Walk In Dry Places #essentialsofrec #Motives

What is the real cause?
Motivations.

Bringing her alcoholic husband home from a treatment center, a woman was dismayed when an argument ensued and he left the car in a rage. She blamed herself and their argument when he finally arrived home, DRUNK.

Seasoned veterans of alcoholic games will quickly understand that the argument had no part in “causing” the alcoholic to drink. Instead, the argument was something he started as a means of getting away from his wife. He still wanted and needed to drink.

In dealing with our compulsive illnesses, we must separate our excuses from what’s really going on. Arguments do not cause alcoholics to drink, but they can be used as convenient devices for getting our way.

I must take responsibility for my own behavior. If I have chosen sobriety, no person and no event can cause me to drink. 

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An Alcoholic's Day

YOU WAKE UP with a start, and as awareness returns, your heart begins to pound and the shakes begin again. Oh God, it's morning and you must leave the safe womb of darkness and the bed. You reach down for the bottle, knowing already that it's empty. It always is, in spite of your nightly resolve to leave a drink for morning. Never mind, there's some in the garage, if you live to get there. A quick gulp of coffee later, you're fumbling for the bottle hidden inside the old tire casing. The whiskey is tepid and revolting, and the first gulps won't stay down. But at last one does, and that wonderful, warm glow starts to spread. A few more quick ones before you back the car out, and at last your heart stops pounding and the shakes begin to die away.

You get to your office, where you work for yourself, by yourself, in a field of personal service to the public. Your main supply of liquor is there, and now you have a few more drinks before you begin work--such work as there is. Before you started drinking on the job, you had a thriving business. But now it is dwindling steadily. Between visits of those who still do come, you take controlled nips at the bottle until noon. The thought of food has become nauseating, and you can't face the prospect of lunch at home, so you sit and drink for a half-hour or so, trying to work up a false appetite. When you finally get home, the family glares at you and attacks the delayed meal, while you pick and push at your plate, muttering excuses about this not being your favorite dish. Nothing has been, for a long time now.

After lunchtime, it's back to the office, a few more quick ones, and then to the afternoon appointments. Pleasantly glowing now, you'd rather talk than get down to business, so long, rambling monologues destroy your work schedule and put you far behind. Some of the people who have been waiting impatiently leave quietly, never to return. Occasionally, one may say on the way out that he'll phone later, but you know he won't, and after a brief flash of resentment, you're glad about it. One less person to take up your time. You don't even get upset about some of the ugly things that have started happening: bitter arguments over bills you've been neglecting to mark paid; complaints about the poor quality of service you've been rendering; incidents like yesterday's, when a woman walked out, saying that you didn't look or act fit to be at work.

Some afternoons, in spite of trying to control it, you drink too much and have to lock up the place and lie down. People come, try the door, knock, then go away, many for the last time. But most days you stick it out until the closing hour, then fortify yourself for the ordeal of dinner. Before you go home, though, every few days there's the vital task of replenishing your liquor supply. You have a system of buying in rotation from seven or eight stores in your own and neighboring towns, so that no one will realize how much and how often you buy. Sometimes this involves a twenty-mile drive, at breakneck speed, but then you're secure for a few days more.

After dinner comes the best time of your day, an evening of uninterrupted heavy drinking. You have long since become a solitary drinker, so it's back to the office again, where the liquor and privacy are. You used to make excuses to the family for returning there, but now you just go, and be damned to them. Simply drinking and daydreaming would be satisfying enough, but some nights there's a ball game to listen to on the radio, or a new magazine to read. Best of all, maybe there's a letter to write, prompted by a controversial remark heard on the radio or read in the newspaper. You'll put that character straight about things! He won't make that mistake again! So out comes the typewriter and the letter begins, but is never finished. As drunkenness progresses, so do the mistakes in typing. Have a drink and start over, you tell yourself. Have another and do it again. By midnight or later, the floor is littered with crumpled balls of paper. The devil with it! You'll do it some other time. It never gets done. Next time, it's someone else's turn to get the ax.

