Get The Aliens Off The Moon!

There's a famous short story by Ursula K. LeGuin about a man who wakes up each morning to discover that his dreams have become reality.  He meets with a psychiatrist and they decide to use subliminal methods to try to shape the man's dreams for the betterment of mankind.  There intentions really were good; the results?  Eh.

They started by trying to solve the world's overpopulation problem - the dreamer dreams that  a terrible plague kills ninety percent of all the people on earth.  They try for world peace - aggressive aliens land on the moon and prepare for an apocalyptic attack on earth, a threat  which binds all nations together in self-defense.  Frustrated, the psychiatrist screams: "Just get the moon off the moon!"  They launch their attack.  It goes on like this for a while.  The results are always a little skewed off center.

I think of this story often when my praying gets a touch too specific.  My HP has a great sense of humor.  For instance, if I pray for my work life to get better I might get fired.  It never comes out quite the way I want.  I'm always getting burned by some weird loophole when I try to tell god what god should do, something that god does not find helpful being as that god has been in god's position for a very long time and is quite happy with how things are working out.  

SuperK and I have our home for sale.   This is a situation that I did not envision when I was 28 years old and waking up penniless in my childhood bedroom.  It definitely falls in the BMW Flat Tire category, which is not an especially rough category to fall into.  Anyway, someone looked at the place twice and we were hopeful that they might make an offer to buy the place so that we can do . . . we're really not sure what we're going to do.   Something else.  Something other that what we're currently doing.

My understanding of prayer is that the problem isn't the praying for specific things but the praying for specific things without attaching the caveat "if it be your will" or something in that vein.  The problem is insisting on a certain outcome.  My wise mama tells me that I can pray for a safe trip or a favorable interview if I add that crucial, crucial addendum.  And I have to be careful that I pray only for myself and not for others, unless I'm praying for something good to happen to them.  It wouldn't be good, for instance, to pray that someone who cut me off in traffic contract bubonic plague.  That would be a selfish prayer even if the person really deserved to be struck down.  Today I don't pray for someone to get the Black Death although I confess to wishing a nasty case of stomach flu - with The Diarrhea and projectile vomiting - on the odd driver or two.

Anyway, I decided to pray for an offer on the place, quickly adding "if that's what you want to happen."  And guess what?  An offer came through, although the buyer's agent has warned us that "it isn't perfect."  

Damn it.  I KNEW I should have prayed for the perfect offer.  See what happens?  God gets it all twisted up and I don't get exactly what I want and if I want it, then it surely must be good for me.  Right?  Right?

Annoyable Seaweed

Annoy:  To disturb or irritate, especially by continued or repeated acts; to bother with unpleasant deeds.

As I exited my Starbucks today, full of over-priced specialty coffee, I found myself face-to-face with a scruffy guy holding a cardboard sign: "Backpack and Sleeping Bag Stolen - Anything Helps."  I gave him a buck, wished him good luck.  I don't doubt his story.  I've run into enough people in The Fellowship with similar stories.  It can be tough out there - crime falls disproportionately hard on those who can least afford it.  And frankly, I don't care anymore if I'm getting scammed out of a buck - I don't think it happens very often and guys drinking $3 lattes can afford the odd scamming.

I certainly bore no ill will to the blameless folks who annoyed me yesterday.  Trust me, I've been plenty annoyed plenty of times by well-dressed old-timers droning on and on sanctimoniously about how humble they are while managing to work in how long they've been sober, where they live, and what kind of job they have.  I can work up a good, strong annoyance towards just about anyone when I'm In The Mood.  I'd rather hang around people who don't care what I think about them than with people who are trying to influence how I think about them.

I'm constantly reminded how big the little things can be.  There's a young Hispanic woman who works as a cleaner at my pool.  SuperK has spent some time getting to know her and I don't think that's common at the club.  I think most people look right through her.  The other day this woman asked SuperK for a job reference.  My wife isn't going to get a medal for this but she should - that's service in action.  Today I swam alone and the young gal asked after SuperK.  I trotted out my terrible Spanish and I could see that it was appreciated.  I try to remember to concentrate on these little things because they're important and when I ignore them I put my own spiritual well-being at peril.

Heavy Mettle

Mettle:  A quality of endurance and courage; good temperament and character.

I hit the road for the Downtown Meeting today, sheets of rain threatening to rip my hat off my head and fling it over some highway overpass.  I was not in my usual fine morning mettle.  I had some mettle but it was not well organized and it faded as the morning preceded.  I don't have a great idea as to why my mettle is fine sometimes and completely lacking in others.  My mettle was out the window today and coffee - normally a powerful mettle-enhancer - did nothing in the mettle-boosting department.

I'm in the corner of this old church basement, the Undercroft so to speak  - big room, high ceilings - and there was a woman sitting catty-cornered to me.  She's often there - doesn't talk or join in at all, which is fine.  She's not on my Irritation Radar normally and it is goddam easy to get on my Irritation Radar.  Today she started to rub at her eyes.  She took a little compact mirror out of her backpack - an odd item to be hauling around on your back - and used it to really inspect what she was doing.  She rubbed ferociously and for a long time, switching eyes, peering into the mirror.  It really got on my nerves.  I can normally ignore stuff like this but in my mettle-less state I was drawn to it like a drunk to lager.  I couldn't see how it was possibly helping the state of her eyes.

Then a guy sat down on the other side of me.  He's usually at the meeting as well.  He pulled a little tiny chocolate cupcake out of his backpack and started to eat it.  The problems for me started almost immediately as he did a lot of lip-smacking and loud-swallowing and Adam's Apple-bobbing.  It took him several bites to consume this tiny one bite chocolate cupcake: a pop-it-in-your-mouth, chew-twice, and swallow cupcake.  Moreover, he had an apparently endless supply of these cupcakes in his backpack which he ate in a deliberate, noisy fashion. 

