Resolve, or how to get pee out of the sofa at your Airbnb

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Strange things are afoot at the Circle K, as they say in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. It is amazing how, as someone who has been sober for 18 years, it is still so easy for me to forget how shitty life gets when I stop going to meetings and how much more sane I am when I do go.

Yesterday I logged onto Substack after a long break and found out I was the #1 rising Substack in Literature. How this actually happened is unclear, and honestly I still think it might be a joke or algorithmic mistake. The only plausible explanation is that has something to do with being mentioned in my friend

Tatiana Gallardo

’s recent Substack post about sobriety’s need for a rebrand.

So if you are here via that, thank you for coming, I hope you won’t be disappointed. And for everyone who has been here all along, thank you for staying. This summer my performance on the writing front has been poor. But this summer serenity, or at least enough distance from myself and my situation to have a sense of humor, has been in short supply.

Both are true or both things are true are phrases I’ve found myself saying a lot in the past couple of weeks. So I actually came on here to change the name of my Substack to one of those phrases and then discovered there are already two “Both Are True” Substacks and one other “Both Things Are True” Substack. So I went with “Also True,” which is something I also seem to say a lot.

Because many things are, in fact, also true. For example:

It is annoying that there are so many Substacks about how to become successful on Substack.

It is also true that sometimes they say interesting things and I read a bunch of them anyway, despite being annoyed.

Another example:

This year has been incredibly difficult financially and spiritually.

It is also true that in many ways I have been incredibly happy.