Always Leave a Meeting With More Money Than You Came in With

"It is always better to ask questions than to make an assumption, because assumptions set us up  for suffering.  We have the tendency to make assumptions about everything.  The problem with making assumptions is that we believe they are the truth.  We could swear they are real.  We make assumptions about what others are doing or thinking (Ed. Note: Thinking! Thinking!!) - we take it personally."

The Four Agreements

"Nobody is thinking about you."

Stevie Seaweed

Over the years I've had friends read my writing.  From time to time one of them will read an entry and think I'm talking about them.  "Was that last entry about  me?" they'll ask, with a proud and knowing nod of their misguided heads.  If it's something positive I often tell a little white lie and say: "Yes!  That was about you."  Here's the thing though - it has never been about the person who thinks it's about them.  It's always about me and my humorous attempts to learn what an asshat I am by poking fun about myself.

Me!  Me!! Me!!!

As if that's not bad enough I'll make it worse: most of what I say and write . . . well . . . I'm making it up.  If I tell a story about something that happened to me it almost certainly did not happen to me.  It's a story.  That's all it is.  I'm a confusing blend of German practicality and common sense and Scottish storytelling bullshit artistry.  Moreover, I bet all that LSD I did rewired some important circuits in my head.  On the one hand I'm trying to dazzle you, to lure you into a maze of circular logic, and on the other hand I'm trying to spin a good yarn.  I firmly believe that truth is no hindrance to a good story!  That's a bedrock Seaweed belief and I hew to it with great vigor.  And it gets more and more worser . . . I've been lying for so long that I actually believe most of what I'm saying.  I'll be in the middle of a ripping good tale and start thinking: "Did I ever do this?  I don't think I did this.  I may be making this up!"  But I keep on going.

Yesterday at the meeting I started my share with this: "It's a good meeting when I leave with more money than I came in with."  Nothing.  I got nothing.  I thought it was fucking hilarious and there were only a few quiet titters.  That one should have brought down the house.

Maybe There IS Something Out There

As a scientist I have a grasp on the miracle that is the complexity of the human body.  It is astounding to learn that we are completely unaware of millions of complicated chemical reactions happening in our body every second.  Our brain is sending out untold numbers of commands to keep us alive.  While we are unaware on a conscious level that this is happening smarter people can explain, more or less, what's going on.  Then there's the mind . . . That big nightmare of neurons and ganglia and electrical impulses talking to each other all the time, mostly in agreement but sometimes at odds with each other.  It's chaos!  It's the committee!      

Here's where it starts to get weird . . . maybe all of this wild shit that's going on up there is only part of the story?  Maybe there's a piece of me that's talking to or is aware of . . . something else.  Something we can't see but is out there nonetheless.  Why not? I take for granted the fact that my body is automatically regulating my pH levels and blood pressure and removing crap from my blood stream and attacking the germs that get in there when I drop some food on the ground and then pick it up and eat it with only a cursory brushing-off of whatever debris is now clinging to that Nutrigrain Bar.  It's the five second rule!  Pick it up and eat it quickly and trust my brain to clean up the mess!

"The mind has the ability to talk to itself, but it also has the ability to hear information that is available from other realms.  Sometimes you hear a voice in your mind, and you may wonder where it came from.  This voice may have come from another reality in which there are living beings very similar to the human mind.  The Toltecs called these beings Allies.  In Europe, Africa, and India they called them the Gods.  The mind sees with the eyes and perceives this waking reality.  But the mind also sees and perceives without the eyes, although the reason is hardly aware of this perception.  The mind lives in one dimension."   

Why is this so hard for many of us to grasp?  That we can perceive with our mind's eye?  That we take for granted that we're going to take the next breath without awareness?  It would be a shitty day if you had to consciously take each breath.  And how about birds who can migrate thousands of miles and end up on the same spit of land that they called home last summer?  These birds can navigate thousands of miles by tracking information in the earth's magnetic field and some of them even have metal bits in their beaks that respond to changes in this magnetism.  They sure as shit aren't doing this consciously.  Maybe they think that god is doing this?  One of the great blessings of my sobriety is that I now believe that I have a Mind's Eye that sees stuff from other dimensions.  Is this God?  Is this a god?  Maybe it's my loved ones who have moved into another plane sending me info that could be helpful to me here on this earth?  After all, moms are always going to be moms.

I'm freaking myself out a little bit this morning.

Crushed by Alcohol

"Never argue with an idiot.  They'll drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience."