While I did appreciate the distraction from the eye-rubber the lip-smacking started to get on every single one of my easily irritated nerves.  He might as well have taken out an amplified bullhorn and aimed it in my direction on full volume.  I was focused on the smacking and the rubbing at the expense of the people who were sharing their experience, strength, and hope, allegedly the reason that I walked down to the meeting in the first place.  I have little idea what any of the speakers said what with the smacking and rubbing noises reaching a Niagra Falls crescendo of wet, mucousy sound.

I projected into the future – one of my all-time favorite things to do – and holding hands with these two good folks during the closing prayer was dancing at the periphery of my vision.  Normally projection doesn't do me any good but today it had its benefits.  I left a few minutes early and headed to the bathroom, where I washed and washed and washed my hands, using a concoction of lye, bleach, anti-microbial cleanser, and soap, which I applied with some steel wool I had in my bag.

A guy that I knew but had never spoken to came in.  We started talking about the weird mental blank spots that all drunks seem to have from time to time concerning alcohol.  He had shared this great story in the meeting about a visit to one of his customers who was an employee of a microbrewery.  His customer had a full mug of beer with a head of foam sitting on his desk.  It got in my friend's head. He couldn't keep his eyes off of that beer.  He knew he couldn't drink it but he thought maybe he could just smell it.  He leaned over and took a deep whiff of a novelty candle in the shape of a mug of beer.

We laughed about that for a while.  '

I didn't shake his hand.

Guy Talk

I received a catalogue today that was geared for the tastes of men, a category that I fit into obliquely and begrudgingly.  I never walk through the women's clothing section of department stores - I'm a little too close to trying on silk stockings and a dress.  This particular catalogue is full of stuff that makes you think: "Wow, that would be so cool to have" even though you realize that if you got that thing you'd say "What in god's name did I want this thing for?"

I didn't really see too much in there for a guy like me.  Tools and sports stuff and very expensive work things.  I have always wondered why someone would need a $200 pen - Bics seem to do the trick for me.  I'm often unsure of the location of my wallet and car keys; if I had a $200 pen the first thing I'd do is throw it down a storm sewer.  That way I'd know what happened to it.  This is more calming to me than reaching for my pen and having no idea where it is and then lying to SuperK about it and then forgetting what particular lie I told and having to come up with a whole series and network of contingency lies and back-up lies and supporting lies.

I like to lie.  I'm good at it.   I have an natural ability to lie and many, many years of practice doing it.  I'm pretty sure I could beat a lie-detector machine.  I would have been a good spook, drifting in and out of the shadows in the dangerous world of international espionage.  The only reason I don't lie today is that I hate making amends when I get caught lying.  I hate it when someone calls me a liar except when I've just told a lie, am currently lying, or preparing to lie sometime in the near future.

What the hell am I talking about here?

Accept

Accept:  To endure patiently.

The topic at today's meeting was acceptance.  I need a constant reminder of the power and beauty of this concept, the ability of acceptance to help me navigate my days, full of challenges and blessings.  I wonder if the opposite of acceptance shouldn't be War or Blitzkreig or Holocaust or Armageddon given all of the troubles I run into when I fight against the way things are.

It's a fool's errand to struggle against the vicissitudes of life.  They're unavoidable and the fact of the matter is we don't know how things are going to work out in the long run.  Or the short run.

Move forward - with purpose - open to all possibilities.

Seaweed Steve: Sage and Seer and Soothsayer.

Advice:  An opinion recommended or offered, as worthy to be followed; counsel.

And after the meeting I met with a guy that I sponsor to talk about the 10th Step.  I really like this Step - not doing it, of course, but telling someone else how to do it.  I'm good at that - telling you what to do, but don't you dare tell me what to do.  That is a firing-squad offense.  The 10th Step lays out the famous "restraint of tongue and pen" concept, and it suggests that anger isn't our best friend and that maybe we can look at all of the millions and billions of people who are irritating us as people who are struggling along sometimes just like we are.  I know I want some understanding when I mess up - why is it that I'm so averse to giving any to you?

This good man is sober about a year and a half; he has come a long way in his program.  In my opinion, however, he is kind of foundering in his outside-the-rooms life - he needs to shake things up or he's going to keep getting what he's gotten, which is boring and frustrating him.  Sometimes we need to sit quietly and enjoy what we have and sometimes we need to burst through the bubble and try something new.  Take a chance.  Not a rash, idiotic one but maybe something that frightens us or makes us uncomfortable.  

I had my speech all ready to go, only to hear him declare that he had decided to make a commitment to the area and to his work.  I stifled a chuckle.  Once again, I'm booted out of the advice business.  I try to dole out honest-to-god, this-is-what-you-should-do advice sparingly - I'm baffled as to what I should be doing most of the time which disqualifies me from telling anyone else what to do.  I always encourage people to ask some other people what they should do and not just rely on my expert advice

Downtown Again

I'm definitely grooving on the Downtown Meeting right now.  I'm a big fan of attending a lot of different kinds of meetings - I won't thrive on a strict diet of new sobriety - but my expectations are in line at this particular meeting right now.  When I go to meetings with a lot of sobriety present I notice a certain amount of back-slapping, aren't-we-fucking-unbelievable?, self-aggrandizing kissey-kissey.  The new people are keeping it simple, not drinking one day at a time, and grateful for just that.

I was stuck in a corner with a few homeless guys who don't have access to a regular shower.  One of them was called on to speak.  He's only recently on the street and he was very articulate - I could tell that he was making an effort to be as presentable as he could be despite his circumstances.  There was a quiet dignity about him that I found appealing.  My favorite attendee was the guy who read The Daily Reflections.  I noticed him when I chaired the other day - he's a wild looking old guy with an Einstein hairdo, uses a walker, and he was nodding off while I was speaking - not unusual when I'm the Main Attraction.  It was mesmerizing - his head would slowly, slowly, slowly tilt forward, and then Snap! he would jerk it upright.  I had trouble concentrating.  He read confidently and quickly, not stumbling once.  He sounded like a college professor.  I loved it.

