From a share at the Primary Purpose Group in Danville, CA, in September 2020.

First, to the newcomers, welcome. I gotta say, while I can’t imagine starting this journey now, there is never really a bad time. Even with COVID it’s possible. Hang around for the meeting after the meeting.

And, definitely, get a big book. It’s not only the manual, but the stories in it show how each of us has a unique story but are still spiritually connected. They always give me a sense of belonging even when I was alone. If I don’t do that for you, you might find it in one of those stories – or one you hear tonight.

Get a sponsor too. I’ve had 4 in 20 years, one I work with actively and of the 3 others I’m still in contact with 2 pretty regularly. Each helped me see something I couldn’t on my own… and for that I am deeply grateful.

So, my story…

I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, first of 4 kids, parents who bickered like nuts but stayed together ‑ Irish-Catholic Kennedy Wanna-Be’s. I was definitely loved and very lucky, but we were also raised not to talk about problems. And emotions were not okay to discuss or have.

Most important here, alcohol was always a part of life. It was so prevalent I don’t recall my first drink.

But I do remember aunts and uncles offering tips about how to drink ‑‑ Eat a good dinner beforehand; have a glass of water in between every scotch.

“You’ll never get a hangover” they said.

Simply put, alcohol was just always there.

Despite strong evidence of alcoholism in the family, “alcoholic” was never applied to anyone. It was reserved for those who’d lost the job, the house, the family and were living on the streets. THEY were alcoholic.

Because issues couldn’t be acknowledged, problems were explained away by other means.

At 17, I was standing in front of a keg talking to a freckled girl in a gypsy dress who said I shouldn’t stand there like a tree with roots. I drank to make myself feel comfortable.

4 hours later I was trying to keep an old Mercedes not owned by me on a gravel road to meet a girl at the end of a horse pasture. I “drove” the car into a ditch where it sat for a day before the tow truck guy could figure out how to get it out. I was “growing up.”

At 20, I went for a pub lunch in Coventry England and woke up 18 hours later in a garbage dump at the end of an airport runway on an island off the coast of Africa and only the blurriest idea about how I got there. I was “gathering adventures for a book to write.”

At 23 I was hiding in the stairwells of a Washington DC newspaper where I worked, barfing my guts out because I didn’t want to be heard being sick in the bathroom. I was “building my resume.”

At 25, a bum on the miracle mile in Chicago got up off the sidewalk and came over to me and shoved 68 cents in my hand and said, here buddy, you need this more than I do... I was “figuring it out.”

These incidents were never labeled “alcoholic”... Other phrases I heard: he’s young, he needs time to figure it out, it’ll make a good chapter in a book I might write.

Always something else – because, like I said, someone who’d lost it all – that was an alcoholic.

So it went for another decade. And on the outside, except for the Chicago incident, I was fairly high-functioning, working in marketing and the arts – world’s that have a high tolerance for bad behavior as long as you presented well.

Still, as I got into my 30s, a feeling that something was wrong grew. Geographics -- NY, DC, Chicago, Atlanta, Minneapolis and finally the Bay Area – kept me from really looking because I could continue down the road without someone seeing what I was – or worse, that I recognize what I was.

Still, a few did. Mostly the women I dated, who, after a month or two almost always broke it off before it got anywhere.

Until I met someone who drank like me. Not good. While short lived, it scared me into the arms of a woman who had 17 years in the program. She was (and still is) a beautiful woman who could make me laugh like there was no tomorrow. Lush with feelings I wanted in my life but didn’t see because of how I was raised. But more distinctly I remember thinking, this is great. I’ll drink less. Which I did just long enough to convince her I was decent enough to marry.

Of course within a year I was hiding my drinking in the alley or on the 38 Geary that I took to get home, or in long unnecessary hours at the office.

Eventually I decided being divorced would be better because it’d give me more time to drink without restriction.

And I really did think that drinking to oblivion was better than the care and kindness of a woman who’d stood at an alter with me and said, I do. I was not good about it and one of my first and most important amends was to her.

I was unable to admit what I was – an irresponsible, woe-is-me, self-centered, self-seeking alcoholic who had stopped growing emotionally around the age of 16.

It would be another year before I woke up in a place where I didn’t want to be, with someone who was treating me, and who I was treating, like a piece of furniture. Going nowhere. Friendless. Demoralized. Loveless. At a spiritual dead end.

It was an awakening in despair that I could not live this way anymore. I was ready. I was willing. And I surrendered everything.

