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Football season kicked off a few weeks ago, and I found myself more excited than ever. I spent some time contemplating why that might be, and then I got to the recovery part of it: Is that a good thing? Am I addicted to TV in a problematic way?
Because—shocking news here!—I am capable of getting addicted to almost anything that is good. I always love the line, “One is too many and 1,000 is never enough.” I think my favorite recovery joke is the one about how during a meeting, a doctor in a lab coat comes running in and announces that she’d discovered a cure for addiction.
“All you have to do is take this pill once a day!” she tells all the addicts and alcoholics.
Then, in the back of the room, a guy raises his hand and says, “Uh, what happens if you take six of them?”
I mean, that’s me.
One donut is good, five must be better.
One football game is great, how about three days of them.
My wife won $10 of a scratch off lottery ticket. I bet I’d be good at scratch offs, maybe I can win a lot of money doing that!
But back to the sports thing. I love sports. I always have. Before addiction. During addiction. After addiction. Sports is a through line through every chapter of my life.
I love movies and TV shows, too. So I do end up piling up lots of hours of TV, especially during the pandemic. There have been times when I am binging a show or an eight-hour block of sports and I catch myself pushing actual important stuff off to the side. That’s not great, I admit that.
And to answer the why part of it, I definitely think the pandemic played a big role in that. I used to do a lot more stuff outside our house with my family but we’ve slowed down, as has most of the country over the past two years. I’m OK with that part of it.
The tricky thing is, am I relying upon TV to fill a void in me that I could be using a spiritual solution for? That’s key—I can’t replace meetings and working with other sober guys with Better Call Saul and UFC pay-per-views. I can say for sure that that does not work for me, and that does not work for anybody around me. Nobody wants that version of me.
This all came to a head the first week of the NFL season. I found myself very excited for the season to kick off last week, and then I thought the Week 1 games were fantastic and a very fun addition to every day.
The recovery part of my brain fired up to ask, am I leaning on football a little too much? I’m not going to unpack the idea of football as a whole being a dangerous game, with concussions and tremendous toll on the athletes. I wrestle with that, too—should I be watching this sport AT ALL? That’s a fair question and one that I think about quite a bit but I’ll leave that for another time and place.
In this case, I spent some time pondering whether I am starting to make football my higher power. As of right now, my answer is no, I don’t think I am, but I want to be mindful of that.
The thing I try to apply—and would encourage others to do—is to contemplate things through the Step 1 lens. Is it making my life unmanageable? Am I powerless over it?
For me, the answer to both parts of Step 1 right now is no. I do think there is a version of me that can go overboard, staying up all night for West Coast football games and skipping my daughters’ dance recitals or field hockey games the next day to accommodate my desire to watch Utah play Utah State in a meaningless game. I don’t want to do that, and I haven’t been doing that.
So I ultimately landed on this. When there is a good game coming up on Thursday night and I find that popping up in the back of head as a thing I am looking forward to, I am not going to get too crazy beating myself up for that. I didn’t get sober to be miserable. I got sober to live life, love my family, follow through on responsibilities (like work and paying bills on time and being a good friend) and to enjoy some of the things that happen on earth.
So that’s what I am going to do… but geez, I can’t wait for Thursday night.
ALCOHOLIC/ADDICT JOKE OF THE DAY
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 drunk comes to after a blackout and can’t remember a thing about the night before. Terrified that he might have done something awful, he calls a buddy he’d seen before he’d started his heavy hitting, hoping to learn that he’d behaved himself.
The friend’s greeting was cordial. Then he exclaimed, “That was some blackout last night.”
“It sure was,” the drunk admitted. “It really scared me.”
“Did you know the whole northeastern United States, from Ohio to New York, was blacked out?”
“Whew,” says the drunk. “I thought it was just me.”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, November 2003, Steve H., Brewster, NY)
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