Adzes and Pitchforks and Mattocks, O My

At about 10AM in my hotel room in a lovely commercial/industrial strip in The Old City I stood up to do a little light yoga.  I suppose I should be grateful for the opportunity to do this, as a middle aged guy who should be working but isn't, in the middle of a Monday morning, but I'm really not.  I figure it's my birthright to have nice things given to me with no effort on my part.  "Sweat of thy brow" my ass.

Across a 100 yards of cracked asphalt I watch a crew from a roofing company clamber up a bouncing ladder to a flat third story roof.  It's cold here -- about 30F - and the wind is blowing hard.  I'm assuming it's cold on the roof.  I could be wrong since it's 72F in my nice hotel room, but I don't think so.  They are using shovels and adzes and pitchforks and mattocks and a whole assortment of Medieval looking tools to rip up roofing material that doesn't look to be coming off too easily.

During one of my early Inventories I was bitching mightily about my work life.  My sponsor pointed to another crew installing shingles on a pitched roof in 100 degree heat.

"You don't work," he suggested.  "Those guys are working."

I saw his point, begrudgingly.

Another, Somewhat Less Funny Thing

And another thing:  I have no idea why I spend any time at all working so hard to get the things that I want, because I have NO IDEA what it is I want.  I pick something, seemingly at random, then I focus all of my energies in trying to secure it.  And on the off chance that I do secure this thing that I'm not even sure I want, I almost never enjoy having it, or I find that's its pleasures are fleeting or much diminished considering my out-sized expectations.  It's almost like I pick something at random. 

Here I am, looking at something inexplicable that I'm holding in my cupped hands:
(Perplexed): "What the hell did I want this for?  What is this, anyway?"


People keep telling me to do god's will.  Maybe I've misinterpreted that as dog's will.  Why is it so #$!%!! hard to understand that the whole goal is not to pursue my own instincts but to try to do the will of god?

A wise man of the cloth once pointed out to me that our instincts for money, sex, and a place in society were installed in us to keep us alive, not to provide us pleasure.  The belief that instincts help us secure what we want is our own corruption.  They help us secure the necessities of existence.

He said it a lot better than I just did.

Another Funny Thing

Anxiety:  Boy, it sure seems like I've already looked this one up.

I also wonder how inexplicably my anxieties vanish, blown away like dust in the wind.  There they are, burrowing deep in my mind, sinking their intractable claws deep, deep, deep, and then . . . they're gone!  I guess since they're not real they don't have to follow any of the normal rules of logic or physics or semantics.  Having an anxiety is like talking to yourself: the conversation is pretty much up to you.  Sometimes I take an action that helps but when I'm tilting against imaginary foes anything can happen.

I was tooling down the road today musing on the most ancient of my favorite anxieties -- my health -- when I took a call from Shorty.  There is some nasty shit being passed around this winter and he has had a hell of chest cold.  I mean, the guy sounds bad.  Like most alcoholics he tries to solve his difficulties alone, relying on tremendous willpower and legendary intelligence, until the difficulties appear insurmountable.  He finally asked for help from a physician, and when the help he got didn't work immediately, he became convinced he had some kind of rare African fungal infection, lifted from a rare African mango that he handled but didn't buy, and the fungus was lodged deep, deep, deep in his lungs, scarring them irreparably.

Really, it's amazing how this thing works if we just keep talking to each other.

Sleep, Horseface: Sleep

And I've been doing some more Deep Thinking about fear, my favorite subject.  Actually, I've been thinking about anxiety.  Fear I have begun to understand in my sobriety.  It's a real thing, and sometimes it's justified.  I used to drive a car fast when I was drunk or choke down a mix of different kinds of drugs or put myself in harm's way, dangerous neighborhoods and the like.  I should have been afraid when I was doing that stuff.  But it's true that sometimes it's just a case of me battling forces that are trying to stymie my overly large instincts, too.

Anxiety seems to be the fear that something unlikely and particularly awful is going to happen.  Anxiety is fear's deranged, psychotic little sister.  I can't see that anxiety does me any good at all.  It makes me fear things that are implausible.  At least when I was mixing drugs I had something real to be afraid of, not termites and monsters.

