I just celebrated my third year in recovery, which hardly seems possible.  If you told me three years ago that I’d still be clean and I’d still be happy about it, I probably would have laughed in your face.  I think I’ve said before that when I got sober, it wasn’t because I didn’t want to use anymore; it was because I didn’t want to hurt anymore.  I didn’t really accomplish that goal.  Sure, I hurt less often and for shorter periods, but guess what?  Life is HARD.  Pain is real and pain is not always self inflicted.  I wanted…

I’ve been reading Arianna Huffington’s post, “2009: The Things I Want to Forget” and realizing that, in many ways, this has been a pretty bad year. It certainly has been for me. I’m still -STILL- on supervised probation and after 14 years that’s pretty old. A kitten that I was wildly in love with got sick and died unexpectedly. I had a couple of uncomfortable and unhappy attempts at dating again that reinforced the idea that I’m hopelessly defective and “not fit for human consumption.” After stopping smoking, and even off nicotine for 40 days, I became so sick with…

It’s a small thing, really; a minor annoyance.  It’s the sort of thing that happens to people all the time.  It happens to ‘normal’ people.  It’s a human problem, so I realize that my response to it may be disproportionate.  But to me it symbolized something greater.

Last night I lost my car key.  I was on a date (I’m dating again, which is huge).  Parked in the structure.  Went to a movie.  Left the theater and on our way to the car I realized my key was gone.  Then I realized that I must have placed it in my right…

I hate confrontation, but I am afraid I find myself in a position where I have to have one. With my boss.

My paycheck bounced.

I am trying to save up some money so that I can declare bankruptcy and my paycheck is bouncing.  I cannot stand it.  My student loan and my car payments are due as is the bill for the attorney that kept me out of jail two years ago and my “Cost of Supervision” – the surtax I pay for being a dangerous criminal.  It’s Christmas.  And I’m barely getting by.  And my paycheck bounced.  I’m so mad…

Last night I realized that the three most recent pictures I have of my mother . . . are mug shots.

The first was taken about 22 months ago when she was arrested in her driveway for “obstructing justice.”  The police were at the house to do a welfare check on my step-dad, who had reported suicidal ideation to his psychiatrist.  She didn’t feel like having the police at her house so, drunk, she stood in the driveway screaming at them and calling them names.  They gave her adequate warning that if she didn’t stop they would arrest her.  She took…

Creative Commons/ photo by mrpattersonsir

I have never gone into any detail about this part of my life.  It is not something that I share, usually.  It has just been too shameful and painful and personal.

And it is complicated enough being a gay man without having to explain your having married woman.  If I’ve left this detail out in the past it is part lie of omission, part simplifying an already complex story.  But there it is.  I was married once.

I met her in 1985.  She was a friend of a boyfriend.  I was leaving him and he was desperate that…

Alix, here at The Second Road mentioned a couple of weeks ago that this will make 100 posts from me.  Hard to believe that I spent that much time blogging here; even more surprising when added to the 435 posts on my own blog.  Add that to the nearly 2000 meetings I’ve been to and the hours I’ve spent with sponsors and sponsees and the time spent in service to groups and it appears that I’ve averaged three hours a day of work on my recovery for the last 1000 days.

I know that seems like a lot.  The truth is…

Nobody told me that, and honestly, I’m not sure I would have been able to hear them if they did, but man-o-man it is an important thing to realize.  That’s  my experience anyway.

You see, this isn’t my first rodeo.  I had over 2 years sobriety on another occasion and I suffered a major illness.  I had meningitis.  I spent several days in the hospital on serious painkillers.  I went home with more of them, and when they weren’t really cutting it for me anymore I reached out for the chemical that was always my first love - crystal meth.  I…

At 40 days off cigarettes my back and ribs hurt me so much that I couldn’t move and for some reason I decided that I needed to see a chiropractor.  So I went to see one, had an exam, took a ton of x-rays, got an adjustment and was told to ice my ribs and come back the following Monday.

Well, that night I couldn’t get out of a chair I sat down in.  I tried to lie on the floor thinking it might help and instead it made things worse.  I called my mom and asked if she had anything…

Funny how the process of recovery works; how we go through phases and stages and, as long as we are committed to the process, more is revealed.  I’ve learned something recently that has surprised me in a way that I didn’t think was possible.

