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LOL Sober
Hosted by Nelson H. · EN
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Sober TV review: Euphoria, Season 3 finale
Yesterday00:13:12Tap to summarizeIf you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces but I am hoping to generate a few bucks to pay for my web site and some other costs. Paid subscribers do have access to frequent premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!Two quick warnings before I get cooking.First of all, if you don’t watch Euphoria, I think you might still get something out of this newsletter entry.Secondly, there will be spoilers about the finale of season 3 of Euphoria. So if you haven’t seen it, maybe come back later.I generally have liked the show Euphoria, though it is one of those shows about young people that I constantly wonder if I should be watching. The show has an incredible amount of violence, sex, money and drug/alcohol use.The substance abuse stuff is why I ultimately stuck with the show, because the Rue character, played by Zendaya, has had an interesting journey with sobriety. In fact, I think the best episode of Euphoria is actually a one-off episode featuring her and her sponsor sitting at a diner for an hour talking about sobriety.So I kept watching the show through all eight episodes of Season 3, but it was a tough watch. I won’t entirely review the show as a TV critic would, but I will say that I gave it a C+. Some of the actors from the show have become big stars (Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney and Jacob Elordi are all A-list movie stars these days) and you could tell it was damn near impossible to get them all on set for a TV show. So there were lots of strange scenes that screamed that they couldn’t book the people together.Also, I’m no prude, but the story spent a lot of time being overly sleazy, with characters we don’t know doing pretty grotesque behavior. Normally I don’t mind that—I’m certainly not squeamish about most stuff I see on TV or in movies. But I felt like the showrunner and brains of the whole Euphoria operation, Sam Levinson, was just poking fun at the criticism of him over the years, which is that he really enjoys pushing boundaries just for the sake of pushing them.Levinson is an interesting storyteller. He has been clean and sober for 10-plus years, and he says his recovery journey has informed his storytelling. I have to be honest—I don’t love the ideas he injects into the show about recovery, and I had a serious feeling of discomfort about what he was trying to say in the finale episode.A big spoiler: He kills off Rue halfway through the episode. She is supplied with drugs that are laced with fentanyl, and she dies on the couch of her sponsor, Ali. Ali is heartbroken. He keeps a notebook of all the people he has known who have died from drugs and alcohol, and it is a longgg diary of death. When that notebook was introduced earlier in the season, I immediately had skepticism about it, because this guy seems must have sponsored half of California to end up having that many sponsees who don’t make it. I guess that’s possible if you have been in an area of heavy drug use for a long period of time?Anyway, Ali is broken by Rue’s death. He relapses and goes to a 12-step meeting, where he announces he is done with meetings. Then he goes home and saws off a shotgun. He takes that gun to a strip club where Rue had worked as a manager and he starts a shootout with the owner of the club who had supplied her with the opioids that killed her.Honestly, I didn’t love any of that. I’m not sure what Sam Levinson wanted us to feel about recovery there. He constantly talks about how sobriety has been perhaps the most fundamental part of him turning his life around, and yet he puts this show out? That was confusing to me, especially since Euphoria’s audience is predominately young adults and high school kids. That might be their first exposure to addiction and recovery, and it isn’t exactly a love letter.I could go on and on about that topic, but I’ll leave it there. I would encourage anybody—even if you don’t watch Euphoria—to check out the episode called “Trouble Don’t Last Always.” It’s a 64-minute episode of Zendaya sitting at a booth with her sponsor, played by Colman Domingo. It’s two awesome actors riffing on life, especially addiction, pain and sobriety. I thought it was a beautiful bottle episode that captures the essence of what we gain in sobriety—and what we have to lose. I wish that concept had made it to the end of the the series, rather than been left behind in that episode.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:Back in the old wild west, a man was riding from Monterey to Salinas when he encountered a drunk lying in the road. The guy had an empty whiskey bottle beside him and his ear to the ground.“What is it?” asked the traveler.“Fifteen wagons, sixty horses, seventeen women, twenty-four men, five dogs, and a donkey,” replied the drunk.“That’s incredible!” exclaimed the rancher. “You know all that just by listening to the ground?”“No,” replied the drunk. “They ran over me about an hour ago.”(Credit: AA Grapevine, November 2002, Ron L. from El Cajon, California)Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe
