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Romancing the Stoned
Being sober has brought me many gifts. I now have a relationship with my family and I am not in fear of being found out that I am high at work. I’m not hiding from the law and I don’t have to pretend about anything anymore.
One of the most precious gifts of sobriety has been to be awake and alive for romantic love.
Every day that I look at my partner, I am reminded of what I could lose and what I would be missing if I got fucked up.
Is a relationship a crutch to stay sober?
For me, I stay sober with my Higher Self. That is my primary relationship. I am complete in that relationship.
Without a connection to my Higher Power, I am lost and reaching out to others to complete me and that is
NO WHERE !!
However, the richness and the enhancement of the gifts of loving someone romantically are so worth the extra effort. Some say this effort is called Love. Love is an action word. It is not what I can get out of the relationship, but what I can give.
.
I cannot destroy the spiritual connection I have to any one I have ever loved. That is a constant and will always be, but the day to day living and the hurts we all cause each other even in love must be cut away and given up.
No hanging on to resentment and anger and disappointment. We must let go absolutely. Forgive and continue to Love.
When I am with my partner I feel better, more alive and stronger in some ways. Maybe it’s just in the knowing that there is someone I can confide in and talk to about my day.
Maybe it’s having someone that I trust to shield my privacy, that really understands me and cares, that gives me a sense of well being.
But whatever makes it worth it, I’m in!
Yes, this love thing is good. Happy, Yes, Thank you, Want more, please.
Like this:
Paul Weller: ‘I Think I’m an Alcoholic’
We Love the Jam!! and we hope Paul Weller sticks around a long, long time!
Paul Weller has discussed his battle with drink, stating: “I think I’m an alcoholic”.
In an interview with the The Times, the singer revealed he had given up drinking over a year ago because he feared that his hedonistic lifestyle was going to kill him.
Weller, who releases his new album ‘Sonik Kicks’ on March 26, said: “I feel fitter now. I go to the gym. Stopped drinking about 16 months ago… Time for a lifestyle change. I couldn’t keep doing it. It was killing me… I miss the silliness… I’m not one of those people who can just have a couple of drinks. If it’s two, it might as well be 20. If it’s 20, it might as well be 40…”
He went on to add:
I think I’m an alcoholic, definitely. Yeah. I would have thought so. It’s hard to know where a pisshead becomes an alkie. Fine line. But yeah, I think so.
Last month, Weller revealed that he would like to collaborate with Miles Kane in the future. Speaking to NME in a video which you can see by scrolling up to the top of the page and clicking, Weller responded to a question about how he would most like to work with by saying: “I’d like to do something with young Miles Kane. I think he’s a talented lad and we could do something good together.”
‘Sonik Kicks’ comes out on March 26 and contains a total of 14 tracks. It also includes guest appearances from Noel Gallagher and Blur‘s Graham Coxon. You can hear a track from the album, which is titled ‘Around The Lake’, by visiting the singer’s official website Paulweller.com.
Weller will play five new London shows to promote the album’s release. He will headline the UK capital’s Roundhouse venue on March 18, 19, 20, 21 and 22. Weller will perform ‘Sonik Kicks’ in full at the shows.
Click here for NME article and video.
My Life With Drugs Rock n Roll and Addiction
http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/23/opinion/stromberg-addiction-struggle/index.html
From CNN Article: CNN OPINION
By Gary Stromberg, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Gary Stromberg, who runs the PR firm The Blackbird Group, co-founded Gibson and Stromberg, a music public relations firm that operated in the 1960s and 1970s and represented The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Muhammad Ali, Barbra Streisand, Boyz II Men, Neil Diamond, Ray Charles, The Doors, Earth, Wind & Fire, Elton John, Three Dog Night and Crosby, Stills & Nash. He’s co-written several books that deal with addiction, including “The Harder They Fall.” His fourth book, “She’s Come Undone,” is due out this spring. He is active in service work to help people recover from addiction.
(CNN) – The Whitney Houston headlines last week sent a familiar shiver through me.
In the 1970s, I ran one of the leading entertainment business public relations firms. Celebrity clients were wildly indulging themselves, accountable to no one. It was money, power and prestige, with no one to say, “That’s enough.”
Drugs and alcohol were endemic. Today, the conversation revolves around prescription drugs, but back then we were into more basic mind-altering substances: pot, psychedelics, cocaine and heroin.
To be truthful, I had an amazing run before it all turned to garbage.
