Free Will?

So the question really is whether I have any say in the matter, or whether I am just stuck sitting in here in this admittedly pleasant little room. I could go out of here, I think, to this thing called a beach, which I am lucky to have. I could put myself on that beach and look out at a green-turning-to-blue sea and pass the day away. I could sleep on the beach, I could find friends on the beach, I might even find love on the beach, or the meaning of life.

 

I believe in free will, and I believe that I am captain of my own ship, steering it expertly through dangerous waters (like aisle 6 at Walgreen's, which has the wine and whiskey for you and the poison for me. The bottles and labels look the same, and the liquid inside smells and tastes the same, which makes it tricky, but there it is.)

 

 

I believe I have free will, but did I have free will when I was lying in bed, with the bottle of Scotch under that bed? I was no longer waking or falling asleep, I was passing out and the coming to. That bum you see sleeping outside Walgreen’s, or under bridges or on park benches?

 

I just considered taking a selfie of me raising my hand!

 

So I am one of the guys you pass each day, if you live in a city big enough to have a homeless population. And I am here to tell you, we do not have free will. I was lucky to be reaching for the bottle in a 4500-square-foot apartment, but my luck would have run out in a few years or perhaps months. Then, I would have been reaching for the bottle outside Walgreen’s. I would be that guy you pass by and give a buck to.

 

So I didn’t have free will then, and honestly I doubt I have it now. I got up at 6:30 and fed the cat and did the kitty litter and took my medicines and washed my face and got on my knees and told God that I wasn’t feeling at all grateful (just then) but I knew that I should be grateful and in fact would be grateful as soon as the cortisol released by my anxious dreams had faded away. I would be grateful after I had gotten five strangers to smile at me and say “Buenos días,” on my walk to the bus station.

 

I have that power, to get them to say “buenos días.”

 

But do I really have free will?

 

I do not, as you know, attend AA, though I do go every weekday morning to a clubhouse that does indeed have an AA meeting. If I attended that meeting, I would certainly never tell you, and indeed would lie about attending that meeting, as I am now doing.

 

I was thinking about all this during the meeting that I didn’t go to.

 

I sit or don’t sit in a room full of Christians, and I’m doing my best not to correct the errors of their ways, which are many. So I had to escape the meeting without someone shouting “fuck you” at me, and fortunately I thought myself out of that one. AA has this absurd belief that the group itself can become your god, but there can be a lot of truth in absurdity. If you don’t have free will and you are living on a flattened cardboard refrigerator box outside Walgreen’s, you’re better off coming into AA (to which you will never admit) and trying to give your “free will” to the group.

 

I think of Yolanda, a wonderful woman I met at my first meeting of AA (shit, guess the cat is out of the bag). Yolanda told me my story as she had lived it, which is unsurprising though unsettling. We drunks and addicts are all living the same story—the sets are different. Then Yolanda, after pouring out her tale of abusive partners, lost jobs and friends, homelessness, prostitution—you know, all the usual stuff—did something amazing, miraculous.

 

She smiled at the group, apologized for leaving early (she was meeting an important client to finalize a deal), took her purse, and excused herself. 

 

Leaving a faint smell of an expensive perfume as she passed me.

 

Leaving me to look at my shoes, which had no laces, since they had taken them away from me in rehab, and I wasn’t organized enough to find new ones and put them in.

 

I mean, shoe laces?

 

So it’s a really good idea to find a group with people like Yolanda, or on the way to becoming like Yolanda. It’s a really good idea to admit that you don’t have free will, and in fact you may never have had it. I look at the people in the meetings I (don’t) attend, and I hear their stories and their shame. Half of the people have families that have been submerged in alcohol for decades. The miracle would have been if they had NOT become drunks.

 

But they’re full of shame, and so am I.

 

“You grew up gay in a small Midwestern town in the 1960’s,” a guy in the program once told me, matter-of-factly.

 

Both of my brothers have also had issues with alcohol, which might suggest a genetic component as well.

 

Did I have free will?

