’s life that the only way to begin that journey is just to shut up, put the ego and pre-conceived notions to the side and take the red pill. Go to meetings. Go until they start to make sense….until elements of “how it works” starts to filter in and crack the surface of your brain. Trust me, I realize the absurdity of this, because your brain is doing exactly what it should be doing this early in sobriety….you aren’t close to being in control of it yet….the moments of euphoria, anger, fear, resentment and emptiness that come and go are all part of your brain healing itself. It takes a while for the red pill to wake you up from the dream…and hopefully in a year you’ll be sharing with a group in some treatment center thinking to yourself…”holy shit…they really have no idea they are living in The Matrix”.

 Speaking of movies…and the brain….they say it takes six months to two years for your brain to heal.  Now, this “healing” has absolutely nothing to do with finally understanding the science of the super-collider, or counting toothpicks like you were Rainman.  It isn’t about intellect or problem solving skills. The healing that takes place is far more subtle and has everything to do with your brain’s “LET’S GO FAST! GO! GO! GO! GOTTA HAVE FUN! CAN’T GET BORED!” switch finally shutting off long enough for you to just be alive in the moment without it driving you crazy. Your brain is conditioned to only be satisfied with the neuron-bending highs and lows that come with substance abuse…and just because you stop the behavior doesn’t mean your brain is done doing that.  This is where “your triggers” live.

Again, I’m a movie guy, my life basically consists of one long string of movie quotes and references, so naturally the next comparison I draw for people has to do with the actual act of going to the movies.  That’s what your path to recovery is like….it’s like going to AMC Theatres. 

 The “Pre-Previews”

 These days when you go to the movies, there is a whole show that goes on before they even begin the previews. It goes on while you are settling in and there is all kinds of info on whatever horrible new pop sensation just got their start on American Idol, and behind the scenes on the set of whatever new tv crime drama Coke is sponsoring…..and this goes on until the lights go down for the previews.  Well, if you are doing a stint in inpatient or working your way through an outpatient program, this is where you are at. You’re in the pre-previews. Meds are adjusting, the fog is beginning to lift a little bit, your swings of emotion are at least identifiable and you are able to verbalize them without totally breaking down or acting out. It’s at this stage where you probably fit into one of three categories….unless of course you’re A UNICORN, like we ALL ARE….your existential angst is too big to fit into these paltry constraints OR you’ve been through like six different rehab programs prior to this (which for some reason makes everyone look to you as “the expert” in the group), and you can recite some lesson you got from a process group that trumps my meager offering…..anyway……these are the big 3 in my experience…

#1- HAPPY!… You are just relieved to still be alive and you are going to take this sobriety thing and run with it.  You’re experiencing the pink clouds, you have a new lease on life, you’re doing all of the homework they tell you to do and you aren’t missing a group. You’ve got a decent support system in place, and are ready to rock and fucking roll.  When your case manager asks if you’re already attending meetings, you probably answer something like “I’m sure thinking about it!”…because so far, so good.  You are amazed at the fact that you aren’t really experiencing any craving…even when you went with friends to one of your old stomping grounds to shoot pool.  And when you made it through that okay, maybe you thought it would be nice if you were their designated driver going forward….you were sober now and cravings weren’t bothering you…so it would be nice to give back and make sure they were safe.  You’re happy, which 99% of the time also makes you completely insane and oblivious to reality. If you’re already so healed you’re thinking about “how to be around alcohol”, you are definitely in the pre-preview.  I give you shit because I was a lot like this…. a 100% relapse guarantee unless you are working a program before the previews begin. 

 #2- PISSED!…  Maybe you’re that atheist or agnostic I mentioned…the angry ex-Catholic from a long, long line of hypocritical religious alcoholics. Or not. But you’re still pissed. You’re dealing with personal wreckage…people who are pissed that your recovery is “all about YOU” after you spent so much time making a huge mess that was also “all about YOU”.  A cop, a judge, a wife….maybe someone forced you into treatment and you resent it, and maybe your loss of control over your own life means  that all you have to look forward to after graduation is still being accountable to one of THOSE fuckers.  The  pink cloud people are idiots, you’d be happy just to feel like your skin fit. Complete abstinence is bullshit, maybe it shows just as much weakness as complete loss of control. You don’t know what you need in order to make it past the pre-previews, but you are pretty sure none of the shit up to this point has been it. Just being around people is annoying, and the prospect of HAVING to go to meetings so that the meeting leader can sign  your little slip to prove you were there is incomprehensibly soul-sucking. These and a million other  things…you’re the quiet guy with the crossed arms that generally doesn’t have a whole hell of a lot to say. A huge paradigm shift is needed in order to avoid either living as a dry drunk, or experiencing massive relapse….to be honest, I don’t know which would be more painful.

