Axiom of the Ass'ole Addendum

Lemonade Lessons and Beyond. .

Lemon 00#. If you cannot get out of your story you are destined TO REPEAT IT.

This is a very different kind of story than the Lemons which have come before or after. Perhaps it is about escape from the Lemons, I’m not at all sure. It is an addendum to the Axiom of the Asshole in us All, because it is the story of a rather odd coincidence having to do with the story that gave us the Axiom. It is also different in that it’s the first Lemon to be added to the tree since I finished writing it over twenty-five years ago. It has already been over half as many years (sixteen to be exact) since this coincidence took place, and I finally thought it worth telling. So here it is.

Many years after I had sat in the pub and heard that all of us have been an ass-hole one time or another, I was rather drawn to attend daily AA-meetings in the Capital City of our great state. Not that I was a regular drunk, but the nature of addictions had taken me elsewhere and I’d become a bit dysfunctional, so to speak. And the therapist that my wife and I were visiting together suggested that I find some meetings for addiction and start attending on a regular basis, to learn about my affliction and slavery to bad habits. And so it was that I discovered “The Club” by asking a panhandler if he knew where the Alcoholics Anonymous folks met. And, for $10 he agreed to take me there personally, and as luck would have it, there was a meeting just about to begin and he joined me.

About fifty people of all stripes and ages were filling the room - besides bums and prostitutes, there were dozens of state workers, lawyers, teachers and other unsavory characters with some very picaresque ways of describing themselves. I didn’t realize then but I would get to know many of them and their stories over the coming years. I was about to begin a new daily habit, since I was unemployed at the time, and didn’t live but ten blocks away, listening to the same conundrum of life dozens of dozens of different ways.

Now it was not at that first meeting, but at the second that a guy a few rows to the side of me began his oratory with the statement that I provided as the title to this piece. “If you cannot get out of your story you are destined to repeat it.” And it was such a wonderful speech I always remember him standing as he gave it — but I’ve never seen any one stand up during a share, so I’m simply picturing it that way, for it was the depth of analysis and application to anyone’s experience that convinced me that Alcoholics Anonymous was much more than I’d ever expected. Only I left that meeting remembering the premise, but like is often the case, I didn’t retain his answer. And it is only now, about eighteen years later that I have reconstructed what he must have said, for it is common “program” (that is, 12-Step program) wisdom that the only way to break free from your story (and the inevitable repeat) is to accept the stories of others as your own. You don’t tell your story to share it at a meeting, as if you are expecting a reflection back and a response (as you would with a therapist or a friend), but you are surrendering it, giving it away.

You can only be free of your story by taking on those of others, accepting them as your own.

Now the very odd coincidence that I mentioned is that, over the next year or so that I went to The Club to listen to others share their appreciation of life’s emotional struggles, I eventually got to know the fellow who’d convinced me there could be wisdom to be had here and a reason to keep coming back. He was not one of the State workers or lawyers or teachers, but a drifter down on his luck, and one day he asked to borrow $100 to help him through a jam and get something out of hock. I struggled with my respect for him, and eventually gave it to him with the understanding I didn’t expect him to give it back. But he did, and on that day he shared his real story with me. He’d put together a company and amassed enough of a fortune to have a yacht and a fancy girlfriend who took off with his partner and most of the company’s money. Simple story from a B-movie. Only then he mentioned that his real passion all those plush years had been calf-roping on the national rodeo circuit. He’d won a national buckle. That’s when I recognized him. Then he got out of the car and said good-bye. I never saw him again to tell him the rest of his story.

There is rather an interesting side-bar to all this. It is also why I decided it was finally worth telling the second half of the Asshole-in-us-all story. For it is about the role of narrative in our consciousness, and a common mis-apprehension that there is a “story” which has to do with who we are and what our meaning is. I have written about this elsewhere, in fact more places than I care to think about, and certainly not footnote here. Yet the whole of this “misapprehension” has bothered me for years, because I am constantly succumbing to the plot that so many of us succumb to. But I have not been able to shake the idea that there is a story to be told that is behind who we are…. and of course, this is exactly what I believe he told us isn’t true at all.

END OF THE LEMONADE LESSONS