Gary Stromberg
My office, on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, was set up like a huge living room with couches, overstuffed pillows on the floor, rock star posters lining the walls and a coffee table, the centerpiece of which was a large crystal bowl, filled at all times with a generous supply of cocaine.
The house rules were “help yourself if you’re here on business — but no take-outs!” We were regularly visited by our clients, including The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, The Doors and Steppenwolf. As you could imagine, my office was a very popular place.
But 29 years ago, I stood at the precipice with a decision to make. With a career of impressive accomplishments in the rear-view mirror, I had what looked like only despair and death ahead of me. Alcoholism and drug addiction had rendered me into what the “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous refers to as “pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization.” The choice seemed simple. Choose life or death.
Do I acknowledge I have a problem, or do I continue to live in denial?
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Do I listen to my friends and family, or do I seek my own counsel?
Do I continue to deteriorate mentally and physically, or do I say, “I’ve had enough?”
Do I choose to live, or do I want to die?
If I once had a dream, I thought, it was long ago shattered. If I once had a dream, it’s floating face down in a bottle of Jack Daniels. If I once had a dream … ahh, screw it, I ain’t no Martin Luther King Jr.
Throwing in the towel and surrendering to admitting I had a serious problem should have been the obvious thing to do, given the state I was in. But at the time, change seemed impossible, unimaginable, incomprehensible and downright insane. Insane was the right word, all right, but it described my state of mind.
Alcohol and drugs are subtle foes; cunning, baffling and powerful. I seemed to be the last one to know I was in big trouble. When my high-profile career started to fall apart, it was other people’s fault. When my substantial income dried up, my business manager was to blame. When the beautiful house I so dearly loved was finally foreclosed, it was the bank that was screwing me. When she finally couldn’t take it anymore and left, I knew she was the type to do this to me. When my friends began to disappear, they were scum and didn’t deserve me. And when, at last, my only friends, my drugs and alcohol turned on me, I knew it was over.
And so a journey of unimaginable proportions began.
Not to any outward destination. No rehab, no trip to a far-off spa. I didn’t move to another city, as if a geographic change would fix it. No, I didn’t have to travel anywhere, except into the mirror, and by peeling the onion of my soul. The journey was within, to at long last discover where the real problem resided.
It was, of course, in me.
What a surprise — with the loving help and support of a 12-step program, I found the real culprit. We in recovery refer to alcoholism as a spiritual sickness. And if you look that up in the dictionary, you’ll find a photo of me. “Mr. Spiritual Sickness of 1982.”
If you ask me nicely, I might show you a picture of that lost soul that I still carry around in my wallet. Yes, I had long hair and a beard, the smug look of false confidence on my face and even the obligatory turquoise jewelry of that era. But look more closely, and you’ll see in my eyes shallow pools of emptiness, pupils like pinholes from the daily consumption of narcotics. As a friend remarked when he saw the photo, “The lights are on, but nobody’s home.”
After you shake your head in disbelief,and look up at me again wondering how this was possible and how I became such a different person, I will offer you an explanation.
I’m a recovering drug addict and alcoholic who was spared from a life of misery, incarceration and death. I’ve been spared from the life of self-centeredness that led me to care very little about others and only about myself. I’ve been spared from the countless fears of inadequacy, failure, success, intimacy and anything else that threatened my well-guarded defenses. I’ve been spared a life of darkness and shown a path into the light.
We don’t yet know why Whitney died, but we know she struggled with addiction. It’s a pity that now, Whitney will not have the option I had.
Time Doesn’t Change Things
Time Doesn’t Change Things 
If your car sits in the driveway and you don’t start it, it just sits in the driveway.
Action coming from love changes the world.
What is self will? And what is the will of true love from our Higher Power?
We can try to make it happen by force or we can wait and see if the world changes while we avoid and do nothing, and guess what?
Neither works.
Faith without works is dead.
Listening and allowing the will of our Higher Power to work in our lives is the only way to peace.
Other wise we are tortured with the little voice in us that tells us, “This is wrong,”
but we do it any way.
It takes courage and trust that our Higher Power will take care of us, no matter how hard an action is.
Addiction and dishonesty hurt every one.
It doesn’t matter how good of a person you are or how many good deeds you do, if dishonesty prevails, we all suffer.
I want to look back on my life and say “At least I wasn’t a coward.”
Walk through fear and know we are loved and protected by our Higher Power.
Do the next right thing.
Time is illusion.