#3- SCARED!… You have no idea where you are going from here, and craving is a huge issue. Your entire support system up until this point may have consisted of nothing but other drunks or addicts, so there aren’t many people to lean on, or the home you are returning to is not a sober one. You’ve been here half a dozen times, and go through periods of numbness followed by extreme anxiety.  I know this will sound crazy, but fear is a great motivator…as far as long term sobriety I’d put my money on you over the happy or pissed off folks any day.

 Like I said, this is not an exhaustive list, but in my experience these are the common themes during the “pre-previews”.  A cheesy illustration perhaps, but I’m telling you…this is where you start getting your ass to meetings.

 “The Previews”

 The previews are basically…..the first six months after treatment.  I know that sounds pretty shitty because six months is a long time, and if you’re putting in the kind of work that is needed, it can feel even longer. Essentially, this is where you are picking up the pieces. You are learning how to navigate the world. You’re getting the pats on the back, or you’re learning how to deal with the angry people whose lives you disrupted. Trust of others begins coming back, as does trust in yourself if you remain sober. However positive or negative it is, your financial forecast and job situation normalizes…that is to say, you’re learning how to live with it. If you started going to meetings when you should have, the weird old men have stopped seeming so weird, and the literature and meeting formats are making more sense. You’re getting to know people, they’re getting to know you, and you either have, or are close to getting, a sponsor. You feel like you belong, and sometimes it’s just a relief to have a place like that. Because sobriety is just weird….it takes a while for those triggers to settle down, and even after they do they always find a way to pop back up to remind you that you have a disease. Nothing is ever really “fixed”, but it is manageable.

  “Your Feature Film”

 Life finally gets underway. The pats on the back are gone, the wary employer has chilled out, people have either moved on or started trusting you. No parades, no streamers….the realization comes that life is just life and you either live it sober, or you don’t. And there isn’t any great magic either way…it’s totally your decision.  This moment is why you started going to meetings when you did….back when you were happy, angry or scared. If you didn’t put in the work, this is the moment where things seem so back to normal that total abstinence doesn’t make nearly as much sense. Your life is strong enough now to handle the occasional party, the wine with dinner, etc. There is now enough distance between you and the pain that brought you to treatment, that the tenets of a twelve step program sound as ridiculous and as unnecessary as they ever did. You are strong enough to do what no alcoholic or addict has ever done before…you can do it in moderation. 

 And that’s the way it goes and the way it has always gone. You either find a way to work on your sobriety, or you don’t stay sober.  I know, there is the possibility that you are the unicorn, after all….it’s only 90% of the people who fail at this….who is to say you aren’t in the lucky 10%. SOMEBODY has to be.

 It’s when you come to a year after first swallowing that red pill that you realize how much danger you were in when you left treatment, and how going to a meeting the very first night you left inpatient may very well have been the smartest decision of your life.  Because THAT decision gave you everything that you have now.

  Yes, I’m a smartass, I’m sarcastic, and I take great liberties when it comes to sounding like I’ve got my shit together and poking fun at the people who are still living in The Matrix. I talk that way to you, because we’re the same person. The first time I ever really connected with someone in AA was one night during my inpatient stay. We had groups all day and night, and in the evening some AA or NA group would bring a meeting up to the hospital. They were usually what you picture when you think of a 12-stepper, kind of off-kilter, all religiousy, some low-bottom stories. Then one night these two ladies from a meeting held in a Jewish Temple in a very affluent part of town came to see us. We’re still in detox, so we’re in pretty rough shape….the little hospital footies, unshaven, I was all broken out in hives from not having liquor in two days. These middle aged ladies come in…perfect hair, makeup, perfume…clothing and jewelry worth more than all of the cars I’d owned up to that point in my life.  I immediately wanted to punch them in the throat for being condescending assholes, coming in like that to do us some fucking favor. And of course, when they began to tell their stories it broke me into about a hundred pieces. They knew what this hell was like. The self-hatred and shame. The fear. The lying. All of the things that bring you to a state of what we call “icomprehensible demoralization”. That was a turning point for me. It got me to meetings, and while I can’t say with the type of scientific exactitude required by the disbelieving Matrix-dwellers to assure them that meetings are the end-all be-all answer to this conundrum….I CAN say that I’ve gone to a lot of meetings in the past year, and it has been the only year of my life since about the age of 15 where I have not taken one drink or one drug.  

