Shangai'd!

When I first started going to meetings, I was pretty... adamant... on my viewpoints.

And, there were a few things I had no intention of doing.  Such as accept anybody's concept of God (hell, I thought you ought to have to say "Higher Power" in meetings, because 'the G word' may offend people), I wasn't going to write things down which someone could find and use against me, I wasn't going to have some damned sponsor running my life for me, I wasn't going to give up social, controlled drinking.  I wasn't going to do this, that, or the other thing... and a number of people thought I wasn't going to stay off dope.

After a while, my views on drinking were amended, and I stopped.  But, I continued to be no less determined to do things my way.

At that time, I was going to a number of AA meetings in the Seattle area, and the three meetings of MSA at the Fremont Baptist Church (the Friday meeting moved there shortly after I started attending).

One day, some of my friends told me about a new meeting in a suburb east of Seattle.  We met up, and were going to head out, when they told me I should ride with them.  So, I jumped in the car.

The meeting started in the usual manner; the preamble and other stuff was read.  Then, the chair took over, and introduced the topic.  It was me.

No shit.

Oh, and here's the best part, I was not allowed to speak.

Well, I sat there, and listened to what every one of those people said about me; about what I was doing wrong, about how I was not going to stay sober, how I was emotionally maladjusted, and spiritually sick.

Now, this happened fairly early in my recovery, because it took place before I moved overseas.  That would have been in March of 1990, when I had nine months clean.  MSA, having only been formed about nine months before I came along, was full of other newly-recovering people.  So, an amount of personality conflict was probably inevitable.

Looking back, I think that the actions of a group of people to single out one member like that is as wrong as wrong can be.  In my opinion, either a guy is doing something so egregious that he should be thrown out (such as violent behavior, sexual misconduct, or just being continually disruptive), or you just leave him the hell alone.  But, I digress.

As I sat there, listening to each and every person present "share"*, I made a decision:  I was never, ever going to give any one of those fuckers the opportunity to say "welcome back" to me.  Even if it literally meant dying.  I wasn't going to let any of the people present that day stay clean longer than me.  Period.  I was going to out last them all.  Fuck them, and their shitty little meeting; I'd show them!

Am I recommending replacing the twelve steps with resentment-based sobriety?  Hardly.  It's not a pleasant way to go.  But, lemme' tell you, there was more than one time, especially early on, when I wanted to throw in the towel.  And, I'd remember that day, clench my teeth, and strengthen my resolve.

Am I recommending a group taking one member's inventory?  Hell no!  Let's take our own inventories.  And, if you feel compelled to take mine, please have the courtesy to go out and make my amends for me as well...

And am I trying to claim that I wasn't pretty abrasive early on?  Uh, I better not go down that road; somebody who knew me from my first ten years will undoubtedly see this if I say that.  There's a reason that I got branded "Mahatmaganja", and it certainly wasn't because anybody really thought I was some kind of guru!

By the way, I can't remember who was present at that one particular meeting.  There are only two people left who know me from before I left Seattle.  One is George; the other is Tom.  It seems to me that I met George just prior to leaving, and I'll have to ask Tom if he was there.

If not, I might just have outlasted 'em all.  But I'm going to keep staying clean anyway -  just to make sure.

-M

* by "share" I mean anything from delivering a well-intentioned lecture for my benefit, to simply spewing invective and ad-hominem attack.

How I found Marijuana Anonymous

I got the nerve up to talk at my third AA meeting.

After the meeting, a guy came up to me, introduced himself, and chatted with me for a bit.  He told me that listening to my story, it sounded like smoking pot was my big problem.  He also told me that there were meetings geared to marijuana addiction.

Now, I'd never thought of marijuana as being addictive; everything I'd been told is that it might be somewhat habit forming, but was not really addictive.  Of course, I'd been trying for two years straight to get one day off pot, and hadn't even got that much until I started going to AA.  So, I figured that this Marijuana Smokers Anonymous program would be just the ticket.

My new friend told me more about the MSA fellowship, and the program - which was essentially just like AA - and I got more and more excited.  By the time he was done telling me about MSA, I was ready to run off to a meeting right there and then.

