420 Summit

Recovery

No nukes!

I celebrate six months of sobriety tomorrow.

This may not seem like a long time, but as far as I’m concerned it may as well be sixty years. Three decades of bad habits are not easily broken and I’m pretty damn proud of myself. In this six months I have lost my mother. I have lost my son. I have lost my home, my friends and my livelihood.

It has not been a great year.

I have also lost my fear.

I am no longer afraid. I’ll deal with what life brings and I’ll deal with it like an adult, just like the rest of the world has been doing, around me, my whole life.

This is scary as hell, but at least I’m not bored.

Posted: Jul 11, 12:37 PM | Comment ? [4]

A Good Man

A little while back I was at the corner store buying something or other — I was drinking hard at the time so it could have been damn near anything — and noticed a homeless dude lurking near the entrance. This guy wasn’t one of the borderline; maybe homeless, maybe mentally ill or maybe just really dirty. He could have been in a movie. Mismatched gloves, three coats and the hem of a second pair of jeans sticking out from beneath the first over a pair of worn boots held together with duct tape.

I am not without empathy but there are just too many people in need and I dread the inevitable, “Got any change, a cigarette, an extra pair of socks, scrap metal?”

Click to enlarge.

But he didn’t ask for anything. He just nodded a good morning and smiled. I bought whatever it was I was buying and got a couple of dollar scratch-off tickets. I ended up giving him one on my way out — just because he didn’t ask.

Posted: May 8, 01:19 PM | Comment?

Blech

For a brief period of time, say about twenty minutes, I decided that I would use this site to chronicle my recovery. I could help others, while helping myself. Maybe even save a life or, at the very least, impress the hell out of my primary counselor. I could sit here behind my keyboard, buried, like any good doper in overflowing ashtrays, half drunk cups of coffee and Leonard Cohen cd’s — it’s not unheard of for there to be a cigarette floating in a Dunkin Donuts cup on a Leonard Cohen cd — and dispense pearls of wisdom overheard between naps in any of the dozen or so meetings I attend every week.

That’s not gonna happen.

Posted: Apr 27, 12:57 AM | Comment?

We admitted...

They — I’m not sure who exactly “they” are, but there sure are a lot of them — say that we should write about what we know.

It has dawned on me that I don’t know half as much as I thought I did. What I do know is how to drink and drug. One of the many things I don’t know is how to live a substance free life — but I’m learning and you get to watch.

They say that we should practice rigorous honesty in all our affairs.

Addict that I am, I figure if telling a small group is a good thing, then telling the entire Internet is a better thing.

Just not today. But soon.

Posted: Apr 1, 01:42 PM | Comment? [1]

They tried to...

make me go to rehab. I said yes, yes, yes.

See ya in a month or so.

Posted: Jan 12, 11:12 AM | Comment? [1]