 I’m not here telling you all of this to sell you Amway or Jesus…I know this is a lot to hear and you’re going to do with it whatever you want. I understand that. You and me are the same.  All I can tell you is that a little over a year ago I stood in my kitchen and somehow had enough clarity in the middle of an epic life-ending bender to make the decision to just give up and ask for help. With help, I stopped drinking, started going to meetings,and began doing exactly what people with a hell of a lot of sobriety told me to do. At one point during “The Previews”, I decided all I really wanted, all I honestly and truly asked for out of life was just to be some average schmoe…..a job, a house, my wife, living peacefully in anonymity, with the ability to just sit still and be okay with that. In my heart, that was really what I wanted my life to be. I’m not a huge “big book thumper”…I like to read some of the literature, but not always. However, on pages 83 and 84, it lists out The Promises…”if we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are halfway through…”, etc.  Like absolutely everyone I talk to who has worked the program, these promises….for whatever reason, are real.  I have the best job of my life, an awesome wife, I grow tomatoes, play golf and am one hell of a home chef. I go to meetings, I lead meetings, and I love getting up crazy early on the weekend to get my day started. Not only are the promises real, they generally give you even more than you were hoping for.

This doesn’t mean life is just awesome all of the time….life still happens and it can suck. But with the program comes the support and strength to make it through all of that, to learn from it, and to use elements of it to help others. At some point as you work the steps, sobriety becomes your new reality, and the gifts you get from it help you to protect it at all costs. Most of all, you learn how to be quiet and just be in the moment….at peace. No nagging fear, no guilt, no trying to remember what you did the night before or the regret that comes when you do. A new freedom, a new happiness…no running from responsibility or micro-managing the lies.

 I don’t have any magical closing words of wisdom that will finally get you to run to the altar like a repentent sinner….this isn’t as complicated or dramatic as that.  All I can tell you is that if you want what we have, and are willing to go to any length to get it, it is going to take work. But you don’t have to do it alone, and all you have to do to achieve it is keep coming back.

 And with that I’ll pass.

Content Copyright 2008

Okay, this is as good a time as any to dish out the “new job” blog…

A few minutes ago I got an email from my division chief patting me on the back for crafting a well written one-page request email. To put that in perspective…at my last job you were lucky to get an honorable mention if you made it through a thirty six hour shift without losing consciousness.

Before I get into all of the greatness of contracting for the federal government, in general I’m still in a pretty calm place. We just celebrated our first wedding anniversary, I’m turning 41 on the 4th of July, and my “other” birthday is July 12th. Tonight we are eating at one of my new favorite restaurants- Justus Drugstore.  Still working the program…remaining as accountable to that as possible. I was leading the 8am Saturday meetings for the past three months, and now I’ll be leading the 6pm Thursday meetings. I genuinely enjoy going, but obligating myself insures I’ll attend. The noon meetings over by where I work are good, but there is nothing like your home group.  Remaining accountable to the program means watching out for highs and lows of emotion in order to avoid the egomaniacal pitfalls that are part of life….specifically the feelings of “YES! I got this job and am doing well because I’m the greatest sonofabitch alive!”, or the equally ego-driven “Oh, I know I’m just not worthy of these good things that are happening…”. I try to stay away from all of that, and extreme emotion in general, which I know has a negative impact on the entertainment value here….but I am treating my newly found sanity with cautious optimism and don’t want to rock the boat.

