The System is Calling the Shots

Random: lacking aim or method; purposeless; haphazard.

When I'm doing The Work I have to laugh at the unpredictability of life. I have absolutely no idea what's going on most of the time and that's a lot of fun when I'm not fighting The System. It's like getting up in the morning and finding out that there was an unexpected snowfall -- I can bitch about having to shovel the driveway or I can go out and make a snow girl, with anatomically correct breasts and a demure look on her face. This doesn't change the essential fact that there's snow on the ground. I can marvel at the snow or I can rail at the sky that disgorged it. Makes no difference to the snow. The snow is part of The System. There are rules that I can't make go away.

Herr Luber has drifted, with some gentle nudges and bumps, into a little swirling backwater of life. One of those spots we all get caught in from time to time. We can see the big, exciting River of Life as we float around, maybe getting dunked by a small waterfall now and again, but mostly just swirling, bumping into the walls. It's not that unpleasant but it's not that interesting, either. Dunk, swirl, look at the River longingly, repeat.

"The Random Meter is pegged at the top," he said. What a great image. Fully Random. That is a great metaphor for total lack of control. It's the loss of control that's frustrating. It's managing the expectations that's hard.

Run Away!

Fight or Flight. They say that great stress impels an organism to stand and fight or to run like hell. The Fight or Flight Response, they call it. This makes sense. It's a good name, if a little bit unimaginative.

I have been battling another individual in my organization who is trying to get me to do something that I don't want to do. Imagine that: me not wanting to do something that someone else wants me to do. This is not the first time I have engaged in this behavior. By nature I don't want to do things if I'm told to do them. Good things, bad things, saving my own life things, I don't like to do anything if I'm told to do it. Technically, I don't have to do these two particular things, either, which confounds the situation and swells my own sense of power and self-satisfaction.

To refuse the assignment, I had to call this guy and tell him that I didn't want to do the work. To prepare for this, I had like four million arguments in my head, using up the better part of two weeks to avoid a half day's worth of work. This makes sense to me when I'm using brilliant and unassailable logic to win an argument with someone who isn't actually present. SuperK chips in, too. I try an argument out on her. She tweaks it. We pop into each other's office from time to time with refinements. This isn't all bad -- some of the stuff that I say to myself really sounds terrible when I'm talking to someone else. Finally, we come up with an airtight solution. Two alcoholics coming up with an airtight solution. Double the fun.

So I call the guy. I'm not confrontational. I'm not upset. I ask a lot of questions and let him do a lot of the talking. I find that when I talk things turn out badly. I figure maybe he'll hang himself with his own rope. I dodge and feint and don't commit to anything but don't refuse the assignment, either. I chalk this up to my kindness and sense of fair play.

Yeah. I was afraid. I was afraid of the confrontation.

P.S.: I received an email this evening "thanking me in advance for helping out with the project."

Talk Talk

Talk: To put into spoken words; utter; to speak emptily or trivially; chatter.

It comes as a shock to me to realize that I am not as interesting to other people as I am to myself. I try to remember this when I'm around someone with nothing to say who nonetheless insists on doing a lot of talking. I was at a large meeting last night where the same few people share every week and frankly, they'd be better off keeping quiet and listening to what someone else has to say. And I notice this, of course, because I think I have something profound to share but don't because I'm too humble, even though my thoughts are profound and revealing and spiced with hilarious and insightful anecdotes from my past.

I can't listen to what someone else is saying when I thinking about my reply. I see this in people's eyes all of the time when I'm talking; my experience as a sales guy has helped me perceive when someone is paying attention and when someone is not, which is distressingly often. I can almost hear the wheels turning and the gears grinding as the other person prepares his response. It's not worth talking to someone who is busy working on a brilliant riposte.

This is what I wanted to say last night. It's not nearly as profound as I thought it was at the time. And it took me most of the meeting to come up with it which means I wasn't listening to anyone else. It's unclear to me why I thought they weren't profound. I wasn't listening. Maybe they were saying things that I needed to hear.

