Some Service Suggestions.

Serve: To do services or duties for; give service to; aid; assist; help: as, he served his country as a great statesman.


Yeah, that's the ticket. I'll serve as long as I can do it as a great something. I don't want to serve in a mundane fashion, helping someone unimportant as a humble and invisible servant, not receiving any praise or money or sexual favors. I'm always a little suspicious of the "great statesman as a servant" theme. I see men and women on TV, with their names in the paper, getting a lot of attention and public acclaim to be great servants, then leaving their service to the people of this great land to take a highly paid consultancy lobbying the people they just left. Not exactly the master washing the feet of the disciple.

SuperK and I were talking last night about how we can be of service to others. We aren't going to actually do anything, of course -- we're just going to talk about it, terribly impressed with our theoretical selflessness. We hypothesize it will be easier to do without the time constraints of a job, which is kind of true but also a convenient excuse for not being of service. She mentioned a friend who started to volunteer once he retired.

"Yeah, Ricardo went downtown and volunteered to read for the blind," she said.


"Read for the blind? What does that mean?" I asked. "Do you mean he read to the blind?"

"You are such a jerk," she said.


"It sounds like he is substitute reading for the blind," I replied. "It sounds like maybe the blind are tired or pissed off and don't want to read so he's stepping in and reading for them."


"I thought the blind had Braille," I continued, making my situation steadily worse. "Are the blind even there when he's reading for them? I don't see why they would have to be there. Maybe they could go do something important. Maybe Ricardo could just stay at home and read for them there."


"Shut up," SuperK said. "I'm trying to read the travel section of the New York Times."

I thought about it for a minute. "Maybe you and I could volunteer to hear for the deaf. Maybe we could smell for anyone who has lost the ability to smell. The possibilities are endless. I think we're really getting somewhere!" I shouted.

It was at that point that I noticed I was alone in the room.

This is going to be a little trickier than I thought.

Rational Lies

Rational: Of, based on, or derived from reasoning.
Lies: False statements or actions, especially one made with intent to deceive.
Rationalize: In psychology, to devise superficially rational, or plausible, explanations or excuses for (one's acts, beliefs, desires, etc), without being aware that these are not the real motives.

That may be the definition for rationalizing for a normally insane person but that is not how I approach the concept. I am perfectly capable of rationalizing what I know to be pure, unadulterated crap whipped up in the lab of a mad scientist. It's not often that I'm unaware that I'm doing it. I'm totally aware that I'm doing it. I enjoy doing it. It's my favorite hobby. It's a clever form of lying, and I have previously stated that I'm a great liar. If I could get paid for rationalizing my often ridiculous behavior I wouldn't even give notice at my current job, and I work for myself! I'd go right to Kinko's and get my business cards printed.

And while I normally pretend to allow other people to live their own lives and find their own way, I'll tell you that I see this in plenty of other recovering alcoholics. Maybe it's better when we know that we're doing it but, then again, maybe it's worse. How many times have I listened to some new guy try to spin some junk by me and thought: "No sense saying anything here because this dude believes what he's telling me. He's not lying -- he's delusional."


This is why I talk to my posse on the phone or over coffee so often. I want to see that look on their faces, that "You're going to do what now?" look. Man, do I ever know that look. It's not my favorite thing to see. But it's a look that tells me I'm trying to pull the wool over my own eyes.

Rationalize. Rational Lies. Not my play on words, actually. I read it in "The Grapevine," which is a great magazine.

I Hate . . . er, Love This Program

Honesty: A refraining from lying, cheating, or stealing.

Sometimes this Program blows me away.

I ran into Shorty and Mrs. Shorty while I was walking to the park this morning. Shorty abandoned his wife to join me which probably wasn't a good choice on his part. Although Mrs. Shorty looked quite relieved to escape his company so maybe I did her a big favor. Maybe he wanted to hook up with someone older so that he could show how fit he was. That wasn't happening mano a mano with his wife.

We were discussing pocketbook honesty. He told of having to call a retailer who mistakenly shipped an extra pair of pants with his order. I was having trouble with a situation where I was accepting a gift that I didn't have any intention of keeping. He thought that was dishonest on my part. I tried to get away from him but he was able to keep up. I didn't want the gift but didn't want to hurt the gifter's feelings. I didn't tell the gifter this, preferring to rely on my telepathic ability to talk to people without speaking. I figure if I think something with enough intensity everyone will pick up on my vibes. I can read your mind so you should be able to read mine.