At the Tuesday Downtown in SF later that day, I chose a sponsor randomly and trusted it would work out. And it did. But most importantly, I stood up and said, “I’m an alcoholic.” A three word goodbye to all the things that I believed made me “interesting” and a hello to something new. And the first glint of freedom that comes with true self-recognition came to me. It was life changing in the deepest way.

Going through the steps, attending meetings, I learned to take responsibility for my actions and my life. I learned to ask for help when I needed it, to offer help when help was needed. To be of service, first to people in the rooms, and then to others beyond that.­­

My sobriety date is Sept 21, 2000. It’s a one day at a time deal, but the benefit of putting some time together has been seeing the growth that has come from the simple recognition of what I am.

An MFA in playwriting at Columbia University, a collective of artists I love, marriage to a woman who can eat fire and who I love to hear laugh in the dark. Two boys who fight like crazy half the time, play like old friends the other half, and have never seen me raise a glass.

It hasn’t always been easy.

As my life in sobriety grew – the kids, the career, the house -- life got busy. And I stopped going to meetings. Stopped calling my old sponsors; Stopped reading; Stopped working with others. I started living like I knew what I was doing, where I was going and what was best for me -- and everyone else. And I was overworking and not paying attention to what matters.

I “came to” on my wife’s birthday in 2017. I’d worked a full day at the office instead of celebrating her. When she told me how hurt she was, I lashed out in defensiveness. I told her how ungrateful she was. How she owed me everything. How I’d given up everything for her and all the sacrifices were mine.

Sober 17 years and there I was again: Selfish. Self-centered. Self-seeking. Loveless.

And when I looked at her – a woman whom I’d fallen in love with in a doorway at 71st and Columbus in NY — at that moment — faced with the pain I was causing — I thought about having a drink for the first time in many many years… It was another kind of bottom.

Luckily something else was still there too –and it said to me: Sure, you can drink, but your problems will still be here, only you’ll be drunk.

So I did what I’d been taught. I reached out for help. I met a counsellor who suggested I try reconnecting with AA. She was familiar with us and knew the meetings out here, even.

And I ended up here on a night when Debbie D. spoke and talked about her 17th year. I’m clearly not like Debbie D, but her story spoke to me about what it means to live sober ‑ and alive. And I came back.

I have a sponsor who continues to take me through the steps -- who I talk to nearly every day.

I need that because this year, well, you know what this is like. And on top of that, I left a job I loved and moved to Montecito in the middle of August. So I’m learning a new industry, company, and team. I’m putting my kids in a new environment. And when I start complaining my sponsor is quick to point out:

I have a job. I live in Montecito for cripes sake. And most of all, while friends have passed from COVID, my own family is healthy and well and looking after each other.

Still, I do find myself on my knees more often these days, Because I am definitely living in fear. But when I wake up in the small hours, and the fear gears get going, I kneel down and look up and ask the air to help me find the faith to remember that all I can see is not all that there is. Sometimes these moments feel like that first moment I woke up in despair 20 years ago. I don’t mind going back to that first day when I recognized what I truly am. A new world opened to me then so that today whatever might exist between me and the world, it’s not alcohol. And I have the tools to start figuring it out me. And that all comes from a moment of hope born out of self-recognition. A moment that truly starts with:

My name is Malachy. And I am an alcoholic.

When she wore sans-culottes and crossed her legs, it was hard not to look: A rising phoenix wrapped itself around her calf.

It was the same one she had on her card. And the same one I had on the back of a commemorative chip I got to mark 20 years.

I never asked about it. But when I think of her, I think of it. And it came to mind again when watching The Flight Attendant. Kelly Cucco has some sort of Egyptian bird spreading its wings in ink under the nape of her neck.

(A show about an alcoholic, don’t you know.)

Makes me wonder if I missed something earlier, if I should’ve gotten one back in college with the earring I no longer wear. I was hot for a girl named Rachael and she seemed to think they were sexy.

But, I didn’t. And it’s not likely at this late stage I will.

Yet, sometimes I think I should’ve asked about it in that office and found out the story of what it meant to her so that I could explore the story of what I thought I was missing.

So, yeah, I don’t have a tattoo.

In the afternoon, he toured the physical school he’d been attending via zoom for 7 months.

When he came home, he was quiet.

Later, he said it was because during the tour he saw the theatre and realized all he’d missed in the year.

Having been in the theatre in more social times, I understood. It was a beautiful space, full of the promise of grandeur that a performance space can hold in the air and create within you.

I felt sad, too. But also proud that I’d helped raise a boy who could see the potential in the world and was not afraid to admit the sense of loss it could deliver when it went unfilled; who could imagine what could be and miss what didn’t happen.

