Episode 1356 - Patton Oswalt

**Marc Maron** (0:00)
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All right, let's do this. How are you, WTFers, WTF buddies, WTFniks? What's happening? How is it? How is it for you? How's the heat, huh? How is the heat? I'm just hanging out, drinking liquid deaths, not a sponsor right now, but I have a lot of them, and spending some time on my 95 degree porch, watching my yard die, because I'm trying to conserve, I'm trying to conserve water.
I guess if I was real righteous, I would just dig the whole fucking thing up, and stick a few cactuses in there, but I'm just slowly watching it die, as I am watching the rest of California die. I guess we'll know we're in real trouble when they can't grow fucking almonds anymore.
The day you hear like there's an almond shortage, it's gonna be the day it's too late to get out of California without being stuck in fucking Mad Max traffic. I had 23 years sober, day before yesterday, August 9th, 23 years. They kinda, it's not so much that they're flying by, but they become not even less significant, but less important. It's just my life. My life is sober. I mean, recovered, yes. Do I get dry? Do I get cranky? Do I get irritable? Is it better really mentally than it was when I was drinking? Absolutely. Do I still find things to beat the shit out of myself about or feel ashamed of? And do I still make mistakes? Of course. But I know one of them is not waking up saying, what the fuck did I do last night? Why didn't I sleep at all? How come my sweats smells funny? Oh my God, when was the last time I ate?
I'd like a little more of that actually. But quality of life, much better, much different. I can't even imagine it anymore. And that's the real gift of it. The obsession to drink or use drugs left me a long time ago. That's one of the promises of sobriety. If you do it in the way that it's done, where you get promises is that the obsession will be lifted. And that seems like a very tall order. Like how the fuck am I, my entire brain is geared around thinking about drugs and alcohol. How am I not gonna think about that anymore? And then somewhere around five years, it went away totally. And I work in bars all the time. I don't think about it. It's no longer a choice. I know in my mind that I can't do it safely, any of it. So you find other things, sure. I mean, I'll plow through some ice cream.
I'll have a week of some maddening masturbatory practices. I'll get obsessed with other things. But I'm not destroying my life and the life of others and exponentially increasing the odds of my safety becoming compromised by engaging in drinking or drugging. And I'm not righteous about it. I just know, I don't think I'd be alive if I didn't do it. I can't imagine what my life would have been like. And it took a while to get sober. I was in and out for a long time of trying to stay sober. And then it took, and I don't think about it anymore. And I know that people are like, don't you wanna just, I don't really need to. It's like, once you get away from it and you truly realize in your heart and in your mind that you can't do it safely and that you're gonna come around the same bend and end up in the same puddle of pee, how many times does that gotta happen before you know, before you know in your heart, in your mind? Look man, I've got smaller rings of self-sabotaging behavior that I end up in. It's not a puddle of pee, but shame nonetheless. But they don't make my life unmanageable. They don't cause a tremendous amount of chaos. I've been divorced twice in sobriety. I've had a lot of bad relationships in sobriety. I've experienced sickness and death in sobriety. I've gone bankrupt in sobriety. But I didn't drink because there's no solution there for me.