A frog in hot water

Before I walked into that fateful AA meeting at the Fremont Fellowship Hall in Seattle, Washington, in early April, 1994, I didn't know it, but I was a frog in a pan of hot water with the heat being turned up so slowly that I didn't notice I was cooking.

I had learned how to control my drinking all right. That was my life, controlling my drinking. If you don't think that is a chemically induced insanity, think again!

My whole life revolved around being able to work to earn the money to pay for drinking and then drinking.

I had learned over the years "how to drink". I'd go to the bar each night and keep repeating a set routine of one drink — usually an Absolut Screw or a Teachers and water — an hour, followed by a bottle of Perrier mineral water, getting a buzz on and maintaining it throughout the evening until around midnight when I would take a cab to wherever I was crashing at the time.

The next morning I would get up, rinse off the booze from the night before — inside and out — and go to work as an independent systems contractor that more than paid for the all too frequent daily cycle called cooking my brain.

I had been doing this for a couple of years after I "fell off the wagon" having gone for a little over three years without a drink. It started slowly but by the fall of 1993 it was becoming an almost nightly ritual. By now I had shed any relationship that might have possibly intervened ... or so I thought ... and abandoned myself to the slow slide into oblivion of the end stages of alcoholism in advancing age. This was the early nineties and I had turned 50 in the late eighties.

I even had a strategy worked out to explain to anyone who asked why I was spending so much time in bars. It was the music. Pioneer Square in Seattle had a shared cover charge for several of its live music nightclubs on Friday and Saturday nights. I got involved in promoting this venue as a sideline ... just enough to show someone who might possibly worry about me what I was planning to do, so they wouldn't think my time spent was strange, but not enough to do anything that would interfere with my drinking. Chemically induced insanity ruled!

I had decided that if there was nothing I could do about my drinking — by now I had failed in staying sober so many times, and totally destroyed any relationship that would have made a difference — then I was going to make the best of being an alcoholic.

Little did I know what was in store for me.

Notes & References:

Forty-two personal stories of recovery from alcoholism can be found in the AA Big Book available online at www.aa.org/bigbookonline/.

The website of Alcoholics Anonymous is www.aa.org

The link to the Big Book of AA is www.aa.org/bigbookonline/

The link to finding AA meetings is www.aa.org/lang/en/meeting_finder.cfm

The above websites are available in English, Español, and Français.