Rub a dub dub

A young woman who was at my meeting yesterday expressed some trepidation about an upcoming business trip. There was going to be an open bar which is a particularly nice kind of bar for an alcoholic. Honestly, we like bars. We like all of 'em. I can't really remember a bar that I didn't like, and I got beat up outside a few of them.

A lot of good, practical suggestions were offered: taking along some literature and a bunch of phone numbers; scoping out Meetings that might be in the area; carrying around a glass of tonic with a lime in case anyone asks why you're not drinking, even though no one ever does. I always had this line ready: "I think I have the stomach flu and I'm really, really, really queasy." That one got people backpedaling. No one brought me a drink after that, although sometimes they would ask the next morning how I was feeling.


"Fine. Why do you ask?" I'd say, suspicious of their motive, totally oblivious to my lie of the day before.

I think it all goes back to the basic fact that I'm not nearly as interesting to everyone else as I am to myself. I never think about anyone else -- ever -- yet I'm under the impression that everyone else is thinking about me -- constantly. My self-centered arrogance is truly spectacular.

I had a job at one point where every now and then the owner of the company would visit and go on sales calls with me for a couple of days. In the evening he would take me out for dinner, and he always ordered a beer. One beer. One fucking beer. At our first meal he asked me what I wanted to drink, and I got an iced tea, sitting on the edge of my seat, my mind whirring with all of the potential stories and excuses I could trot out. I didn't have a specific lie selected -- I figured I'd go with my gut. He didn't ask, of course. Moreover, every single time he visited he asked me if I wanted a beer, never once questioning why I didn't drink. He probably figured I didn't like beer.

I felt like throttling him.

"What's the matter with you?" I wanted to shout. "Can't you see I don't drink?"

A lot of times at conferences and trade shows and the like I'd talk to people during the cocktail hour and eat my dinner. Then when the drinking vibe stage of the evening started, I'd excuse my self to go to the bathroom and just head right on up to bed. No one ever asked me where I was the night before. They didn't care. They didn't notice. A lot of them went up to bed, too. We were the ones who felt OK the next day, and were productive.



I worried from time to time whether my socializing or lack thereof was hurting my business prospects, as if a lot of orders were written at 2AM in a hotel bar. I may have hurt my prospects from time to time, who knows. I seem to have done OK in my business career. Not great, but I've gotten the bills paid.


Then I think about break dancing on the buffet table.

Prayer and Medication

One of the big challenges in my life has been to overcome my need to understand everything.

"How does The Program work to get me sober, exactly?" I asked, early on. It sounded like a bunch of bullshit to me. I didn't see how it could possibly work.

"Come back tomorrow," someone said. "We'll tell you tomorrow."

Thus began my life-long journey of taking things on faith, repeating some simple action until the results become apparent. Usually I don't see the point of whatever pointless exercise I am being told to do until long after the point is clear.

Last night a couple of guys pointed out, none too gently, that there is a lot of advice to be found in our literature. There is, after all, a long section in the Big Book and an entire chapter in the 12 & 12 devoted to prayer and meditation. The second longest chapter, actually.

"Why don't you open up your books and do some reading," someone suggested, "instead of sitting around complaining about it."


Most of my progress has come about as a result of work and not thought. I get up every morning and have a Quiet Time. Early on I mostly prayed because The Committee was still extremely active. It was doing a lot of loud shrieking and bouncing wildly from topic to topic. Meditation was laughable at that point. Now I try to meditate more, mostly because when I pray I end up asking for things I want that aren't good for me and that I don't need, or suggesting that god help this or that person in a very specific way that probably isn't good for them.

Most of the time what I actually do is fall asleep or daydream. A lot of bosses have been killed during my less successful sessions. I have dazzled packed stadiums with my guitar work and spent my Super Lotto winnings on fancy sports cars and the things I've done to supermodels . . . well, they're some things, all right.


