At 58, 100% VA SSDI permanent disabled since leaving Music Graduate school in 2004, 25 years technically abstinent but barely recovered due to changing to even worse addictions and staying mentally sick with all the character defects except for lessening resentments and greater gratitude for what I have received from a loving Higher Power of my understanding, I am finally realizing I’ve just got to keep trying to change my reactions to things that continue to baffle me. Why can’t I get along with other musicians before or after I got sober? Or anyone else for that matter? Few people or things could get through my old wall I built before I heard Roger’s Wall in 1979 around the time I barely graduated high school and started my 40 year chemical
and behavior addiction odyssey throughout the world. My musician AA buddy of 24 years who is still alive and sober and was kind of a sponsor played a big role. He, like me, quit the music scene after hitting AA. He had a family of his own. I never did. I chose the easier softer way. I ran 40 years, most of them dry, but most of them sick. You can’t recover if the victim self pity run and gun wheels keep spinning. The music really helped of the nonbass persuasion. But in the end after burning all the other sonic bridges I wanted to come home to the electric low tones and came here.
I’m in outpatient daily mental health rehab at the VA and have other issues. I still couldn’t play tonight at an open mic club with others who were using and socializing with alcohol. The recovering heroin addict veteran friend who invited me there was clean and supportive but I still couldn’t deal with it. There’s a demon of my own creation in my old mind, a relic of the wall built much earlier in time. Come out, unclean spirit. I don’t need you anymore. I don’t want to die with you in control. I built you. Boy, it’s so hard to set it free, sober or not.
My condolences to the person here who lost his nephew to this disease. The chemical technically did the body in, but in my limited understanding he, like me, is/was in the deadly throes of the prison of our own mind. I found great help in the AA big book and the Higher Power theology, my conception of which has changed throughout the years, but no matter how much ground I covered there were those same old fears. I kept turning and running away. Myself and others dearly paid. I tried to turn the page tonight by attempting to play on a club. Nope, I ran. Not because I was tempted to use, I just didn’t want to see the old altered minds and bodies of older versions of myself and friends of long ago and hear the old soundtracks before I got sober.
So tonight is done. I stayed clean but the sober thing still is a work in progress. This morning I am scheduled to accompany on 12 string guitar a music therapist in a rehab VA class.
On to the next breath.
Barney