So, I asked how to find a meeting.  I was told that there were meetings held Monday and Wednesday at 7:30 at the Fremont Baptist Church, and another at the same time on Friday night at another church in the Ballard neighborhood.

Hearing this, my heart fell.  I literally felt like a balloon that had just lost its air.  There was no way that I could go into a church.  MSA wasn't going to be available to me.  I told the guy that the Monday and Wednesday meetings conflicted with a class I was taking (true enough); that I'd have to try to hit a Friday meeting sometime.  Knowing full well that I had absolutely no intention of darkening the doorway of any church under any circumstance.

That was Saturday, May 28, 1988.

By the following Friday, I was going so crazy for some weed that I'd go to any lengths for some relief.  Even across town to some dumb church.  Which is just what I did.

For the second time, I spoke at a meeting.  I spilled my guts.  I was accepted.
I'd found my home.

For the first time in my life, I could talk about how I felt, and not hold back.  This was a stranger thing than just not smoking pot.  By quite a bit.

Before long, the semester at school ended, and I was free to attend all three meetings of Marijuana Smokers Anonymous in the entire world.

More about that later.

An evening at Skully's

After my first AA meeting (the one where the fight broke out), something really strange happened.  I didn't smoke any pot the next day.  Or the next.  Or for about a couple weeks afterward.  I didn't want to end up like 'those sick bastards who go to AA'.

This marked a huge change in my life.  Seriously.  I'd never put one day up on self will.  But, I'd finally seen the truth about myself; I was never going to use any drugs again.  And, I was only going to have a couple or three drinks at most.  No hard liquor.  No getting drunk.  I did not want to end up like 'those losers at those meetings'.

But, I eventually picked back up.  If I'd read the big book, I'd have known that a real addict, no matter how good a scare he gets, almost never can stay sober on the basis of self-knowlege alone.  But, I hadn't read the book, had I?  So, here I was, expecting to be able to quit, and found that I had slipped up.

Crap!

I went to another meeting, and came out with a fresh resolve to 'not end up like those sick fuckers who have to go to AA'.  This time, a fresh resolve was only good for a week.

I ran into my buddy/dealer (known as 'Skully'... it's an inside joke) on a Friday afternoon.  He was worried that perhaps something had happened; perhaps I was upset about something, because he hadn't heard from me for a few weeks.

I explained that I'd decided to quit smoking dope, and that it was really tough, so I was just laying low for a while; hanging with my dealer wasn't going to make it any easier.  Which made my friend happy; he wasn't worried about the few bags he wasn't selling to me - they'd get sold.  He was honestly worried about our friendship.


This actually made me feel a little bad, because I'd always thought he was pleasant enough, but didn't really like hanging out with him a whole hell of a lot.  I considered him pretty boring... but he had pot and coke.  And, here Skully was actually considering me his friend.  Yeah, that actually felt kind of low.


So, he invites me to stop by that afternoon on the way home from work.  He explained that he didn't want to make me start back on anything I wanted to quit, but there were a bunch of people who hadn't seen me for a while and would enjoy visiting for a bit.


After work, I stopped by Skull's place.  As promised, there were a bunch of people I hadn't seen for a while.  Somebody passed me a beer, which I accepted.

C'mon, it's just a beer.  I didn't really have any compulsion to drink.  I could take it or leave it.  I didn't have to drink a bunch; I could just have one or two.

So anyway, I start sipping on a bottle of beer.  Someone passes me a pipe.  Without thinking at all, I hit it.

Of course, as soon as I took that toke, I realized that I'd just fucked up.  Badly.  Thoughts of all the things that were going wrong in my life, and how they were damn near all caused or exacerbated by drug abuse.

And here I was again.

But, then that familiar argument came back:  I was already halfway stoned; not sober now.  Might as well go ahead and get back on track tomorrow.

This happened about six o'clock in the evening.  At six in the morning, I was still there.  The beers had kept coming, the pot had kept coming, and (hooray) Uncle Whitey made a visit - I'd blown a bunch of lines up my nose.