I'm back in the Old City right now, battling jet lag and my own questionable behavior.  Funny how I really get upset at people when they start nosing around in my business when my business happens to be a little shady.  Right now in my work life I'm behaving in a way that's questionable.  It could go either way.  A person could make a good case pro or con, justified or no, about my behavior.  Regrettably, I'm only responsible for my own behavior, which in my own mind is questionable right now, and that's the only mind that's important to me.  I'm leading people to believe things they wouldn't be happy to know are untrue.  I can justify lying when I believe it's justified, or when I'm not actually saying things that are verifiably untrue.  If I dance and obfuscate and you believe something that is false, sometimes I can live with it.  Not often and it's not easy but it has been done.

I'm anxious about 3 things right now.  One of them I can't do anything about; one I shouldn't even be thinking about because it is so not a problem; and one is an old standby, an old mostly irrational fear that I come back to over and over again.  If there's nothing happening to me that's upsetting, I have some tried and true topics that I can access.

And then, being a good alcoholic, I can't come back and take my time doing what I need to do.  I arrived at my hotel last night at about 2AM and had to get up 3 hours later to make a 2 hour drive in the rain, in the dark, in the night.  I was the deranged little sister this morning.  It's no wonder my temper was short and my worry scanner was picking up all kinds of weird transmissions.

I need to go to bed, and sleep a deep sleep.

Ancient Corollaries

Corollary:  A proposition that follows from another that has been solved.

And as long as I'm talking about ancient riffs, I might as well include my thoughts on ancient corollaries, such as my ability to see the worst in even the most pleasant of circumstances.  I can ferret out the dark and the dank in the Mojave desert, at noon, in the middle of the dry season.  I can miss the breezy and the airy if you put it in a bottle and stapled to my forehead.

In the New City I have noticed some things that I don't like.  And because I don't like them they dominate my thinking.  Dark thoughts are familiar and I return to them over and over again, swirling them in my mouth like a fine vintage of Diet Mountain Dew.  My natural inclination is not to line up the dark thoughts mano a mano with pleasant thoughts to see how paltry and pathetic they actually are.  Or to try to moderate these thoughts by seeing nuance or exception in them.  

If it is a certain way, then it will always be that way, unless it gets worse.

Ancient Riffs

Riff:  A melodic phrase, repeated again and again, often used as the main theme, as in a final chorus, or as background.

I have been thinking a lot -- which technically should be called obsessing, if I'm trying at all to be honest about it, which I'm obviously not trying to do -- about Doing It Right.  This is one of the most ancient of my many dysfunctional life riffs.  I tend to drift about in my own mind certain that I'm Not Doing It Right.  It's a very compelling riff.  It allows me to be unhappy with myself on short notice and with little effort.

If my schedule is full and I'm busy I wonder if I should be enjoying some reflection and down-time.  If I sit down and read the paper I'm sure that I should be out there Doing Something Productive.  And since I'm in a new environment with so much to do and so many tasks to complete it's not hard for me to feel like my effort is lacking.

So many ways to be unhappy, so little time.

Horseface Steve: Clothes Hound Dog

Back to the Old City where I'll be in a hotel room again.  It was nice, in its own way, being in a small space with few things around me that required my extensive management abilities.  A bed, an easy chair, a bathroom, and a microwave, and I was pretty well set.  Dinner often consisted of variations on the theme of heating up some packaged brown rice, mixing in a can of beans and a can of vegetables, and slicing up some fresh bread, with a Snickers bar for dessert.  I brought along about three days worth of clothes, which I had to wash every three days.  Surprisingly, I didn't feel at all deprived with my lack of pants selection.  Blue, khaki, black.  What other colors are there?  All those clothes I own seemed ridiculous and I'm not a clothes guy.  I don't have that many pairs of pants but I'll tell you I think they're all blue, khaki, black.  I can't even think of any other colors that men's pants can be.  Gray?  Maybe there's a gray pair in there that I've had for 20 years and were too tight around the waist 15 years ago.

