No, I am not talking about any relationship with this forum or anybody on it. That's all good.

A couple of days ago, I made plans to meet with a friend I made in AA to meet him tomorrow. I called him a couple of hours ago to discuss the plans more in-depth, and I got a very nasty surprise from him.

He was drunk and stoned, and he was VERY upset with me. Why was he upset with me? Because the first time he came over to my house, he brought his prized scrapbook, and I choose to put it aside so that I could talk with him instead. Now that he is drunk and stoned, he is willing to bitch me out about how much I "hurt" him by not looking at his scrapbook then, and about how he can no longer trust me to look at his scrapbook because of how I "cheapened" it that day. Never mind that my reasons for doing so was because I wanted to have a decent conversation with him - apparently, when he is drunk and stoned, decent conversations do not matter much to him.

I kept on trying to tell him that I wanted to be his friend, but he kept on coming up with reasons why that would not work for him. For example, he asks me if I can take a bus out to his place, and I tell him I don't know how I could manage that, seeing as he lives out in the middle of nowhere. His response? "You have a problem taking a bus to see me, after the times I drove over to your place?!?!?" He seriously took offense to that, and he got even more offended the more I tried to explain that I was holding no hostility or resentment against him whatsoever.

But by the end of this 45-minute conversation, the hostility and resentment did start to rise in my heart. Every word I said to him, he twisted into something that was vastly negative. Clearly, my intents were not at all clear to him, but that's not my fault. At a couple times in the conversation, he said things like, "I am an alcoholic, so I drink, and Alcoholics Anonymous is not for me, because sanity is a myth, and....." Yeah, he was talking like somebody who seriously did believe sanity was a myth, because during this conversation, he had absolutely none of it happening in his mind.

I told him I would call him back tomorrow, and I told him blankly at the end of the conversation that I can't keep talking to him when he is intoxicated. I doubt he will even remember this conversation, seeing as he kept on forgetting everything I told him just a couple of minutes earlier, and seeing as he kept on asking me what day it was. More disturbingly, he also kept on asking me if I was involved in law enforcement, or, to be more exact, if I was "one of Big Brother's little helpers". Yeah, I kinda wonder if he has a reason to be paranoid about that at this point, but then again, I know speculating about that will help nobody.

He is a decent enough man when he is sober, but he wore out my tolerance of him very quickly when I talked to him in his druken state.

Ah, well. That conversation is over. Perhaps that friendship is over, as well. In an odd way, he did help me keep my sobriety for today. He served as a reminder of what I could become if I fall off the wagon, and I really don't want to be like that at all. That's a higher priority than any temporary dubious "benefits" giving into the cravings for booze might deliver. That probably sounds terrible - but it is kinda true.