Then I realized that I'd better get my ass back to that fellowship hall, and hit a meeting.  I wasn't going to end up like 'those people'; I'd already crossed the line.  Now it was just a matter of how much more bad shit was going to happen.  I knew I could never use pot, coke or speed again, without consequences.

That night, I went to a meeting, where everything changed.

The ghost of Christmas past

The holidays are often a tough time for addicts and alcoholics; whether using, or in early recovery.  Or sometimes, not-so-early recovery.  It can be a tough time of year to have to hear about giving gifts to loved ones when one has lost or damaged the relationships with those who should be closest to them, or maybe is having a hard time paying the mortgage.

Every December, my last Christmas that I used on comes to mind, as I expect it does for a number of people.

I was twenty years old, living with my mom.  Having such a full and vibrant social life (in other words, spending every cent I had on drugs), keeping my car running had temporarily eluded me.  A lot of thing seemed to be eluding me at that point.

Unfortunately, I'd made such an asshole of myself that I couldn't spend the night at home.  I was going to have to figure out alternate accomodations.  So, I decided to spend the night in the office I worked at.  While this plan may not seem so bad on the surface, there were several points that made it memorable.

First off, there was the issue of getting to the office.  My car wasn't running, and neither were the buses that evening; I'd have to walk the four miles.  Which wouldn't have been an epic journey, but it was made unpleasant by the fact that replacing my shoes with ones that didn't have holes in the bottoms was on the list of things which had temporarily eluded me.  Unfortunately, I wasn't as good at eluding the snow and slush on the ground. 

This made for a very contemplative walk.

When I got to the shop, I pulled a bunch of chairs into two rows with the seats facing each other to form a makeshift bed.

That was Christmas 1987.  I've never had to spend any holiday so profoundly unhappy since.  In fact, on the average, they've been pretty good.

-M

Mahatmaganja

So, how did I come by the name for this blog?

Well, pull up a chair; fill (or refill) your cup of coffee, and I'll tell you all about it... in the form of telling you the story of the telling of a story.  It was in an MA meeting, where I coined the term to describe someone I met the first time I got high.  

As the story went, I had just started high school; had been there for a day or so, when a kid I'd met over the summer told me he could get me some weed.  It'd be five bucks; come and meet him in the parking lot after school.

The end of the school day rolled around, and I met my buddy in the parking lot, where he introduced me to a friend of his.  We all piled into his friend's Volkswagen squareback, and drove off campus.

The guy with the car pulls out a sandwich baggie full of weed, and trades it to me for five dollars.  This was not a bag of buds, mind you, but a bag of leaf.

Anyway, to commemorate my first purchase, the driver pulls out another bag, and a red, plastic bong.  He loads up a bowl full, and passes it to me, in the back seat.

I smoked it all the way down, until the ash pulled through the stem.  Then, he loads one for my friend, and then one for himself.  Then another for me, another for my buddy, another for himself...

I don't know why I was keeping count, but we each smoked twenty-six of those bong loads of his leaf.

Then he pulled out some bud, and we all took a toke or two of that, and another toke or two each of some hash he had.

To say I got stoned would be an understatement.  I literally couldn't sit up, and was giggling like... like I was on drugs or something.  I've had a few epic smokeouts, but that one has always taken the cake.

Anyway, my friend and I took our leave, and ended up visiting another friend of his, who had a little apartment in the Phinney Ridge neighborhood.  When we went in, I was introduced to my friend's friend, who not only had a drawing of Bugs Bunny with a bong in his hand, but also gave me some advice about smoking pot.

Now, I expect that everybody can point back to places in their lives where they can say, "wow, I should have listened when..."; this is one of mine.

The guy with Stoney Bugs told me that if I was to look to smoking pot, or using other drugs to find inner peace, that I'd be screwed.  It would turn on me.  The only way to inner peace was to achieve inner peace by itself, and then I could enjoy smoking some pot or drinking some wine without it taking me over.