People know very little of me unless they put some effort into it.  I can’t tell you how often people are surprised to learn that I’m gay, for example.  It isn’t the most obvious thing about me.  What I do show people is usually kindness and patience.  I show them my lovely manners.  I iron my jeans…

Thirty days off cigarettes and I have to admit that quitting smoking has been as complicated and as painful as quitting crystal meth.  Some parts of the experience might be harder.  At least when I got clean it was all at once.  Tapering off nicotine with lozenges, like I am, reduces the intensity of the craving but it significantly extends the period of craving, but I’m at 30 days off cigarettes today.

I really wish I could go to a meeting and get a chip for it, you know.  It feels like a really big accomplishment.  It feels like something I…

It is a happy coincidence that I happened to give up cigarettes right before the huge tax hike kicked in.  I did not even learn of the increase until about my seventh day off them, but it did give me another confirmation of the rightness of my decision.

It is curious to go through letting go of a physical and psychological addiction from a place of clarity; from a place where my judgment is not clouded by the effects of more powerful mind and mood altering drugs.  It does not make it any easier though.  It just makes it clearer.

Like many…

About six months ago Bill wrote a post about smoking cessation and said, basically, that if you think you’re in recovery and you’re still smoking cigarettes, you’re not "there" yet.  It pushed my "singleness of purpose" button and I basically came undone.

Well, I’ve had six months to stew on that.  And smoke more.  I tried to do what we 12 steppers claim to do and kept an open mind.  I prayed about it.  I talked to my sponsor.  Ultimately I did a written 1st step exercise about my smoking/nicotine addiction.

And 10 days ago I put the cigarettes down.  I haven’t…

I moved.  I hate moving but I moved and in the process of moving I came across a bunch of stuff that I thought I’d gotten rid of, among them the letters I received from the last object of my obsession during his last committment to the Idaho State Correctional Institution.

The letters that said he was sorry.  The letters that said he loved me.  The letters that said let’s wipe the slate clean.

The letters that I he sent me before the last time he got out and then showed up in the same meetings I go to and treated me…

One of my Grandpa Hales’s more obvious and memorable quirks was the particular way he ate chicken; especially the complicated pieces like backs and wings.  The whole process was very quick, so if it wasn’t for the fact that it was also very noisy one probably wouldn’t even notice it at all.  One minute there would be chicken on grandpa’s plate, and the next minute, after a cacophony of slurping and sucking and grinding, his plate would be littered with bones.  Clean, white, dry bones.  I have it on good authority that he had sucked out the marrow as well…

I realize that many people upon realizing that alcohol or drugs are becoming a problem in their lives simply make a rational decision to choose something else.  Some make a choice to recover in 12 step programs.  Some start, I don’t know, jogging or something.  Join the Rotary Club.  Whatever.

This class of alcoholic/addict really amazes me because my experience was so different.  As a group they seem so much more rational than me and yet I rarely think of them as being smarter or more capable than I am in many other ways.

Culturally we place such a high value on…

Maybe the whole holiday ordeal was harder on me than I thought.  It looks like I’ve been on autopilot for awhile and it has kind of kicked my ass.  Now I’m doing the whole Oprah “I’m mad at myself” Winfrey thing, and while I’m writing this partially as a form of quick confession, I’m also writing it because it illustrates something that, when I read the story in the Big Book, seems kind of lame to me.

It’s the story of the guy who works at the company he used to own.  His pride is hurt.  He’s resentful.  He hits the…

I’m really looking forward to the holidays being over with.  I had no idea how I’ve come to depend on the ordinariness and predictability of my little world to help me keep my bearings straight.  And to think how much I used to love the chaos. Either I’m growing or - I’m getting old.  Maybe some of both.

I’m just really anxious for these last few days of messed up work schedules and messed up meeting schedules and no school to be over with and done.  So I can go back to my beautiful little rut.  And get back on track. …

Part of the tradition of 12 step recovery is that we are “quick to recognize where religious people are right,” and part of my tradition on Christmas Eve is to attend evening services at St. Michael’s Cathedral, the Episcopal cathedral that is located just a few blocks from where I live.  The church I was raised in couldn’t be more different than traditional Christian churches, so I feel a little out of place there, especially at a high mass like the one they do at Christmas.  But the music program is so incredible and the building is so beautiful -…

I understand this is a difficult time of year for most people, and for many of us economic pressures are adding to the holiday burden.