 

Should I feel ashamed?

 

The question is unanswerable and dangerous, of course. What I should do is get up and go to a meeting, where people like Yolanda let me sit down next to her because she too has felt that no one in the world would ever want to sit next to her. No one in the world would like to speak to her. No one in the world gives a shit about her, and if they did, they’d hate her. That’s what she felt when she first came into the rooms, and she smiles at me because she remembers exactly how broken she was, and she knows perfectly well that that’s how I am feeling too.

 

She thinks all of that as she passes by me, holding her purse and wafting her perfume as she prepares to meet her big-shot client.

 

She smiles at me.

 

Remember Yolanda?

 

At any rate, there I was (or wasn’t) in the meeting full of people wearing gold crucifixes in the meeting, and I was just telling them that their whole moral world was based on the lie of free will. 

 

I was pissing on their religion, in fact.

 

So it was time for a little footwork, and I skirted (or punted?), by admitting that the group might be a really good alternative to the false idol that dwells in the green plastic bottle under my bed.  Guys like Ulysses, Achilles, and Odysseus are always talking about “the gods who rule these parts,” and my job was to get away from the god of the filthy bedroom and into the arms of the god who rules the rooms.

 

“The rooms”—our way of saying the program.

 

But that was too complicated, so I told the joke that we all know, and that always gets a begrudging laugh anyway.

 

“This program is pure BRAIN WASHING,” shouts a guy in a meeting.

 

“Well, seems to me like your brain could use a good washing,” says some salty bitch two rows back.

 

Then I told them that if we didn’t have free will when we were drinking—well, who was calling the shots?

 

We drunks may not be able to believe in God, but we know about demons.

 

So I told the guys with the crucifixes around their necks that I didn’t know where my free will (if any) was, but it was a better idea that I bring it (if possible) to here, where Yolanda sits sweetly perfumed before her meeting. It’s better to leave the demons behind, really, and come into a room where…

 

…and of course I couldn’t say it…

 

…where, I continued bravely into the void, you might well meet Yolanda and something that we often talk about, in these meetings…

 

…oh, so often talk about!

 

…a three-letter word

 

…sometimes capitalized

 

…beginning with “g”

 

The buzzer goes off, my four minutes is up, and I am free.

 

I don’t have to say that word. God lives, and has taken that burden from me.

 

The group laughed, and I got away with it. 

 

Leaving the question, of course…

 

…do I believe it?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     

 

 

 

 

Of Trump and Tea Towels

It happens every year, so why I am always so surprised by it? The Christmas “tree” is up on the plaza where I sit on benches and chat with the homeless. The tree is a metal cone some 25 feet high—this year it has footlong strings of light which are supposed to be icicles. 

 

Only in Puerto Rico could they be considered, or even imagined, to be icicles.

 

Well, we’re going to be merry, goddammit, even if it kills us. Or sends us to the poorhouse, since the consumerism seems excessive even for an American of the 21^st century. We are supposed to buy, and a little trip to Marshalls—a store that sells everything that you want (while in the store) but don’t need and won’t like (after a week or two). All of the merchandise is beautiful and cheap—but also exhausting.

 

I think of Little Women, that dear book written by that dear Louisa May Alcott, and please note that repetition of the tired word “dear.” I use it because Alcott, like William Morris, was a wonderfully neurotic, high-thinking, eccentric who had a considerably crazy life, though framed in Victorian conventionality.

 

Morris got tea-towelled, which meant that even though he was a socialist and believed in free marriage (or at least put up with his wife bonking Dante Gabriel Rosetti), his decorative work was charming (another word like “dear”) and could be put onto tea towels. Alcott got tea-towelled too, which meant that even though she was an intellectual, hung out with Emerson and Thoreau, created and lived in communes which attempted to be free-thinking and Utopian-seeking, nursed the sick in the Civil War, and wrote “lurid” works which pleased her more (and earned her some very-needed cash)…well, all she’s known for is dear Little Women. 