God (or as I like to call god: god-god) gives me a lot of credit for trying.

Traditions

Principle: A rule of conduct, especially of right conduct.

Two of my regular meetings have held a group conscience recently. Both times the proposal revolved around moving the meeting; once by choice, once by necessity. Both times I found the entire process unpleasant. I felt like I was in the middle of a contentious political campaign. It was uncomfortable for me. Personally, I didn't see what the big deal was in either case. I thought each group was considering two pretty good options and didn't have strong feelings one way or another for any of the choices.

This doesn't surprise me that much. We are as a people passionate about The Program. We have to be: it's a life and death matter. Stir into the batter the fact that there are a lot of big, strong personalities at most meetings, people with big opinions and definite ideas about how things should run. I've been to our local monthly Intergroup meeting a few times and saw the big personalities in action.



I live in a town that's obsessed with The Big Book and mostly dismissive of the 12 and 12. Don't get me wrong: I love the BB, too. It's our original text written by our founding members. It lays out the blueprint for how to stay sober and should be read regularly. I also have to remember that the oldest of the old-timers had just a few years of sobriety when they finished the text. Some of the stories in the first edition were written by people with less than six months of sobriety; people who wouldn't be allowed to chair a meeting in many places today. Clearly we needed to flesh out the process with some more detail.

The 12 and 12 was written after a lot of problems and heartaches and angry battles. It was the first place that The Traditions were described. I went to a 12 and 12 meeting for many years where we did a Tradition the last Friday of each month. Our attendance dropped by 2/3s that day, and half the people there bitched and moaned, having forgotten it was Tradition night. I don't think I could find a meeting today that studies the Traditions regularly, and there are 750 meetings a week in my town, not including the clubhouses.

From Tradition One: "The unity of A.A. is the most cherished quality our Society has. Our lives, the lives of all to come, depend squarely upon it. We stay whole, or A.A., dies." This Tradition explains that the group must survive or the individual will not. It explains how to live and work together as a group, emphasizing that common welfare is paramount.

From Tradition Twelve: "Subordinating personal aims to the common good is the essence of all Twelve Traditions. It reminds us that we are to place principles before personalities; that we are actually to practice a genuine humility."

You can look it up.

More SERIOUS Problems

I went to the grocery store yesterday. This is not a chore I find particularly objectionable, like ironing or bathing regularly or being pleasant to people I don't like. I didn't have to buy anything urgently. I wasn't late in arriving at the grocery store and didn't have anywhere I had to be when I was finished shopping. I wasn't out of milk and didn't need more milk RIGHT NOW! like if snow is in the forecast. Then I rush out and buy as much milk as my refrigerator can hold so that I have plenty of milk to pour down the sink when it sours. I don't even like milk. Milk is squeezed from cow udders.


Once I had collected all of the items that I thought I needed, many of which will spoil or rot or suffer from a bug infestation, I encountered the check out lanes. If you added up all of the accumulated frustration I have built up over the years in check out lanes and released it all at once I would have a fatal myocardial infarction. And I include traffic as a kind of sub category of waiting in check out lanes; basically I'm behind people who aren't as smart as me who are impeding my progress just to be mean to me, Horseface Steve.


I avoid the express lanes as a general rule, where some felon with 16 items is queuing up directly under the "15 Items or Less" sign. The self check out sounds like a good idea but I always get bogged down on some item I have to look up or that doesn't scan properly or have a working bar code. I don't know if I have mini bananas, organic bananas, fair trade bananas, or just regular bananas. They all look exactly the same to me. I have absolutely no idea how they get information embedded into a few black lines, either.

I usually end up choosing the line with the fewest people in it AND manned by the youngest cashier. No offense to old people like me, but I want to see those nimble young fingers flying when I'm trying to get out of the check out line. The pleasant young man that I choose to be my check out guy was too pleasant. He talked to me pleasantly instead of getting my stuff scanned and into a bag. He was also tasked with bagging my stuff which further slowed him down. He placed each item carefully in the bags. Very carefully.