I do this thing when I travel where I leave an item of clothing in each place that I lay my head.  It's my way of spreading my essence around the world, like a dog peeing on a fire hydrant.

A Quo Here, A Quo There

Status Quo: The existing state of affairs (at any specified time), or the existing condition (of anything specified).

Today I say: Go for it.

I realize that I've done a hell of a lot of bitching about all of the traumas involved with the Big Change I've made.  It's what I do well.  I bitch with the best of them.  I was in the Bitching Club in college and we placed 3rd in the Northeast USA Bitching Regionals.  Unfortunately, only the top two clubs got to go to the Nationals to compete for the Bitching Championships but it was still a pretty impressive accomplishment.

That being said, there is nothing like a jolt to the status quo to open my eyes to all of the wondrous things that life can offer.  If I don't take a risk then it's less likely that I'll get hurt or suffer a loss, but I also won't find any hidden treasures. 

I spent most of my life drinking and thinking, drinking and thinking, sitting in front of the TV, clicking through programs that I knew I wouldn't remember the next day.  It has been awfully easy to focus on the trauma of The Big Move and not all all of the potential.  Sometimes I think how easy it would have been to have just stayed in my old life.  I could be sitting in my old living room, comfortable in my established routines.  No shocks, no jolts, no upsets, no damage to the undercarriage of my ridiculously overpriced car.

A guy I have enjoyed getting to know at the new meetings I'm attending asked to exchange phone numbers yesterday. 

I felt like I was in high school, getting asked out on a date.

High Level Committee Meetings Are In Session

I have to go back to the Old City (which makes this town in the Midwest sound like Jerusalem or Damascus) to complete some more work in a few weeks.  I hope I behave a little better than I did during my first visit.  My behavior was funny -- not ha ha funny but black humor funny, slipping on a banana peel and falling into poop at the bottom of a sewer funny.  I couldn't believe how quickly I made the transformation to Horseface Steve: Angry Pain in the Ass.  It was 4 minute mile fast.
I was trying to find the oxygen in a toxic mix of stress headlined by the Big Move, complicated by my ill-advised efforts to wedge my way into my parent's small house even when it was pretty clear they didn't want me there, sandwiched around a series of arguments with The Boss Formerly Known as The ***hole.  I was a little surprised at how quickly my temper reasserted itself when I had to deal with this guy, who is a master of belittlement.  He is one of those people who knows just what to say to make me feel bad or defensive, not hard with an overly-sensitive, put-upon guy like me.  Normally, I could let his jibes slide off my back but this time I reached some kind of stepping-off point, and I let loose.  I experienced an uncomfortable physical reaction when I got off the phone.  I was literally shaking with rage.  I felt depressed and the stress of all of that sour emotion boiling off left me exhausted.  Not physically exhausted so I could sleep, but mentally wrung out and too upset to sleep.

So I did what I do best: I held a series of high level committee hearings on his behavior in my head.  I talked and I talked and I talked.  I walked a long way in heavy snow to a meeting, talking the whole way, barely paid attention to what was said in the meeting, then talked all the way home.  I'm lucky I didn't get hit by a car.  I was slipping and sliding and trying to stay out of the path of the cars sluicing by on the slick roads.  I'm sure I talked out loud, and I bet I was punctuating my remarks with hand gestures exhibiting varying degrees of violence.  The cops would have been justified picking me up and taking me to the psych ward for a couple of hours. 

Luckily, I won all the arguments.  Unfortunately, I never actually talked to this guy about any of the stuff I was rehearsing.  Not a word.  Never happened.  Total waste of my time.

Boy, the arguments were good, though.

Horseface Steve: Galileo

It is all about me.  No doubt about it.  Everyone is thinking about me, or they should be if they're not.  I'm sure of it.  I'm Galileo.  I'm proposing that it is ME, in fact, that is the center of the universe, not a god or God or Higher Power, if you will.  Every other person, every other institution, is revolving around the light and the force and the power that is me.