 

Here's a tea towel—which is the best we could do with William Morris’s life:

 

Fortunately, these tea towels come from the Radical Tea Towel company, who put Morris’s own words at the bottom of the towel, as ballast for the charm. I know nothing about the Radical Tea Towel company on purpose, since I really prefer to imagine them, not to know about them. In my imagination, they’re a group of oddballs who would make any character out of Alice in Wonderlandseem like an accountant. 

 

And here’s what Dante Gabriel Rosetti thought of Jane Morris, and it’s enough to send even me into a jealous panic—God knows what Morris thought. No man should paint another man’s wife….

 

 

 

Well, well—what a trivial mind I have on this Tuesday morning. I am worried about tea towels and Louisa May Alcott when I should be worried about Donald Trump, and his imminent invasion of Venezuela. 

Why are we invading Venezuela?

 

It’s both a stupid question and a necessary one. We’re invading Venezuela (as far as I can see) because Trump got slapped down, posthumously, by Jeffrey Epstein. There’s a big group of Trump supporters who bought into the theory that a small group of very rich men were preying on very young women (teenagers chronologically and pre-pubescent biologically). They got obsessed with Jeffrey Epstein, who was utterly despicable. They didn’t drop the bone after the election, which Trump thought they’d do, since they have a more permanent value system than he does. So he promised them that he would release the Epstein files in all their luridness (ah, if only dear Louisa you-know-who were here to write about it)…and did they forget about it, as they were supposed to do?

 

Nah—so the clamor got so bad (and the drip-drip of lurid emails grew so constant) that nobody could talk of anything else. Eventually, the shut-down (which was all about preventing the release of the files, since it allowed the Speaker of the House not to swear in a congresswoman from Arizona, who would be the final vote for a resolution for the release of the files) ended. The SNAP benefits were reinstated, so that the poor (about 12.5% of us) could eat again. So Trump saw the writing on the wall (neon is hard to miss), and came out and said that he was all for releasing the files, which had previously not existed and then had become a “Democratic hoax.”

 

The Republicans, who had shut down the government to avoid dealing with the issue, instantly caved and voted nearly unanimously to force the release of the files. (The one congressman voting against the release of the files was a guy from Louisiana who everybody agreed was nuts—even his constituents, who are nuts as well, and therefore have to be represented). 

 

Trump, by the way, is all over the files, as the FBI agents who worked 24 hour shifts to scrub the files (that didn’t exist) to the tune of over 800,000$ in five days last spring can attest. So now we’re a couple of weeks away from getting the files, which will be heavily redacted, to say the least. 

 

We’re in a freefall, logically and politically speaking, so Trump did what Trump does, which is divert. He’s killed over 80 people in scores of bombings of boats off the coast of Venezuela. He says the boats are filled with drugs, the Venezuelans say the boats are full of fish, and the Geneva Convention…

 

…well, you know what they say.

 

Trump is going to do what he has done all through his political career—manufacture an “emergency” and act illegally. His tariffs are built on emergencies, his seizure of innocent people and subsequent deportation to foreign prison camps, his decision to bomb Iran (six months ago) and his decision to invade Venezuela are based on the same flimsy pretext. And we are all following him, shouting “tsk-tsk” as we scramble to keep up with the limousine speeding Trump off to the bank. 

 

There is always a little money to be made, and Venezuela has more oil than Iran, or anybody else, for that matter. It would be a shame, not to get a little piece of that action.

 

This cannot be, my imagined reader from the 22d century will be saying. A president of the United States cannot really be acting like Nero, providing that fiddle music as Rome burns. 

 

This cannot be, you say, in horror.

 

I hope that there is some reader, in some century, who can say some words to express shock and horror. I hope shock and horror come back to us, somehow.

 

What I fear is indifference—a complacency that seeks nothing more than to shop at Marshalls. I fear ignorance as well—where is Venezuela, and why should I care?

 

I fear the death of truth even more. We’re already changing history (our textbooks now say stuff like, “although some abuses did occur, the majority of our black friends and neighbors lived peaceably with their masters on the majestic cotton plantations that graced the South”). Why bother with seeing reality at all? 