By now it's safe to go home, with everyone there asleep. Maybe this is a routine night and you make it home safely, with perhaps only some paint scraped off the side of the car from going into the garage at a bad angle. Some other nights aren't so good, and the local police spot you and take you home in the squad car, while one of them drives your car for you. This is a benefit of once having been a respected businessman. The respect is gone now, and only some kindness remains. You don't like to remember those few disastrous times, en route home, when you wrecked your automobile and were lucky not to be seriously hurt. But this night all is well, and finally you lie in bed, a bottle within reach, and drift off into sleep.

Some nights, though, and more often lately, sleep doesn't come. You think, "Oh God, why am I doing this to myself? How long can I keep on this way? What is going to become of me?"
But then your master, cunning-baffling-powerful alcohol, soothes away your fears. And although you know, deep down inside, that you have a bad drinking problem, and your business is nearly ruined, and the small savings you have left are nearly gone, and your family is about through with you. . .in spite of all this, you tell yourself, "Well, I'm getting along all right yet. I go to work every day, and I've still got money in my pocket, and the family hasn't left, so I guess I'm still managing everything okay. Anyway, if things really get bad, I know I can quit the stuff--and I will. But not yet."

Maybe things will be better tomorrow.

J. G. T.

Negaunee, Michigan

AA Grapevine February 1973   

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Jack McCarthy performs "Drunks" #essentialsofrec #Recovery

Drunks 

We died of pneumonia in furnished rooms where they found us three days later when somebody complained about the smell.

We died against bridge abutments and nobody knew if it was suicide and we probably didn't know either except in the sense that it was always suicide.

We died in hospitals, our stomachs huge, distended and there was nothing they could do.

We died in cells, never knowing whether we were guilty or not.

We went to priests, they gave us pledges, they told us to pray, they told us to go and sin no more, but go. We tried and we died.

We died of overdoses, we died in bed (but usually not the Big Bed)

We died in straitjackets, in the DT's seeing God knows what, creeping skittering slithering shuffling things.

And you know what the worst thing was? The worst thing was that nobody ever believed how hard we tried.

We went to doctors and they gave us stuff to take that would make us sick when we drank on the principle of so crazy, it just might work, I guess, or maybe they just shook their heads and sent us to places like Dropkick Murphy's.

And when we got out we were hooked on paraldehyde or maybe we lied to the doctors and they told us not to drink so much, just drink like me. And we tried, and we died.

We drowned in our own vomit or choked on it, our broken jaws wired shut. We died playing Russian roulette and people thought we'd lost, but we knew better.

We died under the hoofs of horses, under the wheels of vehicles, under the knives and boot heels of our brother drunks.

We died in shame.

And you know what was even worse, was that we couldn't believe it ourselves, that we had tried.

We figured we just thought we tried and we died believing that we hadn't tried, believing that we didn't know what it meant to try.

When we were desperate enough or hopeful or deluded or embattled enough to go for help we went to people with letters after their names and prayed that they might have read the right books that had the right words in them, never suspecting the terrifying truth, that the right words, as simple as they were, had not been written yet.

We died falling off girders on high buildings, because of course ironworkers drink, of course they do.

We died with a shotgun in our mouth, or jumping off a bridge, and everybody knew it was suicide.

We died under the Southeast Expressway, with our hands tied behind us and a bullet in the back of our head, because this time the people that we disappointed were the wrong people.

We died in convulsions, or of "insult to the brain", we died incontinent, and in disgrace, abandoned .

If we were women, we died degraded, because women have so much more to live up to.

We tried and we died and nobody cried. And the very worst thing was that for every one of us that died, there were another hundred of us, or another thousand, who wished that we could die, who went to sleep praying we would not have to wake up because what we were enduring was intolerable and we knew in our hearts it wasn't ever gonna change.

One day in a hospital room in New York City, one of us had what the books call a transforming spiritual experience, and he said to himself "I've got it ." (no, you haven't you've only got part of it) " and I have to share it." (now you've ALMOST got it) and he kept trying to give it away, but we couldn't hear it. We tried and we died.

We died of one last cigarette, the comfort of its glowing in the dark. We passed out and the bed caught fire. They said we suffocated before our body burned, they said we never felt a thing , that was the best way maybe that we died, except sometimes we took our family with us.

And the man in New York was so sure he had it, he tried to love us into sobriety, but that didn't work either, love confuses drunks and he tried and we still died.

One after another we got his hopes up and we broke his heart,
Because that's what we do.

And the worst thing was that every time we thought we knew what the worst thing was something happened that was worse.