In lieu of listening to what anyone else had to say at the morning meeting yesterday, I was pondering all of my woes and trials and tribulations, mostly imaginary or problems of my own making or just stuff that happens to everyone from time to time in the course of life.  I figured this was the best use of my time, the living in the problem rather than the living in the solution.  Thinking about myself is a good use of my time.  

I tuned in for a minute to hear a guy spoke who had recently been released from prison after completing a rigorous 6 month long boot camp type recover program while being locked up.  He was at a halfway house, and he had precisely one month to find a job and one additional month to begin paying his rent, or he would have to return to prison to serve the remaining year and a half left on his sentence.

Problems, indeed, Horseface.  Problems, indeed.

A Productive Day Spent Hearsing

The worst thing about preparing myself for events in the future that have not yet happened and probably never will -- but if they do they'll surely be awful  -- is that I spend a lot of time in my head, talking to people who aren't actually there.  And right now, I'm dealing with 2 large insurance companies and 1 huge electronics outfit who are surely out to do me grievous bodily and mental harm, so my current conversations are not pleasant, not pleasant at all.  They're more along the lines of furious, power-driven arguments where I'm slicing up evil, faceless bureaucrats.  The conversations are all angry and defensive.

I sometimes wonder if I added up all the time in my life that I have spent in unpleasant conversations with non-existent people who aren't actually there how large the number would be.  Weeks, surely.  Months, maybe?  Probably several months.  That would not be out of the question.  Can you imagine approaching some Earth Person and asking them to spend the next 6 months rehearsing and rehearsing conversations, alone, that will never come to pass?  The idea is so ludicrous it's out of the question.

And if I rehearse something to prepare for the actual act, do I then hearse?  I reheat, replace, and recalculate. 

I'm going to hearse all day. 

Bad Furious

I have been doing way too many inventories on my financial mental health lately.  The irony would be to juxtapose these inventories with the little speeches I perform so often in meetings: "I've really done a lot of good work on my fear of financial insecurity.  It just isn't an issue for me that often anymore."  Apparently, I think that sounds good at meetings even though it's more of a lie than anything, because when someone or something tries to extract some of my money from me, fairly or otherwise, then my fear of financial insecurity resurfaces with the fury of something really furious.  Bad furious.

The whole car damage thing has put me into the position of petitioning large corporations who didn't get large by giving money to people like me.  They have more money than I do and they can afford to be patient.  "Shhh," they say.  "Turn out the lights.  Don't answer the door.  Maybe he'll go away."  When it's time for me to give them some of my money, however, then they're efficient and timely and they always provide nice envelopes for me so that I can mail my money to them.  They take credit cards and accept wire transfers, too, and they'll even do me the favor of removing money directly from my checking account, as a convenience for me,  saving me the hard work of mailing them a check for what is actually the correct amount in the envelope they send along with the bill.

And when I start to write about money, then I start to see how fragile and defensive my huge ego really is.  These large corporations don't care how important I am, and they're not treating me with respect and honor.  And I'm sure that they aren't doing this to anyone else, either.  They have specifically singled me out.  "Look, it's Horseface," they say.  "Let's take some of his money then pretend we're not home."

SuperK and I have been pawing through all of the crap that made the cut and ended up in the New City.  Mostly, it's crap.  Mostly, we should have left 75% of the stuff we brought in the Old City, along with all of the other crap that we did leave there, hard as it was to give up even though I can't remember what any of it was and haven't missed ANYTHING since I got here.  I haven't said: "Hey, SuperK, have you seen coat number 8 of the 12 winter coats I had, even though the climate here is much milder and I don't need any winter coats at all?"

Not much of a problem for me, indeed.

Hang Me From the Highest Tree!!

The topic at the meeting this morning was gratitude.  I have heard rumors of this emotional state, and may have experienced it once, long ago, in a distant galaxy far, far away. 

It made me ponder my tendency to sink into the state of pessimistic melancholia.  When my eyes blink open in the morning I think: "OK, what's wrong in my world?"  I don't even care if nothing is actually wrong in my world because I just assume that something's going to go wrong eventually, and then everything will be really, really bad, and it will never get better.