Flash forward a number of years to the meeting where I was describing this.  I was describing what I was thinking while this guy was attempting to enlighten me.  My comments were along the lines that I had wanted this guy to "shut up with the hippie bullshit; did he think he was the 'Mahatmaganja' or something?"

A bunch of people laughed, and 'Mahatmaganja' became one of a number of names given me.

-M

A challenge:

Attending a meeting this evening, a member detailed an interesting instruction given him by his sponsor: mark every direction in the book with the letter D.

It sounds like a very useful exercise; I think it's easy to overlook the fact that this book is a set of instructions, as opposed to merely being an intellectual enterprise.

But, along with those instructions, we are given descriptions of what we may expect as we take action.

So, I'd like to pose the following challenge: find me one page between 1 and 164 in the book, Alcoholics Anonymous (aka 'the Big Book') which doesn't contain at least one promise.  Either directly stated or implied.  Because, I'm not sure it can be done.

-M

My (second) first meeting

If you wanted to know about the first twelve step meetings I went to... I'm not sure I could tell you anything about 'em.

The last day of my Junior year of high school, I had a mishap with a bottle of whiskey.  This prompted the school administration to require me to attend four meetings over the summer, if I wanted to come back the following year.  I chose to go to the meetings, because I'd already had to change high schools once.

So, I ended up going to four of these meetings at a place half a mile from school.  I sat with a bunch of other teens, in a circle of folding chairs in a room.  There was a lady who was probably in her thirties who was running the thing.

Looking back, it may have been a twelve step meeting, or it may not.  I remember that they passed the basket, and I put in forty bucks.  Kind of my way of showing off.  I had a job, and had plenty of cash (for a high school kid in Seattle).  I had refused to talk, but this was my way of showing everyone that I really was doing a little better than the rest of 'em.

I don't remember much else, other than the fact that I dropped another $120 in the following three meetings.  I didn't talk, didn't listen, and sure as hell didn't show up without getting high first.

But, I'd promised you the story of my (second) first meeting, which was certainly more memorable.  Although, I didn't show up sober for that one, either.  But, let's skip forward almost four years.

One Saturday, I was hanging out with my friend, The Scrapper.  We were drinking beer and smoking weed, out in the garage.  Which is what we did around there.

He'd received yet another DUI, and was a little nervous about even looking in the general direction of his car with keys in his hand.  So, about eleven in the evening, he asks me if I'd drive him to a meeting.  It was a couple miles away, at midnight.

Meeting?  What the hell kind of meeting was he talking about?  I sat there for a second wondering why a case worker, parole officer, court clerk, or lawyer would want to meet with someone at midnight on Saturday.  But, I figured I'd better actually answer his question.  So, I told him I'd run him down there.

Now, I had to ask what kind of meeting this was.  It was an AA meeting.  I was curious to see what kind of circus that was - my dad had had some employees he sent to AA to get 'em sobered up.  Which hadn't worked.  I'd always imagined AA was some place where a bunch of winos and homeless came to mooch free coffee and get out of the weather, while some do-gooder stood up at a pulpit and preached the evils of alcohol to 'em.  I imagined a cross between Fred Rogers and a Southern Baptist preacher. 

This, I was gonna' have to see.

So, we jump in the car, and go down to the Greenwood neighborhood, where the meeting was held.  I remember, we parked in a lot behind the building, and went in through the back.  The meeting was held in a storefront that had been rented by a group of meetings, who set up the place to suit themselves.  There were oak chairs lining two walls of a fairly long, narrow room, and there were more chairs at long lines of tables in the middle.  There were a number of signs on the walls with sayings, such as "live and let live" and "easy does it", and two giant lists of rules.  One was the Twelve Steps; the other the Twelve Traditions.  Since they mentioned God, I didn't pay any further attention.  Screw that - I didn't need to hear any proselytizing.  I could get as much of that from my mom as anyone would ever need.

But there was one thing that caught my attention: giant black-and-white photos of two old guys were hung up high on the wall.  These pictures had to be at least three or four feet wide.  The one was a kind of no-nonsense looking old guy with some Buddy Holly glasses; the other was some white-haired old geezer who was the spitting image of my ex-girlfriend's dad.  My heart skipped a beat when I saw that.  "Holy crap," I thought, "Larry's here watching me!"