Plus, I’m just making out like a bandit these days and stop to appreciate it all as much as possible…. great wife and marriage, a dream job where I work 9-5 and no weekends, new stuff around the house and a nice new flowerbed out front, high-end dinners out without freaking about every penny, good friends, farmers markets, an overgrown herb garden, a round of golf with my cool new clubs every damn weekend…..and if all I have to do is work the program to keep all of this, or keep me sane if any of it goes off the rails, then I consider it a bargain.

So it is with gratitude and wonderment that I approach the new job…. one that I didn’t even have to go looking for after seven months of following every friggin’ lead I could find.  Even when things get a little surreal or ridiculous around here, all I have to do is remember what it was like week after week with no leads and no hope.

Without getting into specifics that could get me into some kind of trouble, I’ll just say that I currently work as a contractor in a large federal agency in the IT department. And granted, it is such a different environment from anyplace I’ve worked that I could take the piss right out of it for about 6,000 words if I got into one of my modes. I will say that, in regard to the stereotype of the angry, lazy, government employee, you do see some of that. And you do see every type of disability….when the weather is bad, the Little Rascal scooters are lined up like Sturgis downstairs.  But overall, people are pretty nice, and unlike places I’ve worked like Sprint and IBM, people who make really good money here generally don’t go around putting on airs. At the Sprint Campus, someone making 50K would go into hock and lease a new Lexus just to keep up with the faux-yuppie image….and in general, someone making more than twice that here probably still drives their 2005 Chevy truck or Honda…and even though they happen to have some property and a cabin down by the lake they don’t pull the Sprint/Corporate bullshit and act like it’s a tudor in The Hamptons. It is pretty laid back here. The government goes at the government’s pace, and you hear almost zero talk about politics….because the government goes at the government’s pace…the Fox News/CNN battles that stoke the fires of public outrage really don’t spark that much conversation here. For all of the well meaning liberal white-guilt bullshit “diversity” talk you hear in the corporate setting, diversity is real here. When confronted with a well meaning liberal riddled with white guilt (who usually lives in the all-white yuppie enclave “close enough” to the hood to pretend to be urban) who has something to say about diversity, I tell them “If you really believed in diversity, you’d hang out in the DMV or the tax office to make friends”.  Well, working here is like working around everyone you run into in the tax office or DMV….age, race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief….it is all well represented here in what I refer to as “heaven”.

And it’s heaven because the government has processes, and you learn very quickly who owns those processes, and if you are smart you learn how NOT to piss them off.  Find out what food they like and bring it to the monthly birthday celebration….just be friendly and know your damn place. Do your job. Do YOUR job. Don’t go figuring out how someone else can do their job even better. Getting things done on time here is like extreme overachievement in the corporate world. Know your place, don’t be all loud, and if I didn’t mention it before…know your place.  IF you can know your place and be happy with your place, and I am extremely, ecstatically, enthusiastically ENAMORED with MY place, you’ll do okay. Sure, some people are just angry…that’s their thing.  And if they can make YOU angry, even better for them…..but you spot them quick and tend to avoid them. They are the people who you can literally hear grit their teeth when you hurry on to the elevator at the last second and push a floor before theirs.  So I kid you not, this is something a couple of us do…we wait until we are AT the elevators and we wait for a door to open up. We do not rush to catch one. When we are in a meeting with federals and the conversation abruptly comes to a halt, that means “time for contractors to leave so we can talk government stuff”. You just better know that, nobody is going to say it. When we go to a luncheon, we get our plate of food and leave….we do NOT sit down in the middle of all of the federals and chill with them for an hour thinking we’re getting in good with them. And as crazy as it sounds, it’s the little things like that that will keep you off the radar and allow you to do your job in peace. Now, you have to work with some of the angry people on a regular basis, but it only takes about five seconds of thought remembering how much worse it was at Sprint or IBM to put things in perspective. And like I said, for the most part, people are pretty cool and there are some very interesting and highly qualified folks around here, and while the job can be challenging you generally have realistic expectations put upon you.  You are actually allowed to LEARN THINGS and then PUT THEM INTO PRACTICE….such a different concept.  But in general, it’s not the work you have to worry about, it’s the people.  My masters in org psych is paying off BIG TIME here….because it’s all about getting along with people and personalities. Your boss may be high up on the food chain, but the person with more “power” may be the 70 year old admin you keep pissing off by tying up the printer with those 100 sheet print jobs. It could take your federal lead six months to get rid of you, but THAT lady….she could have you packed and out the door that afternoon because she has worked for the right people at some point. Total common sense stuff, perhaps too mundane, predictable and boring for some, but I love it….I finally found a gig where I can work to LIVE, not live to work.  I put in 40 hours, go above and beyond whenever I can, am always stepping up when volunteers are asked for, and I’m damn friendly and personable. If they want me to work over in the evening or on a weekend (which hasn’t happened yet), that means our homeland security guys need at least a 2 day lead time in order to set up our security access for off-hours. And the cherry on top is that I got nearly a 10K raise when I took this gig. Those promises on pages 83 and 84 of the big book are absolutely real…..I couldn’t make this stuff up if I wanted to. 

