Bedroom Stories

I woke up this morning on the wrong side of the bed.  This is better than the old days when I woke up under the bed or on top of the bed, fully clothed, with what could only be a dead animal living inside my mouth.  Ah, good memories.  A guy at the meeting yesterday said he never woke up when he was drinking: he came to. I can identify with that.

I'm looking forward to winter ending so that I can get outside again.  I'm looking forward to staunching the outflow of money.  And, frankly, I'm a bit weary of all the change.  I feel like I stepped out of my old life but haven't stepped into my new life yet.  This is, of course, the whole idea of change -- going from  something old to something new.  I'm one of those odd people who really tries to embrace change.   It makes me uncomfortable but it makes me try new things.  Today I'm a tired of trying new things.  I wish I was bored at the moment; it would be a relief to be bored for a couple of hours, with nothing big on the horizon.

I need to make a better effort focusing on what is good rather than what is bad, or that I perceive as bad, or could turn bad.  Whenever I feel the stress amp up I tend to drift into negative reflection.  "How will you be screwed?  Let me count the ways," my head is saying.   Funny, though, I can just hear someone else in my head saying: "Maybe you should make a gratitude list."  I can hear my sponsor saying: "Why don't you bring this up as a topic at the jail tonight."  That's a really irritating one when I'm fretting about Stuff and My Circumstances. 

I can hear all kinds of irritating suggestions.  Maybe I should take one of them.

Chair and Share

So the meeting format, here in the The New City where they are clearly doing it wrong and surely waiting for me to set them straight, is to have the chairperson share for 5 minutes to establish a topic.  At that point the chair calls on people to comment, at his whim, picking favorites, ignoring Gods of Sobriety like me, just for meanness. 

Anyway, I was asked to chair a meeting.  I'm assuming this was because everyone was sick to death of what every one else was saying and not because I had anything to say that would be interesting to anyone except for myself.  Normally I need several hours to get my point across but agreed, begrudgingly, that I would do my best with the shorter time frame.

As I begin my little talk, some poor soul wanders, a guy who would have to take the elevator up a few flights to get to the Low Bottom Drunk level.  This man was surely welcome at the meeting and I was glad he was there, but he . . . ahem . . . roamed around a lot and did some chatting when he felt like it, in a voice that was probably louder than he realized.  It was one of those situations where it was hard for me to keep a train of thought intact and even harder for anyone to pay attention to what I was saying, which wasn't too much.  The guy roaming around was a lot more interesting that I was.  It did wonders for my humility.

It reminded me of the first time I spoke at a jail that catered to multiple DUI cases.  I was newish in sobriety and prepared to go in there and save them all.  I stood up in front of 50 or 60 guys and began the talk that would change all of their lives.  I quickly saw that maybe 5 of them were paying any attention to me at all.  If that wasn't deflating enough, most of the remaining guys were audibly talking and laughing among themselves, reading the newspaper, even lying with their heads on the lunch tables, sleeping.

It's all about me, after all.

Deeeeeeeeep Storage

I have been digging through some more boxes that have not been thoroughly explored since The Big Move.  It's never a good sign when you are looking through Stuff that has been in a box for 2 months but hasn't been missed.  I kept thinking: "I bet there isn't going to be interesting Stuff in this box, either."  I believe I have gone on at some length about how much Stuff was brutally culled before we moved.  Clearly we weren't nearly brutal enough.

We have a few storage areas in our new house.  I worked in the main storage area today, the most accessable one containing the most important Stuff, and by that I mean Stuff that should have been thrown away before we moved instead of boxed up and trucked thousands of miles at great personal expense.

"You have got to be kidding me!" I kept shouting to SuperK from the bowels of the storage area.  "Who's idea was it to bring this?  This is a piece of crap!"

A couple of times I yelled: "What is this?  I've never seen this before!"

We have been trying to decide what pieces of Stuff should be transferred into an area that we have termed Deep Storage.  It's an area under the eaves on the third floor that requires the removal of a large dresser before you can even get to the door accessing the space.  We like to call this Deeeeeeeep Storage.  We use low, spooky voices when we say it like that.  This area is for Stuff that we can't even discuss among ourselves, let alone admit to outsiders, Stuff so crappy or useless or redundant that it's embarrassing to talk about.  This is not Stuff that should have been left behind; this is Stuff that should have been burned and the ashes scattered over a remote mountain in the Balkans instead.

The Advice We Give

A guy comes over the horizon in a hot air balloon.  He passes over a dude standing in a field, looking up.

"Hey!" he yells down.  "I'm late for a wedding.  Can you tell me where I am?"

"You're in a hot air balloon, over my field," the dude yells back.

"You must be a sponsor," the balloon guy says.