When I keep my expectations in line good things happen.  When I pre-judge - when I say I'm better than or I'm not as good as - then I miss the magic.

Seaweed On A Pedestal

I was the speaker at the downtown meeting yesterday and I was my usual brilliant, confident, wise, insightful, and totally full of self-absorbed bullshit self.  Ironically, I read the section from The Book that talks about the tendency of alcoholics - and many other people - to be Directors: people who try to arrange the world to their own liking, mixing in wonderful motives, terrible motives, and all flavors of motive in-between.  The suffix "self" appears approximately one billion times in that section, as does the outstanding phrase: "So our troubles, we think, are of our own making."

Yeah.  I got that. Self.  Self.   Self self self.  There's something about the alcoholic being an extreme example of self-will run riot, "though he usually doesn't think so."

The point - should you be trying to find a point here and good luck with that  - is that help and service come in many guises.  I fancy myself a Recovery Beast, a god of Sobriety as it were, forgetting that nothing could be further from the truth.  I got as much of a reaction from the crowd as any standard garden variety drunk, befitting my status as a standard garden variety drunk.  I reflected back on the guy who recently sent me the job review that he thought was devastatingly bad, spending a good deal of time typing out a thoughtful response defending my take that he had in reality gotten a solid B minus.  He responded with a one line thank you and that was the last I heard about it.  I expect to be Put on a Pedestal and instead suffered the  Brush Off.

Kept me sober.

My home group has a page on a social media site and a guy I know asked for some help with the financial amends part of the 9th Step.  I'm going to meet with him this weekend; I've actually done this a few times before.  Money is numbers and I'm good with numbers.  My experience is that mostly people get afraid when money is discussed and they just bury their heads in the sand.  I did that whenever sex, money, or politics came up.  I made little, tiny mouses into great big powerful elephanti.

Tomorrow I meet with a sponsee.  He wants to go through The Steps again.  This is admirable and always helpful but I believe his angst stems from the fact that he is a smart, talented guy and he's not challenging himself.  I'm going to tell him that.  I'm also going to make sure that he talks to a lot of other people because really, what do I know about anything?

Not too damn much.

Basil Seaweed

Dazzle:   To render incapable of thinking clearly; to overwhelm with showiness or brilliance.

Today at Starbucks - or should I pretend like I'm in The Czech Republic and say Starbucz - I decided, at the last minute, to use the name Basil.   I felt kind of Belgian or Swiss this morning.  I briefly toyed with the much more formal William, in a silent homage to Suburban Bill, but switched to Basel when I was prompted to provide a name.  The difficulty was that I wasn't sure if I should pronounce it BAY-sel or BAH-sel and I was under the gun, the barista looking at me, pen poised above the little sticky thing he was going to affix to the cup, so I kind of chokingly mumbled out a hybrid of the two.

"I'm sorry - Dazzle?" the barista said.  I laughed.

"BAH-sel," I clarified.  "Although I do dazzle from time to time."

He stared at me.

"Not this early in the morning, though," I said.

"OK," he said.

 "Although if I do decide to dazzle you'll know it right away,"  I added.

This is why I usually don't go out into public without SuperK.

Crowbars and Sledgehammers

crowbar (plural crowbars)  

From crow +‎ bar, probably because the forked end looks like a crow's foot.

1. An iron or steel bar, often with a flattened end which may also be hook-shaped, to be used as a lever to manually force things apart.

sledgehammer (plural sledgehammers)

1. A hammer that consists of a large, heavy, broad and flat block of metal (the head) attached to a handle typically 0.5 meter to 1 meter long. The sledgehammer's design is meant to allow it to be swung powerfully, and to distribute force over a wide area upon impact.

The other day I took some stuff down to our basement storage.  This is a small cage-like space in the basement, aptly enough, where you can put things that you should have thrown away when dinosaurs were still roaming the earth.  As a general rule if the stuff you own doesn't fit into the space that you inhabit, then you don't need it.  I can see some exceptions: winter sports gear temporarily stored during the summer, luggage, and I can't come up with anything else except for summer sports gear temporarily stored during the winter, although why anyone needs all of that sports gear I can't say.  From the look of most of us we aren't using too much of all of that equipment.

If a piece of stuff is stored in a sealed box - you don't need it.  If a piece of stuff hasn't been used in 6 months - you don't need it.  If you're saving something of sentimental value for your kids - get rid of it because they sure as shit don't want it - do you want any of the crap stored in your parent's basement?

Anyway, I took some various and sundry pieces of disposable crap down to this storage cage.  To access this space I needed two keys - one to open an outer security door and one to open my open personal door - because we sure don't want any international jewel thieves breaking into our storage cages and rummaging through our garbage.

We recently had an extra key made for our apartment.  The key has a square head.  This will be an important fact to remember as the story unfolds.  When I was done storing my crap I locked the inner door and, after closing the outer door, I attempted to lock it with a key that, ironically enough, also had a square head, although it was a different key than the one for the apartment.  We're only two keys here so it shouldn't have been such a gargantuan task to keep them separate.

It didn't work.  I jiggled the key a little and jiggled the lock some and then started to jiggle with real purpose, if by "jiggle" you mean "violently shake while cursing god and all his or her minions."  My theory is if something mechanical doesn't work then the best technique is to force  or pound or throttle the offending device until it does.  This is why I have 3 hammers and only one screwdriver.  I used to have a sledge hammer but it was too heavy to move.  Man, I loved that sledgehammer - that baby got me through some locked doors in the past.  I also had a crow bar.  I think I may still have that.  It was great, too, for prying open doors that didn't open when I thought they should open.

