we will not regret the past, nor wish to shut the door on it

Yesterday was the 3 year anniversary of my sobriety. Since I had to go shopping for my son's upcoming 15th birthday anyway, I went ahead and spent some money on myself as well.

In the spirit of "not regretting the past, nor wishing to shut the door on it," I sent a joke email around at work describing a new dress code for the Engineering department (I am the head of the circuit board design group). I included my mug shot from this page as a sample of the new dress code - dewrag on my head, Pink Floyd "The Wall" muscle shirt and John Lennon shades. There is also a big fat "cigarette" in my hand in the picture, though I didn't smoke tobacco at the time. I closed the email by saying that "employees who do not already own a muscle shirt with a rock-an-roll band logo and/or a dewrag are not cool enough to work here, and will be summarily dismissed." One of the engineers replied saying "all the nerdlings would have to leave, and there would only be about 4 of us left!"

Sure, I had a lot of fun during my 20-plus years of excessive chemical use. I also missed a lot of work, spent way too much money, earned far less than I was worth, puked far too much - all of my wastebaskets had a permanent vomit odor - and, ultimately, lost everything. A few times. And I ended up living on the street, for a while. Rochester, New York is too far north to live on the street.

So, on the way home from the mall yesterday, I had a little reminder of my bad old days. There were three homeless people riding the bus, and they were talking; one guy was trying to decide whether to go to an AA meeting or to another mall. At the AA meeting, he could get free coffee and cookies, he needed the meeting, and it was warm inside; I don't know what the attraction of the other mall was. He decided on the mall. That's the disease of addiction for you - he admitted outright that he really should go to the meeting, because he was trying hard to stop drinking. I saw myself - 15 years down the road, if I hadn't sobered up - in him. Gray hair, slurred speech, on a crutch, with a spot in the kudzu to sleep.

All in all, Tallahassee is probably a better place than Rochester to be homeless, but at least Rochester doesn't have cockroaches in the woods.