"I am.  How can you tell?"

"You've given me a lot of information which, while it's technically correct, doesn't help me at all.  I don't have any idea what to do with it," Mr. Balloon replies.

The field dude says: "You must be a sponsee!"

"I am.  How did you know?"

"You don't know where you are.  You don't know where you're going.  You've made a commitment you can't keep, and somehow it's my fault."

Sounds about right.

Honest is A Policy

"If honesty is the best policy, what's the second best policy?" I asked SuperK.



"I don't know," she said, barely looking up from her computer, hoping, no doubt, that I would tire of the topic and quickly go away. This is one of the drawbacks of going from a lot of space in a house to much less space; there's less of a buffer zone between large personality alcoholics.
"You know you're going to have to humor me here," I said.
She sighed, and thought for a moment. "Really, I don't know. What do you think it is?"
"I don't think honesty is the best policy so I don't really care what comes after that," I said, quite reasonably. "I think we need to work on the best policy first before getting bogged down in secondary issues."


Also, I hate it when someone says: "She's nice -- you'd like her." Why do they say that to me? I don't like anybody. Why would I like I like this person?


Another day gone by where I've done many things well and a few poorly. I am spending most of my time reliving the failures. It's what I do.

Bored With Change

I'll tell you this, Batman: you want to shake up your world try moving to a new city. It's a guaranteed shake up. I have now been here long enough to have reached a tentative peace with the change, and that's a good thing, because the whole idea of the move was to experience the change. I'm one of those guys who has a lot of fear when it comes to change but I welcome it because I know it brings about good things, or interesting things at least. I have to remember that The Big Change was quitting drinking and street drugs and prescription drugs obtained illegally, and it was a change that saved my life.



In my Old City there was a group of guys who went out for lunch every Saturday after a 12 & 12 meeting, which for some reason didn't touch the second part of the 12. I have a lot of good friends in this group, men I love dearly and consider my brothers, so I joined them for 6 months or so, until I got Bored, which was inevitable, being a restless sort who craves new experiences. Yet it's comforting to have a routine like that, populated with people you know. Sometimes in the New City I get up after a meeting and watch old friends pair off and talk, and I stand there alone and think: "Huh."


The Elder Low and I talk about this all of the time. His job has moved him frequently all over the world, and he's looking forward to settling in some place. He terms the place his "headquarters."  He wants to be grounded somewhere, to put down roots. 

I know the feeling. 

Kookaburras In A Rowboat

My Quiet Time this morning bore the following fruit. 

Row, row, row your boat,
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.

What a great song.  I could make a pretty good go of life if I followed the Row, Row, Row Your Boat instructions.  An alcoholic might interpret the song in the following manner:  OK, I might make the following interpretations, anyway.

Get up and take some action.
Do the work but it isn't necessary to kill yourself and get it all done today, and why don't you try pointing the %^!! boat downstream for a change instead of shooting the rapids in reverse.
Make a gratitude list.
Life isn't as serious as you think it is so don't get all self-important about yourself, if you do in fact exist.

There's a book called Life Is A Dream by a 17th century Spanish playwright named Pedro Calderon de la Barca.  Those crazy Latins do a great job of blurring the distinction between what we perceive as reality and harsh reality itself.

And then there's this one:

Kookaburra sitting in the old gum tree.
Merry, merry king of the bush is he.
Laugh, Kookaburra, laugh, Kookaburra.
How gay your life must be.

I guess the word of the day is "merry.".  I listened to some videos of kookaburras and it's a stretch to call that squawking "laughing" but I still like the imagery of merry, happy, laughing birds.  The kookaburra is a funny looking little guy with a funny name.

I think my Higher Power was OK with this work.  If I asked, god could probably make a few suggestions about how I could improve things but he has lots of stuff to do and isn't at all worried about whether or not I'm Doing It Right.  It's the Doing It part he's most concerned about; the Right part is open to a lot of interpretation.  Meditating myself into a state of total Zen bliss or thinking idly about Australian birds is all pretty much the same to him.

The LivInn Sweets

One of the funny things that happened after I spent a few weeks in the same moderately nice, smallish hotel room was that I started to settle into the space.  There wasn't enough room when I was entertaining one of my numerous girlfriends and lady companions, of course, or hosting an all night rave, if what you mean by all night is lights out by 10PM, but that's a topic I should write about later, after I come to grips with what is reality and what is not reality.  I was moving from a largish house to a much smaller rental place that still has way too much room for two people, and fretting about whether or not we would have enough space.  SuperK and I do better if we can put a 100 yards between us from time to time.  Although we divested ourselves of fully 50% of the crap that we owned we still brought way too much stuff.