I am a walking, talking bullshit machine.

Crush:  To squeeze or force by pressure so as to alter or destroy structure; violent compression; mash, squeeze, pulp, squash, press, powder, beat, pound.

"When we became alcoholics, crushed by a self-imposed crisis we could not postpone or evade, we had to fearlessly face the proposition that either God is everything or else He is nothing.  God either is, or He isn't.  What was our choice to be?"

"Crushed" is a good word.  Alcohol crushed me.  It beat me, squashed me, pounded me into submission.  I was mashed into a powder.  Pulped.  Turned into a liquid from a solid state.  The phrase "self-imposed crisis" is pretty apt, too.  I spent a great deal of time postponing and evading.  I'll do this good thing for myself tomorrow.  I'll stop this bad behavior later.  Because I knew I was lying to myself I had to dance and dodge, make myself invisible, fade away into the gloaming or the fog or the dust, into the distance.  Evade, evade, evade.  Evade the cops, evade my boss, evade my loved ones, definitely evade anyone in the healthcare industry.  What good is it to hear bad news when I can pretend there is no bad news?

Isn't it weird that we call healthcare an "industry?" 

"Their problems pile up on them and become astonishingly difficult to solve."  Amazingly hard to solve.  Astoundingly hard to solve.

All Those Bastards on The Committee

Toxic:  Very harmful or unpleasant in an insidious or pervasive way. 

One of the favorite bits we hear often in Alcoholics Anonymous mentions a shadowy essence called "The Committee," a group of gibbering fools who live deep in our heads, firmly entrenched and brooking no dissent, spending their time and energy shrieking and screaming contradictory information at a high volume.  

Think we're special in The Rooms?  Here are the Toltecs: "The mind can also talk and listen to itself.  Part of the mind is speaking, and the other part is listening.  It is a big problem when a thousand parts of your mind are all speaking at the same time.  Each one has different thoughts and feelings; each  one has a different point of view.  This mental chaos is the reason humans hardly know what they want, how they want it, or when they want it.  They don't agree with themselves because there are parts of the mind that want one thing, and other parts that  want exactly the opposite."

Here's a huge Seaweed stereotype: Men come in A.A. angry and defiant and certain that the problem is with someone else and women come in depressed and guilty and ashamed and certain that they're the problem.  There are obviously many variations of this stereotype but it makes me aware that a One Size Fits All approach is a fool's errand.  If someone is sure that they're responsible for all the world's woes it hardly makes sense to come at them with a heavy hand.  If someone is feeling like crap it's not helpful for me to agree.  Guys need to be knocked off their high horse and women need to be helped back into the saddle.

Funny side note on why relationships between A.A. members can be a disaster: a woman who feels like shit believing that she's the problem connects with a guy who is sure he isn't the problem and is looking for someone he can blame.  The definition of toxic.

Gnawing on My Own Soul

"A.A. does not teach me how to handle our drinking.  It teaches us how to handle sobriety. It's no great trick to stop drinking; the trick is to stay stopped."

The Big Book P. 554  "To Handle Sobriety"   

There's a passage in The 12&12 that includes the phrase "gnawing anxieties."  Whew, that is an excellent adjective.  "I can ask myself to what extent my own mistakes have fed my gnawing anxieties."

Gnawing:  A sensation of dull, constant pain or suffering; feelings of doubt or worry that last a long time; to wear away by constant biting or nibbling.

I love the image of constantly biting something that is already sore or injured with my sharp incisors.  And doing it for a long time, never stopping, nibbling on the open wound.  Maybe not even using my sharp incisors - maybe using my back teeth, my flat molars that are designed for grinding up chunks of food into manageable bits.  I like the phrase "to nibble."  Doesn't it sound like what we do to a bowl of potato chips?  

\Man, that sounds like the end stages of my alcoholic life.

Energy Vampires Roaming the Neighborhood

More from "Freedom from Bondage: " I would not only find a way to live without having a drink but I would find a way to live without wanting a drink.  A.A. taught me that willingness to believe was enough for a beginning.  Nor could I quarrel with 'restore us to sanity,' for my actions drunk or sober, before A.A., were not those of a sane person.  Rationalization is giving a socially acceptable reason for socially unacceptable behavior, and socially unacceptable behavior is a form of insanity."