I figured everything out eventually, at a point of time right before the key was jiggled hard enough to snap off inside the lock, which would have solved my problems for sure.  I just told SuperK about this today.  It was a personal story.

Bad Seaweed - Bad, Bad Seaweed

Bad: Not suitable or fitting.

I mentioned a bad meeting that I attended last week.  I went back last night after an electronic tongue lashing by someone wiser than me.  There is a lot of wisdom in the idea that I can always learn something from every experience, and there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that I generally have the tolerance of a marauding Mongol warrior on horseback.  So back I went and the meeting was even worse than last week.  I probably should stop going to this particular meeting but it's just so damn close and it was such a nice night for a walk.  Plus, I got to bitch about how bad the meeting was to SuperK all the way home and you know how much I love to bitch.

I think what happens some times is that similar people go to meetings together.  One of the reasons that I like to frequent different clubhouses and areas of town is that I need to hear the experience, strength, and wisdom of all kinds of different people.  When I say that I don't believe that I'm not better than anyone else and that no one else is better than me I'm mostly telling the truth.  People working good programs lead to a good meeting.

This particular meeting has a lot of people who don't have a lot of sobriety.  There's a tendency to glamorize the past and excuse the relapsing and justify the failures by saying: "But I go to a lot of meetings."  Yes, meetings are crucial for me, too, but they don't get me all that far if I'm not WORKING THE STEPS!  I went to a meeting every day for 18 months and couldn't stay sober because I WASN'T WORKING THE STEPS!  

The message today, should I have failed to make my point, is please WORK THE STEPS!

Today's Seaweed

Slightly to the left of the "Easy Does It" plaque was one that read "One Day At A Time."  This, too, made little sense to a guy who was trying to take life by storm, in big two or three day gulps.  I had things to do tomorrow, I had yesterday's messes to clean up; I couldn't be bothered to pay attention to the day that I was actually living in. This is ironic because it's the only day that I can influence and it's the only day that my Higher Power is going to help me navigate.  If I choose to future trip or wallow in the past then I am firmly on my own.  I get no help for those two days.  Zero Help.  Those days are not in my portfolio.

If you have one foot in tomorrow and one foot in yesterday then you're tinkling all over today.

It's my belief that a central tenet of every religion and spiritual pursuit with any validity at all is focusing on the present.  When I'm in the minute then I'm OK.  I'm fed and watered, and I have a warm, dry, safe place to sleep - those are my needs.  Everything else is a Want.  I'm blessed with a profusion of nice things that I get to enjoy but I can really only lay a righteous claim to food, water, and shelter, and a tenuous claim at that.

Meditation is my attempt to really get in the moment, to really live one day at a time.  Half the time I feel like I'm sitting in a car with the accelerator pushed to the floor and the emergency brake engaged - I gotta GO, I gotta MOVE - but if I hang in there my blood pressure drops, my heart rate slows, and I calm down.  I don't get it but it happens.  Don't take my word for it, either.  Give it a shot.  It really does work

I watched a documentary last night about a couple of retreat masters who took a 10 day class in Vipassana meditation to a maximum security prison in Alabama.  You could see the effects on some of these men after they completed the course - they looked different physically.  It made me appreciate my nice easy chair and my nice, quiet room this morning.

E-Z Seaweed

Easy:  Requiring little skill or effort.

Easy Does It.  I believe that I guffawed out loud the first time I saw that on a clubhouse wall.  I am not, as a general rule, a practitioner of "easy."  I'm the guy who's trying to complicate something so that it boomerangs back around and blows up in my face.  I like it hard and painful and miserable.  I never pass up an opportunity to suffer.

In addition, I was offended that someone was trying to tell me - The Great Seaweed - how to do something.  Who are you, anyway?  A happy guy with a job and a house and a family and some money in the bank?  Besides those things, I thought, what do you have that I don't have?  I'm having fun and you're a tool of The Man.  Can you go home tonight and get drunk and stoned by yourself in front of the TV?  Maybe have some mac and cheese for dinner if I feel like getting around to eat?

Yeah, well.  I find that things go well for me if I move forward, with purpose, all the while trying to pay attention to obstacles that would indicate a stopping point.  Like those metal spikes that say: "Warning - Severe Tire Damage."  Those spikes aren't optional.  As a general rule anything that has "warning" associated with it or has metal spikes as a chief component is to be considered carefully.

A slogan that has been helpful to me is: "Wear the world like a loose garment."  I have to engage but I don't have to buy into everything.

And as a humorous side note, the Urban Dictionary defines easy as "A term used to describe a woman with the sexual morals of a man."

Kooky Drunks

I walked down to the rough meeting today in honor of my good friend Suburban Bill.  As is to be expected, after 6 months there has been an almost total turnover of the members of the group.  There were a few familiar faces, but not many.  I'm sorry these folks didn't latch on to what we have more securely but glad for the reminder that what I have is no sure thing.

I think that I enjoy these meetings because I don't have so many expectations.  At my normal suburban meetings I believe that I am The One - I need to share because I am way past profound and everyone will be immeasurably helped by my wisdom and insight.  Today's group is large and transitional and I'm almost never called on to share.  This is a good thing because I can actually try to listen to what others are saying instead of comprising my remarks in my head.

The meeting began with a call for a volunteer to read How It Works from our literature.

A guy pouring himself a cup of coffee spoke up: "That's me - just a minute."  He poured some creamer into his cup.  He got a stir stick and began to stir and stir and stir.  He tasted the coffee, added some sugar, and stirred some more.  It was all very deliberate and methodical and frankly quite hilarious.  I thought he was doing a little bit of shtick.  Eventually I realized that he was basically saying: "I'll get to this when I goddam feel like it."  Someone else grabbed the sheet and read.  The guy never did get back to his chair.

