Kaiwen yu Hubuo

Many of you know Bill Watterson’s classic comic strip about a boy and his tiger, Calvin and Hobbes, has been a favorite of mine since the early days of my sobriety. If there is a reckoning of time spent when I pass away, I can just imagine St. Peter with an accusing glare, “Spent an entire week of your life reading about a stuffed tiger?” Of course when I think of how hard I have laughed I will honestly be able to reply, “It was time well spent!”

Last night I ran across, Calvin and Hobbes Hideout, a site that showed how the strip was presented in other countries. Even in a foreign language, I still found myself laughing at the panels all except for one presented in Chinese (Calvin and Hobbes is Kaiwen yu Hubuo in Chinese as shown above). I got a little frustrated that even with my vast knowledge of all things C&H, that I didn’t get this one. Sure the facial expressions were mildy amusing, but I knew there something very funny here that I was missing. I saved it as a favorite figuring that one day it would hit me and I would be glad for the opportunity to go back to it. Less than 24 hours later, I am featuring the strip in my blog not because the meaning came to me overnight but because of a very similar frustrating experience.

This morning after I had finished with the recovery meeting I hold at the methadone clinic it occurred to me that there were so many more in the MMT program that were missing out on a recovery program. For those of you who don't know, many times people in MMT are often shunned by 12 steppers in other recovery programs as "trading one drug for another". Also from what I have seen, most clinics do not have active recovery groups beyond the counselors that concentrate more on maintenance than recovery. So the culture of the clinic has goals oriented not toward a strong recovery but more toward phases like "take-homes" and "counselor-free" administration. Now relative to the alternative illicit drug use, these are admirable goals and good things. But there is no reason there couldn't be so much more if there was a strong recovery group advocating a recovery beyond taking a weeks worth of methadone home. It's like all they have is the Chinese version of C&H, yeah its still mildly amusing but there is so much more that is missing.

I hope that one day our recovery group will become more encompassing, that some of the MMT patients will take it up on their own to have TDA-less meetings. That we can get those that have weaned off methadone (they are rare) to come back and speak to the groups. Begin to set the bar higher than just phases and change the culture of the clinic toward recovery instead of just maintaining.

Now that would be time well spent!