For me, the winter of my discontent begins on the 13th of December, my birthday, the day I was arrested the last time, the day I was sentenced to prison, the day I became homeless.  The day I had the meltdown that got me sober.

Then comes Christmas with all it’s demands for happiness for joy and peace and cards and gifts and wrapping paper.  Every wrapped gift I see, every house with electronically choreographed lights and…

Yesterday was the last day of class until January 5th and I am so releived.  I hadn’t underestimated the difficulty of being a fulltime employee and a fulltime student, but, like the book says, "we alcoholics are undiciplined."  And I am an extreme example of that.

This was a particularly hard section to stay focused through because I was stuck having to learn stuff I will never use again and it made staying focused almost impossible.  I did get all of my assignments in last night with an hour to spare so that’s good, but I am grateful that I’m done…

The New York Time yesterday published an opinion piece entitled “Drunkenfreude ” by Susan Cheever, the author of “My Name is Bill” and “Note found in a Bottle,” where she recounts some of the details of the last time she saw anyone obviously drunk at a party in New York City.

The New York apartments and lofts which were once the scenes of old-fashioned drunken carnage — slurred speech, broken crockery, broken legs and arms, broken marriages and broken dreams — are now the scene of parties where both friendships and glassware survive intact. Everyone comes on time, behaves well, drinks a…

I always thought it was such a stupid question; is the glass half empty or half full.  “Obviously,” I’d think to myself, “it is half empty AND half full.”  Being too literal is a defect of my character.  Literally.

Then one day I heard my sister’s answer.  “Half empty.  Half full.  It doesn’t really matter because either way it’s going to spill, and that is why we have sippy cups.”

Yesterday I heard another brilliant answer in the form of a question.  “We have glasses?”

I guess it’s on my mind because it was my birthday yesterday and I’ve been feeling a little…

“Are you awake?”   Message from 208-555-1212 received at 06:47

I wasn’t.  I didn’t even notice the message from my friend Owen until I was about to leave for work.

“Yes,” I repllied.  Brevity is the heart of elegance.

“What’s your mom’s name?”

That’s never good.  Nothing good in my life ever started with those words. I’m sure Owen knows perfectly well what my mother’s name is and I’m horrified by the array of reasons that he might wish to confirm it.  I texted my mom’s name to him and I walked out the door to head to work.

“I thought so.  Check the arrest page…

My dad was in town over Thanksgiving.  I love my dad.  I love him and I love his presence in my life, and no one is more surprised by that than I.  I hadn’t had a normal conversation with my father since I was about 12 years old, and then a couple of years ago I got sober, and I reached out to him for help.  I asked him to come to family week at the treatment center I was at, and, in spite of the fact that we hadn’t spoken to each other in years, he showed up.

Now my…

I did have some real clarity that something in my financial world had to change, though. I was tired of overdraft notices comming from my bank, tired of not having money for rent on the 1st of the month, tired of not knowing from one week to the next how I was going to make it.

First of all, I miss having time to focus and relate and apply myself the way I did until recently.  I miss having time to reflect in front of a keyboard.  I have enough time for superficial kinds of stuff like facebook, but anything beyond casual observation also requires time, and that commodity has become scarce.

I am supposed to be committed to post here 3 times a week, and I could do that, but you’d get some pretty superficial stuff; stuff I wouldn’t want to put my name on.  I’d rather that what I have to contribute here be a…

There are things in life, situations, whatever, that I still don’t navigate so well.  I don’t know if that’s the part where I’m “recovering” and have a ways to go, or if it’s simply endemic to being an addict, recovering or not, or if perhaps I’m simply an outright mental defective.  You’d think I could figure it out.  I haven’t.  All of these things have something to do with living life “on life’s terms.”

So, it’s getting cold, right?  It’s getting cold. And I commute 23 miles one-way to my job.  At night it’s another 16 miles bo school, in the…