On a Lighter Side

"Saying no from a place of anger can add force to our no, and for a moment we feel powerful.  But this feeling of power is illusory, and it always leaves us with an emotional hangover of negativity after the anger subsides.  It also causes suffering for those caught in its path."

The Toltecs

"An epiphany is something that comes to you out of the blue that your sponsor has been telling you for the last six months."

The 12 Steps save you from suicide.

The 12 Traditions save you from homicide.

A General Service committment makes you want to do both.

Lots Of Irritating Guys

You are driving your car and about to enter a long stretch of desert road when you see this sign: "The next 200 miles - You and Your tedious thoughts."

I read a study which estimates that a person has somewhere around 60,000 thoughts each day and that 95% of them are the same thoughts they had yesterday.

It's the breath.  Pay attention to that breath.  It's a great anchor and it's one thing that we share with every living creature on the planet.  When one of those 60,000 tedious, repetitive thoughts pop into my mind I try to remember to say: "Huh.  Look at that thought" and then refocus my attention back onto the next thought.  I try to remember that this is perfectly normal, that my brain has the ability to think and it's going to do it and it is not at all pleased that I'm trying to reestablish some semblance of control over its desire to return to tedious, repetitive, self-involved thoughts.  It's frustrating enough that most of what I'm thinking about is crap but to make matters worse it's the same crap I thought about yesterday.  I can't even come up with any new crap to think about.

One of my eternal loops of thinking is to remember that there is a rhyme and reason to my thinking, that it keeps me safe and it helps me stay prepared for what's going to come next.  That's well and good.  My problem is that the preparation mostly involves worry and planning about illogical and implausible things.  I have enough food.  I have a dry, warm, comfortable place to live.  I have friends and family and lots and lots of conveniences.  Nothing to see here, folks, move along.  So where does my mind go?  Garbage Bag Guy!  Hot Tub Guy!  Boat Guy!  Okay, okay, Garbage Bag Guy and Boat Guy are the same guy but it sounds better to have three guys to be pissed at instead of just two guys.

What can I tell you?  There are a lot of irritating guys out there.

Where Have All the Garbage Bags Gone, O Where O Where Have They Gone?

I hope today that all of us remember that we're perfect just the way we are.  Just for today.  That doesn't mean I'm not a work in progress, that there aren't things I need to improve or to work on.  It means that I should give myself a break.  If I'm honest about it I'm never going to fully measure up to the impossibly irrational expectations I have of myself.  I suspect I believe deep down inside that I can achieve perfection when the surface reality is that if I can get to the point where I'm not a total fuckup then I'm doing okay.

I peeked over the fence today into Garbage Bag Guy's backyard and all the refuse was gone.  When does he get this stuff done?  I didn't hear him pile the bags up and I didn't hear him remove the bags?  Why doesn't he get a paying job so he no longer has to stack overfilled garbage bags right up to my fence line?  The format of the meeting yesterday - when the bags were still there and when I believed they would remain there indefinitely - is for the leader to read a paragraph from the first 164 pages of The Big Book and kick off the discussion based on that reading.  The sadistic son of a bitch that was in the hot seat selected this: "Though we did not like their symptoms and the way these disturbed us, they, like ourselves, were sick, too.  We asked God to help us show them the same pity, tolerance, and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend.  When a person offended, we said to ourselves: "This is a sick man.  How can I be helpful to him? God save me from being angry.  Thy will be done."

Really, really annoying.

I do have to say that I find Bill's wording here a little condescending.  Big Spiritual Seaweed gets to show love and tolerance to some poor guy who doesn't know better.  It reeks to me of pious elitism.  Look at me - I'm in recovery!  A few years ago I was taking a shot of vodka first thing in the morning to steady my nerves and now I'm going to tolerate your shortcomings?  Pretty Big of me.  I love the words "pious" and "sanctimonious."  In layman's terms?  "My shit doesn't stink."

Garbage Bag Guy

Because I live in a warm climate homes generally don't have a basement - they have a crawl space.  I don't know - maybe no homes have a basement.  What do I look like?  A home builder?  In fact, upon some reflection, I have no idea why homes have basements.  I just assumed they're places to store more crap that you no longer need, that you never needed, and that you should just throw in the garbage.  I may have read once that cold weather climates cause the ground to shrink and expand so a basement is needed to counteract this.  I have no idea why I would remember that.  It sounds like something I'd make up.  I explained to a friend that the reason my hair was standing straight up in the air as the result of riding my motorcycle to the meeting.  "You have a motorcycle?" she asked.  "I have three motorcycles." I said.  If I'm going to make shit up I'm going to go all in.  If she believes I have a motorcycle I might as well own three of them.

