In my new book, TICKLED, I talk about a lot of stuff, including presence, precision, Bob Dylan, Harry Potter, and love. I also talk a lot about addiction and the extremely difficult time I had tackling the challenge of alcoholism. The end of my marriage was precipitated by alcoholism. I have lost friendships due to alcoholic behavior. And while my career has been, thank God, a pretty interesting and lucrative one, God only knows where it might have gone if I hadn’t spent much of my 20s, 30s, and 40s in an alcoholic haze. When you’re an alcoholic, it is practically impossible to find presence. Alcohol is a depressant, and it ejects you out of now. That’s why some people drink — because they can’t face the present moment — but it also works the other way around - it’s hard to find peace if you consume too much alcohol, because you are basically a step behind in the living of your own life. I recently spoke to a recovery group on zoom about my addictions and, more recently, my discovery of presence, and the experience was profound, both for me and, based on their reactions, the addicts listening in. Most of us have an addiction to something. I’ve been addicted to alcohol and certainty, separate and apart. And while addictions do seem to tickle on the way up, they definitely don’t tickle on the way down. Today’s guest is going to talk to us about all that and more.

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