A boy with the imagination to dream big and see himself in the dream.

Someone asked me recently what the physical and mental benefits of quitting the drink were.

I’m so used to the platitudes of the program, it took me a moment to focus on what was really being asked.

I was a relatively high functioning alcoholic when I stopped 20 years ago.

While it didn’t stop the divorce from happening, I stopped looking at the split from a retrospective POV and started looking up toward the future with trust: what next?

Over the course of that first year I started sleeping better (no more waking up with the shakes and sweats as the liver tries to figure out the blood sugar), which was huge for dealing with stress, business problems, and enjoying the good moments better. I had a lot of shame about drinking that also clouded my mental landscape and generally kept me in a state of discomfort. That slowly evaporated and was replaced with a sense of “rightness” I’ll call it (others might say spiritual fitness) — a more positive sense of myself that led to less second guessing, less feeling like a hider of things, a secret imposter.

And I had more open energy. I stopped waking up thinking about how to avoid the liquor store and started looking forward to meetings and fellowship. I felt less alone and sought healthy connection.

20 years on, I’m still sober. I have two kids and a marriage that’s healthy enough to contain ways to deal with anger and resentment when they happen, AND deal with changes we didn’t see coming. And when anxiety wakes me in the still of the night, I’m not pouring booze on it and causing more problems than I need to.

It ain’t perfect. But it’s better for sure.

I said, “What have I got to lose?”

She said, “What have you got to win?”

The world’s between these two postures is astonishing.

Every once in a while you pour it out to a stranger. The comfort of an unknown ear lets you open up and say hello to yourself (Hi, you!) and your broken tongue is whole again.

…and too foolish to help it.

What if there were no clocks?

No weekly schedules. No calendars. No New Year’s Day.

No numbers to mark your age.

No BC or AD. No Judeo-Christian notion of history and forward motion.

What if there were no machine on my kitchen wall ticking away the sands, no hour glasses to measure moments?

What if the word moment didn’t even exist?

What if it all just was as it is?

And the stars were just stars and the sun and moon were simply dancers.

What would we worry about then?

Would we enjoy the sight of humming birds in the purple thicket more?

I’m tired of writing “So sorry to hear…”

Moms. Dads. Grandparents. Children.

Distant friends. And not so distant.

Husbands. Wives. Friends.

Everywhere we turn, it’s like a great wave of grieving.

So sorry to hear. Thinking of you. Sending you the best.

All meant. All impossible to make as meaningful as it should be.

It’s been a forever long year, a last year for too many.

So hold on tight to your loved ones. Hold on.

Five favorite moments in a theatre:

1.

When she says in The Ferryman:

When I'm old... when I've forgotten my own face, the shape of my hands, or what those hands did, I will remember your face, your hands. And that's enough for me. That's enough.

And my jaw dropped and my heart saw the love I have for the world and the woman who was putting my boys to bed some 3,000 miles away.

2.

When he says in True West

You go down to the L.A. Police Department there and ask them what kinda' people kill each other the most. What do you think they'd say?

And the brother says back: Who said anything about killing?

And he says: Family people. Brothers. Brothers-in-law. Cousins. Real American-type people. They kill each other in the heat mostly. In the Smog-Alerts. In the Brush Fire Season. Right about this time a' year.

3.

In The Beauty of Leenane at the Steppenwolf when she walks around with the letter taunting, teasing the notion of putting it in the stove and someone shouts from the audience, "Don't! Don't burn it!"

4.

When the white kid in Master Harold and the Boys spits in the face of the black man who raised him because his father didn't.

5.

In the Belle's Stratagem when a redhead stands in a corset, blue eyes afire with life, and draws an invisible bow that she aims at the man who she is promised to. And I think, I am going to marry that woman.

The trees outside are heavy with oranges and limes.

Velvet green hummingbirds hover and float in whirrs among the blooming lavender petals of the mexican sage.

I am spellbound from the window as the kids push and punch each and run to the car with the boogie boards under their arms.

How great is this?

There’s no good way to move unless you’re willing to leave it all behind.

When people talk about hope and faith and higher powers with a sense of certainty, I always wonder if they remember the last crisis: the time when they were falling, tumbling without the parachute.

Did they see the purpose then? Did they have faith the story would end the way it should? Did they really feel the purpose of it all in their snapping bones and say, “I’m all right with this.”

I can tell you I am not that way right now. Unable to see beyond the lamplight of my ego, my inner self ties itself in knots looking for itself, searching for meaning for itself in a pattern of its own making.

It is stupid and useless and profoundly lonely: an exercise in self-defeat.