Finally, I suggested that I would be happy to bag the groceries, assuming that this would free him up for some world class scanning. Normally, I don't do this because I'm watching the register like a hawk. When my attention is diverted I seem to get charged $8.99 a pound for organic, free-trade, mini bananas. This time my total focus on speed bagging blinded me to the fact that my $2 bag of onions rang up at around $10, which put me immediately into the Customer Service line, where no customer service was in effect, that I could see. They gave me my $10 back but kept the bag of onions because of some bar code defect.

"You can run back and get a bag with a bar code on it," the woman offered, unhelpfully. I successfully fought back the urge to tell her where she could place each and every onion in the bag.

I don't really have any problems is my main problem.

Sunny Side Up

Optimism: The tendency to take the most hopeful view of matters or to expect the best outcome in any circumstance; practice of looking on the bright side of things; opposed to pessimism.


One of the things that drew me into The Fellowship and kept me coming back until things got better was the overwhelming sense I got from everyone that things were going to get better. There's very little bitching and moaning in a good meeting unless it's tongue in cheek. And it's not like we pretend that bad shit doesn't happen; we talk about our problems all of the time. It's just that we try to look through the bad to the good that we're sure is coming; we try to keep the bad in perspective, to accept the fact that pain and suffering is inevitable, to balance the relatively small amount of bad with the embarrassingly large amount of good. (Note to self: did I use the word accept? D'oh!) (Note to note to self: did I follow that up with a reference to balance? What is going on here?) (Final note to self: perspective? Perspective!? WTF?)



We do a lot of trudging through the mud so that we can get to the vacation villa overlooking the ocean. I used to plop down in the mud and cry.

"What's the use?" I'd moan. "There's so much mud here."

Now I think: "Man, this mud is really getting me in shape. I'm really going to appreciate the shower in my vacation villa. At least it's not raining."



It can be awfully frustrating when we have to deal with people who are waiting for something bad to happen. I have to bite my tongue sometimes. People who don't get to experience the fantastic benefits of a program -- and it doesn't have to be The Program, it can be any spiritual program -- don't want to hear some sunny side-up horseface dufus tell them that it's not so bad, it's not going to get better.



I try to avoid those people. It's pretty much a waste of my time.

I'm Faster Than Myself

A woman newly sober brought up the topic at my meeting last night. She is having trouble feeling comfortable in her own skin, basically. Imagine that: an alcoholic having trouble sitting still. She is impatient with everything. She's worried that she's not being productive; she wondered why it's taking so long for her life to improve. Another perpetual motion machine set for maximum production.

The recovery part of the topic revolved around trying to figure out the motive behind the motion. A lot of the time the problem is that we can't stand being alone with our thoughts. I can take a normal activity and warp it into an unrecognizable shape if I'm not careful. As an example, it's one thing to exercise: it's good for me, it relieves stress, and burns off nervous energy. It's another thing altogether to exercise compulsively. If I feel that I haven't gone longer, harder, faster when I work out, I'm running from me, and I do not have a good track record of running faster than myself. If I'm thinking about how to knock out the next task while I'm exercising, I'm moving because I'm afraid to sit still.

Sometimes when I'm walking around with the Earth People, I feel really out of place. They seem to get it. They don't seem to be trying to run out of their own skin. Then I go to a meeting and listen to my brothers and sisters talk and I feel right at home. I feel normal-ish.

There has to be a lot of drunks at that club.

The Latin Experience

Efficient: Producing the desired effect or result with a minimum of effort, expense, or waste; working well; competent.

One of the best things about traveling is that I get to see how other cultures do things. I'm very German: organized, efficient, a well-oiled machine tirelessly stamping out snow-blower parts. I'm a high speed train right on schedule. 9 o'clock means 9 o'clock. Wait your turn. Stand in line. Don't just throw your crack pipe or used syringe on the ground -- there's a garbage receptacle right there!

