LOL Sober

Acceptance is the answer, no matter how it is spelled

If 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 went to a meeting recently where a guy began his share by saying, “I brought a visual tool today that is the answer to all of your problems.” Then he unfolded a 4-foot banner spelling out the word, “Acceptance.”Just one problem: It was spelled wrong. He had it spelled as “Accept-E-nce.” I noticed it right away and was aggravated by it. Who makes a banner for the meeting, then makes a proclamation about it to 25 other people, and the word is spelled wrong?Well, the joke was on me. I spent the meeting ruminating on the misspelling, and I think at least five people shared and said thank you to the guy for the sign. It turns out, acceptance is the answer, no matter how it is spelled.After the meeting, I was walking to the parking lot with a friend and I pointed out that it was misspelled. The guy I was with chuckled and said he didn’t notice. Then I said something like, “How did you miss that?”He chuckled again and shrugged his shoulders, and just as I was about to open my mouth to marvel at how this guy could have botched the one word he had to print out, something hit me that still makes me smile: I wasn’t accepting of the misspelling of the word acceptance. I was completely distracted by the letters of the sign and was missing the point of the sign. I wasn’t being very accepting, was I?It was a good reminder about acceptance… regardless of how it is spelled!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 newcomer is struggling to get the ketchup out of the jar when the telephone rings. “Would you get that, Jenny?” she asks her 4-year-old.The child eagerly obeys. “It’s your sponsor,” she informs her mom. Then she goes back to the phone.“Mommy can’t talk to you right now. She’s hitting the bottle.”(Credit: AA Grapevine, April 2003, Richard Morris from Golden, Colorado)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

Transcribe →

Addiction is the villain of Game of Thrones

3w ago00:04:54Tap to summarize

If 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 listening to a podcast recently where the hosts discussed who the worst person in the Game of Thrones universe was. That included the older tv show, Game of Thrones itself, but also subsequent parts of the GOT universe like House of the Dragon, which I am currently watching.There were plenty of villain candidates, that’s for sure. But the thing that ultimately jumped out at me was that the true villain of the show ended up not being the White Walker demon zombies or whatever the f**k they were, or Joffrey, or any other actual living thing: It was the throne.The throne was what caused so much anger, death, revenge, lust, moral decay and a slew of other horrific things. Everybody wanted to sit on that throne, in a giant, cold room, more than anything else. They wanted that power, and they usually wanted it because they wanted it, not because they had noble intentions for what to do with it.Now is the throne from Game of Thrones the same as opioid or alcohol addiction? Not really. One is a piece of furniture and the other two are substances that will alter your mind.But the general concept is interesting: I gave away my soul to get drugs and alcohol every day, and I knew I was doing it. I could feel myself sliding all the time. And that’s what happens in Game of Thrones, too. So many of the people who eventually get to sit in the Iron Throne end up with mixed feelings about it.I will also say that I have seen people get sober but become enamored with someone or something powerful, then their addictive self just ends up chasing that the same way they did drugs and alcohol. I’ve seen it with people chasing romantic partners, people chasing job promotions, chasing money, you name it… power can be an addictive thing, too.Thank God I found a rehab and went and got clean. I wish I could go back in time to sit with the Baratheons and Starks and Valyrians and encouraged them all to seek treatment… a few more million fictional people might be alive today!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:After a night of hard drinking, a drunk pulls out his cell phone and calls the police to report a robbery in his car. “They’ve stolen the dashboard, the steering wheel, the brake pedal, even the accelerator!” he cries.But before the police can respond, they get another call, and the same voice comes on the line. “Never mind,” says the drunk. “I got into the back seat by mistake.”(Credit: AA Grapevine, March 2003, Anthony F.)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

Transcribe →

Sober movie review: Obsession

4w ago00:04:58Tap to summarize

If 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 went to see Obsession recently, the remarkable new horror movie from a sketch comedy artist named Curry Barker. He is 26 years old and directed what has become one of the greatest box office success stories ever. Obsession cost about $750,000 to make, and has earned about $425 million at the box office. You don’t need to be an accountant at a drug cartel to realize that is a good return on investment.I’ll summarize the movie without spoiling it. A young dude has strong feelings for a friend of his, and isn’t sure if she feels the same way. He ends up making a wish that she would love him more than anything else in the world.The dream comes true, and it goes horribly awry (though I will say, Obsession is one of the funniest movies I have seen this year, too). She becomes obsessed with him, so every waking moment of every day is devoted to him, and only to him. There are moments when the old version of her sneaks through, but the auto-pilot zombie version of her eventually always take control again.You can probably feel the parallels, right? This lovely young woman has been devoured from the inside by this obsession, and it has turned her into a shell of herself. Every action must support her addiction: him.The part that hit me the hardest was the idea that the good, normal version of her was in there, trying to escape. But a monster had taken over her body, and fighting against it was hopeless.I won’t spoil the ending for you, because I actually thought the ending was quite good. But needless to say, the obsession doesn’t just drift away in the wind—she needs help.I loved the movie. I thought it did a beautiful job, intended or not, of capturing the craving of someone who needs that one thing to fix everything else. I’d give it 3.5 stars out of 4, with my only minor critique being that I think the lead dude is only an okay actor. I actually found him a little grating, otherwise this might be one of the better horror movies I’ve ever seen.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:Two drunks are talking.First drunk: “You want to go for a walk?”Second drunk: “Isn’t it windy?”First drunk: “No, it’s Thursday.”Second drunk: “Me too. Let’s get a beer.”(Credit: AA Grapevine, January 2003, Buck R. from Silver Spring, Maryland)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

