OK, so there was the base of a spotlight someone had tagged with “Kelp” so I drew it and added more graffiti, including my favorite local graffiti, a Mickey Mouse wearing a Cat-in-the-Hat hat labeled “WANTED”, then thought I should add a street but the angle is ALL WRONG so let’s put stairs next to it so it looks intended to be an uphill, hmm, maybe some San Francisco style buildings to indicate incline and sure an ocean in the background to help point it the incline and maybe if I color it in then OH GOD STOP DRAWING STOP STOP STOP
Anyway.
I was inspired by Amy Knott Parrish’s Soberbia, where she recently dug up some journals from 2013, looking at her goals at six months sober and thinking about her sober life today. Go read it - it’s good!
I’ve journaled regularly for 20 years, since I was 30. When I was drinking, I journaled obsessively, turning it into an arm of my bad habits. Those journals are gone now. So every journal I have in my home was written sober, but no entry was ever as lucid as Amy’s.
Nothing says “recovery journal” like a coffee stain that size
In recent years I’ve favored either very small pocket notebooks — e.g., Field Notes — or thicker Japanese A6 joints, and the thoughts, they are scattered. In September 2020, about one year sober, I was apparently very into motivational quotes, whether others’ or my own.
Life need not be easy, provided only that it is not empty.
— Lise Meitner
Where’d I come across this? Also, Meitner helped discover nuclear fission and escaped Nazi Germany, so I was clearly taking this quote very out of context, a very early sobriety thing to do.
Be humble doesn’t mean eat shit.
This one’s mine, I think. Implying quotation marks around “Be humble” to make the sentence grammatically correct is totally a thing poets like me do. This one could be a response to a favorite song lyric, from an earlier journal:
Excuse me
A doormat’s
good honest work
— Kristin Hersh, “Like You”
The best entry:
Don’t top from the bottom
I also had a list of rules I’d rewrite on the last page of every journal because I was terrified my ex-wife would call me unprompted and I’d turn into a glob of strawberry jelly, working a sweaty apology into every line of dialogue in hopes that maybe, just maybe, things would go back to OK in a way I understood. I’m going to type them out because I bet someone out there can use them. She never did call, so I never did.
The [Name Redacted] Rules
Don’t let your guard down
Never make an emotional appeal
Accept that she won’t like you
Stick to an agenda
Stay positive, but no jokes
Don’t explain
Sometimes the answer is “I don’t know”
Today, four years later, I wrote about how every joy has a comedown.
On Sunday, my son (6) entertained himself at an outdoor market that had taken up residence at our regular coffee shop asking merchants if he could take their picture. His plastic camera has a bunch of templates and frames where you can put each face in a scene, like a circus or a cartoon family in old-timey clothes. If you wanted to do that when I was a kid, you had to go to a kiosk in Spring Hill Mall.
I flipped through the pictures after I dropped him off with his mom — photo after photo of randos smiling wide with my son, as outgoing as can be. He found an actual family and got himself into the old-timey frame, him, two siblings, a mom and a dad.
It filled me with parental joy. A middle-aged squee. So naturally by Tuesday I wrote:
“At Meteor on the back porch and so fucking sad. I made it to yoga last night, but didn’t talk to anyone, headed home, didn’t read, didn’t journal, didn’t stretch. Ate Frito’s - Honey BBQ for extra shame - slept badly. Yet I keep telling myself it’ll be a good day.”
I thought of my days in sober living as I got home from work, made my bed and did no harm. I brought in the trash bins and put away the dishes. I made an effort, and it was a fine day. I didn’t make an effort before. I just drank.
I just finished making my space orderly, then read a poem about the moon and how even the sounds that you think are yours aren’t yours alone. At least that’s how I see it today.
Joshua Marie Wilkinson, from “Swamp Isthmus”
Those [Name Redacted] Rules are great for dealing with people who won't forgive.
Thank you so much for your kind words! It was such a lovely surprise. :)