Until a day came in a hotel lobby and it wasn't in Rome, or Jerusalem, Or Mecca or even Dublin, or South Boston, it was in Akron, Ohio, for Christ's sake.

A day came when the man said I have to find a drunk because I need him As much as he needs me (NOW you've got it).

And the transmission line, after all those years, was open, the transmission line was open. And now we don't go to priests, and we don't go to doctors and people with letters after their names.



We come to people who have been there, we come to each other. We come to try and we don't have to die......... 

Jack McCarthy  

Drunks - A Poem By Jack McCarthy

We died of pneumonia in furnished rooms where they found us three days later when somebody complained about the smell.

We died against bridge abutments and nobody knew if it was suicide and we probably didn't know either except in the sense that it was always suicide.

We died in hospitals, our stomachs huge, distended and there was nothing they could do.

We died in cells, never knowing whether we were guilty or not.

We went to priests, they gave us pledges, they told us to pray, they told us to go and sin no more, but go. We tried and we died.

We died of overdoses, we died in bed (but usually not the Big Bed)

We died in straitjackets, in the DT's seeing God knows what, creeping skittering slithering shuffling things.

And you know what the worst thing was? The worst thing was that nobody ever believed how hard we tried.

We went to doctors and they gave us stuff to take that would make us sick when we drank on the principle of so crazy, it just might work, I guess, or maybe they just shook their heads and sent us to places like Dropkick Murphy's.

And when we got out we were hooked on paraldehyde or maybe we lied to the doctors and they told us not to drink so much, just drink like me. And we tried, and we died.

We drowned in our own vomit or choked on it, our broken jaws wired shut. We died playing Russian roulette and people thought we'd lost, but we knew better.

We died under the hoofs of horses, under the wheels of vehicles, under the knives and boot heels of our brother drunks.

We died in shame.

And you know what was even worse, was that we couldn't believe it ourselves, that we had tried.

We figured we just thought we tried and we died believing that we hadn't tried, believing that we didn't know what it meant to try.

When we were desperate enough or hopeful or deluded or embattled enough to go for help we went to people with letters after their names and prayed that they might have read the right books that had the right words in them, never suspecting the terrifying truth, that the right words, as simple as they were, had not been written yet.

We died falling off girders on high buildings, because of course ironworkers drink, of course they do.

We died with a shotgun in our mouth, or jumping off a bridge, and everybody knew it was suicide.

We died under the Southeast Expressway, with our hands tied behind us and a bullet in the back of our head, because this time the people that we disappointed were the wrong people.

We died in convulsions, or of "insult to the brain", we died incontinent, and in disgrace, abandoned .

If we were women, we died degraded, because women have so much more to live up to.

We tried and we died and nobody cried. And the very worst thing was that for every one of us that died, there were another hundred of us, or another thousand, who wished that we could die, who went to sleep praying we would not have to wake up because what we were enduring was intolerable and we knew in our hearts it wasn't ever gonna change.

One day in a hospital room in New York City, one of us had what the books call a transforming spiritual experience, and he said to himself "I've got it ." (no, you haven't you've only got part of it) " and I have to share it." (now you've ALMOST got it) and he kept trying to give it away, but we couldn't hear it. We tried and we died.

We died of one last cigarette, the comfort of its glowing in the dark. We passed out and the bed caught fire. They said we suffocated before our body burned, they said we never felt a thing , that was the best way maybe that we died, except sometimes we took our family with us.

And the man in New York was so sure he had it, he tried to love us into sobriety, but that didn't work either, love confuses drunks and he tried and we still died.

One after another we got his hopes up and we broke his heart,
Because that's what we do.

And the worst thing was that every time we thought we knew what the worst thing was something happened that was worse.

Until a day came in a hotel lobby and it wasn't in Rome, or Jerusalem, Or Mecca or even Dublin, or South Boston, it was in Akron, Ohio, for Christ's sake.

A day came when the man said I have to find a drunk because I need him As much as he needs me (NOW you've got it).

And the transmission line, after all those years, was open, the transmission line was open. And now we don't go to priests, and we don't go to doctors and people with letters after their names.

We come to people who have been there, we come to each other. We come to try and we don't have to die.........

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Or Follow Us On Twitter #essentialsofrecovery