We parted ways so that I could go to my Saturday morning meeting and out to lunch with a group of guys afterwards. I bought some bread and cheese and a yogurt, and a bottle of crap called Butterbur. I suffer from time to time with seasonal allergies and read in one of my hippie magazines that this alleviates symptoms. Probably not. I probably spent $20 on capsules filled with talcum powder or pencil shavings. I grated my teeth at the cost of the "medicine" but figured if it works it'll be better for me than ingesting manufactured chemicals. I did the math -- 30 cents a pill. A lot cheaper than the Quaaludes I used to buy.

So I got home and the dude behind the counter didn't charge me for the Butterbur.

I hate this Program sometimes.

I Must Be Doing It Wrong

I was reading the travel section of the New York Times today. I like to read and I like to travel so, naturally, I like to read about traveling. Not as much as the actual traveling but it's still pretty enjoyable. I'm not sure you could travel about reading. I'm not even going to try.

The great thing about reading is that you get to create your own mental image of something. Movies are great, too -- good ones, anyway -- but you are force fed the imagery. If the guy is skinny, the guy is skinny. The director wants you to see a skinny guy. The printed word lets you hallucinate up your own images. Now that I think about it, I like to hallucinate and I like to travel. I used to like to hallucinate while traveling but I don't do that anymore.

The writer was very good. She was describing a villa she rents every year in Italy. She describes the beautiful view and the wonderful day trips to impossibly cute towns and the fantastic meals of fresh food prepared simply and enjoyed with an endless stream of intimate friends.

I want to do this. I want to have the time and money to do it, and I want it to turn out exactly that way. Perfectly.

The author doesn't talk about mosquitoes or lumpy mattresses or boring dinner guests or how fucking expensive it must be to rent a villa in Italy, the bitch. And I don't draw that picture in my mind's eye. When I project myself out into the future, everything is a catastrophe. When I imagine someone else's life, I see no flaws.

That's messed up. I need to quit doing that.

Tree Man Redux

Nothing about Tree Man, then back to back posts.


One of the things that I have learned to do in my recovery is to try to take an interest in people I know. This is remarkably hard. I am in my essence concerned only with myself. Sometimes I feign interest in the affairs of others but not too often. I can generate some tepid interest when I think that someone else can do something to make my life easier or can remove some obstacle causing me pain. Otherwise, I can't manufacture much enthusiasm. Other people aren't me which is a flaw that is very difficult to overcome.

I've always liked the phrase "Walk the walk." I also like the concept of "Fake it 'till you make it." I've learned that if I put my intentions into action then my thinking starts to change. It's not clear to me when this happened. It's very subtle. It's like what occurred when I realized that I had overcome all of my huge objections to the idea of a god. I pretended like I believed and woke up one day, surprised that the concept had taken hold.



So Tree Man and I were chatting about life after a meeting. I'm older than he is -- a lot older, he would say, quite accurately and most irritatingly -- and have been sober longer so I was asking a lot of questions and I was genuinely interested in the responses. It's still weird for me to think that's the case. After a bit Tree Man asked:"So how's the swimming going?" Some of you may recall that I learned how to swim a while back and it was not pleasant going at the start. It was quite humbling, in fact.



I thought: "Aha! A question!" It was a beautiful thing. I believe that I should be able to walk into any A.A. meeting that I attend even sporadically and know a little something about most people there. It shows I'm listening to someone else instead of thinking about myself which is my favorite past time. I care about some people more than others -- a natural thing in this dude's world -- but I make the effort. And -- Voila! -- I find myself caring.


Then Willie called me yesterday and said: "It was weird, man. We have this dead tree in our front yard and I read your post and looked up and there he was in my front yard. A tree man! Really weird, man." Not The Tree Man, but a tree man of some kind or other.


As if I could give a shit . . .

Tree Man!

I was talking to my friend Tree Man after a meeting this week, which I can only assume he needed more than I did, and I needed a meeting in the worst way. He mentioned my blog to a dude who strolled by, then suggested that he does so much blog promoting that I should pay him a retainer. That wasn't a bad suggestion, actually. If people only knew how much it meant to me when they read what I write. You can tell me what you think of me, or you can show me by your actions. I much prefer the actions. Talk is cheap.

