One of the things that I find so attractive about The Program is watching alcoholics do their best to squeeze every last bit of pleasure out of every circumstance imaginable. We even give it our best shot when things are not going according to plan. It's an art form. Good, bad, awful, whatever, we work our asses off extracting every morsel of positivity that we can. We're not perfect -- we're prone to fits of depression and pissy outrage from time to time but it's not our default setting anymore. We're in the game, at least.
Then I find myself in situations where I have to spend time with my Earth People family. They're certainly not bad people; they just get quickly swept up in the swirl of negativity that envelopes our world. It's not hard to do; our news media, our politicians, our entire culture is fascinated with the dark side of things. We like to ladle up a dark roux of pain. It's easier than focusing on the positive.
I get to see people take difficult situations and make them totally miserable, for themselves and for every one around them. I took a fake cell phone call yesterday simply so that I could remove myself from a particularly painful situation. It wasn't bad externally for the unhappy players -- it was bad internally. While technically what I did wasn't honest, it was better than freaking out and saying what I thought of the behavior I was witnessing, which would have broken my cardinal rule of Keeping My Mouth Shut!
I will tell you that I sold that fake phone call. I should have been in the CIA. I would have been a great secret agent.
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