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Well, in order to kick-start this blog after a few months in the doldrums, I thought I’d work through some non-AA (or other 12 step fellowship) approved literature. So I’m going to be choosing as topics quotes from one of my favourite films, the childish, immature, facile but nonetheless completely brilliant “Wayne’s World”.

Well, I hope this is going to work.

My concert going is not quite at the level of absolute mania it was last year, but looking back at the list of stuff in my last.fm diary there’s been some good ones recently, and one of those was the Indietracks festival at the Midlands Railway, Butterley in Derbyshire. This is a completely charming festival where you park up, wander on to a railway platform, get on a real live steam train, and sit in a Formica bar drinking lukewarm pop as you chug through a leafy cutting to a railway yard stuffed full of old engines, carriages, railway buildings, and twee indie pop bands. With the main stage sponsored by Madrid’s Elefant Records there was a healthy contingent of Spanish bands and Spanish people, who always seem to be the friendliest people I ever meet at festivals. So, to kick off the totally amazing, excellent discovery of the Indietracks festival, here’s Cooper, a Spanish band who had heard before but didn’t really *get* until I saw them there supporting the Teenage Fanclub set. Whilst not likely to win any awards for innovation, they were nonetheless a charming, competent and heart warming outfit, who even apologised for singing in Spanish and threw in some English covers to make up for it. Here’s a picture I took of Norman Blake of Teenage Fanclub enjoying the entirety of the Cooper Set.

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Cooper - En El Sofa

The sharp-eyed amongst you might have noticed that this post has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with 12 step recovery. Well, I thought I’d try to ease back into that, the way I’m easing back into meetings (2 this week, an improvement). I really don’t feel like forcing it, I am sure I will think of something to say when I get the inspiration.

Yes, I know I promised you a post on “Have I ever done anything I could have been arrested for if only I were caught? What have those things been?”.

Yes, I know this isn’t the topic.

Yes, I know it’s been over a month since my last post.

No, it’s not true that the reason I haven’t posted it is because I don’t want to answer the question “Have I ever done anything I could have been arrested for if only I were caught? What have those things been?”. Although I don’t really want to answer that question.

In fact, the programme and I have not been getting on very well recently. I’ve been going to meetings and thinking, well, I’m hating this, why am I here? And I’ve not been talking to people in the fellowship, or using my sponsor, or really doing anything of the stuff that’s suggested. And it felt, well, pretty hypocritical to be writing about the 12 step programme when I’m not working it.

The good news, for me, for today, if anyone is interested, is that whatever low-level malaise that was affecting me over the past few months seems to be lifting. Tonight a Daniel Johnston song came on Spotify (don’t you just love Spotify?), and for the first time in a long while I got the kind of spiritual lift that sometimes it seems that music can give me. Here’s the song. I can’t talk any more as I have a meeting to get to.

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Daniel Johnston - Life in Vain

Next topic: we’ll deal with that tomorrow.

Well, there’s light at the end of the tunnel so far as my office move is concerned, and I’m missing the routine of doing the blog, and it’s my AA birthday today, so let’s get this show back on the road.

After a morning of shifting boxes and cleaning a kitchen that doesn’t appear to have been cleaned for about 5 years, and ranting like Gordon Ramsey, I managed to get to my first meeting in about 6 days and then my first concert in about 8 weeks. The meeting was great, the concert was, well, a gentle way to ease back into concert going. The band was New York’s Asobi Seksu, visually a fab band, with lotsa fairy lights and strobes and a shoegazing wall of guitar effects with Yuki Chikudate’s Japanese vocals floating over the top. I liked them a lot, although I’m not sure they’d ever be a band I loved. They were selling a tour only acoustic CD, so here’s “New Years”.