"Tell you what," I said. "I'll split my profits with you."

"Deal," said Tree Man.

"I wanted to ask you something," he said. "I've noticed that even though I read this crap faithfully you've never written about me."

"I'm trying to get more people to read, not drive them away," I replied. "If I lose a couple of readers my circulation goes down by, like, half."

"I see," said Tree Man.

"Maybe you should do something interesting every now and then," I suggested.

"I'll see what I can do," he said. "But I did a lot of interesting things before I got sober, and to tell you the truth, I'm kind of done with interesting temporarily."

"Fair enough," I said.

One day SuperK stuck her head into my office as I was finishing up a typical phone call with an A.A. buddy.

"Why do these people even call you?" she asked. "You're such an asshole."

"You ought to hear what they say to me," I said.

Only in The Program.

Easy Come, Easy Go

Con: To swindle (a victim) by first gaining his confidence.

I was on the road early a few days ago, cradling my $3 cup of coffee between my legs, eyeing a set of railroad tracks on the other side of the red light that was delaying my progress, pondering whether to move the coffee to a less sensitive part of my anatomy, chuckling as I remembered the phrase "Beer Balls." I mean, it would be better to scald the shit out of my hand and not my . . . well, you get the idea.


Crouched at the side of the road was a scruffy guy holding a sign that said: "Homeless. Hungry. Please help." Funny that my initial reaction as a privileged guy -- as an incredibly privileged guy -- is to be suspicious that someone wants to take advantage of me. I don't want to get played. Mostly, I think, this is because I spent my entire pre-sobriety life trying to game the system. I was almost never what I seemed, except when I was in the back of a police car or leaning over a toilet. Then the phrase "What you see is what you get" rang true.


The guy probably has a hell of a hard luck story. It wouldn't be surprising to learn he has alcoholism or a drug addiction. That gets a lot of us onto the streets. The way I figure it if he was trying to screw me out of the price of a dangerous cup of coffee he didn't have a very good plan. I think most con artists can come up with a better con than sitting in traffic with all of their stuff in a backpack.

I reached into my wallet and pulled out some money. It was more than I wanted to part with -- which is none -- but not as much as I should have given. I rolled down the window and the guy scurried over to accept the bill. "Thank you, sir. God bless you," he said. I took his blessing. I take all of the blessings I can get these days. You can never have too many people blessing you.

Funny, too, how we enter The Program on a long, long run of cons. If I really didn't want to get conned, I wouldn't talk to anyone with under ten years of sobriety. We're telling tales most of the time. We can't help it. It just comes out of our mouths. I'm not suspicious of people in meetings. Sometimes we get better when other people help us. I used to sit at a coffee shop in Indy and think: "Why is this guy with a job and a family and a home to go to sitting here and listening to me lie?"

Maybe the homeless guy bought a bottle of wine with that money. Maybe he bought breakfast and a cup of coffee. Who cares, really?


I'll tell you this: I felt good about myself all day. I felt like I was part of the solution. I felt like I made a difference. I felt like the world was a better place.

All for the price of a very expensive cup of coffee.


It was $5. BMOC, remember?

According to the Jackson Five

I think that as I have gotten sober I have experienced three distinct phases of recovery. Alcohol gives us a lashing -- and I'm talking a big, heavy lash, well-constructed, with metal spikes dipped in hot sauce. So, initially, life gets much, much better very quickly. We call this The Pink Cloud phase. Surprising as it may be to the active alcoholic, when we quit drinking and using our lives improve. Duh. Active alcoholics take a lot of punishment. We feel terrible physically and we keep getting beat up and fired and kicked out and left. I think sometimes we confuse the absence of so much pain with happiness. In any case, it's a hell of an improvement.

The second phase of my recovery was mostly grunt work. Let's call this the Slog Phase. I went to a meeting every day and was pretty active in The Program, but I was still bedeviled by a lot of fear and anxiety and remorse. Not as much -- things were improving -- but there was still a significant amount. I got scared at the drop of a hat. Like a metal hat -- not a felt hat, floating gently to the ground. A iron helmet thrown toward the ground by a Biblical giant. Wear the world like a loose blanket? I was wearing the world like a spandex unitard three sizes too small that had been shrunk in the dryer for a couple of weeks. Personally, I found this frequently frustrating. The easy improvements were accomplished.