 

Aren’t we already tea-towelling Trump?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

The Old Normal

Well, let’s just paste it in here, this little snippet from today’s New York Times:

 

 

Never underestimate how stupid—and I put myself in this class—the intelligent can be. Nor how loud I can snort.

 

Snorting, of course, because any fool could have seen, back in 2015 when this nightmare started, that Donald Trump…

 

Shall we put in New York Times language?

 

…that Donald Trump was not primarily concerned with those who had chosen him to be president.

 

…Or just plain-damn-fool terms?

 

…that Donald Trump never gave a shit about you and never will.

 

Lovely—and while we diddle with language up here in the previously United States of America, what’s going on in El Salvador? (Just a little fart from a tired brain, but shouldn’t I call El Salvador The Savior?)

 

I can tell you what’s going on in El Salvador, because I have only bound the 80-page report from the Human Rights Watch. I haven’t read it, but the custody of the eyes comes hard for me (even worse is custody of the ears, of course).

 

Just binding the thing told me that reading it—which I will do—was going to be tough. The beatings were constant. The food was scant and inedible. They all got severely beaten after Kristi Noem came down for her photo shoot and somebody shouted, “I’m an American CITIZEN!”

 

I will read this and tell you if any of the above is untrue. Just stand on one leg….

 

Human Rights Watch did what responsible organizations do: they plan, decide, organize, travel, investigate, discuss, and write drafts of the report until nobody has the strength to argue anymore. Then they publish a report that will be completely ignored until we’re done with Jeffrey Epstein.

 

Jeffrey Epstein, who wrote that he had met a lot of awful people in his life, but Trump was by far the worst.

 

I guessed that in whatever year I read the two books about Jeffrey Epstein. Was it five years ago? Seven? Was Trump still in power, or not?

 

I read the books, at any rate, and it immediately became clear: Epstein was a completely disgusting human being, and so was Trump. Did he spend hours with VICTIM (as it appears on the released emails) or Virginia Giuffre (as outed by the White House) alone at Epstein’s house? Did they do it (or have it done to her?).

 

Duh

 

I assumed the worst, because I’m a drunk and I have this belief: it’s always worse than you think. There are always bottles hidden around the house and bills that didn’t get paid because…

 

…you know, ya gotta drink, right?

 

So of course Trump was screwing every chance he could get, and Epstein was putting those chances right in the path, or bedroom, of Donald Trump. When I found out that a huge number of people were obsessed with pedophile rings and Epstein, I thought ‘good for them!’ When I heard that they thought God had put Donald Trump (an unlikely savior, or Salvador) in charge of rooting out this mess….

 

Well, it boggled the mind. 

 

It was a classic awful bind for a liberal. If I tell you that I care more about 250 years of democracy being torn asunder, senators in handcuffs in Federal buildings, armed troops slamming into cars and dragging citizen out of them and into (eventually) El Salvador, am I diminishing the pain of a high school (in some cases middle school) girl being raped by a wealthy older guy? 

 

One man’s death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. Whoever said it (Stalin, supposedly, I think) was just telling the truth. It’s easier for the mind to focus on Trump and VICTIM than it is to deal with…

 

…get ready…

 

“You Have Arrived in Hell” (title of the Human Rights Watch report)

 

Javier L.: “I feel I’ve lost everything—the time I didn’t spend with my daughter. We lived in fear, thinking every time they came into the module it was to beat us.” (page 79)

 

They also said the couldn’t sleep properly, because the lights were kept on permanently (page 75)

 

Miguel Z.:“The hardest part was not knowing what was going to happen, what my future would be, not having access to a lawyer… Not being able to speak with our families—without even knowing if they knew we were in El Salvador—we knew nothing. Not being able to talk to our loved ones or basically anyone—that was the worst.” (page 72)

 

Sounds like just the place for Jeffrey Epstein.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Weary Spirit

How the spirit wearies under this all!