I had a bed and an easy chair and a TV and a bathroom.  I didn't find myself terribly upset that I didn't have this or that possession with me.  Now obviously a few weeks is not the same as a few years and I was getting tired of the blue jeans - tan Dockers two step, but it was surprising how quickly I got comfortable with a lack of possessions.  I do miss the electrical cord that recharges my razor and the Super Bowl XIX ring that Fred Biletnikoff gave me but not much else.

That stuff can really get its claws into you.

The Buzz Cut

So on one of the days right in the middle of the move trauma I decided I needed a haircut.  I was in a bad mood, what with all of the lousy weather and uprooting trauma, and the money flying out the window.  I think it would have been cheaper if I had simply driven down the highway throwing fistfuls of signed checks out the window.  Anyone who found one of the checks could have filled in whatever amount they liked and cashed the thing.  I think it would have saved me some money in the long run.

Anyway, I'm driving along in this bad mood and I pass a barber shop.  I didn't feel like calling up the guy who normally cuts my hair and is familiar with my mercurial mood swings, which was not a good move on my part.  I'm not even sure my regular guy does a good job.  It's not like he's working with George Clooney.  A bad haircut might be noticeable on George.  I have so many other shocking problems with my appearance that the eye is naturally drawn away from any errors on the top of my head.

I told the guy in the barber shop to "just cut it all off," holding my finger and thumb about a quarter of an inch apart.  My hair was close to pony tail length.  Dude shrugs and buzz cuts me.  Takes about 10 minutes.  Looks like shit.  My hair line, while holding its ground, is weirdly uneven.  SuperK thinks it looks like the interface between the ying and the yang symbol, which makes me laugh and pisses me off at the same time. 

"Oh, god," she said when I got off the plane.  "You never do anything in moderation, do you?"

What Is Bad

I am pondering my ability to focus on the negative and short-sheet the positive.  I know a lot of drunks who do this so I don't feel too weird, but it's still a powerful and perplexing impulse.  I see Earth People do this, too, so I know that it's not only drunks who see What Is Bad.  I understand that being optimistic or being pessimistic is mostly a state of mind, a kind of attitude, but I bet a lot of the counselors and shrinks and PhDs that I have talked to over the years about my hundreds of psychoses, quirks, and aberrations would confirm that nature plays a part.  I have worked hard as hell to develop a positive attitude over the years but still have a tendency to focus on What Is Bad.  Some of us appear to be more negative than others.

I'm good at negative.  It comes naturally to me.

I have lived in 4 different cities during the course of my sobriety and the meetings have all had a different flavor.  In City 1 the group stayed together in one room, and we went around the table so that everyone got to share, but not for long.  City 2 had a mini lead on a Step, then broke up into small groups.  Everybody got to share there, too, and for a lot longer time, which I liked because it gave me the opportunity to prattle on about myself for as long as I wanted, but the meetings took up a lot more time, which I didn't like because once I got done talking about myself I was ready to go home.  City 3 had the larger group format but you had to raise your hand if you wanted to talk.  It was kind of intimidating when I first moved there because nobody knew what a God of Sobriety I was, and I was a lot more timid than I am, which is not timid at all.  Now I'm in City 4 where the meetings are large and the chair calls on people.  It's harder for people to get to know you if you don't get a chance to talk, and they miss out on the whole God of Sobriety thing.

I'm sure I'll be able to get everyone to do it my way.

You're Doing It Wrong

I've been "home," or whatever this is, for a few days and I've been to a few meetings, and I'm saddened to report that they are doing it wrong.  I can't see how anyone can stay sober if this is the way they are going to do things.  They should send some representatives back to my "home" . . . er, "away" state to see how it should be done. 

I got sober in a very nice and polite town and moved to Chicago for a number of years.  People in Chicago were pretty nice but not exceptionally polite.  When I started frothing about something or the other that was happening to me but shouldn't be happening they often didn't listen politely, at least not for long.  I was interrupted many, many times when I drifted off into Justification Land.

After a while I moved to another very nice and polite town where they didn't do it right.  They didn't do it right in Chicago, either, until they did it very well.  After a few months I traveled back to Chicago for a funeral.  One of my mother figures, Maryann Z, asked me how the meetings were in my new place.  She quickly cut me off as I started to explain exactly how they were doing it wrong.

"How many meetings a week do they have?" she asked.
"I don't know, several hundred," I guessed.
"Yeah, they need you, with your 18 months of sobriety, to fix the whole system.  The Program is just fine there.  Go home and go to some meetings and keep quiet," she said flatly.

I'm guessing Maryann couldn't pick me out of a police line-up right now, but I never forgot that advice.

It's not them.  It's me.

The Unhappy Cat

Yesterday was a delightful day. It was the kind of pleasant day that I envisioned when I was getting sober. I hoped for days like yesterday but secretly believed they could never happen. It was a day full of the little delights and joys that were obscured by my drug and alcohol use.



