Silly Sally Fourth

On July 4 I saw two Polish men chase down another Polish man and throw him to the ground. Once on the ground this poor guy got, yes, repeatedly slapped in the face. Is this a sort of Polish martial arts? I watched in disbelief and wondered if I was really seeing what I was seeing. Then an old lady yelled out, "Hey, no fair! One is okay, two is too many!" referring to the two men slap-attacking the floored Pole. I quickly pulled myself away from this obscene display with cartoon question marks floating above my head.

Likewise, the rest of my fourth of July followed this pattern. I didn't do much that day: reading, puttering, wandering here and there, cooking, cleaning, unpacking from the recent move. AA meeting at 7 where I saw my sponsor's sponsor speak. Afterward I called up a pal I used to troll around with and we went to a party.

No big deal, I was well-armed with enough repulsion/fear/distaste toward drinking. I was confident with my giant bottle of Orangina. I get to this place and it's a new-fangled building in the middle of abandoned industrial-land, around 9pm. I notice the building is insanely huge and brand new, with about as much charm as a stack of shipping containers made into a multi-level wal mart. My pal buzzes me in and I go to the roof. Within about ten seconds I wanted to leave. Not only was there a jam band, but the jam band was playing ON TOP of Bob Marley. That marjiwanny-smell was everywhere. All these dudes wearing flip-flops and button down shirts were flirting with or making out with girls so hyper-feminized that they may as well have been transexuals.

I start gnam-gnaming on pretzels and chugging my sody, when my friend introduces me to some guy who is disgustingly inebriated. I do what I planned on doing when finding myself in this situation: I messed with him. "So, you're a rich kid, eh?" I said as I got in his face. My rationale behind this was that the guy would...well, I had no rationale; I was just being cocky and egotistical, flaunting my sobriety the same way douchebags flaunt their shiny automobiles. In the space of three seconds I went from feeling bored to angry, and I went downstairs to pee.

I spent the next TWO HOURS hanging out with my friend who said we're leaving in a minute, we're leaving in a minute, we're leaving soon. As sucky as I felt, it never occurred to me to just leave. Nobody would have cared, and I could have gone somewhere else less insane. Instead of stepping back and trying to do something, I just endured this horrific tableau; a cross between a dentist's waiting room with no magazines and the L train on Saturday night.

If you asked me five years ago, or even one year ago, what my idea of a great party would be, I would respond thusly: shitty garage punk bands playing in a disgusting warehouse in the ghetto, pounding 40 oz's and making out with girls who looked like the hipster grifter. It wouldn't have been awesome, but there was a time I would run the falicy of what historian E.P. Thompson calls "the enormous condescention of posterity." I would idealize such parties, neglecting the funlessness, puking, waste of cash, and general ass-making of myself. In other words, there probably was a time when that was the pinacle of fun, but that stopped being true years and years ago. Without AA I would be not unlike those unfortunate 40 year-old women who dress like it's 1987 because that's when they peaked.

Getting back to this time, I finally left the party and met up with my lady friend and drank some water at a bar (no big deal) and tried to forget the party; nothing terrible happened there, it was just boring. So I thought. I woke up the next day with what I can only describe as a "hate-hangover." I was in such a crappy mood so I called up a fellow alcoholic and said, "hey, what's this?" He said it's probably that I had resentment at the party animals and I didn't know how to properly diffuse it. How right that dude was! I owe him a fist bump when I see him.

AA suggests we avoid people, places, and things that are associated with our drinking. When I first heard this I thought, fair enough, don't go to any place or hang out with any people you used to drink with because you may wanna pick up a tipple. But musing on that, the reasoning behind this suggestion is more subtle: being around those places and people you may have a surge of emotion that you won't properly know how to handle. That was definately my case. Being tempted to drink wasn't an issue for me, since my belly was full of coffee (and the only beer left at that place was high life, which I always thought was revolting). The bigger issue was resentments, hate, etc., and not knowing how to properly express emotions like a grown up.

The moral of the story is, my friend as awful taste in people. Just kidding. The moral of the story is, getting cocky makes you think too much.

"The Power" is an electronic pop hit song for the group Snap! from its album World Power. It is particularly known for its hook "I've got the power!"