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Asobi Seksu - New Years (acoustic)

Coming Soon: Narcotics Anonymous Step Working Guides

For a change, instead of music, an AA share. From a convention in Iceland in 2003, we have 3 minutes of stand up comedy from the chair (bear with it, the punchline’s good) and then, for a little over an hour, the fairly mind-blowing share of Earl H. Just my opinion, but whether you’ve been to a meeting, not been to a meeting, or not been to a meeting nor never likely to need to go to a meeting, it’s worth a listen. More shares, from AA and other 12 step fellowships can be found on the XA Speakers site. Top tip: load them on the iPod to while away tedious train / plane / car journeys.

God, the blog is reading like Reader’s Digest today.

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Earl H - Iceland Convention 2003

Next topic: Trying the Twelve Steps.

In recovery we are often told to listen out for the similarities and not the differences. This can be hard - it’s pretty natural to seek to compare and contrast your history with other people’s stories. There’s a killer word that gets fired back at you when you start sentences with the words “I never…” or “I didn’t…”: the word is YET. I sat in my early meetings thinking “well, I’ve never been arrested, I’ve never been to a mental hospital, I’ve never seen the inside of a cell…” and distinguished myself from the other people in the room. Maybe they were more hardcore than me? Maybe I wasn’t a proper addict? Maybe I didn’t have to do all the stuff they did? Some of them spoke of relapses - well, I’d abstained since I’d got into the rooms, so that wasn’t going to happen to me either, right? Well, not yet. The occurrence of some of those “yets” (well, all of them actually) in the course of a full blown relapse helps me understand a little more clearly why members of my fellowship say “But for the Grace of God” when they see people in worse positions than themselves. It’s all out there waiting for us. I may be clean, one day at a time, but in the meantime my disease is doing press-ups in the hope that I get complacent.

I’ve mentioned to one or two friends that I’ve been doing this blog. I’m not sure whether publishing it is an entirely sensible idea, but so far the reaction has been supportive (or at least there’s an absence of negative), and it does force me to write something positive about the programme on a daily basis, so for the time being I’m sticking with it. One of those friends emailed me the following song by Nick Lowe. I’ve been conscious of it before, I’d heard the Johnny Cash cover and been vaguely aware of the original on an episode of the Sopranos. And I listened to it once in a rush and thought, yes, nice song, but a bit obvious maybe… Something a bit more obscure, perhaps…? Some more jangly indie-pop, maybe?

Well, I’ve just listened to it a couple more times tonight, and of course The Song Is Going In The Blog, and what is more, I’m sticking the lyrics up too. Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Nick Lowe and The Beast In Me (from 1994’s The Impossible Bird).

Nick Lowe - Photo: Dan Burn-Forti

The beast in me
Is caged by frail and fragile bonds
Restless by day
And by night, rants and rages at the stars
God help, the beast in me
The beast in me
Has had to learn to live with pain
And how to shelter from the rain
And in the twinkling of an eye
Might have to be restrained
God help the beast in me

Sometimes
It tries to kid me that it’s just a teddy bear
Or even somehow managed
To vanish in the air
And that is when I must beware
Of the beast in me
That everybody knows
They’ve seen him out dressed in my clothes
Patently unclear
If it’s New York or New Year
God help the beast in me
The beast in me

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Nick Lowe - The Beast In Me

Next topic: This Too Shall Pass

I didn’t do tolerance when I first came into recovery. And I could never get why it was such a big deal, that and this letting go of resentment mantra I kept hearing. Yes, I could probably see why we needed to tolerate everyone who came into the room, it was necessary in a sort of “lets all be nice to each other” group therapy sort of way, but did that need to apply to me? Weren’t there some nice yuppie meetings where I could enjoy being tolerant to tolerable people? And what was the big deal?

The big deal was acceptance, and until I learned that I had to accept other people for what they were, then my disease was going to run riot in me, and eventually kill me, whether I was actively engaging in it or not.

A song about tolerance and letting go of resentments would be pretty toe-curling and much less fun than a song about intolerance, over projection and festering resentment. Listen to Soko and do the opposite.

Soko - Photo: David Mushegain

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Soko - I’ll Kill Her

Next topic: But For the Grace of God.