June 10 2025
Work at the Distillery
Today work was work. My place of employment is a whiskey distillery of all places. I know that the irony of a alcoholic in recovery working at a place where they make the shit cannot be lost. It is what it is. I am a cook/chef and I don’t deal with any booze in my day to day. That would not matter anyway. My experience so far is that if I am spiritually fit I can do and go anywhere that I have business with. The AA literature is very clear on that.
My Blogging Challenge
I have made a challenge of sort with myself to make some sort of entry on this blog daily no matter the length or the topic. I just want to have a record of what my life looks like as I take this journey of sobriety and spirituality. This is purely selfish I realize but I also want you to come along for the ride as well and for you to share with me your experiences as well. You can see my email on the contact page. It would be nice to have correspondence with some like minded people.
AA Meetings
As of right now my meeting attendance is two meetings a week and I know that should increase. One of the meetings is my home group that meets on Wednesday and there is literally hundreds of years of recovery in that room. The meeting started in the mid 1980’s I believe? Anyway…the other meeting is Thursday and myself and a few guys bring a meeting to a homeless recovery center here in my home city. It is a real pleasure to spend that hour with those guys. They are very receptive and truth be told it is a rough place and these fine people have really had a rough go by the time that they get to this particular place.
Family Struggles
This is all stream of conscious and please forgive for any grammar or run-on sentences. At the time of this writing it is approaching midnight and I am just letting it rip. There is something that is eating me as of late. My mother has dementia and will be 86 in July. My contact with her is minimal. She no longer even really knows who I am. She is also the one that was housing me in the last ten years of my addiction. It was not a pretty sight. Any of it. She took the brunt of all my illness. I am truly ashamed of the way that I treated her. She is nothing but a sweet nice woman that as really never done anything to harm anyone. She never has a bad thing to say about anything or anyone. This situation is not eating me alive and I don’t think that it is sobriety threatening but it needs to be addressed. I need to talk to my sponsor about it for sure. He has most of the information but I have been holding back on a lot of the details surrounding her.
There are definitely some things in my family life that are not ideal. My siblings have been down this road with me before. Me getting sober and all. I am the guy on page 21 in the big book. I build it up then tear it down again and again. This is the longest that I have been sober since I was 14-15 but I’m sure they are watching with some level of skepticism. I don’t blame them at all. Or I could be completely making all of this shit up in my head and they don’t really think about me all that often. I would imagine that there is a mix of the two.
I have been cooking for the majority of my working life. It’s time for this line of work to end. I am fast approaching 49 years of age and it is definitely a young mans game. My current job could not be easier really. What I would do in place of cooking and hospitality I have no idea. I love photography and would love to make money doing that. I am all over the place here.
Exploring Faith
I also have been looking into becoming Orthodox Christian. I have been to a few of the Saturday services but I have not been to a divine liturgy yet on Sunday. I was baptized Catholic but have not done anything in that faith since. Going to Christmas mass and all that in my opinion is not a practicing Catholic. I digress.
Closing Thoughts
So those are the things that I have been chewing on. Nothing terribly exciting. My life is pretty basic. A far cry from the internal chaos that I was dealing with some 14 months ago. I am grateful when I stop and remember the absolute hell that I was putting myself and others thru. I am off to take a shower and get ready for bed. This feels like I am writing my parents from summer camp if you know what I mean? Anyway I hope that you are well and I would love to hear from you all. God bless and stay on the right side of the bottle!!!