My alarm went off at 3AM. We all remember 3AM, don't we? I got home at 3AM all of the time, vaguely aware that it would not be pleasant getting up in a few hours even without the hangover and shakes. I stuffed my elderly cat into a bag and went outside where it was 3 degrees, which is cold. I drove an hour to the airport and turned in my rental car, and walked a few hundred yards to the terminal with the cat and all of my luggage, in the cold. The cat was not happy with me. The next 8 hours were consumed by flights and layovers with an unhappy cat.

Actually, it was OK. I'm making a lot of this up. The cat was fine, behaving better that SuperK and certainly better that I do when traveling by air. I made it home, or someplace, anyway. I have spent the last 6 weeks in hotels. Eight different hotels so I'm a little uncertain where home is, exactly. The last hotel I stayed at was getting a little too familiar. It was nice to see my wife and sleep in my own bed.


The time I spent in my old city was unpleasant but informative. Work was a miserable grind, my family behaved as if they were taking cues from Quentin Tarantino, and the weather -- a big part of my desire to move -- was awful. When I left my new home to travel back a few weeks ago I was kind of excited. I was still uneasy about my decision to leave and I looked forward to seeing familiar faces and visiting familiar places.


Herr Luber, ever the irritating pragmatist dreamer, suggested that all of this confirmed our decision to move, irritating me briefly. I like the concept that I need to get up in the morning, chat with my Higher Powers, then try to navigate through the day to the best of my ability, taking care to avoid solid walls and walk through any doors that happen to open in front of me.

My old place was comfortable. It was like a piece of white bread with peanut butter: nutritious, not bad-tasting, inexpensive, easily obtained from any store. My new place is an organic hazelnut muffin with cardamon and carob sprinkles, bought from a small shop run by a recovering heroin addict. Not everybody is going to like the cardamon, the muffin is a little expensive, and I'm not sure the heroin guy is up to code with the health department.

I have a confession to make. I didn't throw away the off-brand jar of peanut butter when I was home. I bought a new jar of Jiff, which I ate first, but kept the old one in case the Jiff didn't last the duration of my trip. I trotted out the old stuff right at the end. It still tasted pretty bad. I decided to check the "Sell By" date.


10/7/10.

Ancient Runes

As I have been navigating this stressful series of events, which I should point out that I set in motion myself, willingly, of my own volition, a free man with a sane mind, sometimes, at least, I am aware of a much lessened ability to focus on what is good and instead concentrate on what is not  -- and there's nothing better than bitching mightily when one is the cause of one's own discomfort.  I'm comfortable with pain and failed dreams, not with admitting I'm living the dream. 

So I was at a meeting recently when an old friend talked about the dreaded Gratitude List.  You know the idea -- writing down in black ink on white paper all that you should be grateful for.  The hair on the back of my neck snapped to attention just writing the word gratitude.  Gratitude is an ancient rune chiseled into the rock of distant planet, many thousands of light years away.  I don't do gratitude.  I prefer seething with hidden resentments.

"Oh, the Gratitude List," I winced.  There's something about writing.  It takes all of those vague, delusional thoughts ricocheting around in my mind and organizes them.  I don't really understand how it happens but once I start to write, then look at what I've written, the world comes into better focus.

I made a few lists.  I don't have any problems, really.

Cell Phone Walkin'

I lost my cell phone.  I definitely lost my cell phone.  I experienced one of those awful moments when you reach for something important and it simply isn't there.  I quickly retraced my steps from Last Known Location up until the present time with no luck. 

It's funny how when I make a mistake I feel bad about myself.  I get depressed and agitated.  It's like no one has ever made a mistake before.  When I do something right, however, which is much of the time, the glow vanishes instantly.  When I make a mistake, the funk seizes me and holds on.  Fortunately, it no longer holds on like grim death; more like cheerful death or light-hearted death.  I'm glad death's humor is much improved but it's still death.  It's The Grim Reaper dressed in a hooded garment with a brightly ornamental cinching belt, chartreuse or some other pastel, if chartreuse is indeed in the pastel family.  He doesn't carry that large, sharpened scythe anymore, preferring a much more dignified concealed pistol of some sort.  He's bad but he isn't over the top about it.  You know you're going to die but there's not the overwhelming sense of dread that comes with seeing The Grim Reaper in full regalia.

My friend Willie took me to lunch that day, after a meeting in a clubhouse.  Willie paid for lunch.  I thought he was being nice but now I think he was feeling guilty because he STOLE my cellphone and sold it on the street to pay for his increasingly large Starbucks habit. 

Yeah, that's what happened.  It was Willie.