Action Stevie

Action:  Something done so as to accomplish a purpose.
Purpose:  A target; an aim; a goal; a result that is desired.

I've not had the best attitude the last couple of days.  Everything is annoying me.  While I realize that on my best days 80% of everything annoys me this is still an unacceptable uptick on my Irritation Scale.  It's when The Program and the people populating The Program become universally annoying that I'm really irritable, and I need to take some Action!!  So I drove inland and took a big, honking, exhausting hike up into the mountains.  I knew I needed to wear myself out physically - when I'm gasping for oxygen and wincing at knee pain I have a hard time pouting - and I knew I needed some nature - hard to stay mad when the birds are singing and you're worried that a panther is going to leap out of the bushes and sever your jugular.  

I'm not making that last part up.  I really do worry about panthers (or are they mountain lions?  Panther sounds cooler).   I'm also worried about ticks and biting black flies which absolutely ate me alive on my last hike.  Snakes, strangely enough, don't bother me at all.  A woman passed me on the trail today when I was taking a blow, one of many.  She didn't seem to be having the respiratory problems I was having.  We nodded politely at each other and she disappeared around the bend.  Ten minutes later she came walking back my way.

"I wanted to ask your advice," she said.  "What do you do when there's a snake on the trail?"

I laughed.  She mistook me for a guy.   You know - someone who can do guy things and that is definitely not me.

"Well, ma'am," I said.  "I sneak up behind the critter and I grab it and wring its neck.  Then I cut it up, wrassle up some potatoes and onions, fry it all up, and that's some good eatin.'"

The snake was long gone by the time we retraced her steps.  I was exhausted at this point so her company for the last half hour of the hike was a welcome diversion.  My experience with snakes is that they are in a big hurry to get away from people.

Anyway, when I'm annoyed I usually find that I am not accepting what I have right now.  I find the right now lacking.  Even worse is when I can't find anything wrong in the right now so I go out into the future and imagine something wrong happening there.  It hasn't even happened yet and I'm pissed off about it.  So here I be . . . fighting, fighting, fighting to get my way.  

"And we have ceased fighting anything or anyone - even alcohol."

Dude at the meeting this morning - the meeting that was pissing me off - was called upon to share and this is what he said: "I spoke yesterday so I'm going to pass my time to . . . "  This is called leading by example.

The section we read out of the Big Book was about the actor who wants to run everything.  "Each person is like an actor who wants to run the whole show . . . If his arrangements would only stay put, if only people would do what he wished, the show would be great.  Life would be wonderful."  The implication is that the actor is trying to play god.  Pffftttt.  I wasn't trying to play god, I knew that I was god.  In fact, I may be god.  Not the necessarily, but a god.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: no one wants my advice, even the people who actually ask me for my advice.  They just want me to listen, to be a sounding board, as they try to work things out in their own mind.  People are going to do what they want irregardless of what my opinion is.

Another suggestion we hear is to try to get in the middle of the pack, of the herd, because it's the stragglers that get picked off.  The problem for the new person, of course, is to convince them that this is a pretty good herd.  I was looking for a different herd.  This herd didn't look particularly promising.