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My wife was talking about an old friend of hers recently, and I didn’t know who she was referring to. Apparently we had used to hang out with her in the early 2000s, and my wife was rattling off facts about her. I had no recollection. Then, she finally said, “Remember she had that horrible hip injury from a car accident and she told all of us about it at dinner one night, and then you started calling her hippy?”
Ugh. Now I remembered her, and I cringed at myself. What a dick.
It brought up two big things for me. One is that I had a lot of relationships like this from during my drinking days, where we would hang out with people at bars and restaurants and I would be blasted the whole time. I’m not sure it would be fair to the other people to call them friends in those situations. Who knows how many other shitty, mean nicknames were handed out?
The second thing is that it reinforces, yet again, the difference between not drinking and drugging any more, and actually growing along spiritual lines. Can you even imagine the person who hears about a terrible hip injury and subsequent surgery and decides, “You know what, I will call you Hippy!”? I don’t want to be that guy any more.
I’ve tried just being me, without any drugs or alcohol but also with zero maturation. I especially had trouble with that when I was doing standup all the time, because standup requires a certain level of loud obnoxiousness and a desire to perform that can seep into your real life. All of a sudden I would find myself at the grocery store busting somebody’s chops and realize that I was doing a roast when nobody asked for that. What it showed me is that I still have that side of me that can be domineering and in-your-face and condescending, and that I don’t really like that side of me. I don’t mind it if I am doing a comedy act for 10-15 minutes in front of a crowd that signed up to attend a place where people get on stage and are rowdy. I just don’t want to turn my office cubicle or the cereal aisle at the grocery store into that stage, too.
I was a happy drunk, so I didn’t get into fistfights all the time. But I definitely turned into Howard Stern and would start goofing on people, asking inappropriate questions, probably some flirting… and I usually did it all in front of my wife. I can’t tell you how many mornings I would wake up and my wife would say, “Man, I wish you wouldn’t ask people about their sex life” or “Why do you have to make fun of people all night?”
I used to wave her off. “What was the big deal?” I thought. “It’s all in good fun.”
Maybe it was fun. I honestly don’t know. People generally didn’t seem to be mad at me the next time I hung out with them, and I didn’t pick up on too many that avoided hanging out with us in the future. But I can say for sure that I would be mortified if I saw myself acting like that now. Even if people are laughing and having a good time, I really try to live a life where I don’t mock people and pick at them and come up with hilarious nicknames about their car accident injuries.
Goddamn, I hate even saying that in retrospect. Arghhhhh… live and learn, right?
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 was driving down the street. He was nervous and anxious because he was due to appear in court, but couldn't find a parking place. Raising his eyes to the heavens, he cried, "God, take pity on me. If you find me a parking place, I will go to church for the rest of my life, I will be kind to my family, and I will give up drinking."
Miraculously, a parking place appeared immediately. The drunk again looked up and said, "Never mind. I found one."
(Credit: AA Grapevine, December 2005, by Dennis H. of Flagstaff, Arizona)
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