Big Clangs and Dull Thuds

There's a guy who comes to Keep It Complicated who has put together a couple of years of continuous sobriety.  I like him just fine but I find his behavior somewhat off-putting from time to time.  He's got a sharp mind and a quick wit, and he's got a good heart.  What I find jarring sometimes is his timing when he interacts with other people.  His behavior is not bad, it just doesn't land kindly all the time.  Perhaps I should talk about myself to make this more clear: I have a dry sense of  humor and a mildly skewed way of looking at the world.  When I was getting sober I tried way too hard to be funny and way, way hard to be off beat and the result was often .  .  .  oddly unpleasant.  It wasn't the words - it was the timing and the context. It often didn't work.  My attempt to be funny landed with a thud.  I can say to  Willie "Man, you are an idiot" and he'll roar with laughter.   My timing is good, I have a history with the man, I'm not going to say this at an inappropriate time when he may be hurting.  The words sound harsh but the effect is positive.  It's affectionate.  Put it down on a piece of paper and provide no context and it sounds awful.  For example: I don't really find smutty, suggestive humor humorous.  I'm not saying it isn't humorous - just that it isn't funny  to me.  It wouldn't take an Olympian amount of perception to pick up on the fact that I'm not enamored with this kind of joking around but my friend is not picking it up at all.  I suppose I could tell him to knock it off but that's not really my style.  I'm not comfortable suggesting that someone else should change or how that change should look - I'd prefer that they change all on their own and only if they feel like changing.  After all, it's not my call how he should behave.  Moreover, most alcoholics don't like to be criticized or prodded into behavior that they haven't decided is in their best interests.  I like to think I get to take credit when things go my way and I get to take the blame when they don't.  My sponsor for many years would laugh on the rare occasions I asked for advice: "Oh, no you don't," he'd chortle.  "If it doesn't work out I don't want to hear about it."   

Here's an example: I shared a story about a conversation I had with the young woman who was cutting my hair about addiction and recovery.  I do this all the time - I'm far past the point of caring what anyone thinks about drugs and alcohol.  It turns out she has some issues with drinking, too, and has actually been to rehab - amazing how often I get an identifying response when I talk about my recovery life - so I invited her to join me at the Keep It Complicated collection of knuckleheads and ne'er-do-wells, and offered to introduce her to some of the younger women who attend.  My buddy came up afterwards and quipped about me being a dirty old man and he knew what I was up to.  I get that he was trying to be funny and that some other people would think this is funny or that under the right circumstances even I would think it was funny but in this instance it landed with a hollow thud, a big clang.  I know that I have a gentle, non-threatening way with younger men and women and that my style is more suited to girls than to boys.  I get depression and guilt and shame better than I get anger and aggression and rowdy defiance.  I wasn't at all offended at my buddy's ill-timed and poorly-delivered jabs - I got it that he was trying to be funny - because I understood that this was about him and not about me.  This is how he might have been tempted to behave in a similar situation so he transferred his intent onto me.  This would have been a good time to compliment me on my efforts to steer someone suffering into a recovery program instead of suggesting some kind of predatory intention.   

I still like the guy.  I think he's really changing.  I bet he gets to a kinder, more perceptive place.  But I hope that he retains his own personal Anthony-ness because this is what makes him genuine.  We're able to build real connections with other people by being who we are all of the time.

             

The Plain Language Big Book

From Bill's Story as repurposed in the Plain Language Big Book: "It was a relief to know that most alcoholics have a hard time resisting drinking, even if they are able to control themselves in other parts of their lives.  This helped me understand my actions.  I wanted very badly to stop drinking, but it seemed like I just couldn't.  This is how most alcoholics felt."

In the history of the Christian religion for centuries mass was conducted entirely in Latin.  Great - preaching to an audience who didn't know how to read in a language they couldn't understand.  Good technique.  Makes perfect sense to me.  Then, the Bible was translated into English in an old-timey fashion - The King James' Version - so if you could read you didn't mind a lot of thou-s and thee-s and shalt-s and so on and so forth.  Again, very logical.  Why say "Don't do this" when you can say "Thou shalt not do this."  That's how most people are going to talk as they go through their day.  "Thou shalt not eat that cookie before dinner" and "Thou shalt brush thy teeth after eating that cookie I told thee not to eat."  And so on and so forth.

The uproar!  The outrage!  The apostasy!  We might as well be watching a partisan cable news show - or should I say "news" show? -  excoriate The Other Side.

