"I'm Jim Puckett, and I'm a lazy bum."
"HI JIM!"

Well, doggone it - it's the truth. I am a lazy bum. Not only am I lazy, I am SLOTHFUL. (The picture above is a portrait of one of the Seven Deadly Sins - Sloth. That's the way I feel every morning :)

And when I say that I am slothful, I don't mean lazy like your brother-in-law is lazy - I mean LAZY. I mean that I'm actually powerless over being lazy - that, just like my alcoholism and my compulsive overeating, I have to maintain abstinence from my laziness, or it will take over and I'll never climb out.  I mean that I'm lazy like "needing the Twelve Steps" lazy.

I can remember, back in the worst of my drinking, having a nice long talk with Sgt. Walker, my tank commander - I remember having a flash of insight, and telling him, "Sarge, you know what? I just can't drink. I can't take a single drink at all" and he told me "No, that's silly - of course a man needs a drink. You just need to stay on top of it, is all."

Sergeant Walker didn't hate me or want me to die from alcoholism - he simply didn't understand what it is. And now I find that I have the same problem with a lot of the people in my life - they simply don't understand that I'm a cheezewhacker of the first water - that I am a lazy bum, and that I can't take a drink of lazy.

It's okay if I work myself into an early grave. It's okay if I keep going until I get sick or too tired to care. None of that matters - but it is imperative that I not allow laziness to put me down. Pneumonia may knock me down, but I'll be able to get up. Exhaustion may knock me down, but I'll be able to get up. But if I allow myself to be lazy, then I'll never get up.

My sponsor doesn't even understand this part; my sponsor is a hardworking man. He's a successful man. He doesn't understand what "lazy" is. My sponsor met me after I'd already had the realization that I couldn't lay down with laziness, or I'd never get up; he doesn't think that he's ever met the lazy Jim. But I'm just now realizing that the real Jim is the lazy Jim - there isn't another one.

If I had a Fellowship to go to - if there were a "Lazies Anonymous" - then I might actually be allowed to recover from this seemingly hopeless and helpless condition of mind and body. However, I don't have such a fellowship, and I don't know if there are many - or ANY - others out there like me. And, since I don't have a fellowship, I don't have a Visible Second Step anywhere, so I can't effectively work the Steps. Instead, I have to keep plugging away, holding on to my abstinence from laziness with all I have.

I suspect that my Step work has really kept the laziness at bay, even though I've never had the Fellowship of Lazies Anonymous to work with - in much the same way that my Step work has kept me free from nicotine, even though I've never gone to a Nicotinics Anonymous meeting.  But I still have smoking dreams - and in my smoking dreams, I know that I've been smoking all along, and nobody has caught me. That's the way that my laziness feels - that I've been lazy all along, and nobody has caught on to it.

And, while I've not had any desire to take a drink in decades, I often think that it would be nice to lay down and snooze for a few months. But somehow it doesn't happen - I'm grateful for that, but I am also afraid. There's a story in the Big Book (possibly apocryphal) about a man who, at the age of thirty, realizes that he can't take a drink successfully, so he swears off of booze until he succeeds in business.

He doesn't touch a drop for twenty-five years, then he retires at fifty-five, a successful businessman. As the book says, "Out come his carpet slippers and a bottle" and he drinks himself to death in a few years.

I'm not worried about the bottle - it's the carpet slippers that scare me.