DREAM WARRIOR CHRONICLES : I had taken on the disease concept of Alcholics Anonymous and made my first attempts at the steps.

Middlesbrough Bills  kindness and friendship amazed me.This was a time of uncertainty and was my first tentative steps without alcohol. This was a strange different world that I didn’t fit into. My whole life had been built up around alcohol every minute of every day.The description of myself would always have drink associated to it.My business was alcohol consumption in all its varied forms. I nearly said friends but my associates were drinking partners.Long heavy drinking sessions were my norm, or had been. I longed for the old conviviality of the public house whose smoky atmosphere conjured up feelings of social acceptance, shared secrets and understanding winks. The alternative was meetings and drunkalogs. An acceptance that somehow I had crossed some invisible line. Social invitations started to reappear to drink inducing wine tasteings.New launches of exotic and not so exotic wines,spirits and beers.

The restoration of health the bleeding had stopped and yet the dry heaves returned at the slightest amount of stress. I buried myself into the meetings frightened by the new reality of my situation. I had taken on the disease concept of Alcholics Anonymous and  made my first attempts at the steps. My sponsor had had little experience but freely shared what he had. I understood very little my head was foggy and my reasoning suspect. I reacted with an alcoholic mind to fears,projections of impendin g doom. I worked hard to produce the worst possible outcomes.The meetings were sparsely attended many people relapsed and the resulting deaths,incarcerations proved the adage that alcoholism was progressive.I kept attending meetings as my business life imploded, in my drunkenness I had confided in the wrong people. Thieves had seen the opportunity of a boss who was seldom sober and unresponsable. The unmanageability of a drunken life had spilled into a business life with catastrophic results. Explanations of my behaviour were asked for and then demanded.The blackouts I had so earnestly sort now became liabilities.People appeared to tell of some outrageos episode with someone I could not recollect.I became frightened and confused not understanding that try as I might I had little to no memory of events, the people or the circumstances.

Yet this was sometimes a lie.A brief techicolour flash of a moment when I had come out of a blackout then returned.Flashing headlights angry shouts and then nothing. Flickering firelight in an derelict house. A pool table in an underground cavern.I shuddered at these brief insights into a sots life.Much of this I kept to myself as I tossed in sleepless nights. Tortured by fear and anxiety what would happen to me. What had I become.

The big book of alcoholics anonymous was my constant companion somewhere buried in its pages was an answer but where and how did it apply to me. It told me about the problem , but I was blind to the solution. Yet it gave me some consolation telling me threw its stories that I was not alone. I started to develop a belief in the book. All I could see around me was devastation. Each day brought with a new round of problems which I was ill equipped to deal with. Honesty was starting to glimmer into my life, but the reality of honesty frightened me. Bill had told me to find God.How and where do you find God?

Unknown

Some say he’s half man half fish, others say he’s more of a seventy/thirty split. Either way he’s a fishy bastard.

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