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Materialism is part of my -isms
2w ago00:11:30Tap to summarizeIf you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces but I am hoping to generate a few bucks to pay for my web site and some other costs. Paid subscribers do have access to frequent premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!I saw an unbelievable statistic recently about kids. I’m including it in the written version of this newsletter.It’s a survey question that goes back 50 years, asking 12th graders if they think it is important in life to have “lots of money.”The graph shows that a majority of boys has always answered yes, ranging from 55% in the 1970s to 74% now. That number was 36% for girls in the 1970s, and now it is 75%. So a large uptick across gender of high school seniors saying that it is very important to have lots of money.Before I get to why I am writing about this on a sober blog, let me say a few general things.One is that I always take these surveys with a grain of salt. It’s a regular occurrence these days for people to overreact to generational data based on the numbers themselves, without any context for why different generations might be more or less comfortable answering the way that they did. By that, I mean, it’s possible that in 1970s, before the “Greed is good” 1980s, the same number of high school seniors might have wanted to have lots of money but felt like they couldn’t say that out loud. I certainly think that’s a factor—the idea of being rich has never been more acceptable, so it wouldn’t surprise me if verbalizing that desire isn’t frowned upon like it might have been in 1975.There is a sobriety element to that, which is that I bet surveys taken these days would find more people admitting to drug and alcohol addiction over the years. Is that because there are more alcoholics and addicts in the world now? Or that it is more socially acceptable to admit it? I honestly don’t know the answer but I do think social acceptance is a factor.The second thing I always try to remember is that it is easy to find haunting statistics about today’s youth… but the opposite is true, too. There is data showing teen pregnancy, illiteracy rates and drug and alcohol use among young people are at all-time lows, too. So if they don’t drink, do drugs or get pregnant, but worship material things more, it’s really hard to decide what hot take I should land on. So I ultimately choose to believe that the next generation will probably be fine.OK, now let me talk about the addiction angle of this. Which is: I think a lot of my alcoholism involved alcohol, but also lots of other things that make up the -ism part of that word. That’s a long way of saying that my addiction is a disease of more: more drugs, more alcohol, more food, more money, more Amazon purchases, more everything. If it feels good, do it—repeatedly.I do a pretty good job when it comes to what I would define as materialism. I don’t particularly care if I have a lot of stuff, which you can see by my wardrobe. I’m not very good with money, and I tend to operate as though as long as I can pay my bills, that’s plenty.But man, I do fantasize sometimes about being rich, and I have definitely coveted other stuff over the years. So that is definitely part of my addictive nature. Because of my 10th-grader-level expertise in financial planning, I do end up worrying about money quite a bit. I wouldn’t say it deeply affects my spiritual condition, but there are nights when I am using duct tape and bubble gum to cobble together a financial plan for the next few days or weeks. I definitely have some gray hairs from it, so I do think it’d be nice to just write checks and know there is plenty of money in the account to cover everything. Or to go to sleep knowing that my kids’ college funds are fully set up and ready to pay for everything. So I can’t really get too up-in-arms about young people answering that they would like to have lots of money. In fact, if I got asked that and answered honestly, I think the answer would be yes? I think if someone said no, I might wonder about their sanity!Another thing that comes to mind is that I tend to define materialism a little more broadly as I get older. I used to only think of materialism as relating to having lots of stuff. But I also now include the idea of caring too much about the stuff you have, in addition to caring too much about having lots of stuff. I had this happen a few years ago where a flood ruined some of my giant baseball card collection that I had kept since I was a kid.I hadn’t looked at the cards in years. The cards had very little value. But I wanted to keep them, and I was sad that a few thousand cards got ruined. I ended up calling my collection “my priceless, worthless baseball cards” because they meant so much to me and nothing to anybody else. I came to realize that my valuing of them was a little out of whack, but that I felt ok that stuff means something to me. I don’t want to go the other way and just decide all possessions are pointless and go join a commune that lives in the woods. I just want to try to have the right amount of appreciation for material things.So the moral of this story is, keep your freaking hands off my baseball card collection, and maybe I wouldn’t mind having lots of money, either!