So far I'm finding it to be very inoffensive.  It's almost as if someone asked me or any other A.A. member to summarize Bill's Story.  The words might be a little different, a little more modern, but the message doesn't waver.  The Daily Reflections - approved A.A. literature - is nothing more than ordinary people interpreting a literature passage in their own words.  Most of them I like or find blandly neutral and a few I don't care for.  So what?  I'm not a ten year old.  I can take what I like and leave the rest.

In the MOMENT

I was waiting for my overpriced specialty coffee drink on Saturday and watching a young couple and their daughter, who was just learning to walk.  Dad was holding her arms and helping her along.  She looked damned serious.  "Okay, apparently I gotta do this so let's get to work."  The parents sat down and the child hung around for a second before deciding to strike off on her own.  She took a couple of unsteady steps so I sidled over and blocked her path to help Dad out as he got up to make sure she didn't wander too far.  She stopped, craned her head way back and tried to make sense of this huge skyscraper that was now in her way, and then broke out into the biggest smile I have ever seen and just plopped down on her bottom and continued to look up at me, smiling away.  I could see how in the moment she was.  I could hear her mind working away: "I was walking which was hard but pretty fun and now this is going on so I'm going to take a beat and see what's what."  The walking was gone.  She was done walking.  She probably didn't even remember walking.  It was time to check out the skyscraper and that had her full attention.   

Penguin Doodling

I have a spot for my Quiet Time - a comfortable chair with books stacked around me, my journal, a candle burning, a mood light that I bought in China - a small rectangular tower with translucent red panels decorated with dragons that glow when the lamp is turned on - and lots of windows.  It's the time of the year where it's still dark when I begin my meditation and I get to experience the world as it slowly brightens.  It's really quite amazing watching how the light changes and how this is influenced by the cloud cover and the seasonal angle of the sun.  I think this is God as a deliberate, anal-retentive, careful engineer type.  This took some planning.  This was not getting high and building a penguin.  God did that in like five minutes, laughing his ass off the whole time.  The sky was an engineering task - the penguin was a doodle on the back of a cocktail napkin at a dive bar at 2 AM.

When I'm with other people I hope I'm tossing good energy out into the universe, flinging it into the mix, and that the universe improves because of this.  Is this God getting involved?  Or is this just the good thoughts and the good energy working away, chipping away the bad juju and brightening the sky?  I dunno anymore.  I believe that when I think of other people instead of obsessing over every tiny speck and bit of minutia in my own life that I vibrate some positivity outward and that everyone is the better for it.  I understand that my little bit of vibration enhancement is pretty pathetic all alone but it's all I'm responsible for and all I can do.  If other people vibrate positivity the world gets better.  That's my belief.  But I can't dictate the terms for anyone else.  Chase after your own wishes or desires or live in a life of service or - like most of us - fall somewhere in between.  Plus, not thinking about myself is so good for my mental health.  It's exhausting thinking about myself as much as I do.   

You get to make the call.   

The Lake of Fire

So we bought a new car to replace SuperK's ten year old model.  Just to be clear and upfront this is obviously going to be one of those stories where I bitch about a high-end problem.  Although now that I think about it that's really all I bitch about at this point on the new model.  Since we don't drive a lot we normally buy a slightly used car but we splurged this time.  If you've never had a new car it's a pretty cool experience as you get to drive around inhaling that great new car smell - which is actually toxic volatile chemicals off gassing from all the plastic in the interior - and wondering where the money is going to come from to pay for this extravagance that you spent a lot of money on and all it did was replace a perfectly good low mileage, dependable, used car.

We went to lunch yesterday and came back to the car to discover someone had backed into it and then drove off without leaving a note.  They almost backed directly into the temporary paper license plate affixed to the rear panel.  It looked like they were aiming for the temporary license plate.  I ascribed all kinds of malevolent intent to this incident.  Someone did this to me on purpose.  To me.  They weren't going to hit anyone's car until they saw it was my car which caused them to fly off into a murderous rage.  Intellectually I realize that someone was probably frightened by the damage and fled, maybe someone with little money and poor insurance, the fear overriding their internal sense of ethics, of right and wrong.  Boy, I know all about that.  While I understand that stuff like this can happen but how about giving me a fucking week before you damage my car?  But because I'm a kind, loving, understanding spiritual spirit guide I decided to downgrade my curse on this individual: I merely hope that they burn for all eternity on a Lake of Fire even though this category of transgression would permit me to toss in a devil or demon or two or three whose sole purpose would be to stick white hot needles into the genitals of the transgressor who is already burning for all eternity on a Lake of Fire.  Clearly, in my mind, the Lake of Fire treatment isn't quite harsh enough.  Granted, it does sound pretty awful but isn't it a passive kind of torture - you toss someone in the Lake of Fire and then you walk away?  How about some active, hands-on torture where the torturer can assess the situation and add additional torture if the Lake isn't causing enough suffering?  Relying on the Lake of Fire and the Lake of Fire only sounds kind of devil-lazy.  It's roughly akin to comparing a passive index mutual fund with an actively managed mutual fund.  Granted, the passive variety generally performs better but there's some comfort in knowing that someone is manipulating your money.  I say get some eyes-on-the-ground to amp up the torture when necessary.  Personally, I like hot weather so a Lake of Fire might not be as effective on me as it would be on SuperK who hates hot weather.  Tossing me into a big tub of ice water for all eternity actually sounds worse in my case.

