How to stay sober.
Frankly speaking, the answer that works for me is to find something ELSE to do with my life. Finding a BIG ALL ENCOMPASSING GOAL is rather difficult but a worthy endeavor. I simply cannot drink and accomplish my goals at the same time. Some people simply go to AA meetings every day. I have done that and it works great! That is a classic example of a BIG thing to do with your time here on planet eARTh... For the first year I was in AA I went to a couple of meetings every day... sometimes I would leave the meetings and go get drunk... That was what I did... I did that repeatedly... maybe 100 times... sometimes there was a week of sobriety, sometimes a month, sometimes three months... Eventually, I stopped drinking...
Then I got this job at a factory in Chico and there were a lot of people there in recovery... The factory job was actually very close to what I imagine HELL would be like... Sometimes it was very, very hot and I was covered with plastic sawdust... However, I had found a sustainable way of living. This was a good thing for me. I could go to work, pay my bills, live indoors, shower every day with hot water, eat and go to meetings. It was very comforting to realize that I could do that for years... When I was drinking heavily, there were big crisises that totally threatened my survival. With this factory job and AA meetings, I did not have to go thru big emergencies. What a relief! Then I realized that what I was doing with my time was actually making the world a better place to live. I made wheelchair wheels and knew some people that owned wheel chairs. They liked my wheels and I could see that my time was being used to make real people happy. I made many other things too. Swim fins for scuba divers, coke machine parts, ammunition reloading supplies... In each case, people benefitted from my labor... Of course, the ammunition reloading supplies were very difficult to find any useful benefit from but I just accepted the things I could not change... Somedays I made parts that made the world a WORSE place... Obviously, guns suck big time... The only way I could see a benefit was hoping that the users of the guns would shoot themselves in the foot...
Then I left the factory job and moved to Eureka and went to college for 4 years... I studied computer Information Systems and got a BS degree. Here was another example of not having time, energy or brainpower to spare. This subject is so astonishingly difficult to understand that I couldn't figure it out with a hangover... I even had to stop smoking grass... Eureka is famous for high quality grass but I only smoked it about a dozen times during the last 4 years... |