This Program solves a lot of my problems as long as I'm diligent in working the principles of the 12 Steps. The spiritual principles of the 12 Steps. I came in with all kinds of difficult psychological and social deficiencies as a result of my drinking, and I was in a big hurry to solve them all. Some of them were deep-seated and wedged in but good, and I needed professional help to de-wedge them, but I learned to seek out this help in the process of working The Steps. I never had any luck in solving my problems if I wasn't trying to apply a spiritual solution. It's very tempting to say: "OK, I'm having a relationship problem and I'm going to concentrate on it and dabble in The Program on the side, because this is more important and I don't want to waste any of my valuable time screwing around with all of this arcane crap when I could be screaming at my wife."

I think that there are 12 Steps.

The Talented Mr. Face

Falsehood: Lack of accuracy or truth; falsity; deception.

I was idly thinking about lying when I was cleaning the kitchen yesterday. Not lying about cleaning the kitchen or planning some specific future lie -- I don't need to plan for that seeing that I'm an accomplished and creative liar who can lie at the drop of a hat -- but reminiscing over some Lies in my Past.

When I was still in college Herr Luber and a couple of friends joined me for a camping trip in the Red River Gorge State Park in KY. And by "camping trip" I mean "passing out in a tent after a night of drinking and drug use in the woods." I don't recall specifically if drinking alcohol was permitted in this particular state park but it's highly doubtful. It was probably a dry county. I remember nearly coming to blows with Herr Luber because I kept compulsively whistling Ted Nugent's "Dog Eat Dog." There's not much to the song even if I had known any of the words or the course of the tune beyond: "Cat Scratch Fever, Dog Eat Dog." Maybe the song was called "Cat Scratch Fever." All of his songs kind of sound the same. I think that the chorus was: "Dog, dog, dog eat dog" repeated ad infinitum, and that was all I whistled.


At some point we decided to play a game of Frisbee-by-Moonlight on the country road twisting through the park. It was quite thrilling to stand there, clueless, and have a Frisbee suddenly appear, traveling at a high velocity, right around teeth level. Inevitably, a cop or park ranger swung around the bend and stopped, got out of his cruiser. He had a flashlight with which he probed our sweating, reddish faces.

"Is that your beer?" he asked one of us, pointing at the cold, sweating beer can straddling the double yellow line. I can't remember who answered although the response is right out of the B-Man playbook. I might as well take credit for it.

"No."

I could hear someone down at the tents flinging drugs and drug paraphernalia and just smoked drug detritus into the woods.

The officer poked around for a while before leaving, warning us that: "We don't like to have any of that beer-drinking or pot-smoking going on here."

Being polite boys raised in the suburbs we didn't have much of a history of confronting the cops, so we wisely kept our mouths shut until the guy was out of sight. Then did we come up with some zingers. Stuff that we should have said but are lucky that we didn't.

Herr Luber suggested an aggressive stance, maybe jab the cop's chest with an index finger, and bark: "Yeah? Then what DO you like?" That was very popular. I thought that maybe we should suggest he go someplace else if he didn't want to drink or smoke pot, because that's what we were doing. "Yeah? I'd suggest you get back in your car and get moving because you are in the wrong place."

Wasn't it great to be able to look down at a beer can at my feet, miles from anyone else, in the back woods, in the middle of the night, reeking like a brewery, and say with a straight face that it wasn't mine? What a talent.


Do you think I fooled the cop? Do you think he thought: "Eh, maybe someone else left it here."

I don't think I fooled the cop.

Bongs of Yore

I was cleaning the kitchen this morning and reminiscing about some old drinking escapades. (Yes, I clean the kitchen. I'm not the best looking guy around but I can handle myself pretty well with a can of Lysol or Mr. Clean and all of the other helpful chemicals that DuPont and Dow can come up with.) Probably I was trying to distract myself from cleaning the kitchen, which I hate to do, and wondering why SuperK was sleeping in and not cleaning the kitchen herself. It's bad enough that I have to give her directions if she wants a cracker or a chip.

I digress. One of the stories that got me chuckling involved a friend of mine who had just started medical school. We were driving around looking for a small bowling alley that had been rented by someone - did it ever matter who? - for a private party. We pull into the lot and start taking hits off of his homemade bong. It was about three feet tall. It was purple. It was a real beauty. It delivered hits as smooth as a mountain lake in the early morning. I'm pulling on a quart or two of Colt 45 which I have nestled between my legs. There's a loud crack on the driver's side window.