So I guard all of this. Guard my home life and guard my sanity.  I don’t rush off into all of the tangents that keep me constantly amazed…especially this insane political partisanship of the past 2 years.  It’s nothing but bad reality tv, but people buy into it.  I guess the new thing is to hate federal employees because they are forcing Obama to raise taxes, because they are the only ones who will get all the money?  It’s shit like that people will say to me when I happen to be among any of the Fox news crowd….lots of slogans, lots of catchphrases, lots of posturing, but sadly few facts or figures to back it up.  Granted, I know those on the left can do the same shit….99% of political arguments boil down to going back and forth matching tales of hypocrisy. Government employees are parasites….well, I would have stayed at IBM indefinitely if the already highly profitable company didn’t decide they could boost their profits even more by sending my and 15,000 other jobs to countries where they can pay people four bucks an hour. So to me all of this boils down to, who do you trust more to run things?  The government or big business?  I realize it’s a nightmare choice, but higher taxes have had way, way less of an impact on me than all of the American jobs that are being outsourced so that fewer and fewer people can guarantee they get more and more of the money.  What I hear from the tea-partiers is “well, jobs go overseas because the companies are getting taxed so much”……so by that logic, if taxes are lowered, all of the jobs are coming back?  And of course there is the whole Arizona immigration thing….which is something that blows my mind. Yes, illegal immigrants are a big problem, but as per usual the knee-jerk redneck contingent would rather have a sabre-rattling good time rousting them than do anything to make a real impact.  They want to send a message to the liberals rather than do something for their country.  And by that I mean…why are the illegals coming here?  They come here because people give them money to work. So instead of making a big deal about the failure of government to control the borders, how about we prosecute anyone who hires an illegal for treason?  I’m constantly told by the Fox News/Limbaugh drones very specific things that mean I “either support America or I support socialism”.  Well I support America…..and I love it enough to put people in prison for hiring illegal aliens to do a job.  But they literally don’t even acknowledge that argument when I bring it up, because then I’m threatening big business…I’m threatening capitalism and unrestricted trade.  And I’m threatening it because in order to cut off the cash flow to illegals, which WOULD keep them in their home country, that would mean that the heads of major companies who support things like ignorant Arizona legislation would have to go to prison.  Companies like Wal-Mart, Tyson, Dole….right now they can afford to pay the wrist-slap fines they incur when illegals are found in their businesses, so the infamous Arizona diversionary tactic works just great for them.  And in short, that is one of the things that just amazes me right now…..there’s no good debate anymore, just anger.  No real dialogue about these things.  So other than this last paragraph I don’t give it much thought, and when I’m drawn into the blackhole that is the discussion with a tea-party minded Palin apologist, I try to bring it all back to “so in all of this what can you or I do RIGHT NOW to make a positive impact in a way that actually makes a difference in our lives and does not involve rhetorical, lazy arguments on a national scale?”.  And more often than not, that question ends the discussion….because people generally don’t want to think or do any work, or make any rational sense. The high-minded conservative “work ethic” only applies to whatever got them to a position where they are comfortable enough in life to say “that’s just tough shit…we can’t all go broke taking care of everyone” when faced with questions about what to do with the extension of unemployment benefits or the fact that so many people can’t afford basic health care.  It’s much easier to demonize EVERYONE like they are that stereotypical welfare mother who keeps cranking out babies because babies mean even more money from Saint Obama, than it is to actually get involved with changing a process….the more time you can spend telling someone what they are doing wrong, the less time it leaves you to worry about what you can do that is right.

