At AA meetings, you receive sobriety chips that resemble gambling chips or coins, as a memento of the length of time of you sobriety. On your first day you receive a 24-hour chip. At 5:15 Happy Hour, these chips were silver in color.

Dear God of Economics,
the close brother to the God of Math,
the distant cousin of the God of Adulthood.
I wish you didn’t exist.
You might as well be the God of Empty Pockets,
the God of Overdrafts,
you Old Testament type.
I don’t trust your boom busts.
I’m tired of your depressions.

Dear God of Economics,
even your greatest prophets
stumble over your contradictions.
So I don’t feel all that bad.

There are so many Gods I pray to
before I pray to you,
I beg each one for redemption,
but wine keeps stumbling into my mouth,
so they must not be listening.
I have a small box full of silver sobriety chips.
a shiny new one after every relapse.
I should feel like a rich man,
but, the more I collect, the less each one is worth.
That’s how inflation works, I suppose,
At least, I think so.
You never blessed me,
God of Economics.
All I know is
they won’t take sobriety chips as payment at the liquor store.
They only care about real money,
not the long hours each coin is worth.
That’s a whole different type of labor.

Dear God of Economics,
I am afraid I am a communist,
I’m just not the monetary type.
I believe in other economies.
I purchase stocks of breaths.
I’m heavily invested in heartbeats.
The outlook on futures is hopeful.
Every week I arrive at the meetings
in debt.
There’s always a couple pairs of hands
eager to hold my crash.
They give me full credit.
Forgive them as they have forgiven me.

Amen.

 

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