"Hey, watch it," my friend says, laughing, thinking no doubt that someone we knew saw us pull in. He had a distinctive car. He rolls down the window. A uniformed hand reaches in and snatches the bong, quick as that. My door flies open and a couple of flashlights start probing the interior of the car, quickly locating the bag of pot and beer detritus. More cop cars pull up, lights flashing, and train their headlights on us. We were not inconspicuous. We were not making a subtle entrance.

"Books, how bad is this?" my friend asked after they read us the riot act and disappeared for a minute.

"I don't know," I replied. I imagined a jail cell. It's not that I'm too pretty for a jail cell but I'm not ugly enough either.


For some reason the police take all of our party material and let us go. We sit in the car for a minute and breathe a sigh of relief.

"Do you think we should ask them for the pot back?" the doc asks.

"I don't think so," I say.

"How about the bong? That's not illegal, is it? That was a pretty cool bong. It wasn't easy to make."

"Let it go, " I advise.

He thinks for a minute.

"That pot cost me a lot of money," he says.

I Am Iron Man

Biggish: Somewhat big. (Shit. I didn't think I was going to find this definition. I had something pretty clever to say.)

I'm contemplating doing something new. Actually, a couple of new things and they're both on the biggish side. I don't like new and big as a general rule because I get afraid that things won't work out well for me. I realize that this is a redundant topic, that I'm repeating myself and saying the same things over and over. I'm too lazy to come up with new things and too shallow to come up with big things.


Herr Luber calls these topics "ancient riffs." I'm sure he's thinking about Beethoven or Vivaldi and not "Smoke on the Water" or "Iron Man," but we're in sync with the general concept. Sometimes it's OK to hang on to a few core beliefs. There's some stability with that. Sometimes it's fun to run amok, too.

I do think that life is one big amusement park. I think we should enter the gates and just run around like 5 year olds, shrieking and gesticulating wildly and changing our minds every chance we can get. "I want to ride the roller coaster," we should scream. "No! The Twister! I mean the Mouse Trap! Whoopee!!" I spend too much time thinking about whether the Mouse Trap is going to make me nauseous or the line for the roller coaster is too long or why would I get on any of these fairly dangerous rides considering the general appearance of the carnies operating them? I'm not sure the quality control is too good.


I don't mean new things like playing Russian Roulette or selling all of my Stuff and going to live in the mountains of Bhutan. That's crazy new, which can be OK some of the time as well, Mr. Iron Man. I'm talking about controlled train wreck new. The kind where you know you're going to wreck but you aren't going too fast and you have the brakes locked up and you're wearing a helmet. That would be pretty cool, just to see what happened, as long as it's someone else's train. Don't do this with your own train. That would be crazy new.

And glad to hear from Edward. People show me how to look at things from a different point of view.

Stuff.

Stuff: To fill too full; cram; overload: as the drawer is stuffed with papers.

There's a great scene from an episode of The Simpsons where the wealthy industrialist Montgomery Burns is lying on his deathbed, waiting to expire from some unknown ailment, and his assistant Waylon Smithers asks him if he has any last words of wisdom that he would like to share. He leans in close to hear the whispery voice croak out a final thought.

"I only wish," Mr. Burns wheezes, "that I'd spent more time at the office."

First of all, don't you wonder how an adult man can navigate his way through life when he bases all of his philosophical tenets on a series of dim-witted and fairly profane cartoon characters running on the Fox network? It's not easy, I can tell you that.

Anyway, if I get the joke here -- and I think that I do -- the point is that . . . well, it's a pretty obvious point. You'd have to be pretty sheltered not to get it. Work is great and everything and we all have to do it to fund whatever shallow and pointless pursuits that we think are critical to our happiness. But a lot of us spend too much time doing it and thinking about it and letting it drive who we are.

I can acquire things or I can acquire experiences. Things are deceptive and illusory and strangely compelling. I see things and I want things. I spend money on an experience and I'm not left with anything tangible to hold in my hand. Now if I buy a piece of stuff, then I can heft it up and wield it like a club. I can say: "Hey, look at this stuff." I can show it off and gaze at it lovingly. That's why it's so compelling. It's a thing that shows how important you are.