The final phase, I hope, is Long Term Sobriety. I think the phrase "long term" is fluid. I know people with many years of abstinence who behave like horse's asses and I know deeply grounded individuals who have only been with us for a short while. Anyway, we've been through a lot of things a couple of times. We stay active and engaged. We begin to understand what it means to practice these principles in all of our affairs. It's no great feat to get sober but still act like a jerk. We roll with the punches. We sit in our canoe and paddle, content to go wherever the river takes us.

One, two, three. As simple as A-B-C.

Here Comes Da Bride

I went to a wedding yesterday for a good friend in The Program. I did not anticipate this event with a lot of enthusiasm. I'm not a very traditional person and I get easily annoyed by people, places, and things, and just about everything else not in those three categories. Actually, I don't look forward to doing anything as a general rule, preferring to isolate and think about myself and how I'm not getting everything I deserve, luckily for me. This is why I subscribe to the theater: if I didn't have the tickets I wouldn't go. Once I get some skin in the game I'm pretty reliable.

The funny thing is that I almost always have a good time once I get going on something. It's the fear of the terror of the anticipation that gets to me. And, of course, with someone else's wedding the entire focus is not on me, which is as it should be. But I ask you: why would I spend time thinking about someone else? That's counterproductive to my motto of All B-Man, All the Time.

I like the idea of being of service. Actually, no, I don't. However, I have learned how critical to my personal happiness and well-being this is, so I do it, grudgingly and under half-steam, which is better than doing it the way I used to do it, under no steam at all. Someone had turned off my boiler. So yesterday I took my camcorder to the wedding and made a tape to give to my friend. It was actually kind of fun: I got to stand up and display myself and walk in front of everybody and stuff like that. I looked important. I looked like I knew what I was doing, which was not the case. And a bunch of my A.A. friends were there. We sat together and talked and yukked it up and generally had a great time.

I'm pretty sure I had the camcorder paused about half the time.

The Process

Process: A particular method of doing something, generally involving a number of steps or operations.

One of my tasks as The Technical Guy for my company is to support the distributors who actually sell our product, which is quite technical. SuperK doesn't think too much of a company that uses me as tech support. "You can't turn on your computer without screaming for help," she says. "That's a hell of an organization they're running over there." I don't pay attention to her criticisms any more, especially when they're right and pretty funny to boot.


I used to call directly on the end-user which I liked because it meant I was IN CONTROL of the entire process. I qualified the prospect, ran the presentation, and followed up to try to close the deal. I like being in control. Everything works better when I'm making ALL OF THE DECISIONS. Everybody can see that. Everybody concurs. The arc of my life demonstrates that this is a fact.

Now I have to babysit distributors who handle the details with the end-user. Some of them are good at this and some of them really suck. None of them, of course, are AS GOOD AS I AM. Here's where that leaves me: I do as much as I can without being too annoying -- no small task -- and then let go of the process. I need to repeat that for my own sake. Let go of the process. Let go and let god. Let go and let distributor.


I let go of the process like I let go of everything: the process has claw marks and teeth marks and tire tracks all over it.

A few weeks ago a salesman at one of my distributors asked me to accompany him on what I thought was a dubious appointment. Apparently, I didn't respond with enough alacrity so he called my regional manager, whose entire purpose in life is to make the simplest process complicated and ponderous, copying everyone in the world while adding nothing to the conversation. He just gums up the works. Throws a wrench in the machinery, all the while protecting himself.

After much to-do about nothing, I show up at the distributor at the appointed time only to find out that the bitching salesman in question is off that day. His manager is going to pinch hit but can't leave the branch until some help shows up, which they do not do. So this dude complicated my life for no good reason and then doesn't show up, which leaves an unimaginably important person like me to stew in my own irritation juices, which are quite caustic and deadly to most organic life matter.

Guess what? I went out to the car, in some nice morning sunshine, and called some buddies in A.A.. Then I pulled out a notebook and did some writing.

How hard was that? How unpleasant was that?

The B-Man: Leprechaun or Urban Legend?

Legend: A story of some wonderful event, handed down for generations among a people and popularly believed to have a historical basis, although not verifiable.