 

I shouldn’t complain—I have made a deal with the entity that I call God. I will devote my time and energy to Donald Trump and the current mess for a limited time each day. I try to keep it to half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the evening. I write about it so that I can forget about it. I choose my battles carefully, and yesterday had to force myself out of Washington D.C. and into the Faure Requiem, from the BBC and the Royal Albert Hall.

 

I’m happy to say that England still keeps producing kids, seemingly unchanged for centuries. There they were, in the chamber version of the Faure, which featured boys singing the soprano parts and a kid who nailed the Pie Jesu. This child was unnervingly blond and innocent. This kid was a rock star.

 

So Faure was just what was needed, after I got YouTube to stop pulling me back into the affair of Epstein and Trump. New developments—read, another drip—have occurred. The Senate just released a trove of emails that the Epstein estate has very happily provided. The House has just confirmed the final vote needed to force the release of the Epstein files; the Trump administration is holding a meeting in the Situation Room to try to deal with the situation.

 

One email is particularly troublesome, since it came from Epstein, was addressed to Ghislaine Maxwell, and stated that Trump had spent hours alone in Epstein’s house with one of the most outspoken victims of the sex trafficking scandal, Virginia Giuffre. (The Epstein files redacted the name, but the British press and later the White House provided it, and so do I.)

 

Virginia Giuffre died of suicide six months ago. Her book, Nobody’s Girl, was recently released, and it was so awful that King Charles III had to strip his brother of his “styles, titles, and honors.” His brother went from prince to commoner, got booted out of the Royal Lodge in Windsor Castle and into Sandringham Estate. 

 

Is there an adult in the room?

 

Do I want there to be?

 

The adult, if there is one, would be smacking his lips. Everybody is perfectly in place. We have a demented psychopath in the White House. He did his job, which was to win, let Elon Musk in with the wrecking ball, decimate the entire Federal Government, and pave the way for troops in the streets and the suppression of protest / free speech.

 

Trump did his job.

 

Now he’s gotta go.

 

Fortunately for the moguls who are waiting to run this country, Trump mishandled the Epstein mess. Or perhaps he did the only thing he thought he could do, and that he ever does. He lied and distracted, and it certainly worked for everything else. Nobody woke up this morning thinking about the East Wing of the White House, which is now being used for the fill of a gulf course. Nobody (except me) woke up thinking about Cecot, which is the El Salvador prison that is holding a whole bunch of people from several countries (including possibly the United States) that we rounded up and sent on planes down to El Salvador. Nobody is wondering about the 300 people ICE picked up in Chicago that the judge said had to be released on bond.

 

Nope.

 

We’re wondering what Trump and Virginia were up to in the hours they spent alone together in Epstein’s house.

 

Chess?

 

The spirit wearies. The magnitude of the crimes of Donald J. Trump—and we worried about the pedophilia? It was cool to send Abrego García and the Venezuelan makeup artist Andry José Hernández and hundreds of other illegally detained immigrants to a place that the Human Rights Watch called “hell?” It was all right to put troops on the street to fire bullets at the foreign and domestic media, handcuff and detain US senators and mayors, take revenge on his enemies like Robert Mueller and James Comey?

 

The onslaught of assaults on the laws and the norms of our country has been horrendous. Everyone is overwhelmed, myself included. And I have, if I may say, the additional burden of ancestors who came to this country willingly (thank God), created the first democracy in modern times, adopted ideals that were in large part honorable. My people fought for this country and died for this country.

 

True, Henry Herrick was there, hanging his witches in Salem one year and apologizing the next. Nothing about Herrick is particularly instructive, morally speaking, since his defense (he had fallen victim to the Devil) was the same as the charge against the plaintiffs (they had fallen victim to the Devil). I might call it a bit self-serving; a more balanced viewer might detect blatant hypocrisy.

 

The devil had run through Salem Town in 1670. The devil may be running through Washington DC, and it may be that we / they have all fallen victim to it. At some point, we are all going to have to answer the question: what were we doing when the great American Experiment (Adventures in Democracy was the title of my High School history textbook) got blown away by a corrupt, stupid, demented and very cruel man?