And even though I know this, I cannot help myself.

Why?

We drove through the hills and found a spot in the lowlands to see Neowise.

In the dark, we stared up toward the Big Dipper and searched.

But there was too much light and we could only stand with our heads craned as people around us pointed and said things like, “I think that’s it, there.”

After awhile we gave up and went home.

The next night, as I was putting Liam to bed, he suddenly sat up. “Wait, Dad, we have to go out and see Neowise.”

“Oh, Liam,” I said. “We missed it. Last night was the last good night.”

There was a deep pause in the dark. Then he began to cry. Big sobs of loss.

“It’s okay,” I said. But nothing could hold back his tears.

“It’ll be 7,000 years before it comes back,” he said.

It was unnerving and true. All I could do was hold him.

One of my first jobs out of Ad school was at a small, nationally-known creative boutique in Minneapolis.

My book was great and I was proud to be hired there. The school was too, and used it to advertise themselves.

But the agency was heavy into healthcare and the Clinton Healthcare Act killed the appetite from clients to spend.

Assignments dried up and I competed with award-winning art directors and writers for even the tiniest jobs — weekly flyers for low priced strawberries at the local chain grocery store and direct mail pieces for tooth brushes.

I began to compare my salary to other things. Cars, vacations, furniture sets. Nothing seemed right. Then, I settled on the image of a baby Steinway.

That’s what I was. A baby Steinway that was being unused.

The negativity of my mind never ceases to amaze me.

There are three lists.

The first is all the stuff I thought I wanted to do. Become a famous writer. Unseat a president with undercover reporting. Make love to lots of hot women. Direct famous movies. Win a gold medal as the untouted member of the US Equestrian Team. Be an award winning creative director. Be someone interesting enough to open SNL and do the talk show circuit. Be the kind of guy everyone listens to in the room. Pull off a Nehru jacket at a cocktail party. Tell the funniest jokes on the planet. Blah, blah, blah.

The second is all the stuff I think I still want to do, all untested by reality. Stuff like, learn to surf and sail, scuba dive with my wife and kids, ride the Colorado River, write a book/story/play/poem/tv show/movie/essay that’s life-changing for all who read/see/experience it, meditate better, travel the world with my kids, make more money, win big ad awards (still), found a theatre company that produces work that bends time and space with cleverness and authenticity and earnestness. There’s more, but really, who cares? As you can see, the things I still think I want to do is a forward looking shadow of the things I thought I wanted to do.

Then, there’s the third list.

That’s the list filled with things like marry a woman with freckles who can eat fire and has a wicked sense of playfulness, be a dad to two boys who yell at each other half the time and play like old friends the other half, help an amazing redhead be as fiercely herself as possible, bike to Walnut Creek for a hamburger, meet Jesse Owns and learn that he was friends with my Uncle Jimmy Lee, hold an Oscar statue given to the screenwriter Ben Hecht in my hands in the bowels of the Newberry Library, be mistaken for Moby, nearly get fired by David Mamet from a bookstore that taught me the real value of reading, move to LA and live between a McDonald’s and a Buddhist temple at Crescent and Sunset, kiss a girl in front of the Chagall in downtown Chicago’s hot summer midnight dark, talk with my father before he dies about what’s on his mind, make Tacos for my sister when she’s recovering from chemo, apologize to a woman I married and hurt, rebuild a Lego At-At without instructions for my kid, ride the Matterhorn at Disneyland 12 zillion times because I love the laughter that comes out of the boys every damn time we do it, listen to a friend play “The Rain Song” from the bumper of a car in the Staten Island summer heat, drive a Mini Cooper from Cedars Sinai with a new life in the back, ride a bike to Subway with a laughing 8 year-old , get ice cream on a lark in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. And more.

The first list goes on and on and never ends. But it’s full of things that don’t carry much meaning anymore. The second list, while tempered by time, also stretches out forever. It’s all in the future, too — all based on a person I want to be.

It’s the third list that’s meaningful. It’s an incomplete list but one that will someday find an end that is sharp and cliff-like. It’s a list of the things I’ve actually done while trying to do the things on the first two lists.

Which is not to say the first two lists are useless, or bad, or a stupid fantasy. They are necessary because they are signs of hope and ambition and the values I carry within and project outward. But they are best used as guides, rather than goals or definitions. They are places to aim toward, not land.

My dad always told me to do something I loved.

And generally, I have. Which means I’ve been lucky and I’ve had a pretty good time.

So I work. A lot. Because I like work.

And I’ve got a reputation for it.

But sometimes people tell me not to work so hard.