The Fire of Addiction
The Fire of Addiction
For me, things only have the power that we give them. That includes alcohol and drugs. In other words; I am powerless over fire. I accept that and I have a healthy respect for fire as a result. But fire only has the power over me that I give it, so I don’t strike that match nor stick my hand in the flame. Fire can be appreciated, for what it is, from afar. For addicts, alcohol and drugs should be kept far from our thoughts.
Razzle D Bathbone
We Have Brought You Back Three Times
From Anonymous Contributor:
We struggle with belief in a Higher Power and shame that we are not worthy of love, yet our intution gets more clear as we get more and more awake and sober. This poem was contributed by one of our new writers who has just celebrated one year of sobriety.” Sober Driver
“we have brought you back three times”
to keep fresh remembered
that i am powerless
but through the grace of my god
kicking screaming
i want to be normal instead i am blessed
how did i make it this far?
spirit has worked through love – in my life
in such a big powerful way
how can i be lovable?
i like to think i am love
is my perception correct?
and who is the judge?
feelings are not facts and thinking is ego
powerless
such a humble feeling and thought and state of being
can i be humble? can i value and and appreciate what it means
to have no control booze drugs people places things
to really let go of all my defenses
and come to believe that a power greater than myself
which can do all things
really care to restore me in mind body and soul
can i choose to believe?
only one moment at a time
my judgement is fucked up
even at my best most connected moments, am i not still self seeking?
can these motives be cleaned?
to be this love i seek, to surrender and fall in.
whose work is this, it is beyond me, within me?
to person up, woman up, for love’s sake.
“i will strengthen you. i will help you. i will hold you up victorious with my right hand”
words i read write/strive to believe.
how can i not see with my experience of majestic love
and all that i have tried to tear apart?
it is so selfish to be unworthy?
time has waited for me while i have been the cat
why me, when so many others have failed?
“we have brought you back 3 times”
what does this spirit want from me?
to claim my power? to be this love?
why me? why me? maybe it is not about me.
maybe it is about the others…
Virtue v/s Circumstance
An addict will not change by virtue. Virtue did not get us sober. An addict gets to AA by circumstance, circumstance that ripped our lives to shreds. For most of us, AA was the last house on the block.
Given the gift of desperation, we come in the rooms of AA willing to do what ever it takes to change our lives. Many of us are surprised when we find out that we are to give up the drink forever and that we are not here to learn “how to drink.”
We become willing to find a Higher Power other than our selves.
Our best thinking got us into situations that kept us in slavery to the will of others, including jail, mental institutions, unhealthy situations and just plain juggernaut behavior that was defining our lives.
We know deep in our guts when we are holding on to some thing or some one that isn’t working. We feel such relief when we finally let go and get honest with ourselves.
The truth is we are imperfect humans and we make mistakes. No one said we have to do this perfectly. The only thing we have to do perfectly is, just not drink or drug.
Many of us have grown up confusing independence with self will.
Many of us chose the path of avoidance, wanting God to take care of all our problems for us, like when we are sleeping or while getting surgery under anesthesia and waking to the surgeon telling us, “You’re healed, we got it all.”
Half measures availed us nothing. We stand at the turning point with complete abandon.
A million miles away
Your signal in the distance
To whom it may concern
I think I lost my way
Getting good at starting over
Every time that I return
I’m learning to walk again
I believe I’ve waited long enough
Where do I begin?
I’m learning to talk again
Can’t you see I’ve waited long enough
Where do I begin?
Do you remember the days
We built these paper mountains
And sat and watched them burn
I think I found my place
Can’t you feel it growing stronger
Little conquerors
I’m learning to walk again
I believe I’ve waited long enough
Where do I begin?
I’m learning to talk again
I believe I’ve waited long enough
Where do I begin?
Now
For the very first time
Don’t you pay no mind
Set me free again
To keep alive a moment at a time
But still inside a whisper to a riot
To sacrifice but knowing to survive
The first to climb another state of mind
I’m on my knees, I’m praying for a sign
Forever, whenever
I never wanna die
I never wanna die
I never wanna die
I’m on my knees
I never wanna die
I’m dancing on my grave
I’m running through the fire
Forever, whenever
I never wanna die
I never wanna leave
I never say goodbye
Forever, whenever, forever, whenever
I’m learning to walk again
I believe I’ve waited long enough
Where do I begin?
I’m learning to talk again
Can’t you see I’ve waited long enough
Where do I begin?
I’m learning to walk again
I believe I’ve waited long enough
I’m learning to talk again
Can’t you see I’ve waited long enough