I have started to feel a sense of wonder and optimism about my new home.  The weather is starting to break and we have waded through many of the larger tasks that moving to a new city entails, leaving us time to do some of the fun things that we imagined would be there for the doing.  And mark my words: there is no better facilitator to whole-sale change than The Program.  I have a huge ready made group of friends in a vibrant sub-community, like pre-packaged chocolate chip cookies.  I just have to remove the wrapper, pop the dough into the oven, and Voila!  Cookies!

During the course of the day I received some bad news about a car that was damaged while being transported to my new home.  This being business, no one will take any responsibility for anything, of course, leaving me with a damaged car.  Gratitude? No tengo la gratitud nada nunca no no no.  Now my brain knows I have a nice car which is insured, and I have the money to fix it in any case, so all of this is a Problem of Prosperity.  But I still feel put out, sunk into the depths of despair because something Bad happened to me.  

Dang me.
Dang me.
They oughta take a rope and hang me.
Hang me from the highest tree!
Woman would you weep for me.

Special Steve Is In The House

It has been interesting and a lot of fun trying to assimilate into a different regional culture here in the old U.S. of A.  Make no mistake about it, this is a large country, and there are definitely some big differences in how people go about things in the various quadrants.  I can close my eyes and imagine putting a Southern belle, a Texas cowboy, an Italian from Brooklyn, a lineman from Wichita, and a tree-hugger from Oregon in the same room for a no-holds barred iron man free for all.  THAT would be an interesting conversation.

I am definitely a child of my Midwestern roots: logical, private, hard-working, unemotional.  You can just see me in Bavaria, behind a mule, plowing a field in a cold rain, my sensible boots caked with mud, moving slowly and steadily and inexorably down the rows.  My wife would look up from her sauerkraut canning when I walked in at the end of the day, and ask how the plowing went.  "Fine," I'd say, sitting down heavily in front of the fire, shucking off my wet britches.

I am not a patient man, however, and would like the assimilation to go faster.  Blindingly fast, irrationally fast, in fact.  I don't care when things that take time for everyone else also take time for me, Special Steve.  Things should happen immediately for Special Steve.  This is how life was when I used: I could change my mood from bad to good or from good to great very quickly, with a pipe or a bottle.  Now I have to do the work to effect the change that I want.  Working at things that take time.  Oy.

I am not happy with anything less than perfection, either.  It's not that I want things to be good or even great; I want them to be perfect.  No blips, no errors, no problems.  To say that I have the emotional make-up of a 5 year old would be insulting to the millions of children out there.  I aspire to the emotional stability of a 5 year old. 

Special Steve has spoken.

Fairies Wear Boots

On my fifteenth anniversary a friend in recovery and I went to see Black Sabbath in concert.  When I was drinking I liquidated a lot of my scant resources on tickets to see heavy metal bands like Sabbath.  After I got sober I found I had trouble listening to their kind of loud, hard, frantic music for a while.  I could pop in an AC/DC CD from time to time but there was no way I trusted myself to survive a live performance.  The roar of the amps from the warm up band, the smell of the dope wafting through the air, the sense of impending mayhem was too much for me.  I didn't place myself in those situations for a long time.  The thought of that onslaught made me uncomfortable and I wisely stayed away.

My buddy and I bought tickets from a music consolidator.  Good seats, fourth row.  I noticed right away one of the benefits of sobriety: I had a job and some money in my pocket because I wasn't spending everything I had on beer and pot so I could afford great seats.  But on the day of the show I began waffling, and I actually called up John and said: "Dude, I'm bailing.  I don't think this is the right thing for me to do."

He said: "No, we should go.  We'll be OK.  We're going together, and this isn't your life anymore.  You'll see."

I'll always remember walking through the gravel parking lot and into the outdoor venue.  I forgot how loud it was; the air was physically vibrating, the bass a steady jolt in my breast bone.  I went to a Jethro Tull concert once and was in Row One right in front of a 90 foot high bank of industrial speakers.  My left ear rang for 3 months.  It's still not right today.  I patted the industrial ear plugs I had in my breast pocket.  I never go with out 'em.

