A DVD Player and a TV
The point of this one is that you need to occupy your time in those weird hours. There's that weird time between a meeting and sleep that you have to fill. It's these idle hours that drove me crazy. Those are the hours that the liquor store seems really close. There are also much less dangerous, but still bad, ideas. Calling up old girlfriends who really don't want to talk to you again is one that comes to mind.
While cable TV may be out of your price range, it's not that hard to get hold of a TV and a DVD player. You probably don't realize how easy these are to come by. A lot of people have spare ones sitting around that they're not using anymore. People don't want to throw away a working TV just because they don't have a room in the house without one. When the new flat screen comes home, the old, fat, bulky TV gets retired to a room they don't use, like a boxer getting a greeting job at a casino. They'd rather give Old Clunky away. But who doesn't have one? You.
New DVD players are only about $40. That even looks weird to type. I remember when they were $800. Used TVs are really cheap at all the thrift stores. So even if you can't find one for free, buying one won't be much.
When I first got sober, I'd go to a meeting and hit the video store afterwards. They had old movies for a dollar or two and two-day rentals.
At night, my mind was not calm in the least. I spun through past circumstances, worried about the future, and generally, freaked out about the state of my existence. I was too scattered to read, I already had a day's worth of program stuff, I didn't really want to talk to anyone, but I needed to focus attention outside of myself. Enter the high school teen movie.
Kitchen Stuff
At one point I owned some pans and some silverware, but I can't remember where they disappeared to. I used to have a coffee grinder and a French press. I had bowls and glasses. Then they all went away.
I've left a lot of things behind. I'm not sure where it all went, but when I did get sober, I had nothing that belonged in a kitchen.
I lived in a series of houses and used whatever was there. During holiday season, I'd pick up the package with the bottle and the two glasses. I was drinking alone, so the second glass was for when I broke the first one or for the second day of drinking, whichever came first.
The point is to live like a normal person. After years of scoring drugs and using, it's really easy to score food in the same way. The natural inclination will be to subsist off food that you can buy somewhere else. You'll get little bags of fast food as a substitute for little bags of drugs.
Maybe you'll never be much of a cook. But you definitely can't cook without pots and pans, and you need things to eat out of. So get them. Even if you're making ramen noodles or mac and cheese, making your own dinner is a further step into normal.
Phone
I don't know how 12 Step worked before the cell phone. Really. What went on? This all started before answering machines were even common. Back then, when you called somebody, they answered, you got a busy signal, or it just rang until you hung up the phone.
Get a phone. As soon as you can. Get a plan that allows for lots of texting and anytime minutes. People will call you anytime. They will call at noon, they will call at two a.m. They will call you in crisis, they will call you drunk, and they will call with inane questions.
The phone is great for those Fuck-It moments. When I'm ready to quit my job over some dumb thing that happened in the office, when I feel like getting into a fight over the slightest infringement on my pride, when I feel the shroud of self-pity coming over me, I call someone. It's that easy.
DANNYBOY
I sometimes joke that I didn't recognize Dannyboy when he came into the group because he wasn't on fire. Dannyboy was one of those guys I always used to see with a cast on one leg one week and on the other leg the next week. But I never ever saw him slow down.
Dannyboy is one of the Dog Patch Winos. I'm not really sure how to describe them; the best I can do is to say they're like a biker gang without the bikes. They have all the hell-raising and partying without the Harleys. They drink like bikers ride.
Take any social group and pick out the craziest drunk. The one guy who, no matter how wasted he gets, seems to stay upright and get more energetic as he goes. Now take one of those guys out of all the social groups you know and make them hang out with each other. That's the Dog Patch Winos.
I always knew when I walked into a bar in the Mission District and saw the DPW patches on the backs of those jackets that sooner or later, all hell would break loose. It didn't matter the time of day or the day of the week. More than three of them together, and things would get raw in no time.
I was genuinely surprised when I saw Dannyboy in a meeting. It wasn't that I didn't know he drank too much; it was that I didn't think he would ever stop. Looking back on it now, it's hard to picture him drinking anymore, as his sobriety is as serious as his partying was. Remembering him drinking is weird, like he was playing a character or something.
Around the time I ran into 12-Step Dannyboy, I wasn't doing that well in my sobriety. I had no sponsor, no sponsees, no homegroup, and I wasn't through the steps. I was coming off a nasty breakup, and I was white knuckling as bad as I had since I came in. I was hating being sober, but I didn't want to go back to being a drunk; then again, I did like the idea of going to Reno and getting drunk for a week and not telling anyone. But while I wasn't yet through all the steps, I was hanging on to the first three as if my life depended on it.
I knew I was powerless over alcohol, and I knew that even drinking for a week would set me off in a dangerous downward spiral. The idea that I wasn't looking to go out and get wasted for one night was a big warning sign to me. My idea of getting drunk once lasts for a week. I was sober enough to see the insanity there.
I did believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity. Like, maybe in another fifteen, twenty years. It was going to take some time. There's no way that it would happen any sooner, right?
Now, I thought I had done Step Three, but I hadn't. I thought I had turned my will over, but I was really holding back. Looking back on it, I can see that as long as I didn't trust the group process and the community of drunks and addicts, I was still holding on to my will. I was tooling around with the Fourth Step, but without the surrender of will, you're probably not going to get something like that done.
I had this mindset that when people started to notice me in meetings, miss me if I wasn't there, or asked me to do a commitment, I picked another meeting and didn't go back. There are so many meetings in San Francisco, it was easy for me to get away with this for years. Dannyboy was a big part of why I stopped acting this way.
Dannyboy was at the meeting that is now my homegroup. Everyone seemed to know him already and like him. I was jealous of that. As much as I disliked the mob mentality and as much as I distrusted groups, I had that lonely part of me that wanted to belong to something. It was definitely a case of wanting what he had but not being willing to go to any lengths to get it.
My idea of getting drunk once lasts for a week. I was sober enough to see the insanity there.
When Dannyboy became the secretary, he called on me first for every discussion. I had to say my name. I had