A guy talked about moving into a new place where he had his own bathroom.  This resonated with the crowd - a lot of people talked about the joys of pooping in a private bathroom.  It reminded me of the car I was driving at the end: it didn't have a radio or much of a heater and it didn't run very well if it was too cold or too hot or too wet or it hadn't been started in the last 20 minutes or so.  And it only had one headlight - you want to attract some attention from the cops drive slowly around bad neighborhoods at 3 in the morning in a car with only one headlight.  I should have just installed a big flashing neon "Drunk as Hell" sign on the roof.  When I bought my first new car I couldn't believe how pleasant it was to own something that worked right.  I turned the key and it started right up.  Amazing.

Another guy was celebrating 60 days of continuous sobriety.  He had recently completed an in-patient treatment program after being warned by his doctor that if he kept drinking he wouldn't last another 3 months.  "So I had a good reason to stop," he said, in the understatement of the morning.  Made me think about all of those people who blow through the Death stop sign and keep right on doing what they've been doing.  Being told that you're going to die isn't much of a warning to some folks.

Pain

Pain:  The condition or fact of suffering or anguish especially mental, as opposed to pleasure; torment;distress; sadness; grief; solicitude; disquietude.

And for those of us who use The A of A as a tool to stay sober, here are a few quotes - duly credited - from our literature about pain.  

Actually, that doesn't sound too good.  That doesn't sound too good at all.  The literature isn't about pain.  The word "pain" appears 12 times in the 12&12 and the first 164 pages of the Big Book.  I would have thought it appeared dozens and dozens of time, forgetting that the literature is all about solving problems, about solutions, not about the problems themselves.

... pain, and even calamity turned to good ...   12&12 Step Twelve, p.112   

We know this because we see monotony, pain, and even calamity turned to good use by those who keep on trying to practice A.A.'s Twelve Steps.

... pain and problems.   12&12 Step Seven, p.74   

Until now, our lives have been largely devoted to running from pain and problems.

... pain had been the price of admission ...   12&12 Step Seven, p.75   

In every case, pain had been the price of admission into a new life.

... pain less, and desire humility more than ...   12&12 Step Seven, p.75   

We began to fear pain less, and desire humility more than ever.

... pain subsides, a healing tranquillity takes its ...   12&12 Step Five, p.62   

As the pain subsides, a healing tranquillity takes its place.

... pain was the touchstone of all spiritual ...   12&12 Step Ten, p.93   

Someone who knew what he was talking about once remarked that pain was the touchstone of all spiritual progress.

No Pain - No Gain

The chairwoman at today's meeting was celebrating 3 years of continuous sobriety.

That's all I could get out before I got distracted.  It reminded me of my good, good friends in The Old City interrupting me each year as I announced my anniversary: "That's continuous sobriety, Seaweed?  It has to be continuous sobriety."

"Oh, continuous sobriety?" I'd reply.  "I didn't know it had to be continuous."

Anyway, she had gone through a difficult year.  There were some deaths and sickness to close family members; and she had made some big changes in her personal and business life voluntarily.  It had been a painful time.  I used to separate events into two camps: Good Stuff and Bad Stuff.  Today I prefer thinking about Pleasant Things and Painful Things.  I try not to use the good and bad qualifiers because I simply don't have the skills to see clearly into the future, my proclamations notwithstanding.

Our literature is full of references and examples about the presence of pain in our lives.  It suggests that pain is not a bad thing; it isn't a pleasant thing but that isn't the same as bad.    "Pain was the touchstone of all spiritual progress," to quote a wise man.  "No pain - no gain," to quote some beefhead at the gym.  I know that I don't tend to grow when I'm getting my way - it's when I'm hurting that I do the hard work to make changes for the better.  

And I enjoy that I'm not peering into the future with a lot of fear and trepidation anymore.  Part of this I attribute to the fact that I've lived through some difficult things - problems of money, power, and sex - without drinking and with relative good cheer.  When I'm tempted to quake at some future calamity I can draw comfort from the fact that I'm going to get through it without drinking and with relative good cheer.  

"Pain is inevitable - suffering is optional," to quote my chowderhead sponsor.

Seaweed - Summer Up of Great Truths

The guy who brought up the topic yesterday had in mind a discussion about regret in a general sense - most active drunks squander money, opportunities to succeed in business and school, relationships, and pretty much everything else.  The crowd drifted toward the money and stuff part - often the first few people to talk set the tone for the meeting, and Stuff was on their minds.

I knew that the chairguy wasn't talking about Stuff specifically - in fact, after the mid-point break he emphasized this, which did nothing to stem the tide of all the willful alcoholics in the room.  After the meeting I approached him - as did SuperK - and we told him that we got what he was trying to say.  He was relieved.  He thought that he had kicked off a bad meeting, which I've been told by some don't exist.  He thanked us for talking to him.

"The thing is," I said.  "You didn't call on me.  THAT was the problem."
"I was working around the room, Seaweed," he said.  "I was trying to get to you . . . "
"You don't get to me," I interrupted, putting my arm around his shoulder.  "You start with me. I'm the headliner here.  Drunks come from miles around to hear my wisdom.  The only reason not to start with me is if you want a big finish, someone to sum it all up for everyone else."

I really did say that.  This guy is my friend so he laughed it off.  He knows about my bad sense of humor.  I didn't mean most of it although there's a little, teeny, tiny part of me that believes it to be fact.  

Well, not so teeny, tiny, unfortunately.

I Could Have Been a Contenda!

Regret:  To feel sorry about (a thing that has happened), afterthink: to wish that a thing had not happened, that something else had happened instead.