And with that, I bid you a good evening and a happy and safe 4th of July weekend. And you know why I don’t have time for some kind of a smartass sign-off?  It’s because I’m a social parasite who gets to leave work now and I don’t want to use any of my own time to talk with you…..

So I started this blog because of my love of food….a love so deep and misguided that I had to have surgery to avoid an early death.  But I haven’t talked about food that much lately because most of my cooking has been of the day to day Suzie Homemaker variety, and most of my dining out has been the same handful of places due to the lack of employment.  Plus there’s the whole recovery angle now.  Last week’s No Reservations (I just watched it….finally got a DVR!) focused on food obsession and had a segment on food bloggers.  Compared to what’s out there, I definitely would NOT call this a food blog…..and that’s okay with me, I like to mix things up, and while I appreciate food blogs for recipes and restaurant tips, many seem to go in a direction I don’t particularly admire.  Many of them take things to the level of nerds who love to show their dicks in Intel vs. Athlon arguments, partake in cyber-bullying and oneupsmanship, and very few have anything resembling a sense of humor or irony.  As much as I love food, I don’t ever want to come off like a douche, because it is something so elemental and important to me that I can’t stand the thought of taking myself so seriously.  I want to have a fuller life than that.  eGullet used to be a big part of my internet life, and I DO owe meeting my lurking wife to that website, but either it has changed or I have changed….or both to some degree.  It has become as boring as fuck, like a room full of W.A.S.P.-y whites who are chomping at the bit to correct you on some meaningless point, and thereby keep the website (the end all be all of food wisdom oracles) clean, concise, correct…..and so fucking sterile I can’t even think of any decent obscene imagery to describe it.  Shit like…”But in your original statement you inferred that BLAH BLAH BLAH, and while that may have been true in reference to the cultural aspect of BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH, you forgot to take into account that the translation of the dish, is, in itself, a BLAH BLAH BLAH MOTHERFUCKING BLLLAAAHHHHHHHHHH”.  So those types of dipshits turn people off to the website, but hey, they get to feel smart in a vacuum full of boring doppelganger dipshits who also enjoy minutia that  jumped the shark the same day someone had the spare time to take it seriously enough to outline a code of ethics.  A couple of years ago I would have been giddy at the thought of people from the food nerd community getting a few minutes on Bourdain’s show, but now it’s just annoying….kind of like eGullet can be if you spend too much time there.  I mean, if I ever get to the point where I am engaging people  in order to wax poetic on a humorless, humorless, humorless eight page thread about the best type of wooden spoon on the planet, please put one in my brain. Seriously.  And if I ever approach a level of self-importance where I annoy you with a camera at dinner like it is the sane thing to do, sound like I’m a baseball card collector when I’m reminding you of how many cool restaurant experiences I’ve had, or generally lose the sense of irony that comes with the realization that in a few hours I’ll be shitting out this two hundred dollar meal……then kick me in the nuts one good time before you put one in my brain.   Bourdain needs to do that one over……he has a lot of crossover appeal and it would be nice to let the world know that not everyone whose kitchen toys are worth more than their car comes off like a socially retarded douchenozzle when you talk to them about their favorite subject. 

SO WITH THAT SAID…..I finally got to cook what I think of as a “real” meal over the weekend.  Sure, I’ve cooked some great dishes, God knows I’ve had the time, but a “real” meal to me is one that takes a couple of weeks of cookbook research, followed by a process of elimination to narrow down potential courses, followed by the listing of all ingredients, specialty hardware/techniques that are needed…..followed by….a timeline for all preparation leading up to the meal.  If I’m not cooking something two days in advance in order to have everything ready…..then it’s not a “real” meal.

The occasion for Sunday’s dinner was the result of a raffle I may or may not have mentioned in the fall…..basically, I donated a “you name it and I’ll cook it for you” meal for an AA fundraiser, and the people who won it came over this weekend.  They were trying to figure out what they wanted me to cook for them, and while we were chatting after a meeting one day it struck them…..Asian. Dammit.  I’ve never cooked Asian food before, specifically anything Chinese, Thai or Vietnamese.  At least, I haven’t cooked it on a level where I would consider it a “real” meal…..so damn, you know how obsessive I had to get with that sumbitch.  Oh, and to complicate matters, I had to take dietary restrictions/allergies into consideration…… no corn syrup, no msg, no wheat….and get this….no PORK!  Asian…..and no pork.  Oh well, I was up for a challenge, these were super cool and friendly people and I wanted them to have a memorable meal.