The experience, however, lives in my head forever.

On the Road Again

I have a cold. I'm sick. It's so annoying to get sick. It's such a waste of time. I don't see the advantage of it and I would prefer that it didn't happen to me. Illness is the mosquito of the human condition: it has absolutely no value. I think I got sick on the plane coming back from vacation, wedged into my seat in coach like a steer on the way to the slaughterhouse. I was obviously wedged in with someone who was already infected. Maybe this individual infected me on purpose. "If that guy reclines his seat one more time I'm going to cough in his ear."


Even though I got sick the trip was totally worth it. There is nothing as illuminating as travel. It feeds my soul in a way that I don't fully understand. I know that a big part of it is the anticipation of newness, the challenge of experiencing something for the first time. I never go anywhere more than once as a general rule. If I've seen it, I've seen it. If I haven't seen it, I want to see what it's all about. I spent the first 28 years of my life researching the ins and outs of life in a dark bar. I've got that down. I know what that's all about. I don't need to do that anymore.

I like the stress of travel, too. It makes me change. As a general rule I don't change unless I'm under some duress. It's a good sign if I want to get out of the trip the night before I leave. I want to think: "What the hell am I doing this for again?" I want the challenge of tackling a new experience.

I would prefer, however, to be returned to soundness of body.

The Lead

Lead: To show the way to; to mark the way for.

Sometimes when I'm listening to someone share What It Was Like at a meeting, I find myself running a short clip of a typical Homer Simpson debacle. You can picture the scene: Homer gets too close to the edge of a cliff which breaks off. He falls a long way, bouncing off the rock walls as he plummets. Eventually, he gets caught on a ledge and breathes a sigh of relief, only to have his perch collapse and send him down again. When he reaches the bottom of the gorge all of the debris that he dislodged on the long descent smashes down on him. Then a truck runs over him and he catches fire. Then . . . you get the point.

I was vaguely aware that things weren't going too well when I was drinking but I was able to ignore the magnitude of the destruction. It was quite the revelation the first time I tried to recount the series of events that brought me to A.A.. Before I started my lead I worried that I wouldn't be able to fill the better part of an hour with my prattle. I was stunned at how many bad things happened to me as a result of my drinking and drugging. It got boring. It was like listening to white noise or a jackhammer running. Eventually I just tuned myself out.


Every one of us, no matter how desperate our final circumstances, can help someone else.

People Who Don't Like Me

I went to a little family reunion thing recently. I'm not particularly well liked by my family, as astounding as this may be for someone who is so universally loved and admired and revered and cherished and . . . did I say loved already? It won't hurt to say it again. I am definitely the individual in my family who isn't DOING IT RIGHT. I'm going to admit that this is the truth. They all do it one way - a perfectly fine way of doing things, by the way - and I do it another way. I almost always do things the other way. There's the right way, the smart way, and there's my way. Actually, I don't think that they actively dislike me but I do think if I never showed up at any family gatherings, which I'm doing with increasing frequency, anyway, that no one would be too upset.



As a people pleaser, my emotional development, such as it is, has gone through a few different phases. At first, it was important that everyone liked me. I would do whatever it took to make you like me, even if you clearly didn't like me. In fact, I was drawn like a bear to honey to anyone who didn't like me. I was especially interested in spending time with these people. I would knock someone down who liked me to get close to someone who didn't. I was obsessed with getting the people who didn't like me to like me. I could have cared less about those of you who did like me, on the occasions when I could find you.



Then I came to the shocking revelation that some of you just don't like me, and that was never going to change. Now, I don't like some of you, and this makes perfect sense to me. I have totally justified this internally. I can see your faults. But I had a lot of trouble grasping the concept that other people might not like me. I have hidden my faults so well.

Finally, I have come to the conclusion that this is all OK. I'm amused when I run into people who don't like me. I'm not suggesting any malevolence here, either, active hatred or anything like that. There are just some people who would rather go talk to some other people who aren't me.

So be it.

Once Again: Me.

Conundrum: A riddle whose answer is a pun; any puzzling question or problem.

I often ponder the difference between my will and god's will. It's quite the conundrum. I am perfectly acquainted with my will. I should probably capitalize that for effect: My Will. Maybe all caps: MY WILL. Then I could throw in an exclamation point, a couple of exclamation points: MY WILL!! Now we're talking.