Legend has it -- Irish legend, not urban legend -- that a leprechaun sits at the end of the rainbow, hammering on a shoe. We don't think that he is somewhere over the rainbow, either. And no one has been able to explain the difference between the end of the rainbow and the start of the rainbow. Maybe he's at the start of it. That would make more sense unless it doesn't.

It isn't clear why he's hammering on the shoe -- the legend doesn't go into detail as to why the leprechaun is preoccupied with cobbling. Maybe it does. It's not like I look anything up. I think that I'm completely comfortable with total leprechaun speculation.

Anyway, the point is that if you find this creature, it's rumored that he reveals where he has hidden his pot of gold. I can't imagine that he would just volunteer the location of a whole pot of gold. Maybe it's a very small pot. Maybe it's fool's gold. Maybe you have to beat him up. Seems this would be easy to do because he's pretty small, but Irish leprechauns have a reputation for being tough. Still, two feet tall is two feet tall. Me, personally, I would be more worried about a troll or a hobgoblin but, as they don't have riches to divulge and live under bridges and the like, I would have no reason to fuck with one of them, besides meanness or spite.
The point of all this is that you can't ever get to the end of the rainbow, according to the scientists, because it's an optical illusion. If you try to reach the end, it just seems to move farther away. Very frustrating. Leprechauns are said to enjoy mischievous pranks and this one is a real ace in the hole for them.

That's why it's not very bright to chase that pot of gold, because you can't get to it, which is what I'm driving at. I like the imagery, the constant striving to get to something which is always just out of reach. That's me: I want what I can't get at. And usually the stuff I get doesn't make me any happier than the stuff I already have.

Which is the point.

Perfection, Not Progress

Let's talk some more about me, The B-Man. I can only assume that everyone is as fascinated by me as I am.

I am by nature, nurture, and inclination a clean freak and obsessive organizer. Some people would call me a little fussy. Well, all people actually, but what do I care? Wait, I'm a people pleaser. I do care! I do care! My good friends, however, call me prissy, not being overly concerned with hurting my feelings.

I think I've gotten better at releasing my iron grip on my environment, but not much. I think I've progressed from a state of dangerous mental pathology and been reborn as a mild obsessive. And just because I think I've gotten better doesn't mean I have actually gotten better. I think many thoughts and wear reality like a loose garment.



SuperK, always the normal one in our relationship, tolerates this, sometimes. She is more of a Chaos Manager. Consider our offices. Mine appears to have been sanitized then abandoned for many years. No one could possibly work in that sterile space. SuperK apparently likes to host violent demonstrations in her office. Strangely enough, she can find things more quickly in her chaos than I can in my clean room. I make a file, label it, file it away, then forget where I put it. I fall back on my favorite excuse: Too much LSD in college. She rummages through one of her teetering piles and quickly retrieves whatever it is that she's looking for.

When I enter our house, I head for the closet and hang up my coat. Sometimes I organize the closet. SuperK drops her coat on the closest available surface, as quickly as possible. This annoys me, so I put her coat away, which annoys her, especially since I often forget where I put it, a problem that I recently alluded to. She can't seem to put things where I want her to put them and I can't seem to stop hiding them from both of us. Sometimes I put things away before she has a chance to use them. She'll take some pickles out of the fridge and I'll put them away when she turns her back to get a fork. I don't even know I'm doing it.

I experimented with all kinds of techniques to get her to change to my specifications. Back to the coat conundrum. For a long time, I grabbed her coat and hung it up, muttering in annoyance. Then I migrated to my favorite state of mind: passive aggressive. I still hung up the coat but tried my best through various swearing and huffings and defensive body postures to will her to see how irritated I was. Sometimes I'd throw her coat on the floor of the closet. None of these methods worked for long.

Finally, I decided to just ask her to hang up her coat instead of requiring that she read my mind. Even I don't know what's going on up there, and it's my mind. It's in an ancient language long vanished from this veil of tears. She listened sympathetically and, for a while, hung up her coat, sometimes, which was almost as bad as never hanging it up. It's not that important to her and it's not my right to ask other people to adopt my standards of behavior.


You know what? Who gives a shit, really? Why would I spend all of my precious irritation time on a coat on a chair? There are so many people and institutions and circumstances that irritate me. I need to save my energy for them.

Perfection, not progress.