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:Fed up with her husband’s coming home drunk every night, late one evening a wife drove her husband up the mountain to an overlook where they could see the local liquor factory in full swing below. Lights were flashing, machines were roaring, and trucks were pulling in and out.“See?” the wife said. “They can make it faster than you can drink it.”“Yes,” he replied. “But you have to admit, I’ve got ‘em working nights.”(Credit: AA Grapevine, October 2002, Donny B. from Wurtsboro, New York)Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe
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The equipment wipedown paradox
3w ago00:11:30Tap to summarizeIf you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces but I am hoping to generate a few bucks to pay for my web site and some other costs. Paid subscribers do have access to frequent premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!At my gym, the manager recently put up signs encouraging people to wipe down equipment after use. And for a year or so, I did. I’d say half the gym sprayed down and wiped off equipment and half didn’t.I found myself wrestling with a bunch of issues. First of all, if half the gym wipes stuff down and half doesn’t, what is the point? The policy doesn’t seem to be working. Secondly, I don’t really sweat when I am there, so what am I wiping away? Just any molecules I leave behind? If that’s the case, shouldn’t I be scrubbing down the door handles, the bench I sit on, the bathroom sink, everything?Thirdly, I don’t love squirting chemicals all over paper towels that leak that fluid onto my hands. I go to the gym every day, so if that happens five times every day, that seems like a lot of cleaning fluids on a person’s hands. That’s not great.Last but certainly not least, I hated seeing the trash cans overflowing with paper towels all day. On a regular basis, I or someone else would have to put a foot in the trash cans and squish the mound of paper towels down. I just felt like it was so wasteful.What ended up happening for me is that I had two strong principles colliding: the wastefulness of the piles of paper towels, and the desire to try to follow rules. I’m not someone who likes to color within any lines told to him, so recovery has been quite an adventure in learning to respect all rules placed in front of me, rather than ignoring the ones that I think are dumb or for other people, not me.I’m writing about gym paper towel usage because it got me thinking about how often principles are at odds with each other. My silly paper towel scenario, for one. But I also thought of how most of us have ambition in the workplace, and yet also try to exhibit humility as much as possible. So what happens when you go for a promotion and have to hype yourself up? It’s not like you can interview for a job and say, “I’m just a bozo on the bus, so it’s fine if I don’t get it. Give it to whoever you want.” No way. Shoot your shot. Try to get the job and be humble after you get it.This happens to lots of us in recovery when we see good friends sliding toward a relapse. On one hand, I always feel the pull to let somebody know I think they are slipping away from recovery. On the other hand, I’m a strong believer that people change when they want to change, not when someone else thinks they should. I have yet to grab somebody and shake them and see it have much of an impact.In that scenario, I always fall back on a few tools. One is to pray—just put it out there into the universe and see what comes back. Another is to ask a fellow sober person about what they would do. The key is, I am not the person floating an idea, evaluating that idea and then executing that idea. That process is too streamlined! I need to welcome in help.I guess my main takeaway of what to do when principles collide is to treat it like a math equation. What is the principle that matters the most to you? And once you determine that, be sure that by choosing that principle, you acknowledge that this is a one-time special exemption.In the case of the gym paper towels, I have decided that I will not be spraying down the equipment that I use unless I feel like I am sweaty or gross. I just value the wastefulness a little more than the rule following in this situation. But I am also making sure that this is not the beginning of a new era of me deciding which rules matter and which don’t. They all matter and should be followed except in special circumstances… like when my bicep curls and dumbbell press are killing lots of trees every year!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:HEARD AT MEETINGS: “As a kid, they called me ‘Half Pint.’ As an adult, they called me ‘Full Quart.’”(Credit: AA Grapevine, October 2002, Richard L. from New Westminster, British Columbia)Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe
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We all need a backstop
4w ago00:04:07Tap to summarizeIf you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces but I am hoping to generate a few bucks to pay for my web site and some other costs. Paid subscribers do have access to frequent premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!When I was a kid, I did a lot of baseball pitching. And I will never forget the feeling of a few times when I played at rural fields where the other team didn’t have a backstop. You could throw a curveball in the dirt and the ball would skip past the catcher and keep rolling and rolling until it stopped. It was terrifying, because you felt like you had no wiggle room.I mention that because I have been in a cycle recently where I got to meetings on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, then have had other commitments on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. I would say that four meetings per week is a pretty good rate, especially for somebody with long-term sobriety.However, I found the frequency matters—as in, I do better when I get to a meeting every other day than if I hit a meeting every day for five days straight, then take five days off. By day three or so, I start to feel a spiritual slide.In my case, that hasn’t meant that I ever came close to a relapse. But I just slip a little on the spirituality scale, so I find my attitude and behavior to be less than ideal. To complete the obvious metaphor, during that stretch of not making meetings, I feel like I am living life without a backstop, and it’s dicey. In baseball, not having a backstop didn’t mean I would throw one wild pitch and we would lose the game. But it meant that one wild pitch could be extremely damaging, and that the fear and insecurity of not having a backstop easily started creeping into my mind for every single pitch, which absolutely could affect whether we won the game or not. I remember having some spinouts mentally because I felt like I was all alone out there, close to one mistake with nothing to help me.I can’t afford that in sobriety. Without connection to program stuff on a regular, consistent basis, I’m pitching without a backstop, and nobody wants that. Especially me.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:HEARD AT MEETINGS: “When I was drinking, I paid a high price for low living.”Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe
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A few thoughts about pink cloud
Apr 2800:07:21Tap to summarizeIf you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces but I am hoping to generate a few bucks to pay for my web site and some other costs. Paid subscribers do have access to frequent premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!What does the phrase “pink cloud” mean to you?I ask because I have been rethinking it a bit recently. The way I used to think of it was as a general time period in early sobriety when you feel naturally high about being off drugs. Recovery is exciting, and you feel like there are no limits to a sober life.But under that definition, I always thought of it as coming to an end, too. That life can’t just be a big, long pink cloud. That certainly was my experience. The electricity of early recovery began to wear off for me and life went back to normal, whatever normal even means any more.So in my head, I always framed pink cloud as something short and sweet that will end and turn into something that is more of a grind—chopping wood and carrying water, as they say.But I recently spent some time around newcomers who were either in the middle of pink cloud or coming out of it, and then I also was around some people with longterm sobriety of 10-plus years. I was struck by a few things that made me contemplate my own definition of pink cloud.First of all, I enjoyed hearing about the newcomers’ excitement around early recovery. Those days are awesome—I wish you could bottle up that feeling and sell it. There is an optimism about the future and a relentlessness to be better than the past that I don’t always feel in my sobriety these days. People see a whole new world when they are off the sauce and getting acclimated to the world. It’s a beautiful thing to see.Secondly, I thought about why that pink cloud feeling even happened for me. A big part of it was just escaping the physical misery of that first week without drugs and alcohol. I had headaches, body aches, terrible sleep and no appetite. I wanted to sleep all day but couldn’t sleep, and I had the worst case of restless leg syndrome in the history of humanity. It was miserable, but I was able to gut it out. To this day, I try to always have empathy for people who can’t get through that first week, because I get it. I still laugh about how the worst hangover feeling I have ever had was when I tried to stop drinking and drugging!Lastly, I think I am done framing pink cloud as something that comes at the beginning of sobriety and disappears. It doesn’t have to be that way. Those long-term sober people I mentioned seem very happy to me, with plenty of pink cloud moments in their lives. I find that when I do the right things in recovery—which is a lot of work, admittedly—then I still experience stretches of pure bliss. Just this past week, I had an awesome lunch with two of my kids, one daughter won the science fair, another daughter got into the college of her choice, I had a work accomplishment that I was proud of and my wife and I talked about celebrating our wedding anniversary, rather than completely forgetting it until the day of. I don’t know that I would describe that as nonstop euphoria, but it was pretty damn great. So I’d say pink cloud is still available—as long as I am willing to float toward it!