Anyway, MY WILL!! seems to revolve around the essential tenets of More money, More power, More sex. Maximize the pleasure, minimize the pain, that sort of thing. God's will is a little trickier. It seems to revolve around not doing MY WILL!! but seeking god's will, which brings me back around to the problem of not knowing what god's will is for me. It's all very circular. And a lot of the time, when I'm running amok, which is most of the time, god's will seems to stand in direct opposition to me doing my will.


The Program seems to put a lot of emphasis on being of service to others. I don't see how this helps me get what I want, which is other people being of service to me. In fact, it appears to be diametrically opposed. I heard early on that You Have To Give It Away To Keep It. That made no sense whatsoever, accustomed as I was to trying to get other people to give things to me. If I gave something away I didn't get to keep it. "Great," I thought. "These people are insane," I thought. "How do I get out of here, anyway?"


I think god wants me to seek to do his will. God knows I don't know his will. It's a little party trick he likes to trot out. I think that God wants me to give it a shot, at least pretend that I have some interest in other people and in trying to find my place in the grand scheme of the universe. He knows that in my essence I don't, really, have any interest in anyone but myself but he gives a lot of points for effort. It's like when you're polite to someone you can't stand.

It's just the right thing to do, I think.

Kick the Can

Stupid: In a state of stupor; dazed; stunned; stupefied; lacking normal intelligence or understanding; slow-witted; dull.

It's not that I don't do stupid things anymore. I don't mean to imply that. It's more along the lines that I don't do as many stupid things or that I don't do really stupid things or at least I pause a couple of beats before doing something stupid. That seems to be the big advantage to having some clean and sober time under my belt. It's not that I'm no longer stupid. I'm still stupid. I'm just not as stupid as I used to be.

I heard at a meeting that we still have all of the defects we had when we got sober; it's simply that they aren't as bad as they used to be. I'm still trudging down the path of life. I'm under no illusion anymore that I'm not going to get knocked off course or stray right into the brambles all by myself. However, I don't get absolutely blasted 50 yards off track any more. I used to wander so far off the path that I couldn't find it with a GPS and certified guide.

I talked to my buddy EMC this morning about something big he has been dealing with in his life. We discussed the importance of kicking the can forward, using terminology appropriate for the emotional 10 year olds that we still are. I kick the can. Sometimes I don't get too much distance when I kick the can. Sometimes I whiff and pull a groin muscle. Sometimes some asshole trying to impede my halting progress in getting what I want comes out of nowhere and and punts my can 10 yards backward, erasing all of my steady 6 inch incremental gains.


That's OK today. Today I go back and start kicking the can again.

Everything Makes Sense . . . In Retrospect.

Retrospect: A looking back on or thinking about things past; contemplation or survey of the past.


I ran into Tree Man at a meeting last night. Not literally, of course, although I did back into his car and take off without leaving a note. He mentioned that he is thinking about transitioning from his current line of work which is . . . well, I'm going to assume that it's doing something in trees or with trees or to trees -- I'm not interested enough in what he's doing to actually ask him -- and going back to the kind of work that he did before The Troubles took him down.

It reminded me of my start in this Great Way of Life. I've documented it or at least planned on documenting it or thought about documenting it but got the thinking and the doing confused and am not sure whether I actually did it or just thought about doing it, which is not at all unusual. You can imagine how confusing it was making it through the day when I was smoking a lot of dope. I said the same things over and over, I'm sure. I'd sit there and think: "Did I already say that or did I just think about saying it?"


Did I mention that I documented something?

Anyway, I had my ass transitioned for me by an angry company when I was newly sober. I went from a job where I had some responsibility to one where I had none. I was basically a typist. Now there's nothing wrong with being a typist except that I can't type, don't like to type, have no training as a typist, and had to move to a much more expensive city where I was going to be making less money to take up my typing responsibilities.


