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At a meeting the other night, we read Bill W’s story from the Big Book. At one point, he mentions that one of his worries about quitting drinking was that he would lose his creativity.
That always connected with me, and other people always mention it connecting with them, too. I like to think I am a creative person, and as a writer, I need to have a steady stream of ideas. When I was in active addiction, I really did believe that it loosened me up and let the creative floodgates open up.
The problem is, I never could drink one or two or even three drinks and have the creative juices flow. I’d drink 15 beers and take a bunch of pills, and the only juices flowing came from me barfing into a toilet.
One of the scariest things that convinced me I needed to go to rehab is that I started to black out a lot toward the end of my drinking and drugging in 2008. For 10 years, I was a very heavy drinker who somehow managed to stop just an inch short of having many blackouts. But over the final six months, I was forgetting entire evenings.
Which brings me to a very funny story in the fall of 2008.
At that time, I had just gotten a Blackberry—yep, remember those?—and could now check emails and send emails even after I left the office. Well, one morning after a blackout, I woke up and found an email I had sent to myself. It said one word: “smilk.”
I remember thinking, “What the hell is smilk? What does this email mean?”
I thought about it for an hour or two, but I couldn’t retrieve the information from my own brain. Eventually I shrugged my shoulders and moved on for the day. But it was so weird to have had a thought, typed it into an email six hours earlier, and now have no recollection or understanding of it.
So the next day, I of course started popping pills around lunch time, then put together my usual cocktail later that night of beer and Ambien. I again blacked out, and I again emailed myself. And the email solved the smilk mystery.
The followup email was from the night before, from during another blackout, and it explained what smilk was. I had apparently decided that people love Smores, and they also love milk. What if we combined them into Smores-flavored milk?
SMILK!
Listen, most of my creativity from drunken stupors was dangerous and dumb and impulsive. It involved drinking more than I should, trying new concoctions of drugs with my alcohol that could have killed me, driving when I shouldn’t, and 1,000 other absolutely embarrassing ideas.
But I am going to stand up for smilk till the day I die. I swear people would buy it… well, they’d buy it once. I think it would be pretty disgusting, in reality, but I bet we’d sell $1 billion worth of it before people realized it was grotesque!
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 beginner was asked what had been his favorite drink. "Brother," he said, “I didn't have any favorite drink. I'd drink anything that was too thin to chew!"
(Credit: AA Grapevine, February 1949)
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