JB Smiths Blog – Author @ books4free.com

It would not be my last. I wrote a post after we learned the news of Osama Bin Liden’s death that went viral shortly, and now that I’m thinking about it I wrote an article that MSNBC posted after 9/11, so I guess I’m selling myself a little short.

The AA Boy Meets AA Girl cartoons though were a riot. My higher power loves irony though because I ended up marrying a woman with tattoos that I love, and she does not actually appreciate the sentiment of these videos. I give you they are written largely from the male perspective, in early AA, which is hardly the model for solid mature equanimity of thought, or even baseline equality.

Truly, both men and women are largely train wrecks emotionally, financially, spiritually, and of course in all sexual habits, our character defects are raging, when we first come into recovery. Mine especially.

The big book does a phenomenal job of trying to thread the needle around sex, ironically around page 69. Needless to say, I leaned more to the “straight pepper diet” side of the spectrum when I came in to the rooms of AA. Honestly, if beautiful woman hadn’t been a part of my early sobriety, I probably would not have stayed sober.

That of course does not mean ANY of my early relationships in sobriety were by any means healthy. Hell, a drinking woman had taken me back out, or at least been a contributing factor in many of my last several relapses, not to mention the love/obsession I had for Krista Bell, (Gwyneth) in Spiral’s End, now deceased, that took me to the needle on the one fateful night I ever indulged and contracted Hep C. But I digress.

I wrote this cartoon in extreme pain. I was going through a break up, which is a generous way of framing my 13th stepping a girl as she’d come into the rooms of AA, told me she was married and her fiancé was in prison for stealing airplanes. The good news was he’d be locked up for a decade, and their marriage was not really legal because they did the ceremony in the Bahamas. You know, you’re typical backstory.

Needless to say misadventure ensued, she kept in touch with him and he got out of prison six months later, and I was devastated, heart broken for the first time in early sobriety. I believe I was around 3 years sober. I’d just launched the first version of my book, Hippopotamus Sea. It was selling a little here and there, but not enough to live off of and I was unemployed at the time. I began writing a cartoon, and it just poured out of me. I had high hopes it would drive traffic to the site, books4free.com which would then in turn sell a few books.

It was pretty funny, and a lot of people told me so. The really funny thing was that every one of the stories came from real-life experiences or something someone had told me.

It went a little viral in the AA rooms, and usually if I show someone in the rooms of AA the cartoons, someone, usually a man, has sent it to their early sponsees, but this is perhaps a local thing given the number of Facebook connections I had in Atlanta, I haven’t ever experienced that nationally now that I think about it, but still it was fun.

I didn’t even attempt to address my sexual proclivity in AA until about my 12th year sober, and while not especially proud of that, or the misogynistic tone, they are a window into my consciousness, a slice of time, at 3 years sober, when I was in pain, and processing all the wild things you hear and experience in early sobriety, and they are, in my opinion, still funny. Even if a bit sexist, they also do poke fun of the man, who thinks this will be the one that saves him, that they can turn “playing house” into a healthy, sober relationship, because we do all think this when we come in. Sex does feel like the last bastion of fun you can have in early sobriety, for a while, and for me, it certainly was. My character defects didn’t feel like they started biting back for a long time in sobriety, and honestly it did take therapy eventually, but first, losing something that was very painful.

I heard a speaker in Gainesville at the GA State AA Conference, in 2011, a few really good ones now that I think about it. A lady who was Bob Marley’s neighbor in Jamaica, who he told, “You’re a narcissist and a hedonist, and I want nothing to do with you”, lol, and that struck a chord, but then the male speaker discussed going back to early childhood pains, and working with a therapist to overcome some of those blocks. And eventually I did.

But the cartoons remained, and continued to get views. Though I can’t link them to any books being sold, I did once lose the YouTube videos, after I ran my mouth to Hu Jian, the communist mouthpiece editor of the Chinese Times during Covid, and I was blown away that within minutes, a coordinated censoring of my Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook accounts took everything of mine related to Twitter down. I appealed and it came back but that was scary, and a real feeling of loss. So while not my proudest writing, the fact that they did get a little bit of traction is a source of pride and I was quite relieved they came back online. It still blows my mind that they did that during the height of Covid, but if you’ve read the Twitter files that is not shocking. I recommend you do so, it’s critical to understand power dynamics, propaganda and the world we live in today.

I digress again. The cartoons are meant to be funny, nothing more. They are a brief glimpse into my psyche of early sobriety, as is the whole book. I wrote Spiral’s End at 2 years sober, and I’m coming up on 20 this Christmas Eve. But it was the best I could do at the time. Once we know better we do better, but in early sobriety as in life, its always best to do what you can with what you have, right in this moment. A good plan today is often better than a perfect plan 20 years later. I’m glad the cartoons exist, as does the book. I’d like to retitle it back to Hippopotamus Sea though, Hep C and Me is the worst title on the planet, and it didn’t help with SEO as I’d hoped lol.

One day.