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:How many AAs does it take to change a lightbulb?Three. One to make the coffee, one to chair, and one to guide it through the Steps so it can learn to change itself.(Credit: AA Grapevine, September 2002, John S.)Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe
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Knowledge vs. wisdom
Apr 2300:04:33Tap to summarizeIf you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces but I am hoping to generate a few bucks to pay for my web site and some other costs. Paid subscribers do have access to frequent premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!At a meeting last week, a guy said his sponsor once told him that “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing that a tomato doesn’t belong in a fruit salad.”Everybody laughed, including me, but wow, what a profound phrase. I run into the conflict between those two things on a regular basis, and I see it a lot in other sober people, too.One of the biggest potholes to my sobriety journey has been thinking I have enough knowledge to wage this battle on my own. I don’t. In fact, I’m not sure there is an amount of knowledge that will ever be enough to self-treat my addictions. I’ve read the key pieces of sober literature at least 25 times each at this point. I don’t know every word by heart, but I have explored every syllable of the major pieces of literature repeatedly, so my knowledge is quite good.It’s not enough. I actually think incredible knowledge of sobriety can be a huge hinderance, because I think knowledge doesn’t ultimately lead to wisdom. I get wisdom from other sober people, and being connected to them. That’s why I think so many people didn’t love Zoom meetings as much as in-person meetings (brief aside: some people love Zoom meetings, and I believe Zoom meetings probably saved thousands of lives during the pandemic. So you will not hear any shade from me toward Zoom meetings. If they help you, that is awesome!). There’s something about reading about living a sober life and then seeing it in action, up close and personal, at meetings and get-togethers with people in recovery. If I really want to live the life that I think I do, I need to see it in action.I’m a huge sports fan, so I see it play out on TV all the time. A guy knows the playbook really well, but then can’t execute the play or the run or the throw at gametime. That kind of thing requires knowledge and wisdom… and so does my sobriety.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:Q: What’s the difference between a recovering alcoholic and an active one?A: The recovering alcoholic says, “Halfway through the meeting, I passed the basket.” The active alcoholic says, “Half in the basket, I passed the meeting.”(Credit: AA Grapevine, August 2002, Penny D. from Melbourne, Florida)Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe
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The two branches concept
Apr 1700:07:12Tap to summarizeIf you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces but I am hoping to generate a few bucks to pay for my web site and some other costs. Paid subscribers do have access to frequent premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!We recently had to have a tree service company come out and look at the giant tree in our front yard. We were pretty sure that the tree was going to have to be cut down because of all the branches that have been falling in the yard and, frankly, it looked like it was dying.To our surprise, the estimator came in and said the tree was actually quite healthy. “Somebody loved that tree a lot,” he said.My wife and I looked at each other like, “Uh, ok, what exactly does that mean?”He took us out into the front yard and pulled out a little red laser pointer. He shone the light on the bottom of the tree and worked his way up to about 25 feet into the tree, to an open space between the two huge halves of the tree. It splits into two about 10 feet off the ground, then those two halves of the tree go another 100 feet or so into the sky. It looks a little like a humongous wish bone with leaves.He said, “Look right there, at the wire connecting the two halves.”We stared up and noticed something we had missed for years—sure enough, there was a heavy-duty wire that looped around the two parts of the tree, like a 30-foot rubber band.The tree