There's a Simpson's episode where the whole family has been sentenced to hell and Grandpa is shown sitting smack dab in the middle of a big bonfire complaining that "I'm STILL cold."  That would be me.  I'd nudge the rheostat on the Lake of Fire to turn the heat up a little more.

While this flight of fancy is all kind of fun and hallucinatory the real message is that we're both okay emotionally, more or less.  I wish it hadn't happened and it's going to be a pain in the ass to remedy but I do have insurance and there are good body shops that can repair this minor damage and even if they couldn't/can't it's not like the car - the very nice car, very luxurious car - can't be driven.  A note.  A note would have been nice.  But as we worked through our emotions we did admit to the possibility that maybe the driver doesn't have insurance and doesn't have much money and was terrified at the consequences.  While this doesn't make it right it does add some perspective and perhaps make it more understandable.

Again With the Gratitude List

I bring up the fact that as a naturally ungrateful person, a person who sees the problem much  more clearly than the solution, who is wary and suspicious and guarded by nature, that I find it salutary to manually go through a Gratitude List every morning.  I maintain that this worldview is pretty common - life is hard and if I see a bear behind every tree then it's not likely I'm going to get eaten by a bear - so for many of us it is a great coping skill.   I also acknowledge that there are indeed some freaks of nature out there who are naturally grateful.  I suggest that these are the people we should worry about and not pissy, irritable people like myself.  

Anyway, the first pieces of my list and the pieces that absolutely dominate the list all revolve around people and my relationships and how incredibly, incredibly blessed I am to have so many wonderful people in my life.  Then, at the very end, I express gratitude for my stuff - two nice cars, a lovely  house, enough money in the bank that I don't have to worry about an unexpected expense.  Here's where it gets weird and deliciously ironic: when I first stumbled into The Rooms the ass-end of my list was always migrating up to the front.  Money!  Power!!  Sex!!!  Gratitude for the direction given me by my long-dead grandparents?  Gratitude for teachers who were patient and wise when I was a pre-teen?  I did not think this way.  Pressed I would have said I was grateful for them but I didn't express this gratitude in my daily life.  I was too consumed with pursuit for the almighty dollar and other shallow and ultimately unsatisfactory things.

Who's The Real Idiot?

There's a guy that has been a regular at my meeting since he got sober.  He was an angry guy.  He was so angry that he was tagged by some of our more sarcastic members with the sobriquet "Angry Chris" which - of course - pissed him off.  He's been coming to meetings for seven or eight years and he has gotten a lot less angry and watching these kinds of transformations are one of the great joys of my life.  If someone doesn't use a turn signal in front of him his old reptile brain still brands that driver as an idiot - that's his essential Chris-ness - but it doesn't make him mad anymore . . .  or not as mad anyway.  I love seeing people change without losing touch with the kind of person they are.  He's still Chris but he's "Fun Angry Chris" now.

I think of my own growth in The Program.  I've always had what I call a dry sense of humor and it no longer irritates me when someone suggests instead that I'm sorta a sarcastic pain in the ass because there's probably some truth in that.  That's my essential Seaweed-ness.  If I didn't have a dry sense of humor I wouldn't be me and most of the time I like me just fine.  But what I needed to do was to learn how to make this dryness playful and kind and not cutting and judgemental.  I bet if you heard newly sober Seaweed say the same thing to the same person - the exact same words - that thirty-eight year sober Seaweed would say you'd cringe at the old Seaweed and laugh with the new Seaweed.  Same words - different effect.  Something would be off with the impact of the old Seaweed.  You'd wince a bit.

I feel like what I've been able to do over the years is to rub off the rough edges of the old Seaweed and add some putty and bondo to the underdeveloped parts and come up with a new and improved Seaweed.  Funny and kind Seaweed instead of arrogant and unkind Seaweed.  That's the improvement.  But as weird as it sounds I still retain some of my arrogance and judgemental nature.  That's the essential, the authentic Seaweed.  I still think I'm better than everyone else and I still think everyone else is an idiot.  I think you're an idiot and I don't even know who you are.

The good thing is that I DO know who the REAL idiot is.