Then I go someplace where things don't work that smoothly. My problems start when I try to make them work my way. My inclination is not to go with the flow. My inclination is to build a highly engineered flow control system and MAKE THE FLOW GO WHERE I WANT IT TO GO. My vacation was someplace where things usually happened, sort of, somewhere in the vicinity of the place they were supposed to happen, at fairly random times.

Can I get my check, please? I've been done eating for 18 seconds.


My favorite incident revolved around an island ferry. Information in my room indicated that the ferry would return from Isla de Mujeres (Woman Island -- isn't that a great name?) at 2:30. We show up at the dock at 2:15, being good Germans, to find out that the next ferry was actually at 3:30. We were standing under a wooden sign that read: "Next Ferry: 2:00," despite the fact that time had come and done went. To complicate matters further there was a full list of ferry times hanging on the wall indicating a ferry would depart every 30 minutes. There were no exceptions for any days or times of the year listed. It started to rain. We didn't have raincoats.

At around 3:30 three ferries heading to three different locations show up, none bearing any markings of a final destination. People crowded forward into a large holding pen, forming lines at random. No one was speaking English. I tried to trot out my Spanish but probably asked for a transvestite lounge singer if the look on the attendant's face was any indication. We figured we had a one in three chance of ending up where we wanted to go.


One day we joined a bunch of people on a tour bus for a trip to a Mayan ruin. The pick up process had gone badly and some people were grumbling a bit. The nice lady who was the tour guide apologized, then tossed out a few bon mots:

"You know, there are millions of people who want to be on vacation and can't go. My mother told me that when you get angry that the only person you hurt is yourself, so why get angry?"


Man, does that sound like The Program. Maybe some people just get it.

Simply Be of Service

Testosterone: A male sex hormone.

Shorty came over the other day. I have a snow-blower and a long driveway down a steep hill right between two unforgiving stone walls, and there's 2 feet of snow on the ground right now. The snow-blower is not presently operating in any fashion whatsoever. It sits in silent protest, mute, keeping its mystical secrets hidden.

I bought it last year and used it exactly twice, and assumed incorrectly that it would start the 3rd time out. I didn't fire it up before it snowed. That's thinking ahead which I avoid at all costs, unless I'm imagining something terrible. I consider that productive foresight. This is not a common opinion in the normal world.

Having known me for a while and being aware of my massively overwhelming mechanical abilities, Shorty shows up with some tools.

"Do you even own a screwdriver?" he asked, a little snarkily.
"I have a screwdriver," I retorted. "I think so, anyway. If I do it would be in a kitchen cabinet with my other tool, a hammer of some sort."
"Is it a Phillips or a Flathead?" he asked. "We need a Phillips."
"Is it a what now?" I replied.

Our very male plan of attack consisted of pulling the rip cord that starts the machine with varying degrees of ferocity. We tried pulling it fast and pulling it slow; we used rapid, short strokes followed by long, steady pulls. We pulled from the side, low down, way over the top. We looked away, pretending to ignore it, then seized it suddenly in a surprise sneak attack.

"Does it have gas?" Shorty asked, panting. Checking the gas gives people the impression that they're doing something.
"Yes," I gasped.

We checked anyway, then repeated the exercise with the oil receptacle, which we located with some difficulty, before engaging in another bout of energetic cord pulling.

We decided to make sure that the spark plug was connected properly, verified the gas and oil levels again just in case, and re-checked the spark plug that we had disconnected and inspected 30 seconds ago.

We had nothing.

Shorty attacked the rip cord again, viciously.

"Did that sound different? Did it almost catch there?" he wheezed.
"I think so," I lied. "I think it did."

