Two Lonely People in a Bar

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways
that won't work."

Thomas Edison

For 15 years my major relationships began in bars. After a night of drinking and talking, and with my judgment impaired, I'd fall in love and then try very hard to make the ensuing relationship work.
The drinking together part was fun. I was younger then, and I thought it was very liberated of me. What was hard was trying to relate together in the nondrinking hours. We didn't always like each other when we were sober.

But I was tenacious, if nothing else. I could even go years trying to make things work out well. Sometimes it was only a matter of months. In those days, a six-month relationship constituted a major event. But once I went eight years, off and on. Another time, it was two years.

I found the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous when I was 36. I had tried to commit suicide three times. I had two children, one of whom I had placed for adoption. I had 15 years of failed relationships.


I don't think I was a failure as a human being. I think I found 10,000 ways that don't work, before finding the one way that did. Sobriety has been the great gift of my life.


Here's a poem I wrote about one of the ways that didn't work so well.
How do you relate to Edison's quote?


Two Lonely People in a Bar


To him—who speaks of nights that sound like scriptures
read by some poor trembling monk
who sometimes in the clutch of darkness
has traced against his will the silken flesh
with longing lips and flinching soul,
alone with his colliding needs—

she—who thinks herself forsaken—
is incandescent, whitely in the
dim gold bar lamps crying
I could make the morning
come