service guy proceeded to explain to us that that sort of wire can be placed around a tree that is splintering so that it can continue to grow separately but never drift too far apart. “It allows the tree to chart its own path but never split to an unmanageable distance,” he said.I really felt a gut punch in that moment, because I couldn’t help but think about so many relationships in my life—in all of our lives, really. We all move on from high school and move out from our parents’ houses, so we suddenly have distance between family and friends. Then many of us go on to college and make new friends in a new place. Then we move on from there. And on and on and on, for the rest of our lives, getting close and then moving away.For someone like me, that also includes adding in addiction, which wedges even more distance between people. In my case, I lived in the same freaking house as my wife and kids and still managed to have a lot of distance between us. So it isn’t just geographic distance.But sobriety provided me with that wire, and I am now responsible for maintaining that distance. I used to worry that by abruptly deciding I had to overhaul my life, that would shoot me off in one direction and I would be headed away from my loved ones. And that fear is real—there were lots of behaviors that I had to clean up, and there were so many people in my life who had adjusted their lives to accommodate and love that version of me.Realizing that it was okay for me to branch off and still love all those people has been a revelation for me. We all grow in different directions, sobriety or otherwise, and it has to be a significant goal of mine every day to keep us growing in unison, even if we are not growing exactly the same.A few weeks after that conversation, I was still thinking about it when the tree trimmers arrived. They proceeded to trim off a bunch of branches and reinforce the wire. Since then, I have noticed that the tree seems healthier, losing very few branches after a storm or windy day. And I also can’t help but look up once a week and find that wire because it helps me remember that it’s ok to grow apart from each other as long as it’s not away from each other.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:HEARD AT MEETINGS: “The closest I ever got to a 4.0 in college was my blood/alcohol level.”(Credit: AA Grapevine, July 2002, Dave S. from Ithaca, New York)Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe
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A few thoughts about Tiger Woods
Apr 1000:14:27Tap to summarizeIf you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces but I am hoping to generate a few bucks to pay for my web site and some other costs. Paid subscribers do have access to frequent premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!I have been getting asked quite a bit for my thoughts on Tiger Woods, which any sober person can tell you is a common thing when a famous person gets into trouble and drugs and alcohol are involved.As usual, I would say the same basic thing that I do about all people who might or might not have drug or alcohol issues: I don’t know. I don’t know if anybody else is an addict or alcoholic. I don’t know if they need help. I don’t know if they drink or drug because they were treated like crap as a kid, or if nobody paid attention to them when they were in high school, or any other reason why anybody becomes an addict. Hell, I’m not sure how or why I became an alcoholic. How am I going to assess somebody else’s addiction issues?OK, now that I am done clearing my throat, a few thoughts:—I was sad when I heard the news that he had rolled his car and gotten arrested for a DUI. It seems like most of my recovery friends felt the same way, and most of my non-addict friends were more fired up that he continues to drive after multiple accidents related to intoxication. “Why doesn’t he just hire a driver?” is something I heard a lot. That’s a fair question. Anybody who is rolling cars every few years ought to be getting asked about not driving any more, with or without substances possibly being involved. And yes, Tiger Woods is wealthy enough that he could have 10 cars waiting for him outside any time he goes somewhere, and then he could pick the shiny red car or the silver SUV or the tour bus that he rented out and get a ride home however he wants.The reason I felt sad, though, is just because I ache when I hear about somebody who might have addiction issues. Again, I say might—I have no idea what his drug and alcohol intake is. But if there is a chance somebody feels like I used to feel every day, my heart hurts a little bit. I definitely transition to the “get a driver, dude!” stage a little later in a case like this. But my first reaction is a pang in my gut about the suffering that someone might be going through.