Some of the crowd looked pretty rough; as luck would have it, my first AA meeting was to be the Saturday 'Hoot Owl' meeting at Seattle's somewhat notorious Fremont Fellowship.  And that meant bikers, street people, and a varied cast of other colorful characters. 

Everybody filed into the room, styrofoam coffee cups in hand, and took seats.  Lots of these people seemed to know each other.  There would have been a few dozen folks.  A few of 'em were my age or maybe younger; a lot of them were older.  When I was twenty-one, someone in his mid-thirties was 'older'.  (unfortunately, that's not the case now)  I saw some guys wearing colors from a local motorcycle club.  A few pieces of paper were passed around; small candles were placed down the middle of the tables.  Cigarettes are filling the room with smoke, making a mockery of the non-smoking section along one wall.  A guy at one end of the room hit the table in front of him with a gavel and started talking, calling the meeting to order over the hubbub.  A couple people are called on to read different things.  Then the lights went out, leaving only the candles on the tables for illumination.  Someone else started talking over the din; talking about his life.

Now, this surprised me; I'd expected some kind of leader to try to brainwash us all into not drinking.  I'd been waiting for someone to tell me how if I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior, that I'd be saved; if I paid membership dues, that everything would be taken care of.  But, as I listened, I never did hear about the catch, the angle, the fine print, or the asterisk.

I'd been drinking and smoking all afternoon, and this happened a couple of decades ago... so even if I wanted to, I couldn't tell you all of what was said there.  But, this was Fremont, which means you could expect to hear stories of week-long blackouts, boy hookers in prison, waking up in bathroom stalls with bloody rigs hanging out of your arm, or anything else.  And yes, I did hear about all of those things (and more) there at Fremont.  But those are other peoples' stories, and not mine.

And these people, one after another, simply told about what their life had been like, what happened, and what it was like now.  No sales pitch.  No "you ought to..."; just a lot of "I found I had to..."

As I listened, there were two things which kept standing out.  All these people had started out like I had; alcohol and drugs magically made 'em feel okay.  And that things had got worse for them as they continued to use.   Sometimes 'worse' could be a very, very inadequate word.

I sat there in the dark, looking at the faces of the people illuminated only by the flickering light of some candles; sitting still while my mind raced.  Then, raised voices broke me out of my reverie, and a fist fight broke out.  This was enough to completely derail things.  The lights came on, the fight was broken up, and the meeting ended.  The Scrapper got his court slip back from the guy who'd opened the meeting.

That night, I decided that I'd have to stop drugs altogether, and only drink small amounts of beer or wine (three drink limit; no hard drinks).  I had started out just like all those sick bastards, and I sure as hell didn't want to end up like them!

-M

The Twelve Steps... how did I ever get here?

So, you may be wondering:  who is this "Mahatmaganja" guy; why is he blogging about recovery, and why did he get into it in the first place?

Well, it's pretty simple.  Taking drugs quit working.  But, it didn't quit happening.

I once heard prison described as:  "sex whenever you want it... and sex whenever you don't."

That's what smoking weed was like for me.  I got high whenever I wanted to, and whenever I didn't.

The fact that every time I got high, I sat and thought about how my life was going nowhere - due to smoking pot - didn't slow me down a bit.  Every weekend, I planned how I was going to take care of stuff during the week; leaving this weekend free to party. 

Every weekday morning, I would think about how I didn't want to smoke any weed that day... not forever, mind you; just for a day or two.  That I'd take a short break and get my head together.  But, every afternoon, I'd have "changed my mind", because - what the fuck - I could always do all that stuff tomorrow.

(at this point, you can cue the music from Annie:  "...tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya', tomorrow; you're always a day away...")

A friend of mine had been court ordered to go to treatment, and had to get a slip signed at twelve step meetings.  And on one Saturday night, he asked me for a ride to one, where I did a little accidental listening.

And that's how I got started... well that's the Reader's Digest version of the story.

-M