I gave up at that point and started to shovel surreptitiously. I had to clear the driveway and I could tell at that the snow-blower wasn't going to be part of the equation. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Shorty pull the cord out as far as it would go, stand there for a minute like the Statue of Liberty, before letting it wing back into place. Then he started lifting the entire machine about 6 inches off the ground and letting it crash into place. Finally, he grabbed the rip cord for one, last Herculean series of pulls. Insanity is, after all, doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. He gathered himself, gave a mighty jerk skyward. There was a small explosion showering us with bits of glass and metal.

I have these . . . had these motion control search lights installed just above my garage door entrance.

He picked up a shovel and started to help me clear the driveway. There was a lot of glass and metal buried in the snow right in front of the garage. I can't imagine that's going to be good for car tires.

Later I called and thanked him for trying to help out. I mentioned that, if he was available, I was having some trouble with the motion control lights on my garage. He hasn't called back yet.

Reality Check

Reality: The quality or state of existing or happening as or in fact; actual, true, objectively so, etc; not merely seeming, pretended, imagined, fictitious, nominal, or ostensible.

I was on vacation last week. Some of my "friends" wonder what it is exactly that I have to take a break from, seeing that most of my time is consumed drinking coffee and staring into the distance. This is an attitude I find a little less than helpful while still conceding that they're pretty much on the money with their observations. It's annoying and funny all at the same time, kind of like my friends.

Be that as it may, we were fortunate enough to be able to go someplace warm while dodging a nasty cold and snowy week at home. I will admit that a lot of the attraction was being able to roll out of bed and put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and drink coffee and stare into a distance totally dominated by waves crashing on a Caribbean beach. That alone took the edge off of almost everything.

One of the things I enjoy so much about breaking my routine of sitting slack-jawed and thinking about myself, is that I get to see how much effort it takes to maintain such a complicated life style. I don't want to be idiotically short-sighted about this, as attractive and comfortable as that is for me -- we all have to work if we want to eat and I do enjoy my stuff from time to time -- but I really get to see how overly complicated things can get if I'm not careful.

I had about 2% of the clothes that I own with me and wondered what exactly is filling up my closet at home. I had no car so I took the bus which was fine because I didn't have anywhere that I had to go. There was nothing to clean or fix or organize. I had a banana and bowl of oatmeal for breakfast which I was able to prepare without using any of the seven thousand kitchen utensils that I own.

And that damn espresso machine didn't fit in my luggage despite my best efforts to get it in there. I tried to sneak it into SuperK's carry-on but she noticed the extra weight right away. We managed to rig up the little coffee maker in the room and made perfectly acceptable cups of coffee.

I could feel the aches and pains and headaches ebb away.

I'm Afraid of Everything

Practical: That can be used; workable; useful; as, practical proposals.

And I think that I do myself a disservice if I try to go through life avoiding all fear whatsoever. I don't think that's very practical, attractive as the concept may be, and this from a practical guy. Fear can be immensely practical.

When I first got sober I kept doing things that I did when I was drinking and using, just sans the alcohol and drugs. One of my favorite activities was to get up early on Sunday morning, smoke a large amount of weed -- partly to dull the effects of my hangover and partly to enhance the experiences of the day -- and drive my poorly maintained sports car at high speeds on country roads. I tried this a couple of times sober, before concluding that it was dangerous.

"Man," I said, swabbing at the large circles of sweat around my armpits: "This is dangerous."

That's good fear.

I also used to find myself awash in bad fear, useless fear. I'd hear an ambulance in the distance and assume the worst. Someone I cared about would be 10 minutes late and I'd assume the worst. I'd sneeze and figure it was cancer. Someone else would sneeze and I figured they were going to infect me with cancer.

There's fear that something quite plausible might happen and there's the icky, yucky, free-floating anxiety based on nothing except twisted expectations.

I'm off to someplace warm now.

More About People Not Doing What I Want Them To Do.