—Pain is a motherfucker. During his recent arrest, Tiger Woods brought up a crazy amount of medical procedures he has had on his body over the years, and it reminded me of how pain can be a crushing force on people.When we talk about our paths to addiction, many people talk about past trauma, and rightly so. Other people say their parents were alcoholics, and their parents’ parents were alcoholics, so it’s in their genes. But I always try to mention chronic pain as one key factor in my life—as someone who had multiple amputation procedures on his feet over the years, painkillers and other substances were actually necessary. I, of course, got out of control with them. But they were put in my world by a doctor, not at a rave by a frat guy with a pillbox in his man-purse. And while I don’t meet a lot of fellow alcoholics and addicts who had all 10 toes amputated, I have met many sober people who have said the biggest hurdle in their recovery was when they had a back surgery or their appendix removed—unmanageable pain can be a very sneaky, dangerous trigger.—Another question I have been asked this past week: Do you think Tiger Woods picked the right kind of treatment plan? He announced in a very vague statement that he is going overseas to get help, and I didn’t see any direct mention what kind of treatment he was actually seeking.Long answer short: I have no idea. I’ve always had personal opinions about what works best for someone who wants to get sober, and I have no evidence whatsoever to base that on, and I am almost never right about other peoples’ recovery. It’s a strange part of longterm sobriety, where you see people come in who need rehab but don’t go… then they get sober. Or where you see people who you think are doing everything right, and they can’t make it three months without a relapse. There is no real rhyme or reason to so many peoples’ path.That said, I made a decision when I went to rehab that I wanted to go to a place that was decent, but not too nice. I didn’t want to be horseback riding on a beach for a month, or doing yoga with baby goats at a mountain resort. I wanted something with a little grime on the chairs so that I could get help but from a place I didn’t want to come back to.I found the perfect place in New Jersey and joined an intensive outpatient program there. In retrospect, I wish I had just checked myself into the hospital part and been locked away for a month or two. But that’s not what happened, and I have been sober since 2008 with no relapses. So even with my own recovery, I can’t say for sure. What if I had been put in that same hospital’s lockdown facility, hated it and left after four days? Maybe I’m dead right now.So you never know, even with your own recovery! I certainly don’t know what Tiger Woods should or should not be doing. But I will leave you with this: Even with our most troubled people with addiction issues, I am rooting for them. The world is a better place without people living in active addiction.(But yeah, maybe get a driver?)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:“Now that I’m sober, I no longer wake up in the morning, roll over and introduce myself.”(Credit: AA Grapevine, June 2002, Anonymous)Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe
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Not the outdoor type
Apr 100:06:52Tap to summarizeIf you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces but I am hoping to generate a few bucks to pay for my web site and some other costs. Paid subscribers do have access to frequent premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!When I was a freshman in college, I was just getting started on a drinking problem. I wouldn’t drink every night, but I wanted to. And I also wanted a girlfriend.I met a fellow freshman who I really liked. She seemed lukewarm on me, but I kept inviting her to parties and she kept coming. At one point, I thought maybe I had worn her down enough to officially be considered boyfriend-girlfriend. And a big part of that was because we shared a mutual love of camping and the outdoors.Just kidding. I hated the outdoors. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania but I never quite enjoyed nature like so many friends of mine. I didn’t love hunting or fishing, even though I had done quite a bit of both. And I would have rather slept in the laundry room at a Holiday Inn Express than outside in the nicest tent on earth. It just wasn’t for me.But my potential girlfriend—we’ll call her Debbie—loved hiking. Loved looking at birds and trees and mountains. She practiced building fires and I practiced lighting cigarettes. It wasn’t a good match. And yet I completely pretended that I was Mr. Bass Pro Shops.I bring this up on an addiction newsletter because I found phoniness to be a telltale sign that I was searching for something that was impossible to attain—I wanted something to fill the void in me, even a potential girlfriend who I had nothing in common with. I had all sorts of dating partners like that in my early days, where I just tried to immediately turn myself into something I wasn’t so that maybe they’d like me. That is dangerous territory for an aspiring alcoholic, because it’s the starter kit for living a life of lies.In this case, I was trying to date Debbie when a new Lemonheads album came out. The Lemonheads were a great alternative rock band in the 1990s that I always enjoyed, and their