 

What were we doing when Trump came down the escalator in 2015?

 

What have we been doing for the last decade?

 

How did we let this happen?

 

If there are any questions in any mind of any descendant I may have—those are the ones I flinch at being asked. Because I won’t get the easy way out, which is to pretend that basically Trump was fine the first term around, but nuts and demented the second time around. Shoot—if we’d only known.

 

We knew, and we voted.

 

I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to bind a copy of the report that the Human Rights Commission just issued about Cecot—that prison we sent our prisoners to and then forgot about.

 

I’ll put it up on the website I want to have, along with the other documents that may well disappear, if Trump’s extends his authoritarian reach. I’ll talk about it to a bunch of poets in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

 

And I’ll leave you with this:  

 

  

 

 

   

Not a Mission Statement

“Just write a mission statement,” said Paul. Or words to that effect—something that would clue in a visitor to what my (our) website is going to be about. Something that would explain, or maybe even convince, people that it’s better to buy a handmade book than a commercial book. 

 

I nodded my head sagely, as best I could, and didn’t tell him the truth: I never read mission statements, I remove mission statements from any document I have the pleasure of editing, and I will do anything short of lying in the bus lane to prevent you from writing a mission statement.

 

I hate mission statements.

 

I hate them because they suggest that I am acting clearly and purposefully. They suggest that I have a mission, and I should have, I agree. It would be great to have a mission, or to pretend that the mission that I acquired is somehow the real mission.

 

I stumbled into bookbinding just as I stumbled into writing. Officially, I am a bookbinder because of Tyler (my nephew), who got it into his head to get married. This meant that I had to buy a gift long either on expense or sentiment.

 

Surprise—I chose sentiment!

 

So I found myself the perfect thing: a family history my grandmother had written at the end of her life. It needed updating, surely, which meant that a respectable 40- page document became 120 pages. Then I had to hand it in (as it were) and somehow a three-ring binder didn’t feel appropriate. So I bought some William Morris paper and decided to make a book.

 

Anyone can make a book.

 

This story is true, and it’s true that anyone can make a book.

 

It’s true as well that making the book started me off on a long journey into bookbinding. I watched hours of bookbinding videos on YouTube every day for several years. I made journals every chance I got, and once considered bringing sections of paper to the beach and binding them there.

 

The book I made for Tyler (which I earnestly hope got tossed in the move from Brooklyn to New Jersey) was bound using the Japanese stab binding. This meant that I attacked the text block (the book without the covers) with an electric drill. I drilled four holes and laced strong thread through and between them.

 

It’s utterly simple and if you are Japanese (or even just coordinated), it can look beautiful. I glanced at the work I had done, and decided that the William Morris paper was definitely the way to go. Here’s what the book didn’t look like:

 

 

The wedding was a great success, the marriage has been even better. My part was done, and there was no reason ever to bind a book again. But each morning in that dark period when the Covid-19 pandemic was just ending and my mourning the suicide of a dear friend was still enduring, I got up and made a journal.

 

I didn’t understand what I was doing until I saw a Netflix series about the tsunami that hit Japan and knocked out the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Several men were “missing” for several weeks, and each day the widow (sorry for the spoiler) got up and made origami cranes. She acknowledged other people, she ate to keep alive, she rested when she could no longer go on.

 

I sat in my living room and watched her do it. I knew that the actor playing the widow was in real life a perfectly normal woman. It was only I (making terrible journals that slowly got better) and the crazy Japanese woman on the Netflix series who made cranes who were nuts. We had woken up each morning with an impossible life to get through for the day. She made cranes; I made journals.

 

Mission—stay alive (and sober, Marc?) for another day.

 

I couldn’t tell anyone what I was really doing, of course, which is why it helped that Tyler does exist and did get married. But when people drifted by and gaped at what I was doing in the Poet’s Passage, I told them the incidental truth, not the working truth.