Into the Valley of Death Rode the Five Hundred

One of the main benefits of The Program is that it teaches us how to manage our relationships better. In some respects this isn't that complicated a task because we're so self-centered and have behaved so badly that it's not hard to make a few changes. There's a lot to fix. We don't have to dig too deeply to find flaws. It's like we have ten rifles and one machine gun and we're blasting away at anyone who comes into our path -- we don't think, we just shoot -- and The Program takes away the machine gun. That's the good news. The machine gun has been doing a lot of damage.


But, of course, there's some bad news. Isn't there usually some bad news? Doesn't it usually involve hard work? God, I hate hard work. Anyway, we're so impressed that we're not killing people at a fearsome clip that we think we don't have to do anything else. Our sponsor points out that we may have to do something about the remaining rifles. We start taking them down, one by one. Some of them aren't too hard to give up. Some of them are hard to give up. And most of us keep a secret stash of rifles and the odd rocket propelled grenade launcher in our secret arms cache. Just in case.


I'm not adverse to firing up the machine gun from time to time.

Helpful Gossip Only

Gossip: A person who chatters or repeats idle talk and rumors about others.

Shorty gave me a call the other day to ask my advice -- which should give you some idea about the quality of his sobriety -- about some advice a guy we know was giving to another guy we know. I don't think that we were gossiping, although that is something we like to do. We're pretty good at it. We practice a lot. And we know that the only way to make this type of defect any more enjoyable is to congratulate ourselves for never gossiping. We do that, too, with a beautiful sense of self-righteous oblivion.

One of the really cool things about gossip is that you can just make stuff up. It's like blogging in that regard. For instance, does anyone really believe that someone as improbable as Shorty could really exist? And if someone like that did haunt this earth, would I have anything to do with him? I'm better than that. I exist on a higher plane.

No doubt about it -- when engaging in gossip the truth is not required. If you can make yourself feel better by soiling the good name of another, then I say why bother with the facts? Make the person despicable so that you'll really feel like a Big Man or Big Woman, depending on your own personal circumstances. Hey, if I want, when I'm gossiping, I can dress up in women's clothes and feel like a Big Man in women's clothes. As long as you don't really care about personal integrity or living a spiritual life gossiping can be quite enjoyable.

I wanted to write about something else. I only have a vague recollection of what.

Baaaaaaalance.

Balance: Mental or emotional equilibrium.

We talked about balance in our meeting last night. I had to look the word up this morning because I have no idea what it means. For me, balance is what occurs when I spend an equal amount of time at the extreme ends of whatever spectrum I'm currently navigating. For instance, exercise compulsively or take a month off. Work 60 hours or disappear for a while. Dessert tonight? A prune or 47 Oreos buried in chocolate chip ice cream.

I always joke that I have two speeds: off or full acceleration. If I'm going to do something, I'm going to do something. I'm completely engaged. You got all of my attention. In some weird regard this can be OK. I get a lot done. But I've had to learn how to step out of the wildly spinning machinery and take a breath. If my knee is swollen to the size of a watermelon and is oozing blood and is throbbing with sharp pain, maybe I can skip the daily run. Nah, come to think of it, maybe I'll take tomorrow off.

A.A. has taught me how to strike a balance . . . sometimes.

More Rhetoric

Rhetorical Question: A question asked, as in oratory or writing, only for rhetorical effect, to emphasize a point, introduce a topic, etc., no answer being expected.

One of the rhetorical questions we hear in A.A. all of the time is: "Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?" I guess this doesn't really qualify as a rhetorical question because we are expected to give an actual answer. We are expected, in fact, to give the correct answer.

I think the answer is simple: I want to be RIGHT! Being a hyper-active, hyper-competitive Type A personality I go right into Winner Take All mode whenever there is a contest of the wills. I want to win. I want to vanquish my opponent. I want this success even if I don't care a whit about what I win. I just want to win. Winner take all! King of the Hill!

SuperK calls me a Street Fighter and I don't think she's using this term in a complimentary fashion. She knows that, in a fight, I don't maintain very high standards. I pull hair, poke eyes, groin stuff, whatever it takes to end up on top, even if The Prize is a box of agitated scorpions.

This is an understandable point of view for someone with my amazing vision of How The World Should Work. I see far into the future. I know what's best for everyone. I can predict how everything is going to work out. I don't want to take one step back to gain two steps forward. I want to be moving forward with grim purpose and turbulent determination.

