Rational Lies

 Here's what's what this morning . . . 

I'm always working on being grateful.  Being more grateful because I am grateful, just not as grateful as I should be, or could be.  Gratitude is a work in progress for me.  I'm not a dude who naturally sees the good stuff.  I'm a Defect Specialist.  One of the reasons I like old-timers who are active in Alcoholics Anonymous is that I enjoy experiencing the Gratitude wafting and oozing out of their essence and, really, anybody who is active in their spiritual recovery is covered with ooze, just not as much as old-timers who have been working on producing and storing ooze for a longer period of time

I'm always working on being productive.  This is a blessing and a curse.  Being productive means I get a lot of productive things done but it also means I can be hard on myself.  I have to laugh at America where we use terms like "killing time" or "wasting time" or "filling time," like time is something to be mastered and wrestled to the ground and vanquished.

I'm always working on giving myself a fucking break with every fucking little thing.  It's okay to just be.  It's okay to sit in the sun with a thousand yard stare, like some slack-jawed yokel.  You're not going to hell because you watched a dumb sitcom instead of translating Tolstoy's "The Cossacks" from the original Russian.  It's enough with the Russian translating, already.

From the morning Big Book meeting . . . 

Drinking alone: what a purely alcoholic construct.  I learned this early on.  It's efficient.  I thought: "I really don't like people and I'm really cheap and I don't have any money anyhow and I can't get any girls to listen to Black Sabbath with me for nine straight hours so why don't I get drunk in front of the TV and watch old re-runs of Gilligan's Island?"

Drinking for pleasure or relaxation: not what we alcoholics do.  We drink to survive.  Our days revolve around our drinking.  We're tolerating everything that gets in the way of our drinking.

I heard this phrase today: Rational Lies.  Rationalize.

Rationalize: To attempt to explain or justify with logical, plausible reasons, even if these are not true or appropriate.