To relax and enjoy myself.

Take a break. Make sure I get a vacation.

They tell me that there are other things that life is about besides work.

Therapists have been particularly enamored of telling me this.

On your death bed, they say, you won’t wish you’d spent more hours at the office.

Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll think, shit, if I’d worked a little harder and made a little more money, I might’ve left something more for my kids.

Maybe I’ll think, Fuck, I really enjoyed working at that place, what the fuck was I thinking not doing more?

It really depends on what you do, doesn’t it?

Do you like what you do? Do you love the people you work with and for? Do you think the organization you’re clocking hours with is doing something worthwhile in the world?

The therapists don’t usually start there because the people who come to them come with anxiety and stress. You’re staying calm at the office and yelling at the kids when you get home. And they assume that what you do at the office is meaningless to you and you can’t see it.

They assume you don’t like it.

They assume you’d do something else if you could.

It doesn’t occurs to them in a true way that you might just enjoy it. You might actually love it.

That it’s simply life and being alive that’s stressful and anxiety producing and that there’s nothing you can really do about that. Except notice it and live with it because a vacation (or a meditation or a book or anything else you might think of) won’t keep you from avoiding it.

Plus, they think that what they do is really amazing. And it is. But not what I’d want to spend my life doing.

So anyway. That’s why I hate vacations. They’re based on that idea. That whatever you’re doing you don’t like and so you need to do something else for 2 weeks a year.

Or let me put it this way: If you’re doing something you dislike so much that you think 2 weeks a year doing something else will make it worthwhile, you should fucking quit your job.

When this is all over, I’m gonna start a theatre company called the Theatre of Rejection and it’s going to put on nothing but ignored, forgotten, aged work that no one ever saw. It’ll be run by the blind and maimed lurching around in the shadows of the minuscule flyspaces where the rats gnaw at costumes in the dark. We’ll paper the walls of the lobby with all the “Thank you but no thank you” letters. Every show will be billed as the “worst theatre ever produced.” And every show will feature a character named Cassandra played by a fierce pale skinned redhead I am in love with and who breathes fire at random moments so you leave with singed eyebrows. Our curtain call will be a big fat finger to everyone who ever said NO!

When this is all over, I’m gonna stop working for everyone else and put the 401K down and take a long nap. And when I get up, I’m gonna get a pair of OP shorts and a black sweatshirt and learn to sail with my teenage boys in a warm water bay where sting rays glide like angel-winged wafers over the white sand. Then we’ll sail around the world and the boys will learn to be fearless and discover that the true meaning of faith is to let go of everything absolutely and the only way out the airplane built by others is without a parachute. And when we get back we’re gonna spend our Saturday mornings at the food bank passing out watermelons and potatoes to the truly needy.

When this is all over, I’m gonna teach our old dog to stand on her hind legs and dance the pogo while playing the only three chords you need to make a Ramones song destroy an eardrum.

When this is all over, I’m gonna kiss you furiously in the kitchen and the living room and play room and patio and bedroom and anywhere else I need to so that you never doubt how much you are loved by me.

When this is all over, I’m gonna read a Sunday paper that you hold in your hands while drinking freshly-made coffee as you sleep late in bed.

When this is all over, I’m gonna look at my resentments every day and demolish them with clarity and openness and clear amends where necessary and I’m going to jump into H&I with both feet and be of service to people who need it. I’m gonna reach my hands out and hold the world for anyone who needs it.

When this is all over, I’m gonna stop worrying about being liked and trust in love and hold the whole world in pre-emptive positive regard.

When this is all over….

All over….

When this is all over, I’m gonna do stuff I’ve never ever done before.

Yep, when this is all over I’m gonna stop waiting for this to be all over and I’m gonna do some stuff. Big stuff. And I’m gonna do it like it’s never going to be over, because it never will be.

In the ring is the question: Pie? And the answer: Yes.

On the inside of the looping sterling silver bracelet: …the ever fix’d mark…

But the most important thing to me that’s been engraved over 18 years is on the air we breathe together and the steps we take no matter what the world has done around us…..

The irises of her eyes widen.

We talk about the other therapist, E. I go into the journey of it. How I got to her. Why I felt matched well with her — her knowledge of the program, the sense of intimacy that ran deep in me. Her understanding of me that made me, eventually, feel too transparent.

DId she mean too much to me? Or perhaps I wanted too much, to be more than $140/hr appointment?

The desire to be more to people who mean more to me is deep. To be special.

Moving through this starts here for some reason, with this new therapist who listens with her eyes.

What will I discover in the reflections that appear in the dark irises of her eyes?