GOING CRAZY IN ORDER TO GET SANE or
ANOTHER TRUE TALE TO BEGIN THE NEW YEAR

What can I tell you? Alana was beautiful. A natural blond, her face in the sunshine seemed to give off light, and her soft, angel-bow lips my lips could sink into—what can I say? She was so beautiful, an art student half my age, and I was a beat up old MFA grad student. I was forty-one? Forty-two? And just a few months sober. I wasn’t worth a whole hell of a lot in a relationship. She was attracted to the wrong kind of men, I think. The one after me tried to stab himself to death and set his house on fire when she left him. Me, I just mooned around and tried not to run into her on campus.

Anyhow... we lasted about a month before she wanted out because I was too controlling. That’s how I drove off three wives before I got some outside help on that. Two divorces before I met Alana and one after.

One night, just after she broke it off, I wanted a drink real bad because of her so I walked down to Goofy’s where I thought she might be having a drink. I put my hand on the door handle. I imagined going in there and going up to her with a beer. “There! See what you made me do?” and chug it down right in front of her. Yeah, that would get her back!

There’s always a laugh when I say this in a meeting. Anyhow... for some reason I didn’t go into Goofy’s. I don’t know why I didn’t go in. I stood with my hand on the door handle for a few seconds before I turned around and went back up to my room in the veteran’s dorm on campus, and I lay up there in the dark, on my back, suffering. I really needed a drink, but I was resisting. Drink or not? Confront or not? How could I live without her? How could I live with her? No one would ever really love me....

One bad thought led to another, and soon, all my miserable life flashed before my eyes. I felt deeply what a detestable, lousy human being I was. I let everybody down. I was no good. I saw that I failed as a father, a son, a student, a husband, a lover, a boyfriend—you name it—all my failures lined up like death row in my head. My whole life stretched out before me, a road to doom. I writhed on my bed and slammed my fists into the mattress.

Then, I really did think of Tolstoy’s short tale, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”, and I felt myself dropping into a suffocating sack of nothingness, like Ilych did. They’d pull the draw strings closed over my head, and I’d be dead forever, stuck in that sack. Terror! No escape.

I recognized myself as this miserable failure of a wretch who’d been fighting all his life, fighting everything and everybody. Then another strange image came into my head. I thought of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” which I’d read and studied in a Milton course way back in undergraduate days in the mid 1960s, and, suddenly, I saw myself as Satan in the opening stanzas, imagined myself as the Great Satan down in the huge caverns of Hell, flinging my fist in the face of god, and I realized I had been like this Satan fellow all my life, arguing and fighting unsuccessfully with god (or reality) all my life. God, I wanted a drink! God, I wanted a drink!

This was the powerless moment they tell you about, where the only power I would have between me and a drink would be a higher power, one greater than myself. They also told me there either is one or their ain’t. You got to decide. What a wrestling match! But I didn’t want a god like that Christian god who’d made such a mess out of this creation. Who could understand such a god? But I was in misery. I needed help. I knew I needed help.

“Help!” I thought. Then, just like that, a decision was made, and I told myself that I couldn’t imagine a world which came from nothing. There had to be a creator. So right then I became a believer. A creator suddenly made sense. Just like that!

But, still, I felt this pile of guilt coming in like a bomber from the upper right hand side of the room above my head. They also tell you that you can pick any higher power you want, so I said, “I don’t want this god coming with all the guilt to drop on me.” The guilt went right away, and I felt suddenly free and light enough to float, like a cooling breeze of helium was blowing inside me which would lift me above the world and all my troubles. Soon, I fell into a deep and refreshing sleep.

My eyes opened to a brilliantly sunny morning. My first thought was full of fear, “I’m going to die!”

For a second I literally thought I was going to die, that I’d been freed from drinking so that I could die. That was a damn strange moment! Afraid, I got up, pulled on my jeans and a shirt and hurried out of my room. I didn’t know where I was going to go but I had to keep moving.

Outside, I can’t remember a brighter day in my life. I had the oddest sensation that everyone I passed was a living soul. I was so certain of this that I think I could have burst out in song.

Later I came to believe that this is what Christians mean when they say they’re “drunk with the Lord”. I saw a girl, once, who spun down a college hallway with her face flushed and radiant. She told me as she passed that she was “drunk with the Lord”. She was a Christian. So I’ve witnessed the phenomena from inside and outside now.

For nine days that’s all I could do—talk about god. I couldn’t concentrate to study or go to my job. It was an effort just to pull my boots on. I see now that I went a little crazy for awhile. I talked to everybody about god. They thought I was crazy unless they were in the program or a religious person.

It was quite an experience, one I’m glad I had. I know what someone means when they say they’ve had a born again experience now. Only mine didn’t land me in Christianity. It landed me in better sobriety. It helped me to become a more stable person. I’m glad I had it. Later, I came to realize that I really was going to die that morning when I awoke. A part of me was going to die—the alcoholic part of me. After a time, I came to see that when some psychological mechanism, or set of synaptical pathways, do die in us, then that is as real a death as if someone we know well leaves us by death or by choice, by just moving away.

Someone might ask, “How could you have that experience and then be an atheist?” I don’t know. It just happens. People keep changing and learning. To me, now, it’s just a psychological happening. A good thing is that it taught me that people can have transformative experiences which help their lives without becoming superstitious or religious, either one. You don’t have to give up your human freedom to be free from your troubles.

Another thing I noticed is that in one part of working through these experiences I came to a place where I could literally turn the god idea on and off every minute. Believe, not believe, believe, not believe. That’s what truly convinced me that I had the power to believe or not. I can create or uncreate god at will. If I can do that, so can anyone, and way to many of the most superstitious among us constantly keep creating this hoary being who should long ago have ceased to trouble human life.