This is key, in my opinion. It's not the stopping drinking that is the most important - it's the staying stopped.  If quitting was the magic key then sober living houses and psych wards would be turning out miracles by the thousands.  Plenty of us stop - at least for a while - but almost as many don't maintain the stoppage.  We don't find a solution for the reasons that make us drink.  If I have suppurating wounds all over my body because I don't know how to handle a kitchen knife the most important thing to do is to stop cutting myself, not to learn good wound management, antibiotics and bandages and all that.  While good wound management is crucial at the start we're going to figure out that we either have to learn how to handle a knife or we have to throw the suckers away.

"A.A. has taught me that I will have peace of mind in exact proportion to the peace of mind I bring into the lives of other people, for the only problems I have now are those I create when I break out in a rash of self-will."   

Other people, other people, blah blah blah, I am so sick of thinking about other people.  Other people are the worst.  Other people drain the energy out of me and so prevent me from thinking about myself.  Other people are Energy Vampires.  Why can't they think about me?  And the thing is, in my sobriety, I'm speaking mostly in jest here but not as thoroughly as I should be . . . and when I was drinking?  Forget about it.

"If you have a resentment you want to be free of, if you will pray for the person or the thing that you resent, you will be free.  If you will ask in prayer for everything you want for yourself to be given to them, you will be free.  Ask for their health, their prosperity, their happiness, and you will be free.  Even when you don't really want it for them, and your prayers are only words and you  don't mean it, go ahead and do it anyway.  Do it every day for two weeks and you will find that where you used to feel bitterness and resentment and hatred, you now feel compassionate understanding and love."

I like the part of this . . . Promise, really, when you think about it, this path to freedom from resentment . . . that suggests that we don't have to be sincere when we're praying for peace and serenity and good health and good fortune for some rival, some irritant, some enemy we actually wish would move to Antarctica and then freeze to death when they get there.  Even when we're just saying words that we don't mean an effect is made upon us.  We grow and we feel better and we often lose that resentment.  Now, granted, there are some really irritating sons of bitches out there that are going to require sustained and repeated praying but the magic really does happen when we stick with it.

Instead of praying that the irritant in your life goes blind how about praying that he only goes blind in one eye?  It's not great, it's not a form of advanced spirituality, but it is only half as vile as it used to be.     

This Wack-Job I Know Who Might Also Be a Dabbler

I know a guy in Ventura A.A. who has been sober forever.  Granted, a good chunk of this time he was dry rather than sober - a not insignificant difference - but he hasn't had a drink in 45 years.  That's a long time.  I don't care what kind of weird wack-job you are it's impressive for an alcoholic to not drink and drug for such a long stretch.  I love this guy and I tell him that, but he's still pretty much a wack-job to this day and if you tell him that he's a wack-job right to his face he'll laugh it off and say: "Sounds about right."  He's got good things to say for the most part and his independence, his insistence to blaze his own trail, is a comfort and an inspiration to many people.

Here's where we diverge: he insists periodically that it's therapeutic to take a year off of attending meetings.  I guess.  Who knows what works for other people?  His rationale is that he finds himself hiding out in The Rooms instead of doing the work that he needs to be doing on himself.  I guess my opinion is that you can do both simultaneously but I will grant you that I see A.A. members on a regular basis who go to a ton of meetings while not doing any of the grinding work necessary for recovery, and I don't as a rule find my relationships with them very satisfying.  They're dabblers; dabblers in the recovery world. 

Dabble:  To take part in an activity in a casual or superficial way.

Actually, as I think about it, Superficial Seaweed would be an excellent nickname.  Or maybe just The Dabbler.  As in, "Hey I saw The Dabbler at a meeting yesterday!"

Back to my rant . . . which is that in forty years of attending meetings I have never, ever, not once, heard another person state that he was going to take a year away from A.A. meetings to "work on himself."  Not saying that doesn't work or that it doesn't work for my friend but I would call it a pretty extreme approach.  The issue for me is that from time to time someone who's new will take up this banner and charge off into a "no meetings for a year" phase when I feel that is rarely a good idea for an alcoholic, particularly a new one.  And I say this fully aware of the searing irony of my insistence that we should all be free to follow whatever path to recovery that makes sense and works for us individually.  Apparently, except for taking a year off to work on yourself.  I know, I know . . . I'm a hypocrite.

This train of thought came about in the light of my relationship with the foster home guy I wrote about recently.  I don't think he's in any position to take a year off meetings.  But what do I know?  We're friends.  I'm not his keeper or parole agent.  All I can do is talk to him and hope that my wisdom hits a nerve.  Or doesn't hit a nerve at all  because I'm not the guy at this time and place who is put on this earth to give him advice or direction.