What I saw in the concession area was this: a group of men, mostly, many of them my age, at a Black Sabbath concert on a week night.  I got to see what I would have looked like if I had never stopped doing what I was doing.  Not only was it not attractive or compelling, it was sad.  I saw a lot of thousand yard stares.  I could have walked up to any one of them and said: "You don't really have too much to do tomorrow, do you?"  I wasn't tempted to drink or use.  I was reminded of why I no longer did.  I recoiled as from a hot flame.

Anyone, I had a blast at the concert, which I remembered.  I had also forgotten how I usually mistimed my high so that I was ready to crawl under my metal folding chair and pass out about half way through the show.  And the peeing, all the peeing.  I held it until I was ready to detonate because I was never sure I could find my way back to where I was sitting, or squatting, usually.  I never timed the peeing too well, either.

Ozzy didn't look too good anymore.  He was either yelling: "C'mon, make some fucking noise" or "Show me your fucking hands" or "I can't fucking hear you."  He didn't look like he had much longer to live.  He didn't have any other things to yell, although he seemed to know most of the words to the songs.  He tried to run around the stage a little but it was more of a fast shuffle than anything.

Funny thing: we were so nervous about being there that we totally forgot where we parked.  We wandered around until the parking lot was nearly empty.  Got home at 2:30 AM. 

Ears were ringing.

The Negative Attracts The Positive

I have been mulling over the difference between positive thinking and negative thinking again.  While this doesn't sound too productive it is an improvement on my normal mulling process: thinking negative thoughts exclusively.  There's a sign on around my neck that reads: "Management reserves the right to refuse service to anyone thinking positive thoughts."  I considered just tattooing it on my forehead instead of going through the daily ritual of putting out the sign when I wake up and taking it back down at the end of the day, but I'm afraid of needles.

I think that a lot of people who dwell on the negative with the ferocious intensity I see often in The Fellowship have a little something in their make-up that predisposes them to veer toward the Dark Side.  I think it's fair to say we have some crossed wires and chemical imbalances that drive us to think negatively.  I can have 20 things going on, 19 of them good, and that one bad thing consumes my thinking more often than not.  I'm the guy who can't stop touching the sore tooth with my tongue.  I have a mouth FULL of good teeth which I could care less about, preferring to explore the bad one until the pain goes from minor to considerable to agonizing, and still I don't stop probing.  I must be comfortable with the pain.

But a lot of us were raised in an environment where the negative is emphasized.  I recall a quote from a German philosopher, Schopenhauer -- a happy lot, generally, the Germans, especially old philosophers -- that I'm sure I'm butchering but implies there isn't an idea so stupid that it can't be driven into the head of a child by repeating it over and over, with great solemnity, as they grow up.  I know that if I won $50 million in the lottery, which I hope to do despite my aversion to buying lottery tickets, my mother would say: "Oh, boy, the taxes are going to kill you, and then you'll probably lose half of it to all the criminals out there, and then you'll invest unwisely the pittance that's left and probably die penniless and alone."

She's probably right, in my case.

Difficulty Factory, LLC

My brain is a Difficulty Factory.

The goal of my spiritual life is to be OK no matter what the external circumstances are; I can't will others to change or, even worse, the whole world to change to satisfy my whims.  I try to figure out what god's will for me is in the next five minutes -- I believe this is as close to understanding god's will as I'm ever going to get.  I try to do what is in front of me.  I try to do that.

I don't want to take the gift of recovery for granted.  My trials with my disease have made me a unique individual.  There are very few people who have the power to help active alcoholics recover like recovering alcoholics.  MDs can't do it; religious leaders can't, either; and PhDs in matters of the mind can't help like we can.  We can help solve the problems of people who are hopeless.  We are Large People.  Our presence liberates people.  That is an amazing responsibility and an amazing gift.

You don't believe in god?  What god do you not believe in?