Here’s what’s been going on.
My work password is the same I use for my personal computer. It’s bad Security & Privacy health. I’m a two-for-one to any hacker, I know. It’s bad mental health, too. I think of work all the time. I’m prompted to.
The day I chose my PC password, the day I chose to live like this, I was in that cold, lightless cave you find yourself in three-and-a-half-plus years into sobriety. Exhausted, plain beat. Just feeling blindly along walls to find a place to sit down. Needless to say, I was also feeling pretty uncreative, and I’ve felt pretty uncreative since.
Am I right in assessing God created the world in seven days, and then took forty to destroy it, and he did kind of a half-ass job? Poor planning? The family he’d kept alive to repopulate his barren world, for instance, weren’t really the peaches he thought they were. Noah, it appears, was little more than a drunk, and probably schizophrenic.* One night, this was long after the flood, his son Ham checked in on him for some reason or another and happened to see him naked. Next day, when Noah found out his son had seen him naked he put a curse on his son’s son Canaan, banishing him to the eastern Mediterranean. Sure, we alcoholics make impulsive decisions we regret when we’re drunk or hungover. But shame on us when we double down. Noah issued no apology. Never offered to lift the curse.
Some bible and literary scholars write that saw his nakedness is a euphemism for incest. If that’s so, Noah’s retaliation does make sense. He acted impulsively because he was seen doing wrong, and he meted retaliation proportional to just how wrong he was.
Almost four years sober.
Holy Moses.
I casually mentioned to my brother I was almost four years sober and he said, wow, you probably don’t even think about it anymore. I lied that I don’t always. In reality, I think about it all the time. I have to. Apparently three recovering alcoholics I know from the AA group I used to go to, all of them four years sober, are relapsing today. Not using, no. Relapsing. One is getting massages again. That euphemism for the very thing that pushed him to get clean. Four years ago, he cut out the booze and drugs to release him from betraying his family. Now he’s here. Four years sober and lying to them again.
Another recovering alcoholic bought CBD gummies and asked his sponsor if that jeopardizes his sobriety. I don’t love it, but I guess it’s just CBD, his sponsor said, but be careful. It has some THC in it, too, the recovering alcoholic with four years sobriety said. Coming clean while lying to himself. I suppose you’d call that using, but it’s something new now. That’s where he is.
The other, to distract himself from relapsing and obsessing about relapsing, goes on long hikes to please himself in the woods, like Walt Whitman. He’s worried the winter will be bad for him.
I’m coming up on another anniversary, one year since my last good story. There is a story in the works that’s probably as good, but there’s no way of knowing until it’s edited, and edited, and edited until it’s done. And then read. And then I’ll know.
But I can’t seem to sit down. My cave’s too dark.
It could also be the Mariners’ fault. Cal Raleigh’s historic year. Julio’s great second half. Geno and Naylor’s and Arozarena’s bats. They’re loading up bases for like the first time in twenty years, and it’s possible they jump into second place in the AL if they can win the Astros series, and if Detroit continues to leave their W column alone. I bought an AM/FM alarm clock so I can listen to the games on 710 when they’re in-market and I can’t listen online. I refuse to set the time. Time is not its purpose. I might even stick Gorilla tape over the green digits. Seeing them kind of drives me nuts. Seeing them arranged all wrong kind of drives me nuts.
*Maybe I’m projecting.
todd of tacoma 