A Free Man

I’m a step further to getting my 12 Step Podcast up and running. I’ve secured my own domain with bandwidth enough to host the audio files. From now on this site will be hosted here. Please come and visit.

    Tonight a friend and I will go to the Tuesday night Witney meeting to meet a guy we twelve stepped last week. It was a controversial 12 step call as he was referred to AA by his probation officer. I got the call from our probation liason – a new intergroup service position – and as I’ve been told to do said yes when asked to go and talk to him. One of my closest AA friends, a fellow I’ve 12 stepped with before said he couldn’t go along because he felt that this type of service ran contrary to the traditions. He made the analogy that if a wife phoned asking for a 12 step call for her husband, we wouldn’t go – that is true. But it seemed to me that being referred by your parole officer, is similar to being ordered by a court to attend AA. Neither of these are great ways of going about it. But my argument was that the ends justify the means.

How many people really got to AA for the “right” reason? I went to my first meeting to save my relationship. So did my sponsor. So did the friend I was arguing with. For me, the magic happened at that first meeting and I don’t care any more about how I got there. I figure if we can get people through the doors, they have a chance for that magic to happen for them.

We met with this guy at the probation office in Oxford. He was surly, probably a little bit drunk and not particularly responsive. We shared our experience, strength and hope. I told him about “a new freedom and a new happiness”. And by the end of it, he wasn’t completely against going to a meeting. He said he’d think about it and give us a call.

I got the call yesterday afternoon and we’re going to pick him up for a meeting tonight. So this fellow’s got his chance. Tell me, do the ends justify the means?

    I’ve always loved my iPod. It’s great to be able to plug in and tune out on the way to work or long airplane trips or when going for a jog. I’m a big music fan and have been an iPod owner for nearly five years now.

What endeared me even more to my iPod was when I discovered a way to use it in my recovery. About nine months sober, I discovered podcasts.  This sort of radio on demand was fantastic for me. I’m an American living abroad and was feeling a little homesick. Podcasts allowed me to keep up with my favorite American radio programs.

And, then I found AA podcasts. There are little things along the path of my recovery journey that really changed things for the better. I discovered AA podcasts just when I needed to, just when I needed a strong influx of the message. With these podcasts I could plug in for an hour in the middle of the day. Get a meeting at lunch even on days when there wasn’t a lunchtime meeting. Because most of the speakers that I found were American, it also helped with that homesickness.

I still listen to them today and if I’m in need of a boost and I can’t get to a meeting, I’ll turn on a Clancy, or a David A., or a Johnnie H. Here are the ones I know of, and I’d love to hear about more:

12 Step Podcast

Sobercasting

My gratitude list for today.

• My lovely partner S. and her eternal patience
• Baby DVD on the way
• Our resident bat that I see flitting around the backyard in the evenings
• AA friends, especially Peter K, Peter Q, David C and Flora
• Sinead O’Connor’s album “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” – starts with the serenity prayer.
• The rainy British summer.
• Cycling to work in the rainy British summer!
• Blogs

I’ve been blogging for about a month now. I started with the imminent arrival of my partner and I’s first child – a gift of sobriety. But, because my site includes my full name in the address, I’ve been hesitant to talk much about sobriety, except in sort of veiled language. While, I’m pretty open with family in friends about my recovery, for professional reasons, I choose to maintain my anonymity on the public site.

All that being said, recovery has been such a joy that I feel like sharing my journey, and that’s going to be the goal of this site. So in less than a month, I’ve gone from no web sites to two. Alcoholic behavior?