SuperK and I are heading off on a vacation in a few days and my main man Shorty is taking us to the airport. We do this for each other, this shuttle service thing. It saves us both a chunk of money for parking and we avoid the headache of getting from the remote parking lot to the terminal. I'm pretty sure this isn't going to be at the absolute top of his list of things to do at 6AM on a weekend morning. I hauled him over there a few months back. I wasn't thrilled about doing it before I did it, but we had a meeting in the car on the way over and I ended up feeling good about myself. I was THINKING ABOUT SOMEONE ELSE.

The weather report for that morning is looking a little dicey, so SuperK and I started coming up with contingency plans in case he didn't want to make the drive, which I think is eminently reasonable. He could have sent his regrets. I would have been fine with that. I doubted that he would change his mind, but still thought it best to come up with an alternate plan of action. Rigid thinking isn't the way to go any more. SuperK and I thought about driving over the night before. We considered leaving way, way early if the roads were bad. We reminded each other that the problem was potential and still a few days in the future, even though there is nothing like making a problem appear out of thin air. Whoosh! Where did that problem come from, Mr. Wizard?

Anyway, he called and we talked about it. I liked the exercise. It was problem solving what we did. We weighed options. We eliminated the possibility of any misunderstandings. He's still going to take us over. I would have killed him if he didn't.

I'm in the throes of another bout of Living in the Problem with my family. It's very frustrating watching people live in The Problem. It's even worse when they insist on dragging me into it with them. It would be like screaming obscenities at Shorty if we had a blizzard and he couldn't get here to pick us up. We want to consider that as a possibility before it happens, which it probably won't. Sometimes we don't get to do what we want. Sometimes we have to work around situations. We can't just plan on leaving when we want, if it snows.

A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.

Middlemarch

Middle: A point or part halfway between extremes; central point, part, time, etc.; something intermediate.

As the Moody Blues have counseled:
"Ride! Ride my seesaw!"

Seesaw: Any back-and-forth or up-and-down motion, action, or tendency.

That's a great word. It has no definite origin, being merely a bastardization of the word "saw." It's a great metaphor, too, for how I used to live: wild fluctuations between improbable extremes. Everything was either a disaster or a miracle. I saw no nuance in life. I was getting EXACTLY WHAT I WANTED or I was pissed off.

It's not for everyone, I realize, but I try to occupy that middle ground. I try to look at fear, pain, stress, and life's other little unpleasantries with an analytical eye. I try to see what those things are telling me. Sometimes they are giving me good information: don't hit the big guy, for instance, is a great example of good fear. SOMETHING TERRIBLE IS SURE TO HAPPEN is a great example of bad fear.

I'm trying to heat the house this morning without burning it down. Good fire -- bad fire.

Stress

Stress: Strain; pressure; especially force exerted upon a body that tends to strain or deform its shape. -- Webster's.



Stress: The condition that results when the brain overrides the body's desire to choke the shit out of some asshole that desperately needs it. -- Popular.



Now that I'm sober I have a lot less stress in my life. Mostly that's because I try not to spend so much time doing the things that cause stress. I am, without a doubt, my own worst enemy. My problems, I think, are mostly of my own making. When I quit behaving in an illegal, immoral, unethical, and of course, irrational fashion, the stress tends to evaporate.

Sometimes I get in trouble when I pretend that all of the stress is completely gone, forever and ever. Life is going to toss stuff at us from time to time. We can manage stress, reduce it, and react better when it happens, but not eliminate it entirely. All of us are going to have money, power, and sex problems; stressful by nature.

I can run but I cannot hide.

Embrace the stress. Give stress its due. Give it a big kiss. Alcoholics like to pretend that problems don't exist. That was our modus operandi when we were drinking. We were vaguely aware of some horribly embarrassing episode from the night before; we were certain that it just went away with enough alcohol.

I need to deal with my stress. It's going to manifest itself somehow if I don't. Stress is like matter -- you can destroy matter. You can change its form but not the fact of its existence. You have to do something with it. It's going to come out somehow.