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Sometimes I target this newsletter toward a recovery topic. Sometimes I just try to tell an amusing story. This is one of those times.
When I was a kid, growing up in Pennsylvania, we started sex education in fourth grade and continued through sixth grade. It was taught by the foremost expert in teaching about sexual health—my gym teacher.
Yep, the same guy cackling about drilling all the nerds with dodgeball one day was in charge of teaching little kids about the vas deferens and the vulva. Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?
But that’s how it worked back then in the late 1980s, and I remember during that time period my elementary school would have one special assembly day every year where we’d sit in the gym and have an all-day marathon session where different speakers would talk about everything deemed bad back then: alcohol, drugs, sex and smoking.
They’d bring in a cop to do an hour-long presentation on drugs and alcohol, and he’d show photos of car crashes and horrific livers from people who died of cirrhosis. Then they’d have a doctor talk about the risks of smoking. Then a nurse would get up and try to scare the living s**t out of you about the dangers of sex.
It was all very 1980s “This is your brain, this is your brain on drugs” scare tactics. I say 1980s, but sometimes I wonder if that still isn’t the American way for many people. Personally—and this is just me—I think I may have benefited from a more realistic conversation about safely being around those things, versus “run like your ass is on fire” if somebody lights up a joint near you. As a parent myself now, I see the way my kids react when they hear you should never do something—they want to do it twice that afternoon.
But back to my fifth-grade self. I remember vividly one of those all-day sessions of relentless terrifying photos of tar lungs and pregnant 12-year-olds. I sat beside two elementary school friends of mine, and by the end, we all had eyes bulging out of our heads in fear. As we walked out of the gym, I remember a conversation that went something like:
Me: “Guys… let’s never drink or do drugs.”
Friend 1: “Yeah, that looks terrible.”
Friend 2: “And I am never smoking a cigarette in my entire life.”
Me: “And oh my god… sex is so disgusting. I’m never doing anything like that.”
At the end, I remember we did a pinky promise for all of it. None of us would ever smoke cigarettes, do drugs, drink alcohol or have sex.
Uh… I think all three of us have been to rehab. Stunner, but that session wasn’t a sustainable deterrent for any of us.
In all seriousness, would better education have helped? Probably not. I don’t really think it would have mattered what kind of lessons I had gotten on those topics. I was going to have issues with all of them, and I did.
My fifth-grade self would be horrified!
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
A wealthy CEO was slumped in his chair after a five-martini lunch when his phone rang. Answering it, his assistant said, "Sorry, Mr. Jones is unavailable right now. He's out from lunch."
(Credit: AA Grapevine, February 2005)
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