Don't you hate it when you cede just a little bit, and things work out better than you could have expected?

P.S.: I'm happily married.

More SuperK

I was working in my home office this morning when SuperK walked in and said: "I want a divorce."

"OK," I said, not looking up. I peeked out of the corner of my eye and saw that she was still there. "Right now?" I asked. "I'm kind of busy."

"Yes," she said, somewhat vaguely.

"Any particular reason this time?" I wondered.

"No, not really," she replied. "Same old stuff, I guess."

"Well," I said. "We've talked before about whether you would want to get married again and, if so, the dating. Remember? Putting on make-up, pretending that you're interested in someone else, all that?"

She thought for a moment. "God, you're right. That sounds awful."

"What about the cat?" I asked. "I'm willing to let you walk but I'm not giving up the cat."

"That's fair, " she said. "The cat likes you better."

Happy Enough

Happy: Having, showing, or causing a feeling of great pleasure, contentment, joy, etc.; joyous; glad; pleased.



Curious definition. I feel like some devil has reached into my mouth and grabbed my tongue, and is waggling it furiously. I can really put my finger on what makes me mad or what makes me furious or what really pisses me off but I become strangely silent when I think of happiness. One minute my brain is filled with screaming, insistent committee members yowling for revenge or sex or something shiny and new to play with and, in an instant, all you can see is a lonely tumbleweed bouncing across a devastated landscape, a thin wind blowing, coyotes yipping in the distance.


In a movie we watched last night the stereotypical perky waitress asked the stereotypical crusty but strangely lovable cook if he was happy. He looked at her and said: "Happy enough. I don't ask much, I don't give much, and I don't get much. Happy enough. Why do you ask?"


I think he's missing the boat with the not giving part but everything else made sense in kind of a neat little Hollywood wrap-life-up-in-one-sentence way. I'm happy when I don't expect much. Those freaking expectations can really get in the way of a decent life. How easy is it to feel frustrated at the end of the day because something tremendous didn't happen? I place a lot of pressure on an ordinary day to really come up big.

Happy enough.

Till Death Do Us Part

SuperK and I were sitting in the backyard today reading. She had a book and I was working on the NY Times. I read an article about a woman who writes a column about relationships, how people fall in love, when they "knew." The reporter hadn't done too well in the relationship department and was bemoaning this fact.

I put down the paper. "When did you know you wanted to marry me?" I asked.
SuperK looked at me: "Are you kidding me? This is what you've got for me?" She thought for a minute. "I have no idea," she said. We laughed pretty hard.

"How about you? When did you know you wanted to marry me?" Then she answered for me as she often does. I don't have to say much most of the time. "You never wanted to marry me. I dragged you into this kicking and screaming." Then she told me what she considered my worst character defect. We both laughed pretty hard again. She was dead on and it didn't bother me at all.

"Tell me something I don't know," I said.

"How about me? What do you think my worst character defect is?" I had no idea how we got from "when did you know" to "why do you hate me" but I couldn't stop the momentum.

I thought for a minute. "There are so many to choose from," I said. "I can't pick."

"Tell me something I don't know," she said.

We resumed reading.

I'm Talking the Talk

Boredom: The state of being dull, uninteresting, or monotonous.

Boredom is a kind of low level depression, the selfish luxury of people who have too many good things and no appreciation of any of them. When I'm bored I'm not grateful. I'm expecting life to deliver -- on a silver platter with a couple of cookies -- even more things that I don't deserve and will promptly ignore.

Willie and I had a cup of coffee yesterday -- when we both should have been working, I'll point out -- and made our case about who was most bored. It was a real Bore Down. He showed up after an alleged sales call in shorts, a T-shirt, and tennis shoes.

"Working hard?" I asked. His reply was unprintable. He did graciously inquire, though, what I was doing in a coffee shop in the middle of a work day afternoon. I told him where to go, or what he could do to himself, I don't remember which.

We decided after a while that we weren't behaving too well. I suggested that while I didn't know if he was going to go to Hell that it was going to be pretty hot wherever he ended up and that there would be a lot of bad people there. He wondered why I didn't just pour gasoline over myself and strike a match. "That way," he said. "You won't be so shocked when you end up at your final destination."