 

I had stopped mourning my friend / son and had gone on to mourning my marriage and my country. I had to get Donald Trump out of my head and back where he belongs, which is NOT the oval office. The disease had shifted, the cure remained the same.

 

So my mission is to get through the day, honestly.

 

That said, I’m ready to talk about books.

 

See you tomorrow!     

 

 

 

  

Stumbling through the door again!

So much has happened that I can’t really write about it. I could, of course, if I had processed it all, but I couldn’t. I know that I went to a meeting last Friday, and an old timer asked me, inexplicably, how I was doing. I gave the usual formulaic answer, and she pressed me.

 

“I think I might be on the verge of a relapse,” I told her.

 

It was a strange thing to be saying, since I hadn’t been (consciously) thinking any such thing. But there it was, a true thing coming out of a false man.

 

I did the meeting and left to go to Marshalls—a store that sells for reduced prices things I absolutely don’t need, but can convince myself I do. So I bought two rolls of garish Christmas paper to cover notebooks (even garish people need notebooks, after all) and went home to ponder it all.

 

Jeanne called.

 

She wanted to know what she had done, since I wasn’t answering my phone much and was pleading being in the wrong place at the wrong time when I did pick up. So I told her that I had just been to a meeting and just declared my impending lapse in sobriety.

 

So we talked about that, and then agreed on next steps. The obvious one was to call my shrink, to see if the antidepressants that I take when times are good will keep working (at a higher dose) when times are rough.

 

Then it was time to go to the Poet’s Passage, where I thought it might be an idea to clue Lady in about my possible future slip.

 

“Fight it,” she said.

 

There was craziness inside and outside of my head. The craziness on the streets came from ICE, which crashed a car driven by an American citizen. The agents dragged her out of the car, handcuffed her, and then held her for several hours before releasing her. The video is below—if no one has bothered to take it down.

 

It was jarring to realize that even now, I don’t have much control. I go to meetings every day; I pray as much as my knees allow; I peer at a picture taken of myself on the day I went into rehab for the (hopefully) last time. I am the model alcoholic, in some senses, but really I’m a guy who got lucky by just skating by. Other people work a lot harder than I do; they suffer relapses that I am spared.

 

Has anybody ever written about what it's like to live with alcoholism? We do the confessional / coming-to-Jesus memoirs really well, but no one had ever written a book that would tell me that, eight years after my last drink, I would find myself in Costco, alone in the vast wine section. I had no desire to drink, and no idea why I was there; nor could I say why it felt so good, oddly, to be surrounded by a poison that nearly killed me. But I was there, and I was able to get myself out of…there. 

 

Which is the story of my sobriety.

 

So I haven’t relapsed, though I have told you the story that I heard in my meeting this morning. Because it wasn’t me in the wine section, it was actually Brad, a guy in my group. He came in a year ago to his first AA meeting, and got around to tell us the story of how he got to us only today.

 

He was suicidal, his wife was out of town, but he got to a phone (somehow) and got to an English speaker (after four tries). So Brad ended up on our doorstep on the day Trump ended up winning his way back to the White House. Since no one could talk about politics, we ended up welcoming Brad into his new world instead. He’s still here, and he’s the guy who got stuck in Costco, not me.

 

A distinction without a difference. Today was both an anniversary for Brad and a new day for another guy, who was coming into the rooms for the first time. Things are turning, turning, until they come round just right, I think, though it may be only because the Democrats have swept every race they could enter last night. But anyway, Brad got through the door, the new guy got through the door, and there’s even a chance that the country will squeak by and get through the door as well.

 

Some of us will find ourselves standing blankly in the wine section of Costco, of course. There are a lot of doors, as any drunk can tell you, and not all of them lead to rooms that have the exit plainly marked. 

 

But there is a way out, even if I don’t know it, or if I can’t see it. I ended up in the rooms—Brad did as well. He got back to the rooms today after visiting the war zone in Costco yesterday.

 

He got out safe.

 

We can, too.