Transcribe →

The best time ever to get sober is today

Jul 700:03:50Tap to summarize

If 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!A friend recently told me about an app called Meeting Finder, and like a true alcoholic, he stood beside me and made sure I downloaded it. I’m glad he did.Meeting Finder is amazing. It’s an approved web site, managed by AA, that shows where meetings are. You can be standing any place in the U.S. and if your location is registering, it will feed you meetings within five or 10 miles of where you are.It also has an incredible navigational tool to show you, on the spot, what virtual meetings are happening, too. If you get on there at 6:15 pm or 5:45 a.m., you can find a meeting somewhere on Earth that you could click right into as you stand there holding your phone.How lucky are we? Think about trying to get sober in 1945, or 1965, or even 2005, without the ability to have meetings at your fingertips. I try to remember as much as possible how good we have it as sober people in 2026. There are more meetings than ever, in more places than ever, probably with more sober people than ever, with more ways to get sober than ever and, in my humble opinion, less stigma around addiction than ever before.Now contrast that with the generations before us, and what they went through to get a recovery community on solid ground and break some of the stereotypes about the worth of someone with addiction issues. Lots and lots of alcoholics and addicts walked so that we could run. I can’t imagine informing your work colleagues in 1950 or even 1990 that you have an alcohol or drug problem and need time off to go get treatment. I’m 100 percent sure some workplaces were very kind and accommodating, but I’m also 100 percent sure that some workplaces were not. Compare that with now, when I think the societal and legal norms allow for so many of us to seek treatment and recovery without the same kind of repercussions that our alcoholic ancestors faced.And now, in 2026, a guide to finding a sober community is right there on your phone, updating constantly for real-time information about meetings. What a gift.Thanks for letting me share, and I will be standing behind you now, until you download the Meeting Finder app!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: “A meeting is like an orgy. When it’s over, you feel better, but you’re not sure who to thank.”(Credit: AA Grapevine, December 2002, Roger D. from League City, Texas)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

Transcribe →

A funny thought about God's will

Jun 1600:04:08Tap to summarize

If 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 heard a line at a meeting recently that was very funny… because it’s so true.A guy was sharing about how he’s still learning to live by accepting God’s will for him, which is something that always gets a lot of head nods at meetings. And really, doesn’t that go for just about everybody on the planet, regardless of whether you struggle with addiction? I feel like even normies who don’t have substance abuse issues often struggle with accepting what the universe throws at them. I know I do.Let me define how I think of God’s will. First of all, I have a very vague sense of God, so mine is more about accepting what the world throws at me, versus a spiritual being who is up in the clouds making decisions about hurdles that will appear in front of me in my life. Secondly, I often think about God’s will as, what is the pathway for me that is the best for the world and for me? In other words, I think of it less as a predetermined outcome and more about the choices that I make.This guy shared that he regularly takes back his will, but that God always takes it back—because he’s strong. I laughed about that, because isn’t that so true? How many of us spend large chunks of our lives battling to win a tug-of-war against stuff that is so much bigger than us? It’s impossible to win that battle! And yet, we try.The day after I heard that at a meeting, I went to my daughter’s field day at her elementary school. She’s in fifth grade now, so the kids at her school are grown-ass little people. One of the events was a tug-of-war, where about 10 kids lined up on each side to compete. I was lucky enough to be placed in the middle, where I would ref. I was encouraged to try to keep the competition even, so when one side would get a lead, I wasn’t afraid to yank the rope as discreetly as possible to balance things out.Well, one team lost a few kids in the middle and I didn’t notice. So when I yelled go, the other team pulled the rope and easily started to drag the other side across the line. I tried to help the losing team as nonchalantly as possible so no one noticed I was influencing the outcome, but holy s**t, I started yanking harder and harder and harder… and damn near got dragged across the wet ground. We lost that tug of war, and as I wiped some of the mud and grass off my hands, I couldn’t help but think about what a funny representation that field day event had been for the idea that I cannot successfully win a tug-of-war against the universe, literally or figuratively!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:At 2 a.m., Mike finally vacated the stool he’d been gracing all day and went outside. Leaning against the wall, he contemplated going to a club for a few more, thought better of it, and decided to go home. Spotting a car with a sign on the roof, he hailed it and fell inside. “Take me to Mount Washington,” he mumbled.“I know a short cut,” replied the driver, who proceeded to the nearest police station, where Mike was booked for public intoxication. Looking up, the desk officer remarked, “Did he give you any trouble?”“Not at all,” said the cop who’d delivered him. “He opened the door and climbed right in.”(Credit: AA Grapevine, December 2002, Ken P. from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)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

Transcribe →

Sober TV review: Euphoria, Season 3 finale

Jun 200:13:12Tap to summarize

If 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

Transcribe →

Materialism is part of my -isms

May 2100:11:30Tap to summarize

If 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

Transcribe →

The equipment wipedown paradox

May 1300:11:30Tap to summarize

If 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

Transcribe →

We all need a backstop

May 700:04:07Tap to summarize

If 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

Transcribe →

A few thoughts about pink cloud

Apr 2800:07:21Tap to summarize

If 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

Transcribe →

All episodes

Acceptance is the answer, no matter how it is spelled