"We will not regret the past or wish to shut the door on it."  This standout member of The Promises was essentially the topic at today's morning meeting, with our chairman tacking on the following addendum: ". . . although we may from time to time we may really slam the shit out of the door in spite of ourselves, wishes and wants notwithstanding."  

My tendency is to find problems.  I'm an alcoholic who loves to be miserable, apparently, given all of the time I spend trying to find things to be miserable about.  There are some popular destinations: the future is always good, imagining horrible outcomes to disastrous plans; resentments against people, places, and things is very popular, and deliciously satisfying; and cruising back into days of yore, regretting our actions, ruing our choices, bemoaning what coulda shoulda mighta been.  One little old lady said: "I coulda been a contenda!"

The past is, I think, an inevitable destination from time to time for the best of us.  I personally spent four and a half years pursuing a very specific eight year degree, although I was trying to get it done in six years, killing myself with summer school and ridiculously heavy class loads.  Then, I simply quit doing the work and I drank full time.   I didn't make a conscious decision to do this, I simply began to drink as much as I wanted whenever I wanted to.  I didn't let any stinking work requirements get in my way.

And, yes, they kicked me out.

From time to time I wonder: "What if?"  But I don't dwell there.  I'm in a good spot, living a great life.  I did what I had to do to get where I am now.  My life would have been different if I had finished this degree.  Would it have been better?  I don't know the answer to that.  It would have been different.  What is is what is.  

Seaweed: Employee of the Year

Here's another funny thing about alcoholics.  Here's a funny thing about me, anyway, if by "funny" you mean "man, are you kidding me?" - I spent my whole life behaving selfishly, and then when I started to act like a reasonable human being I was pissed that I didn't get some kind of award for it. 

A friend of mine told this story: "I was always late for work and I was always getting in trouble because I showed up late.  I finally starting arriving when I was supposed to - when everyone else did -  and developed a resentment that I wasn't singled out for special recognition.  I  started doing what everyone else was doing already, some of them covering for me because I wasn't on time, and I wanted an Employee of the Month plaque."

It is interesting to note that when I started to show up on time and working until the end of the day; when I did the tasks assigned to me without bitching or slacking or arguing; when I actually worked when I was at work, rather than surfing sports and porn sites; when I realized that my bosses weren't interested in me telling them how to do their jobs; and when I tried to be friendly and supportive to my co-workers - THEN my work life improved.  I got promotions and raises and good reviews.

I had no idea.

Step One, Being the First Step . . .

.Control:  To exercise influence over; to suggest or dictate the behavior of, oversit.

After I spoke with my Old City sponsor yesterday and was thrown out of the house, I went down and had a lovely coffee at my favorite coffee shop, sitting outside in the sun on a beautiful day, while SuperK worked away at home doing things that I thought were unnecessary, an opinion shared by exactly no one else currently alive on this earth.  When it's 6,973,738,433 to one you know you're swimming upstream.  NASA was reporting signals coming from distant planets circled by dying suns agreeing with the decision to do the things that I deemed unnecessary.

When I came home SuperK, The Stager, AND The Professional Photographer were in the condo. I immediately threw myself out of the house.  I went down to our small storage locker in the basement and loaded up the truck with many, many boxes of crap that we should have thrown away 4 moves ago.  I did have to first remove the offending chair, the source of yesterday's thrown-out-of-the-house rationale  - I handled it gingerly in case it was a grudge-bearing chair.  One can never be too careful.  I drove the crap over to a much larger storage container that we have rented to store the crap in, at a not insignificant price.  Smart people throw away the crap at the start - I choose to move mine around, trapped in a devilish maze of circular logic.

"Who exactly is in charge here?" I groused.  "Me, or the crap?"  I didn't answer myself.

Our real estate agent is a lovely, lovely woman that I'm very fond of.  She knew that I was not happy.  I always think I'm fooling people when I'm acting like an ass but I'm never fooling anyone.  This is why I try not to act like an ass - that, and the amends stuff, which I loathe doing being a faultless, arrogant prick.  My lovely, lovely wife had a talk with the agent, explaining that I'm a control freak and I get frustrated when I lose control, which I do all most all of the time.  There's a reason that we have a Step One in our Twelve Step Program.  For the novice let me paraphrase Step One: "You are not in control of ANYTHING!"

I timed my return home to coincide with the offending people vacating the premises.  SuperK suggested that I write a short email to the agent; an excellent suggestion.  The email was very, very well received.  Alcoholics aren't the only people that think it's all about them; they're not the only people that think that they need to change something to make other people happy.  I had to emphasize repeatedly that it had nothing to do with anyone but me.`

Everything is about me.

Hitting the Trifecta

Let's see . . .  three days ago I had an argument with a woman that I had never seen before about how my car was legally parked on a public street.  Two days ago I went to war with the condo association president on the mechanics of getting my stuff out of my own private residence into my own private car.  And yesterday SuperK and The Stager ganged up on me over the placement of one of the few pieces of furniture left in my home; I wanted it left alone, they wanted it gone.

I lost my temper.  I said some very bad words as I yanked the chair through the front door and into the back of my truck.  I wrenched my back; I banged the chair against the door frame which didn't do either the chair or the frame any good; and now I have a chair taking up most of the available room in my vehicle.

Smooth move, McCool.

I composed myself, came back inside, and apologized immediately.

"I was trying not to laugh," quoth SuperK.  She knows not to laugh in my face when I've got a good rage going on but doesn't feel any compulsion about not laughing behind my back.  That's fine with me - if I don't know it's going on I don't care about it.  It does not exist.

Needless to say, I was firmly thrown out of the house this morning.  Actually, SuperK and I get along so well that the ejection is usually along the following lines:

"Should I walk down the block and get a cup of coffee?"
"Yes."
"I'll be gone about an hour, maybe an hour and a half?"
"Good."
"You're sure that's OK?"
"Yes."