new album had a song called “The Outdoor Type.” It was like they were singing the song to me. It was a cover of a song released a few years earlier, about an indoorsman who was pretending to be the outdoor type to date someone.Let’s just say that freaked me out. I couldn’t believe someone had me pegged like that—the song was the perfect encapsulation of searching so hard for fulfillment from another person that you become a total fake.I think about it now, at age 48, and how there is a certain amount of phoniness involved in the dating scene, no matter who you are. Everybody wears nicer clothes and makes sure their hair looks ok and they don’t have s**t stuck in their teeth if they are early on in the dating process. That’s pretty normal. But I think I would never dream of pretending to be a camping super-fan just to get somebody to like me any more.I consider that a gift of sobriety—it took me a long time to figure out who I was, then how to live as that person, not the person that I think somebody else wants me to be. So I don’t think I ever want to go back to pretending that keg stands in the woods is my absolute favorite thing in the world!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:The speaker was going on and on. A man in the fifth row stood up and walked out. As the speaker was winding up, the man returned. After the meeting, the speaker asked the man where he went.“I went for a haircut,” he said.“A haircut? Why didn’t you get a haircut before the meeting started?”The man replied, “I didn’t need a haircut before the meeting started.”(Credit: AA Grapevine, June 2002, Jay C.)Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe
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A picture is worth a thousand breaths
Mar 2600:06:16Tap to summarizeIf you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces but I am hoping to generate a few bucks to pay for my web site and some other costs. Paid subscribers do have access to frequent premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!I was at the gym recently for about two hours, and for the first 90 minutes or so, I watched the end of an action movie, then several MMA fights and then a news show, which primarily focused on the war in Iran.Then I went to the treadmill and climbed on to get in a run. I found myself a little jittery, and was hoping to run off whatever kind of bad energy I was feeling. I put on a TV show on my phone but then I thought, maybe I will run for a bit with no music, no TV, no cage fighting. Maybe the silence would be good for me.So I did that, and it was fine. Then I glanced at the treadmill screen in front of me, and there was a stock image of a small creek running down through the woods. It was a blurry image, meant to just be the throwaway backdrop picture as you type in the speed and incline of your walk or run.But I found myself staring at that image and feeling calm. I zoomed in my eyes on the water, and the rocks, and the greenness of the vegetation surrounding it. Next thing you know, I looked up and 10 minutes have gone by and I found myself much more peaceful.So what is that about, exactly? Well, I don’t know, for sure, but my opinion is that with me, I swallow imagery and sounds all day that are fun and fine and entertaining. But they aren’t very nourishing. They don’t really do much for me other than entertain.Let me be very clear: I like to be entertained. And I will not be eliminating fun podcasts so that I can listen to the soothing sounds of a babbling brook, and I will not be glueing a waterfall photo on the inside of my eyelids.But that gym moment did remind me that I will become whatever I consume. If I wake up tomorrow aiming to be a spiritually fit, serene father, husband and neighbor, but then I listen to people scream at each other about the NBA MVP or the top 2028 presidential primary candidates, well, those two things do not add up to serenity. I’ve written in the past about the audio of life, and how our inputs are really never turned off any more—I pour music, podcasts, TV, the news, Instagram reels, whatever, directly into my ears, which then affects my thoughts, which then affect my actions. Those sounds matter.And I would say the same thing about sights—what I look at all day will impact how I look at the people I care about. That means I need to seek out babbling brooks and quiet as much as I do UFC events and football games… though I am now intrigued by the idea of seeing how I would feel if I could merge having sports happen in the woods…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:Hoping to commune with nature, two boozers went on a camping trip. But by nightfall, the mosquitoes were so bad, they retreated into the tent and started drinking. Finally, one poked his head out to see how things were going and saw a swarm of brilliant fireflies.“We’re done for!” he cried to his buddy. “They’re coming after us with flashlights.”(Credit: AA Grapevine, May 2002, Chris B. from Columbia, South Carolina)Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nelsonh.substack.com/subscribe
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