It was actually kind of funny. Or it's kind of funny in retrospect -- it was decidedly not funny at the time. I was assigned a desk in a huge warehouse of an open office space. There were probably 75 women there and me, a six foot three Ichabod Crane figure, towering a foot over everybody else. Maybe god was trying to jump start my love life. If he was, I didn't take the hint, probably because I was engrossed in all of my typing responsibilities. God should know that if you want to get my attention you have to get right in my face and scream at the top of your lungs. Or better yet, use a bullhorn, an amplified bullhorn. Even then I might not pay attention. When I'm thinking about myself, which is all of the time, I'm focused to the point of delusional psychosis, should such a thing exist.


To increase my enjoyment and sense of self-worth, I was stationed right near the office door where all of my former equals came and went. My humiliation was on display for everyone to see. In retrospect, my job paid the bills and gave me the time to do what I needed to do: get healthy. I started at 8, ate lunch, and quit at 5. I went home and ate dinner -- notice that I ate two meals? big improvement -- went for a jog, then hit a meeting. I got there early and stayed late. Then I went to bed and got a good night's sleep. I didn't need a lot of stress or responsibility or long hours at work. I needed to eat, sleep, and recover.


Eventually, of course, the time came to move on.

More Things That I'll Never Get . . .

Don't you wish that you could see the consequences of something before you took action? How sweet would that be? You could just say: "Well, I'm not going to change jobs because the new one isn't going to work out." You could make the best, wisest decisions all of the time. You would never regret an action because you would always be doing the right thing. You would absolutely glow with self-confidence.

This would be helpful in almost every situation but it would be golden with the big decisions. I think that when we ponder something that takes a big leap of faith -- a huge leap of faith -- like having children or getting married (not necessarily in that order) or moving to a new city or divorcing a wife who is really getting on your nerves, we have to step off of the cliff at some point. I ask people considering such things if they have done their due diligence: prayed about it, written about it, discussed it with friends and colleagues, and the like. Then you do something or you don't. It works out to your liking or it doesn't.

If I wait for the timing to be exactly right in my own head, I never do anything. I'm still a little afraid of pain, of failure, and I'm still a little too addicted to ease and pleasure. I want somebody to tell me that it's going to work out. This is why I need that Steve to God hot-line on my bed stand. A quick call before I take action for confirmation.

"Uh, god, this is what I'm planning on saying to SuperK."
"B-Man, I'm going to recommend against that. Here's what will happen."
"D-oh!"

Digging Holes, Filling Holes

It's not such a bad life being in recovery. I didn't think that way when I first came in. I really loved to drink and take drugs, conveniently blocking out the devastation the stuff was causing in my life and the fact that drinking didn't work any more, causing more problems than it solved. I was hopelessly lost in the happy, delusional fantasy world of Euphoric Recall, that lovely time when alcohol scratched my itch. Apparently the Hole of Emptiness that I had to fill kept getting bigger and bigger. It sure got impossible to fill. At the end it was quite a large hole.



I was terrified of losing the only thing in my life that meant anything to me - the focus of all of my fun -- and replacing it with something of dubious value -- not drinking at all. It didn't appear to be much of a trade. I didn't see too much to look forward to. I didn't see what I was going to get in return. Peace of mind seemed to be a crappy trade off for tons of excitement.

Then I strolled into a meeting, looked at the people in the room, and thought: "Holy shit, I'm in some serious trouble." Things didn't look too promising to me. Little did I know.

My friend Farmer Bill once said: "I know that I'm loved. I can't even tell you what I mean by that but I know that I'm loved." What a mish-mash of mismatched people crammed together on hard folding chairs in old church basements. I never thought I would look forward to seeing these people

The good news is that there's a solution. The bad news is that it's us.

Well, Irritable and Discontented, Anyway.

Restless: Never or almost never quiet or still; always active or inclined to action; seeking change.

I think that it's possible to be restless without hauling around the irritable and discontented baggage that frequently accompanies it. Don't get me wrong -- everybody, more or less, irritates me all of the time. I am intimately acquainted with irritability. I'm not suggesting that I stand atop the Rock of Contentedness, which has fallen on me from a great distance on more than one occasion.

And some day I hope to turn the Winter of My Discontent into some kind of regular contention or contentedness or the like. Of course some day I want to be a rock star in outer space, or maybe thrive in an underwater basketball league, and that stuff's not happening either.