I called my Old City sponsor before I left.

"Wow," he said.   It's never a good thing when your sponsor says "Wow."  
"Three times in three days.  You hit the trifecta.  Maybe you should head over to the horse track and see if there's a horse running called Angry Dude or Furious Dude or something like that."

Always has something bright to say, that guy.

Crikey! Tripe!!

Tripe: The lining of the large stomach of ruminating animals, when prepared as food.

I received a note today from an old friend, Spandex Junior.  He's one of the many eggers-on that I have in my life; if I'm going to do something new or something new and BIG, the eggers- on are right there, egging me on.  I don't mean this in a bad way, either, but in a Don't Play It Safe way. Playing It Safe is no fun at all. 

Spandex Junior passed along a quote from an interview given by a famous theatrical composer that he admires.  He never forgot this line: "The worst thing that you can do is fall off a low rung - if you're going to make a mistake, make a big one."  This is great advice, generally, I think, except for the times that I have fallen off very high rungs right on my head.  Then, not so much.  
This is why the eggers-on are so much fun to hang around with.  They're the ones saying: "Sure you can hit the pool from the 4th floor balcony."  

I spent so much of my pre-sober life sitting in front of The TV, watching shows that I couldn't remember the next day.  I'm done with that - I'm glad I try new things.  It reminded me of the time I was in a little village in France where the specialty was stuffed tripe.  It sounded disgusting to me but I figured I was never going to get back to a place that served hog intestine full of mystery meat, and called it the best thing on the menu.  Well, as god is my witness it was the most disgusting thing I've ever eaten.  I eat everything but this very well could have been cat food - I could have dug through the dumpster out back and come up with something that was tastier.

The waiter whisked away my uneaten tripe, informing me that there were two selections for dessert: brie and fromage blanc.  I had eaten brie which left me with fromage blanc.  Fromage blanc appeared to be something in between chunky, unflavored yogurt and rotten brie cheese.  It made me long for the stuffed tripe.

Traffic and Such

I was banished from our apartment today.  The real estate agent has been by the last couple of days; she is "staging" our furnishings to make the place more attractive to potential buyers.  "Staging" appears to embrace a whole variety of concepts, including but not limited to anything but the imagination of the "stagers:" moving things around and around and around in an endless combination, positioning them in way that all appear to look pretty much alike to me; selecting possessions that we had set aside for the trash heap to highlight our place; putting everything useful away so that we couldn't continue to live here without adopting the ascetic of John The Baptist.

"Toilet paper?  Toothpaste?  Foodstuffs?" the head stager said.  "Oh, no, no, I don't think so."

I'm kind of a big picture guy; I envision trips and new places to live and things to do and then I get contrary with the details.  SuperK knows this, and she throws me out of the house.

"Go away," she says.  "Don't come back for several hours," she says.

I went to the pool this morning to swim away my frustrations.  The New Town is very progressive and involved - there are often races and walks and runs and parades through downtown.  I have to go through the downtown to get to my pool so I'm not a big fan of these events.  Today the flashing red lights and police barricades alerted me to some fucking fun run or the other.  The races block every bridge across the river, and across the river is where I must go to get to my pool.

Can you see where this is going?  

There are two techniques to deal with traffic: to sit patiently in the traffic jam until the fun run runs its course or to find an alternate route.  My experience is that it's better to sit patiently because everyone else tries to find an alternate route, further jamming up the downtown street maze.  Today I made the mistake of asking a vest wearing volunteer standing in front of a "Local Traffic Only" sign if the road was closed.

"Oh, no, no," he said.  "The police are just letting some runners through."  

The police let a lot of runners through without opening the road.  Hundreds and hundreds of runners.  I considered going back to throttle that lying SOB volunteer but someone as pretty as me wouldn't do well in jail.  I stuck with my Stay Put and Wait Patiently plan until I thought my brain was going to jump through my skull and go back to throttle the volunteer all by itself.  I made a right turn and then a left turn, going a total of about 50 yards before running into the inevitable orange barricades.  This time a truck following me pinned me against the barricades.  The driver got out and walked around for a while.

"It's going to be about an hour," he said, when he came back.

Yadda, yadda, yadda, blah, blah, blah, about an hour later, after a stunning run of driving the wrong way down one way streets, I made it to the pool.  

No homicides, no assaults, no expletives unleashed, no curses invoked, and no impassioned pleas to god to strike that bastard down.

At coffee afterwards I called Little Westside Johnny.  I had a great talk - we had lost touch for a while and it was really cool catching up.  As I was getting ready to leave one of the other residents of my building - one of the suspected tattlers - stopped by my table and asked if she could join me.  We had a lovely talk.  It was a warm and sunny spring day.

"Our troubles, we think, are of our own making."

Down Goes Seaweed

Today I'm tired of philosophizing and I'm not going to talk about other people behind their backs - it's not that I'm tired of it or don't enjoy it or have lost my talent or enthusiasm for gossip, simply that I'm going to do something else.

What to do, what to do?  Hmm.

Sometime during the night on my final day in Vacation City I got up to have a sip of Diet Cherry 7UP - it's better than it sounds - and void my bladder.  As I staggered into the bathroom in the dark, still half-asleep, I stepped right on the edge of this kind of wooden latticework thing that served in lieu of a bathroom mat.  It seemed to be an odd choice to me during my stay but bathroom decor is not my specialty - maybe it allows the floor underneath to stay dry or as a convenient home for cockroaches.  Anyway, the edge of this structure was significant enough that it hurt my heel, causing me to list slightly to the right, toward the tub.  My hand slid on the wall, right onto the shower curtain, which provided absolutely no support for my 180 listing, careening pounds.