Where I am here?  Oh, yeah, we had sneaky rats get into the crawl space a few years back, making entry through some poorly sealed openings that I guess allow the crawl space to breathe or something.  Get some air flow through that crawl space and I'll tell you this as well - crawl space is an apt description because you're going to have to crawl to get around in there.  A nice dude comes out, seals up the openings and catches all the rats, of which there were an alarmingly large number.  Now, the rats have returned.  The sneaky bastards found a small hole around a water pipe or electrical conduit or sewage outlet and took up residence again.  Not the same rats, I'm assuming, maybe some relatives.  Dude comes back out and is catching rats and sealing holes and all will be well, all will be well, all will be well.

I started to ponder why rats and why in my house?  We have fruit trees all around my property so I'm going to make an effort to keep any fallen oranges and tangerines collected and disposed of.  What else?  Where else for the source of the rats?  I peer over the fence into Boat Guy's back yard and what do I see but a whole ton of garbage bags which appear to be filled with bottles and cans for recycling.  I can only hope that's what they contain.  God help me if it's actual garbage.  For the record . . . he no longer has the boat - replacing that with a beat up old truck - so maybe he needs a new nickname?  Garbage Bag Guy? 

No way this is allowable under our community rules.  But I'm stuck again in the Conundrum:  Do I escalate this by contacting park management or by confronting Garbage Bag Guy directly?  It's amazing how things can spiral out of control once official mechanisms get activated.  Nonetheless, it's not fair to me that he's behaving like this.  No one else in the community is collecting cans and bottles for recycling.  No one else is parking junk trucks in their driveway.  No one else is irritating the shit out of me.

Fair disclosure - I'm hitting another age milestone that ends in a zero in December.  I've had some struggles with these numerically significant transitions.  It's uncomfortable to ponder the passage of another decade.  You look around at your friends and think: "This is it?  This is the best I can do?"  When you are young the End of Things is so distant it has no meaning.  Now the Grim Reaper is on the horizon.  He's still out there a bit but I can make something out and if I use binoculars I can definitely see someone in a black hoodie with a sharpened farming implement.  I have to be aware at times like this.  Boat Guy . . .  er . . . Garbage Bag Guy is no longer making a lot of noise so there's that.  Is the status quo bad enough to risk a new status quo?  Always possible that a new reality will  irritate the shit out of me in a different way.

Often, keeping my mouth shut works out best.  When I talk . . . bad things happen.  When I'm silent . . . things work out.

The Crying Baby

"The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it's the same problem you had last year."

John Foster Dulles

There may be many things we want to alter in our lives.  But unless we stop talking and start doing something, those changes won't happen.  We can start by setting a small, easily attainable goal.

"My philosophy of life is No Pain, No Pain."

George Carlin

Resistance to pain = Suffering

Me.  I said that.  Everyone said that, maybe, could be!  It's talking to me, that pain.  It's sending me a message.  It's keeping me safe from physical and emotional danger so why do I spend so much time trying to get rid of it?  Today I try to look right at the pain, to pay attention to the pain, to figure out whether it's the good pain, trying to keep me safe, or the bad pain, the useless pain I hallucinate up in my mind worrying about non-events?

When I first started traveling on long overnight flights of many hours I would occasionally be seated near the dreaded Crying Baby.  The best antidote to a long flight on a cramped airplane is to sleep as much of it away as possible.  A Crying Baby doesn't make the task of falling asleep while seated upright on a jostling aircraft any easier.  Initially, I thought that the babies were doing it just to fuck with me.  Then I thought the airlines were scrutinizing the seating chart so that they could put as many babies in my section as possible, assuming that at least one of the babies might morph into the dreaded Crying Baby.  Then I read at one point that the human body is more programmed to notice a change in incoming stimuli than to notice the stimuli itself.  If I try to ignore the Crying Baby I am hyper-aware of any fluctuations in the volume, tone, and timbre of the wailing but if I just relax and pay attention to the howling my brain gets bored and begins to start to ignore it.  It doesn't ignore it completely - it's a Squalling Baby! - but it removes most of the anger and frustration I feel which is really what is keeping me awake.

