Chaos Theory

Chaos: Any great confusion or disorder.

The planning of dinner and for breakfast the next morning was the most entertaining episode of the weekend, as well as the most representative of what happens when a group of kind and well-intentioned alcoholics battle their own always powerful egos.  We want to be thoughtful, we try to be thoughtful, but we don’t always succeed.  We usually do pretty well, though, and we’re almost always getting better at it, but that #!$! ego does get in the way from time to time.  I don’t think we're usually aware that we're allowing our egos to run amok, to be honest with you.  I know my own personal ego totally confuses bad actions with good intentions.  That I think I behave a certain way doesn’t make it so.

For example, we all got together to buy supplies for both the evening meal and for breakfast.  The initial problem is that it's quite difficult to get ten drunks to pay attention to one thing all at the same time.  We get distracted.  We start to talk.  We futz around.  Then, to get the drunks to vote honestly and with consideration for others is to try to climb another tall mountain that really needs to be climbed.  We agree to things we don’t agree with so that we appear pleasant and congenial – god forbid someone doesn't like us – or we insist, we demand, that we get our own way.  And the final fly in the ointment is that we don’t pay attention to what anyone else wants ANYHOW because we’re so hell bent on getting our own desires met.

Here’s what I'm talking about: we took a vote on what to buy for dinner.  Let’s say the choices were squid, snails, or kimchee.  Some of the drunks simply weren’t paying attention and didn’t vote or didn’t vote very well or in a way that would be noticed by the talliers of the vote.  I could tell that there were people keeping their mouths shut when they clearly disagreed with the consensus - they wanted what they wanted.  And the vote talliers seemed to hear what they wanted to hear.  I thought that the choice of snails was the big winner but the shoppers came back with a big bag of squid.  Some of the shoppers did, anyway; a couple of different groups of people got into a couple of different cars and went to different grocery stores, no one talking with anyone else.  Some of them were working off of a list and some were winging it, making selections and choices on the fly.  We ended up with a hell of a lot of some things and a hell of a lack of others.

And how we like to complicate things!  I thought that ordering a few pizzas or schlepping down to the local Mexican restaurant for chips and tacos made the most sense.  Failing that – and I could see the allure of the team-effort home-cooked meal - maybe a few pounds of hamburger and a tub of potato salad.  We had different groups going to different stores with different shopping lists that had arisen from the same consensus to buy expensive organic foods or hard to prepare items.  We managed to prepare organic almonds perfectly toasted in olive oil and sea salt, finely diced for our salad, but no cucumber or mushrooms or carrots and only three small tomatoes.  For 10 people.  It was hilarious. 


And the grilling of the purchased meat was right out of Dante's Inferno; Level 3, I think.  The coals took forever to ignite but when they did they gave off a fearsome heat.  The chicken never had a chance -- it was flash seared, scorched, burnt, incinerated, while the inside remained a moist pinky pink.  The grill was so hot that one of the protagonists had to lift the lid from time to time with a small scythe because the proper implement was not available.  Eh, maybe it was available and he was using the hand sickle by choice, making the setting of the scene even more dramatic.  When he raised the lid great clouds of smoke and leaping tongues of fire lit up the night.  It looked more like the coke smelter at a steel mill than a backyard grill.  I turned away, unable to look anymore.  The group around the grill was laughing manically.  It was great and clear to anyone watching that the chicken was in big, big trouble.

I whispered to SuperK at one point: “It’s no wonder that we drive earth people crazy, even when we’re not drinking.  We're not adults -- we're children.”

I’m really glad that I went. I had a great time.  I didn’t have a great time every single minute but the overall experience was wonderful.  I’m glad that it went down the way it went down.  I wouldn't have had it any other way.  Life is variety.  Life is trying the new thing.  My tendency is to try to separate things into the categories of Awful and Transcendent.  I'm trying to lower my expectations so that I see the middle ground in much of living


Those are hard categories to get into.