Corking the Bottle

(Reprinted from my blog post July 28, 2018) We store pains in our brains and issues in our tissues. Sounds to me like a good excuse to drink, huh? At least it was a good excuse for me. If you think too much, you may drink too much. Go ahead, self-medicate, that evil little voice inside me used to say. Did it work? You know the answer already. If it did, my brain right now would be fogging, not blogging. My corpuscles would be clogging. I'm going to stop this rhyme, just in time. (It sounds pretty stupid, and I don't want you to miss the point.) That is that alcohol is poison, bad medicine, addictive, and dangerous. To remove pain from your brain and issues from your tissues, try God. Pray daily. Take your higher power on vacation with you. It will fit in a carry-on. Your gray matter matters.

(Reprinted from my blog post July 13, 2018) I'm not happy all the time. No one is. When I get a flat tire, am allegedly nagged by my wife, stub my toe, get bitten by my cat, or watch the Pirates lose, I feel unhappy. Yet I feel joy pretty much all the time, even while those bad things are happening. I am about 2/3 finished reading  Choose Joy Because Happiness Isn't Enough , by Kay Warren. ( http://kaywarren.com/choosejoy/ ) She doles out an overdose of scripture, in my opinion, and claims the Bible to be the unquestionable 100% word of God. That's fine for her, but I have my own set of beliefs. And you have your own, too. Nevertheless, she gets it right, in my view, much of the time throughout her book. She defines joy as "the settled assurance that God is in control of all the details of my life, the quiet confidence that ultimately everything is going to be all right, and the determined choice to praise God in all things." Happiness, she claims, is a temp...

(First published July 3, 2018) I was about to lose my job in 2004. My friend, confidant, and sister-in-law (rolled into one) must have sensed a high-pressure system and impending rainstorm. She told me I should go sit on a beach until I find the real Dan again. Of course I didn't take her advice."We thought we could find an easier, softer way. But we could not ( Big Book , page 58)." At that point, I hadn't hit bottom yet and so was still frantically digging my hole. Today, I find the old Dan is no more. It turns out the hole he was digging was his own grave. But from all the depression, DUIs, fender benders, and blackouts arose a new Dan. I seriously have never felt like this my entire life. I feel no stress. I am empowered. I am in control of my life. I discovered true joy. I made a decision to turn my will and my life over to "the care of God as we understood him." Further, I made a moral inventory of myself and "was entirely ready to have God ...

TAYMFA (Two Acronyms You Might Find Amusing) EGO (Edging God Out) AA (Attitude Adjustment) And here's a riddle: What does a dermatologist and God have in common? They both remove defects if I let them.

This comes from a group page, Faces and Voices of Recovery. I have written in this blog often about the issues that led to my demise. Alcoholism is a symptom of something going wrong in our lives. The cure needs to eliminate the demons that lead us to self-medicate. Said another way: Tim Harrington  shared a  link . Treatment of Addiction ...Of course, the needs of someone addicted are the same as what all humans need: self-acceptance, relief of pain, peace of mind, social connection, and a sense of power and place. Treatment, thus, should explore how, in a person’s life, these needs were not fulfilled; why that person developed the belief that only through particular substances or behaviors would they be met: or what, in other words, created the susceptibility....

I saw this in yesterday's newspaper. Actually, yesterday's online transmission of news. See if this is something you can identify with. DEAR ANNIE Annie Lane Worker lives for drinking at pub Dear Annie:  I work in a big city. After work, I enjoy going to the local bar. I’ve been doing this for three years, and everything was fine — with occasional problems — until the past few months. Now it is what I seem to be living for. My work is not very challenging, but I consider myself lucky to have this job. Many people would give anything to have it. At five o’clock, I leave the building and head straight for the bar. When I started doing this, I could take it or leave it, but gradually going to this pub has become an obsession. I can’t wait to get there and to order that first drink. It’s as if I perform busy work all day long, and I can only enjoy life and really be myself at the bar. In the past few months, I have noticed that I think about going to get drin...

When one stops drinking, there are two kinds of recovery. Physical recovery takes 90 days. Mental recovery takes 90 years.

I'm home from our annual family camping vacation, which includes my family and my in-laws. Only 11 attended this year. It was the first such get-together since my father-in-law died. My mother-in-law didn't go. I'm glad my 87-year-old mother was able to go. She even rode a camel at a wildlife park. As for me, I was there 100% sober. I can't say that for every year. One time I was sick for several days as I detoxed. One year I went just a week after a 28-day out-patient stay. I even went to  an AA meeting someplace in Ohio that year. But I stayed sober only about three months after that. Other years I thought often about how soon I would be home...alone...with vodka. I couldn't wait for the outing to end. It was so nice this year to be sober and without a thought of my next drink. Each morning during my fitness walk I thanked God for the nature around me, for taking over my life as I had asked him to do, and for my family at camp and places far away. I'm ...

I wanted to tell you I leave Tuesday for our annual extended family campout. I will be back Sunday. So if you check this blog and it hasn't been updated, please come back. I will start blogging again on July 22. Bye.

I have a Fitbit watch. It counts the number of steps I take, measures my heart rate, keeps time when I exercise, and tells me how to relax for two minutes at a time. I can go on line to my Fitbit app and see how many calories I have burned today. Let's see.... As of 3:04 p.m., I have taken 4,964 steps, walked 2.4 miles, and consumed 1,587 calories. I think Fitbit also can tell me how many people I made mad, but I haven't figured that one out yet. Every night at midnight, everything goes back to zero and I start all over again. Abstaining from alcohol works the same way. Okay, so I didn't drink today. At midnight I have to start over. It's great now at 3:08 that I haven't taken a drink. Wise people take life one day at a time. Sometimes one minute at a time. Now that I have gone one year, two months, and 14 days without drinking, I feel like each minute and each day are easier. But I can't let down. I can't get over-confident. Today: yeah, okay. But a...