Honestly, I'm more irritated by the two boring people sitting behind me who spend half the flight droning on and on about absolutely nothing.  The Crying Baby, at least, might be responding to the pain in the inner ear that can occur with the change in cabin pressure as the plane ascends and descends.  The baby has a reason to cry while the two adults talking loudly about absolutely nothing in a cabin full of people who are trying to sleep?

They're going to hell.

What Is Good Behavior In Alcoholics Anonymous?

One of my friends in Alcoholics Anonymous is a young woman - young-ish woman - who grew up with two alcoholic parents, the father taking a powder and leaving his kids to fend for themselves with no guidance or support after subjecting them to years of disdain and disbelief.  This kid got herself involved with a piece of shit A.A. member - yes, we have them, too - with a ton of sobriety and a big presence in one of our local villages.  Fair enough and not unheard of.  SuperK and I got things going when we were both pretty new in sobriety.  So it happens.  And it happens because we're in an environment where everyone is sharing or should be sharing, anyway, very intimate feelings of sadness and loneliness.  If you're a piece of shit predatory type then you're in a pretty fertile hunting ground.  I should say this: I do not know the guy.  Maybe he's just a minor piece of shit and not a huge piece of shit but I'm gonna stand by my classification until proven otherwise.  This mixing of all kinds of personalities and histories is, of course, one of A.A.'s greatest strengths while being the source of the occasional great pitfall.  A man with a lot of sobriety should have not behaved this way; or should have behaved this way only with great caution.  He is still a presence at two meetings that my friend visited regularly but is now too abashed to attend.  He's fine, apparently, blithely unconcerned about how this relationship affected someone new enough that drinking again could be a plausible outcome for his victim.

Here's the point of my judgemental screed:  I'm not a close, day-to-day friend with this woman but we talk at the Keep It Complicated meeting regularly so I was floored when I found out she had suffered this abuse at the hands of this guy.  I was floored that I didn't know one solitary thing about the relationship that she was invested in so heavily that it really caused some emotional damage when it ended.  She mentioned it not once to me.   Did anyone know about it?  Did her sponsor know about it?  I know her sponsor very well and find it hard to believe she would have watched this behavior without weighing in with some pointed, unequivocal advice.  We try not to give direct advice but if you tell me that you're going to feed your whole arm into a wood chipper I'm going to say something.

Okay, here's the real point, finally: Talk to people!  Tell people what you're doing!  Get some fucking feedback, for chrissake!  If someone talks to me about something going on I really, really try not to be dismissive or critical but what I can do is to ask a lot of good questions that allow the other person to hear themselves talk out loud about what they're doing.  How many times have I listened to myself talk to another member and after a bit thought: "Well, I sound like an idiot."  The other person did not have to tell me I'm an idiot.  I sounded like an idiot to myself.

Irony. Irony!

Irony:  A contrast between expectation and reality.  (Ed. Note: Yeah, alcoholics don't do that shit.)  (Ed. Note: See that?  THAT'S irony.)  It occurs when a statement means an opposite of what was said or an outcome is the reverse of what is expected.

Have I mentioned before how important I think it is to be present, to be in the moment?  Have I mentioned before how confounding it is personally to constantly forget how important it is to be present, to be in the moment?  Maybe this is why the reminder shows up again and again in the spiritual and recovery literature I rely on.  Maybe this is why one of our most important slogans in Alcoholics Anonymous is "One Day At A Time.  I should have this tattooed on my forehead backward so that every time I look in the mirror to remind myself who the problem is I'll be reminded what the solution is.

"Too often we put off our own happiness until some event is realized in the future.  The result is a cycle of setting and achieving milestones, only to realize after each one is achieved that it failed to do for us what we had thought  it would.  This is why many great masters of all traditions have stressed the importance of living in the present moment."

The Toltecs

I ascribe to the belief that if I want to be "happy" in the future then I damn well better work on being "happy" today.  While it's OK to be a striver, to work at improving and arriving at a "better" place - a stable relationship, children, extra money, a successful career - if I make my "happiness" contingent on achieving these milestones I'm going to be in danger of screwing up today.  I have found that a "truth" in my life is that when I quit grasping at something then it comes to me more easily and more naturally.  Which can be frustrating and a good example of one of the ways my Higher Power can be an ironic, tricky son of a gun.  An example: I came into A.A. extremely broke and some extra money, some "fun" money, some "bullshit" money only started arriving when I realized I could lead a good, satisfying life without the extra.  The irony is that now that I have some of it I need less of it.