Long story short…I did not stick to any strict theme…first of all, they wanted my famous cream of mushroom soup (Top Chef recipe…simple and it rocks), and some sort of rich, chocolatey dessert.  So after much pondering, reading and obsessing, I settled on the mushroom soup served with homemade shrimp toasts, my wife would make a Vietnamese rice noodle salad, then lettuce wraps with beef for the main, and finally that mega-insane “Chocolate Oblivion Truffle Torte” with Amarena cherries. 

It took a lot……a LOT….to boil it all down to that list, not to mention shopping for specialty ingredients, which I love to do anyway.  Everything ended up being well received, but I said all of that just to have an excuse to talk about my new favorite book…..David Chang’s Momofuku cookbook.  Total genius stuff….a profanity laced joyride that would be fun to read even if you didn’t cook any of the recipes.  I needed a GOOD excuse to cook from it….I’m not overstating my abilities when I say that it’s not for the entry-level home chef.  Many of the recipes will have a few tablespoons of something that is a completely different recipe in the book, and that recipe will have crossover too….but I wanted to keep it real and not take any shortcuts.  The main dish was the one thing that drew from the book…..lettuce wraps with beef sounds simple enough, but when you are adding half a dozen different sauces and pickled elements it adds considerably to the complexity of the prep work.  I did Chang’s sauteed onions that cook for about an hour to get them just right, his famous ginger scallion sauce, and a pickled mustard sauce that requires you to make a batch of his quick pickled cucumbers and pickled mustard seeds.  But the big boy, a revelation to my kitchen, was his “ghetto sous vide” technique that I plan to use just about any time I need to prepare any cut of steak.  The key to that is having a Foodsaver…it’s one of those things you won’t know how you lived without once you use it.  So the steak, in this case flatiron, goes into the bag with an onion/garlic/soy based marinade, and it sits for a day.  Then things take a turn for the weird…..the ghetto element of the sous vide.  Well, Chang has proven to me that you don’t have to spend a grand on a thermal immersion circulator in order to cook in a bag.  Basically, all you need to do is get a pot of water in your sink and run the tap so that it stays between about 120 and 125 degrees….it takes some finesse, and in my case some adjustment to the hot water tank, but when you get it in that zone you put the bagged steak in the water for about forty five minutes to an hour.  Check the temp from time to time and you’re good.  All you want is for that steak to stay in there long enough to achieve approximately 125 degrees throughout, which in my kitchen is a pretty perfect rare to medium rare. Then you shock it in cold water, take it out of the bag, dry it off and hit it in a ripping hot pan or on the grill for a minute or two on each side. Perfection. Even the usually tough flatiron just melted….I cannot say enough good about this technique.  Slice it on the bias and then surround it with the aforementioned sides and sauces, along with a huge garden of assorted sliced vegetables. Everyone loved it.  Then the death blow…that chocolate torte.

It was good to get back in the kitchen and do something like that. I do love cooking for people, and I have to admit the ego-boosting accolades do not suck.  There is some stress and obsessive compulsive behavior involved, but the payoff is worth it. 

Yep, that’s about it. Just wanted to brag in food nerd show-my-dick fashion…….Lost is on pretty soon. Different subject for a different day, but that show has ended up sucking….big time.  In short, I think the appeal is based solely on the anticipation the viewer experiences from week to week, boosted by the investment one has to put into the show…which does not allow you to then admit the fucking storyline was written by hitting random items on a dartboard.  If you don’t believe me, watch a whole season back to back on DVD….when you do that it’s easier to see the cheesy ridiculousness.  It’s just not that inventive or revolutionary….oh, it’s great network TV, don’t get me wrong, but before you scramble off to some weekly discussion to pore over the details of this week’s episode, go read the fucking Schroedinger’s Cat Trilogy or something….damn. 

I’ll talk to you guys later.  Have a safe St. Patrick’s Day…..or as real alcoholics call it….Wednesday.