"Uh-oh," I must have thought.  "I'm going down."  It's a weird feeling.  It was unwelcome.

With my typical flair for the dramatic, I grabbed onto the curtain - affixed to the curtain rod, affixed to the wall - and pitched forward past the point of No Return.  I pirouetted nicely, figuring ass-first was better than face-first, into an endless sea of ceramic tile.  There was a lot of crashing sounds as I fell, pulling the curtain, the curtain rod, and all of my dignity down with me.

It was pretty loud.  SuperK did not wake up.

So there I was: sitting in the tub, my legs up over the edge, my back against the wall.  I checked for broken bones or wrenched muscles, looked for blood.  I sat there for a second, contemplating my existence.  

"Boy," I thought.  "This brings me back."

I'm a drunk - I have a lot of experience falling down.

My Willpower

My:  Belonging to me.

I've been off on another willpower jag; as in: what exactly is willpower?  I'm afraid I'm going to repeat myself here by saying the same thing over and over but willpower is a fascinating and confounding and illuminating concept.  The Fonz really helped me the other day with his comment to his higher power: "this is what I've got planned today - let me know if you would rather I do something else."  It really makes things simple to think that all I have to do is do what's in front of me to do god's will.  I spend far too much time trying to figure out what it is and then deciding whether or not it's worthy of me, which it usually isn't.  My will is SO much better than god's will.  The ego of god to think that he could do it better than me.  Who's better than me?  God?  Please.  I could run the world much more effectively than god.  God spends way too much time on things that don't directly involve me and when he's engaged with my stuff, god is goofing it up most of the time, the twit.

When I was getting sober it helped me to substitute "wants" for "will."  I could get my hands around the idea that I was better off turning my wants over to god's care.  Turning events over makes some little sense - if I get a flat tire today I'm not astounded.  It happened - I deal with it.  I confess, however, to really, really not wanting a flat tire.  I don't see why my incompetent higher power would visit such a plague on me - there are tons and tons of Lesser People out there that could be given flat tires and it wouldn't bother me a bit.  In fact, there are a lot of people who deserve flat tires and there are a select group - like the nosy woman who criticized my on-street parking technique - who I would curse with flat tires, dozens of them, day after day.  Defective rims, nails and screws and glass and road debris, drunken teenagers maliciously deflating all four tires in the dead of night, which I never did when I was drinking.

I have been mightily impressed with all of the helpful hints in The Book about willpower.  I am comforted that I have one and I can use it to the best of my ability; indeed, I'm expected to use it to the best of my ability.  I just have to quit using it like some Medieval battering ram, crushing unsuspecting people as I move through my day.  My will is not the will of other people, and it is not the will of god.

I need to keep it in a box, taped shut, and only release it when it's absolutely necessary.

Big Trucks and Parking Spaces

"This is what I'm going to do today.  If you have something else in mind let me know."  The guy who shared this looked like The Fonz - big pompadour, sleeveless black T-shirt, every exposed inch of skin tattooed.  I like it when things are simple, although you wouldn't know this watching me try to complicate the hell out of everything.  I like the idea that it's very human to try to find a comfortable place in the world and that it's very spiritual to listen to any and all ideas that god might have, all while trying not to trod on the toes of my fellows.  It allows me to move forward while suggesting that I don't knock down any old ladies or neonatal physicians.

Yesterday the movers came - guys from The Program who are the best.  They had a big truck which they parked in the condo parking lot, blocking a few spaces.  We were in and out of the building every few minutes and our apartment is right next to the entrance door.  It would be hard to miss exactly who was moving.  Anyway, a couple of people called the building management company to complain.  This pissed me off.  It reminded me of someone tattling behind my back to the teacher.  

"Why not come in and ask me to move the truck? " I thought.  I would have cheerfully done that.   I do realize that not all truck movers would be cheerful and that a lot of people are terrified of confrontation, especially with a guy who looks somewhat like Ozzy Osbourne.  Still, it was chickenshit behavior.  I fumed a bit but not for long - I'm sick but I'm getting better.

As I sat idly contemplating my navel I remembered an incident from the day before.  I had parked my car on our busy street - SuperK and I were unloading groceries and backpacks with our exercise gear.  A little old lady across the street, unbidden, said: "If you move your car up then someone else can park there, too."

I looked at my car: "I don't think so," I said.  I'm an outstanding parking guy.

"Yes," she insisted.   She waved vaguely: "I live around here."

"I live around here, too," I replied, heating up over the advances of this nosy busybody.  "I'll tell you what: I'll come back out and move my car after I get my groceries inside."

"You're a mean person," she said.

"Why don't you mind your own business?" I countered, concluding our exchange.

Yes. Yes.  Why wouldn't someone want to come out and ask me to move a large truck?  Why wouldn't they want to do that?  I don't know.  I have no idea.

"Again with the cars," SuperK said.

The Move

So we're in the midst of The Move.  This is stressful, moving.  This is a fact.  This is not an opinion on my part.  Moving is rated as one of the top 5 most stressful things that one can do.

So the question is: why am I doing this thing?  It's becoming clear to me that I have only a shadowy grasp of why I do anything.  Most of the stress that I have in my life can be directly traced to my own actions.  This is one of the reasons that people find it so irritating when I bitch about the problems that I think I have in my life.

"Didn't you make the decision to do this?" they ask, perplexed.  "Why are you taking up my valuable time complaining about something that's your own fault?"

Yesterday SuperK and I had a little spat about some packing dynamic.  The fact that we can only generate enough energy to fight about glassware that we don't care about and should be thrown away is telling.  Anyway, I don't get angry that often but when I do people notice.  It's not that you can't tell when I'm angry.  You can tell.  It's obvious.  And I fight to win - I'm not a defensive fighter.  I'm real big on the offense.

Try not to talk, Seaweed.  Try not to talk.