I figure that I spent enough time in dark bars with no windows in the middle of the night, or sitting in front of a television, smoking dope and watching bad TV shows that I knew I wouldn't remember the next day. I'm not sure why I even turned the thing on. I could have pasted a picture of Homer Simpson on the screen and saved the electricity. I could have bought one movie and then watched it over and over again, secure in the knowledge that I wouldn't remember what happened.

For someone who is a little suspicious of change I sure spend a lot of time tracking it down. I don't sit on my ass and stare into space very well. I like to try new things and go to different places. If you gave me a nice cabin on a quiet lake in the woods somewhere, I wouldn't take it. I figure that once I've seen something it's time to see something else.

Do I have some bad experiences? Absolutely. Do I get some bad meals, turning down my favorite dish for boiled intestine stuffed with haggis and minced intestine? Yowser. (I actually did order stuffed intestine in France once and it tasted roughly the way that you might imagine it would taste. I should have told the garcon to scoop whatever was in his slop pail into a bowl and garnish it with fresh mint.)

Garcon! Three bowls of the haggis, stat!

Where Do They Find These People?

"So what's your part in all of this?"

Whenever I'm ticked off or upset about something I try to share it with my sponsor or one of my recovery paisanos, one of those guys who are decidedly not afraid to say something that they know I don't want to hear. Sometimes I think they enjoy saying something I don't want to hear. At some point in the conversation the comment about my part comes up. I visualize guns, knives, and other heavy weaponry while I think: "My part in this is that I'm not going to pour my hot coffee in your lap." I don't like thinking about my part in anything. My specialty is thinking about your part. I can see the error of your ways.

It gets tricky when I'm dealing with someone who isn't behaving very well. It gets extremely tricky when it's my first encounter with someone who isn't behaving very well. I'm always taken aback when someone isn't very nice or thoughtful, even though I've taken being self-centered to dizzying new heights.

"My part in all of this is that this guy's an asshole." This is all I can come up with some of the time. I mean, it's not like there isn't the odd jerk walking around out there. And everybody gets to have a bad day. When I behave a bad day I want some understanding. When you have a bad day, I want an apology.

Still the solution is in my hands. If I walk up to someone who lets loose a string of obscenities unbidden, a good solution is to skirt this particular individual the next time.

That's a pretty good solution.

Horseface Scorsese

Direct: To move, turn, or point (a person or thing) toward a place, object, or goal; aim; head.

I love the section in The Big Book that talks about The Director. There should be a little picture of me on that page, scowling in disgust. The gist of the story is that there is a class of people who insist on getting their own way and they become frustrated and unhappy when they don't. Alcoholics, of course, have subjected this tendency to a strict regime of metabolic steroids. We view the world as a play and we try to control all of the players. What happens? Things don't go very well for our poor director. People don't like to be moved around like chess pieces. So we get upset. If only every one would do exactly what we want them to do we think that we would be happy.

To compound our difficulties the world is packed tight with directors and they aren't limited to alcoholics. There are plenty of people pushing and shoving and trying to get their own way. I have developed a three step technique for dealing with these individuals. I tried to come up with 12 steps but I lost interest and wandered off somewhere for a while. When I got back I forgot what I was doing. There wasn't enough time left to do what I started to do so I quickly made up a few things.

1. Start out with the people pleasing. Do whatever the other directors want you to do. If you don't do what they want these people won't like you any more and where will you be then? You'll be friendless. You'll die alone in a dark and cold place. All alone, all alone.

2. Develop a resentment and decide to go Toe to Toe as your own director. Try to get everyone else to do what you want to do. You can even pretend to be fair when you do this, as in: "Last night we did what you want to do so tonight we get to do what I want to do." Stick to your guns even if you are asking someone to do something that you know they don't want to do. Develop a resentment when they develop a resentment at being forced to do something they don't want to do. Justify your behavior by pointing out that last night you did something you didn't want to do, even though you moaned and bitched and got all passive aggressive about it, and generally made the other person miserable.

3. There really isn't a third step. At this point you should be so disgusted with yourself and your poor behavior that you call your sponsor then go to a meeting.

Sometimes I have to simply separate myself from other individuals. I realize that I can't always do this -- sometimes I have to just endure -- but there are plenty of people that I'm around by choice. If someone doesn't ever give an inch, I go somewhere else.