Addiction: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, March 2022

All sin tends to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation.
W.H. Auden

I got nasty habits / I take tea at three / Yes, and the meat I eat for dinner / It must be hung up for a week
Mick Jagger & Keith Richards, “Live with Me,” Let It Bleed

I was newly sober thanks to Kaiser’s Chemical Dependency Recovery Program. It was 2012 and I wasn’t doing Alcoholics Anonymous. Instead I was sitting zazen at the Page Street Zen Center every Monday night for the Meditation in Recovery meeting which melded soto zen with AA. I’d started putting out cushions for that meeting on a regular basis, but suddenly it was determined I needed to be vetted for such an innocuous volunteer task. So I went out for a cup of coffee with Tom to discuss the state of my recovery. He prefaced our talk by saying that, while the AA 12-steps fit hand-in-glove with Buddhist meditation, AA is absolutely necessary whereas Zen is not. Then he proceeded to quiz me about whether I’ve committed to a higher power yet and how far I’d gotten in my fourth step to “make a searching and fearless moral inventory” of myself.