Drunkablog ll

I'm slipping into S.A.D. and this feels morbid, looking back.

I still don't understand A.A.'s promise/wish "We will not regret the past, nor wish to shut the door on it".

I'd forgotten this. Jane is my sister in Nashville, a mother of five, and she was deathly ill.

She needed Mom, and Mom needed me.

That summer, my brother got sick too. In the hospital for ten days, suffering so much he finally forbade us to visit.

What's with all these family emergencies, I wondered.

I was struggling to regain my sobriety while working a cubical job as an applications programmer. Prayed to God to give me the good nature to accompany my mother down there to help with the kids. I didn't want to go, not at all. What good is a dry drunk? No good without a lot of prayer.

So I didn't get the good nature but I went anyway. "I AM". You just learn you better fear god. No problem asking for a better nature but no surprise you don't get it.

During our week there I pilfered some pain pills. Enough to be friendly, enough not to need a drink. Last day there, I was free and spent the night in downtown Nashville with a cell phone, trying to get some old friends out to come see me on a work night. I think I hooked up with a drug dealer, I don't remember. Got back in time to set off for Iowa. Had Mom drive the first few hours. Across the Ohio.

I rented storage space for Resentment, like someone owed me for this. These were the vacation days I felt entitled to that summer. The resentment eventually willed its way out but not with too much destruction. Except I may have stopped praying altogether. Maybe there was a lot of destruction.

On the way home, Mom and I had a blast, just talking and reminiscing. There were scandals in Nashville, close to us, a little too close. It tickled us, escaping.

I just stopped going to work, or stopped in starts and stops. Checked into the third floor and got a dozen roses from my company. I was FMLA, getting rich doing nothing. I remember I found it hard to walk and I thought I was going to need a cane. Feinting spells, where I never fainted. And I lost the job eventually but collected unemployment, which was still more money than I'd ever had.

Then I inherited money, as punishment maybe.

But here I am now four years later and got myself two homes and a job and who knows what else, I don't notice.

I'm no longer rotten to the core.
Grafted to the olive tree but not the roots.
How it goes.