Out of Control

A Monday morning—the beginning of a week. I’m 68 and haven’t needed to get up and do a workweek in years, but the habit is ingrained. By the end of this week, I want to have a website, since I’ve found a way to make notebooks faster than Lady can sell them at the Passage. It’s an opportunity, not a problem.

 

The big news is that over the weekend, seven million people got out into the streets and protested Trump and his allies. Trump responded by releasing an AI generated video of him wearing a crown and flying a plane and dumping shit on the protesters.

 

I am so down with this. 

 

I am so ready for this.

 

It may be the sour mood that comes from sitting in a room (as I have just done) of people talking about God. That’s what we do in AA, or rather, it’s what they do. Two years ago, a guy shouted “FUCK YOU” at me after a meeting, during which I had apparently offended him. He offered a formulaic apology; I accepted it politely but gracelessly.

 

I no longer engage with religious people. 

 

I sat in silence while others spoke of their relationship with God. I enjoyed the silences in the meeting more than the shares. I did not hold hands and pray the serenity prayer, which is how we end the meetings.

 

I’m there out of fear, because a “slip” could for me very easily return to the nightmare that brought me into AA in the first place. I stay quiet because I have to: I am in the void, and the void seems to hold nothing. In fact, for me there is anger, confusion, rage, desire, hope, despair—the entire world of emotions, especially the negative ones. I spoke from the void on the day the guy shouted “fuck you” at me, and I learned again what I had forgotten, so immersed was I in exploring the void.

 

I went back to the meeting the next day, because even though I was enraged, I’m still a drunk. My first job—really, my only job—is to get through the day without drinking. I tried to do it without AA—no luck. With AA, I can do it. It costs me nothing to be silent for an hour.

 

And it costs me nothing to admit that nobody wants to hear what I think. In fact, I don’t want to hear what YOU think, though I did it for an hour. It was a bit trickier to admit that maybe I don’t know the truth, and that if I thought I did, that might be a real indication that I was off the beam. There was a book called If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him when I was a kid, and getting into Buddhist meditation. I never read the book, but I wondered about the title. I never knew what it meant, and still don’t. It may be, however, that I’ve been rigorously executing every Buddha I met on the road. The road is, in fact, pretty littered with dead gods.

 

I kill gods, and when I met alcoholism on the road, I was travelling alone. The road littered with gods had led me to a bed perched awkwardly over a bottle of Scotch. The road to sobriety offered me the god of my childhood, since Bill Wilson, the founder of AA, was more than physically a dead ringer for my Uncle Bill. In fact, Uncle Bill and Bill Wilson were just as alike spiritually as they were physically. They both told me that God loved me, and shouted FUCK YOU at me later on.

 

So sorry—you don’t get to talk to me about God, none of you.

 

I was bitter and may still be so. In fact, I am on much better terms with God (since I have created him in my image, inevitably so) than I am with any of his children. God has been incredibly good to me: wonderful parents, great schools, talent, intelligence, even charm (occasionally). God showered his gifts on me, and I turned into a drunk.

 

And now I am in the void.

 

I accept that there is a god out of intellectual honesty: I couldn’t get sober by myself, but I could with God. I’m grateful, and if God worked through the AA group or through the lousy coffee or through the FUCK YOU that inevitably went along with it—well, I’m grateful for it. My silence, as you talk about God, is a small part of that gratitude.

 

I’m in the void, now, partly thanks to another person talking about God, whom I met on YouTube the other day, and who told me her story. Britt was a good Mormon girl, raised in a good Mormon family, who met (I presume) a good Mormon. So good a Mormon was she that she went to theology school, which was her undoing.

 

She’s now an atheist.

 

She also has been telling me about the void, which is another word for Nihilism. And she dropped the news that the chaplain for Harvard University is also an atheist. Both of these atheists, in fact, have spiritual lives, as do I. I get down on my knees and pray at least once a day. I ask a God who does not speak to me (or whom I cannot hear) for wisdom and strength. I don’t tell him what to do, nor do I trust myself to believe that what I think is God telling me is in fact God. It may be, and I will have to act on it, as it pertains to my life alone. When you walk into the room, the conversation stops.

 

Britt has also been telling me that I don’t have free will, and she’s impossible to argue with, because she’s right. The neurological studies that use fMRI to look at brain activation point to the fact that we make decisions before we have to become aware of them, act on them, explain them or (later) defend them.

 

It explains why so many of the things that have happened in my alleged sobriety have happened seemingly unwittingly. I know that at a certain day, eight years ago, I got out of bed, found the phone, and called my brother. Five hours later, I was in detox.

 

I know that I struggled for several months, went back to rehab, and then found myself, in 2017, standing in front of a doorway under a sign reading Caribbean Twelve Step. I walked in, and have been walking in every morning since then.

 

I walk in, and since I am entering from the void, I cannot claim much knowledge or wisdom. But I sit with people who very much know God, and are happy to share it with everybody. Their gods don’t look like much to me, but who am I to speak? 

 

I’m alone in this void, and the decision to stay in it is mine—perhaps, if I still have free will over my thoughts. I stay in it for the baby, Sobriety, who is being bathed in sludge. I hold my nose, and try to pour the bathwater water / sludge out carefully. 

 

I arrive at the meeting a minute late and leave a minute early. I listen carefully, smile, and leave. The founders of AA were part of the Oxford Group, and Wilson’ “spiritual plan of action,” hasn’t been changed / revised / updated since 1937. I hear nothing about god that would not have put a blissful smile on my Uncle’s face, had I told him such things late at night on the sun porch of his Illinois farm.

 

I say nothing to the people of AA who are offering me what they cannot give: the love of God. I say nothing to Britt, who is busy being spiritual and atheistic. But I do wonder, in fact, if it’s not a better thing to be in a void, if the alternative is an illusion. 

 

I wonder, too, if I am not acting on free will, then who’s calling the shots? Who got me to the telephone and to detox? Who got me standing, that morning, in front of the door that lead to my sobriety? Robertson Davies once wrote about a car going “out of control,” and posed the question: was the car “out of control” or “into someone else’s control?”

 

At any rate, I have killed every god I met on the road. I’ve killed the Buddha, too.

 

But I’ve spent some fruitful time in the Ashram.