The funny thing is that this really was the gist of the discussion. The benefit to me in talking to old friends in recovery is that I have to hear how ridiculous my thinking can be. Some of the stuff that makes perfect sense when I'm all by myself sounds hilarious when I say it out loud. A few times yesterday Willie just looked at me, didn't say a word.

Didn't have to.

Horseface Steve -- Servant

Service: The occupation or condition of a servant; helpful, beneficial, or friendly action or conduct; act giving assistance or advantage to another.

Let me see if I understand this: my goal as a recovering alcoholic -- as a decent human being -- is to be of service to other people? My question is: how is this going to benefit me? I don't see the upside to doing something nice for someone else unless they are going to be doing something even nicer for me. I'm not willing to trade nice act for nice act: I need to receive something nicer. And you can stuff a sock in the idea of being of service for no reward at all. A servant?!? I see myself in the master class. Servants do things for me, not the other way around. That way I have plenty of time to do all of the important things that I do, like sit at the coffee shop, staring into space, slack-jawed.

Shorty harangues me about service all of the time. He's almost as important as me. He told me one day that he stopped doing all of the very important things that he was doing and went to visit his father. He asked his dad if he needed help with anything. He was imagining great, important things. His dad asked him to change a light bulb on the front porch. There he was, an important man with an advanced college degree, doing the work of a servant. That's what it's all about: doing something nice for someone else that they want done, not what I think I should do for them.

Last Saturday SuperK and I picked up dinner and visited my parents. After we ate my folks asked if she could install a digital converter box on a couple of totally ancient TV sets -- that should be thrown off a cliff somewhere -- so that they would work when commercial TV makes the switch to an all digital format. I was irritated, and I didn't even have to do the work. I envisioned witty conversation about deeply personal or intellectual matters, and my folks wanted us to rescue a couple of decrepit TVs.

It's all about me.

This is Almost Funny

Something: A thing not definitely known, understood, or identified; some undetermined thing.

Something or another will go wrong today. Some one who is out to get me will break through my defenses, stout as they are. I hope that when the ramparts are breached the defeat is not centered around a thing, an object, a piece of stuff. Man, I have a whole house packed with stuff. I have a couple of cars -- big pieces of stuff -- in a garage with more stuff in it.

I don't think I care about too many of these things any more, unless one of them breaks or is damaged, or someone takes one of them without my permission, or I see something new that I want. I tire of things so quickly. I put them in a box and down to the basement they go. I move them from house to house, secure in their little caskets. I pull them out from time to time and peer at them curiously. I can't always remember what some of these things are even used for.

Life is not about stuff. Nobody is going to peer into my grave, look at my ravaged corpse and say: "Wow, he had a great car." People remember acts not things.

Apparently god doesn't think that I'm absorbing this information. He has been dispatching his agents to slightly mar my things lately. The city is replacing the gas lines which run under the street in front of my house. Today I watched a man maneuver a backhoe up a hill and into my front yard. I recently hired someone to plant ivy on this hill. It wasn't a fair fight. Ivy is a tough plant but not that tough.

I had to laugh.

What is the Deal with this Thingumabob?

Thing: Any matter, circumstance, affair, or concern; that which is done, has been done, or is to be done.


Today I'm thinking about things. Big things, little things, things that you can see and touch, real things. What am I going to allow to get under my skin today? People? Of course I'm going to let people get under my skin. I think that's why other people were put on the face of the earth -- to annoy me somehow or to resist my attempts to control their every move. Is it the people or is it their actions? In my case it's clearly both. Irritating people doing irritating things to me is pretty much the story of my life.

I wonder how much of my time I spend worrying about unimportant things or about things that will never happen. I bet I would be APPALLED at how much time I waste doing this. I bet it would add up to years and years of my life. I know that when I imagine that something bad is going to happen to me it almost never comes to pass. That makes all this time wasting even more galling. Not only do I spend a lot of time worrying about unimportant stuff most of it never happens. And then there's my preoccupation with stuff. Worrying about stuff is the height of madness.


Would it be worth my time today worrying about how the N.Y. press would treat me if I struck out to end the game, with the bases loaded, to lose the World Series? As if someone could get something past me? Or worrying about the condition of an object or someone else's opinion of me. If nothing is actually going on that is a problem, I make things up. I project implausible outcomes arising from an improbable series of events far, far in the future.

Man, there's a lot of stupid stuff that can preoccupy my time.