Bastille Day

I'm not French. I know next to nothing about French history. Yet every year for the last 32 years I celebrate the now 219 year old French holiday, Bastille Day.

Bastille Day commemorates the storming of the French Prison, which not only held prisoners indicted by the crown for un-appealable offenses, but also was used as an armory. The holiday commemorates what the French believe was the start of the modern French Republic. Kind of like our Boston Tea Party.

Bastille Day coincides with my own day of liberation from the prison of addiction. Thirty-two years ago today I decided I needed to stop drinking. I was a daily drunk at that point. Not working. Unable to work, because of my drinking. Living once again in the nightmare of round the clock intoxication and unmanageability. I had been there before and I knew the scenery well. I never slept the night of the 13th. I drank and drank and drank all day and night and couldn't get drunk enough to forget that what I was doing was futile and that if I kept doing it I was going to relive my past and probably not survive it this time.

I couldn't sleep. I just sat in the home of my most recent drinking buddies, until it was a reasonable time (9 AM) and I could call my friend Betty. Betty was the mother of a friend of mine. Her son Vito and I had been through drug rehab together and Betty and I had also become friends. There was an Italian connection there. Betty was a sober alcoholic. She had been sober about 5 years at the time.

I called Betty and went to her house and told her I needed to get sober. I stayed with her for the first 3 days of my sobriety. I basically detoxed in her home.

Betty took me to my first AA meeting. She told me I never had to have a first day again. She talked to me for hours on end while I couldn't sleep. She refrained from laughing at me when I read the 12 steps and said arrogantly, "I've done all these." She invited her sober friends to her house and we had an AA meeting sitting around her kitchen table. She fed me. Gave me a bed to sleep in, and kept bringing me to meetings. Thanks Betty! If not for you, I'm not so sure I would have been able to get sober 32 years ago. She always told me to just pass it on.

Thirty-two years is a long time to not do something. Because of Betty, the people she introduced me to, and the things I heard in AA meeting rooms ("the rooms"), I know that just because I haven't had a drink in 32 years doesn't mean that I am not an alcoholic anymore. It just means I don't live like an active alcoholic anymore.

It was only last week when the thought of sitting and drinking some wine crossed my mind. It was a month ago, prompted by something I read, that I wondered what it would be like to do LSD now, knowing what I know, and being of sounder mind than I was 40 years ago when I first start doing acid. The thoughts still arise to drink, to smoke pot, to taste heroin or utilize meth to pump up my energy level. They arise and they get batted away almost involuntarily like swatting a mosquito biting my arm or a fly buzzing about my head.

But the thoughts still arise. They always will. A cold beer on a hot day, or at the ballgame, will always be appealing. Because of that I remain diligent in my adherence to practices I learned in early sobriety. No eating food cooked with alcohol. No using mouth wash with alcohol, or tooth paste with alcohol, or other ingestible products made with alcohol. I do no recreational anesthetizing, no matter how good the thought of that may be at times. No erosion of the practices I established to get sober. That has been my commitment.

So today I celebrate another 365 24-hour periods of continuous sobriety. I celebrate silently all day long. I pat myself on the back for a job well done, again, this day, the only day that I have to make my continued sobriety a reality. I'll feel good about it all damn day.