If you're like me you think/thought the idea of god was baloney, ballyhoo, and boring. God is the creepy-crawly word that kept me out of the AA rooms for so long. As someone who grew up in the papist church, I was turned off to the whole idea of gob and jebus and highber powber by the time I was old enough to pour my own drinks. Flash forwards (or backwards, depending on where in time you are) to psalm psunday, 2009. At my local watering dump, I see a woman who I knew drank little and went to church but yet hung out in that place. I says to her I says "Psst! Hey! I wanna go to church with you."

At that time in my drinking career, I was close enough to wrecked that I was just about ready to give up my athiesm that I got from these guys and here more specifically, and most convincingly, him. I had this crazy idea that if I could just get a little religion, I'd be able to moderate my drinking and not have to stop. Pssh! Girl, please! That psunday was no different than the last time I was forced to go to church (the feeling of terminal boredom, "this-is-total-nonsense" banner ads running through my mind, and the familiar need to pee a lot). Yeah, I wanted to get some religion, ME, who knew religion was just a result of how our not-yet-developed reptilian brains try to make sense of the unknowable, and to connect to people we're isolated from in several dimensions: time, geography, language, tradition, nationality, race...don't get me started, don't EVEN get me started.

Ok, fine. The mass I went to with this woman commemorating when the easter bunny was nailed to a palm tree or whatever (I wasn't paying attention, ok?; I skipped out asap!) did nothing to chink my armor of athiesm, and I think I scampered to the barfy-stinking bar and filled up on easter beers.

The next few weeks, not much happened. I think somewhere in there I got a TV. But other than that, life went on as sourly usual. I went into my first AA meeting, with the broken desperation of wanting to give up drinking no-matter-what. Flash forwards again past things I'll address here at a later time, and my sponsor says to me he says "Ok, I want you to do something for me."

"What," I says, "pretend there's a god?"

"Shut the fuck up," he said. "I want you to imagine there is a loving, benevolant god who wants you to be happy. And I want you to pray to him every night."

FUCK. Last thing I wanted to do, I said. Whatever, my sponsor knew his stuff, and I admitted the first step ("We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable."). I assented. I had a sneaking suspicion up until then that, while AA claims you don't need to be a believer and you can make up your own god, it was simply a cover for their backdoor monotheism. I was wrong. Sponsor told me to imagine god however I wanted to. The first thing that popped into my mind was:

KYAN DOUGLAS (see Figure 2)

Figure 2 : God

That's right. My idea of god is totally made-up. Please forgive his stupid pants and lame silk-screened shirt (this pic is like 2002, bro!) but, whatever, you've seen Queer Eye. He's the guy who never looses his cool. I could be all, "Kyan! If I cut my hair short I'll look like a water-head baby!" and he'd be all "Don't worry about it, Maxie, I've got you. Hold my hand." Kyan has it under control! Yeah, Kyan really is a dumb name. Like his parents were fighting over the two equally-boring baby names Kyle and Ryan and had compromise sex. Anyway, I don't know why I chose anyone from that show. It's basically unwatchable now, the music is too early-twothousands and the clothes are hideous. But look who else was on that show: the black guy in the pilot episode had no personality, the interior designer was pouty and too puffy about the face, the guy with glasses had no personality and his mouth looked funny, the blonde guy looked like a muppet thrown in the dumpster, and the porter rican guy was just too twinky. Thus leaves Kyan Douglas, the down-to-earth one who shares my enthusiasm for Kiehl's prodct.

So, when you get into AA, you'll call your sponsor complaining that your sobriety is making you antsy or frowny or what have you, and he'll tell you, "Send it up to your HP." He doesn't mean send it to that Hewlitt-Packard printer that never worked that your parents got you for christmas in the 1990's. He means Higher Power. Personally, I can't imagine saying, to anyone other than Kyan, "Hey, man, even though your arms are full of groceries, can you please take care of this first world problem I'm having?" He'll say, with his barely-audible lisp, "Abssolutely."

I've variously described my god to people as my celebrity bromance crush, my imaginary friend, and god. I've somehow accomodated the idea of having god exist as this: our primitive reptilian brains are probably biologically adapted to believe in god, so why not play a trick on this and pretend, on a certain, strictly-personal level, that there is a divine being? We athiests can still be militantly against teaching garbage science in school, the church saying that gay people are no good, and that abortion is the worst thing ever.

Somehow I'm an athiest, AND, a believer. I don't pretend to have reconciled these two things yet. At least I'm fighting my papistly-ingrained homophobia...