Ascription

Ascribe:  To attribute a cause or characteristic to someone or something.  

One of my favorite pastimes is to ascribe bad motives to other people.  I'm sure they're out to Get Me, to do me grievous mental, bodily, and emotional harm.  They're doing it to me.  There's nothing better than waiting a minute or two or hour or day to let things settle down and sort themselves out.  That and talking to other real live human beings to get their take on the matter.

As much as I like flying off the handle.

Peace Frog

While Day Two did not contain any of the drama of Day One it did show me how far I've come, or how far I still have to go; I'm not sure which.  I was blasting along, humming a jaunty, merry tune, traveling about 10% above the speed limit.  I do this as a routine practice because I'm Special Seaweed, a driver of such uncommon talent that normal traffic laws don't apply to me,  so if I happen to be stopped for a traffic violation - such as exceeding the speed limit - you can easily understand that the anger I feel is completely justified.  I grouch and I brainstorm, and I'm permitted to do so. 

I noticed a peace officer parked by the side of the speedway,  shooting video pictures of the cars zipping by.  I tapped my brakes to slow down when I was about 100 from his patrol car, a clever move meant to defeat his radar that I'm sure is effective half a mile away.  Nonetheless, he lets me pass.

I keep my eye on him in the rear view mirror.  I'm a drunk - I have a lot of experience keeping my eye on cops in the rear view mirror because they were there so often.  I watch him pull out and blow by several intervening cars, settle in behind me, and flick on his lights.

"Ah, this takes me back," I thought.

So be it.  I've gotten a few driving certificates in sobriety - none in several years - and I've deserved each and every one of them.    It sure is nice to have car insurance and a valid driver's license, good brakes and tires and working headlights, and a complete lack of empty beer cans, full whiskey bottles, spent joints, and coke residue in the passenger compartment.

The cop comes up and I hand him my license.

"The reason I stopped you, sir," he said.  "Is that you don't have a front license plate on your car.  Why is that? "

"Are you fucking kidding me?" I replied.  "Has my life come to this?  No DUI, no public intoxication, no drunk and disorderly, no felony possession?  A license plate violation?  You fucking stopped me for a license plate violation?"

Frankly, I was a little offended.  I've fallen a long way or I've made a lot of progress, I can't remember which.

He let me off with a warning.  He didn't even do me the courtesy of writing up the ticket.

Whimsical God

Whimsy:  A quaint and fanciful idea; a whim; playfully odd behavior.

Everything goes smoothly until it doesn't.

God should make a better effort at giving me exactly what I want.  God should be by the phone in case I call and if I say I'm going to call and I don't, God should be cool with that.  My needs are very specific and I articulate them clearly - this is why it's so frustrating when God doesn't fill them.  It's not like I'm being vague, for chrissake.  I'd be happy to write the demands down on a piece of paper if that would be helpful.  Sometimes I think God isn't very smart.

Because SuperK and I sold our condo without first securing a place to move to, I had to head in the direction of my new home.  I split the drive from The New City to Vacation Town into two segments: Day One was through the rain and the mountains so I planned on 7 hours and 15 minutes; Day Two was a straight shot through the flatlands so I was clocked in at about 8 hours.  I made it exactly 7 hours into Day One before there was a total stoppage of traffic on the speedway.  I turned off the engine and leaned my seat back, and sat there for 3 hours.  It was pouring so I couldn't even get out of the car and walk around.  I could have walked to the hotel in this time.  I briefly considered abandoning my car.  This did not please me but I was still nice to the hotel staff when I did arrive.

On Day Two I did not flatten a tire or have to stop my car for 3 hours.  

Day Three is a whole another matter.

Hard

Hard:  Severe; harsh; unfriendly; brutal.

My sponsor rang me up on the telephone yesterday.  He was reading a book on spirituality and one of the chapters made him think about me - he told me the name of the book and the specific chapter.

"You should go buy this book and read this," he said.  "You're too hard on yourself."

Man, he should have seen me 20 years ago.  I was positively self-homicidal.  I had a trunk full of whips and chains and that weapon that looks like a bowling ball with spikes on it, and I used these items on my own hide each and every day.  With relish.  I've always said that if someone treated me the way I treat myself I'd pop 'em in the nose, and I've never hit anyone, ever.

You might be tempted to ask:  "Why was your sponsor calling you?"  To which I'd reply: "That's an excellent question," avoiding any good explanation.    But the point is that I need to talk to other people because I can't always see what kind of spot I'm wedged into.  I think I'm doing OK but all I'm doing is bullshitting myself.

The Doors of Perception

Ruined:  The state of being a ruin, destroyed or decayed.

I enjoyed the topic of today's meeting: "What brought you through The Doors and into The Rooms?"

Did you know that The Doors got their name from Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception" detailing his experiences when he was experimenting with mescaline?  True story, unless I'm making it up.

Anyway, the secretary called on a few of the old-timers to share and they used words like "ruined" and "broken."  I still take some mild offense at being coined "insane" and "sick" even though I'm both and in spades.  

I like to hear the evolution of alcoholics who are drinking when the alcohol and drugs are still working.  Let's face it: if you're an alcoholic then alcohol fills that gaping, hungry hole right in the center of your being.  Until it doesn't and eventually it won't.  At the beginning the alcohol provides relief for a significant amount of time.  I was sober and full of fear and remorse; I drank and the alcohol hit me like a sledgehammer, melting away my worries; and then I drank too much and suffered the consequences.  When I was young my constitution allowed me to bull through the pain in a somewhat functional way.

But the sweet spot of relief between the fear and the consequences, the spot when the alcohol was working like a well-oiled machine, got shorter and shorter, the constitution began to weaken under the relentless attack of the alcohol, until it spot vanished like a soap bubble, with a tiny pop.  We call this "the jumping off point."  The alcohol has quit working.  We can't imagine life with or without alcohol.

This is a bad point.

Patient Waiting

Patient:  content to wait if necessary; not losing one's temper while waiting; longminded; not bothered with having to wait; not unwilling to wait.

There is a whole shitload of "waits" in that definition.

Throughout the condo selling process I have supplemented my regular writing - my "Can you believe how bad I have it?" writing - with a daily log of my thinking, fears, projections of likely and/or preferred outcomes, my desires, etc.  It's kind of a running commentary of insanity in action.

It has been a blast reading it from time to time to check my progress in dealing with life.  It's amazing to see how much divergence there is between what I think will happen and what actually happens.  The results are totally all over the place.  Sometimes I get exactly what I want and this works out well and sometimes I get exactly what I want and it blows up in my face.  I have to watch what I pray for because I have no idea what's best for me.  Other times I'm thwarted and stymied and frustrated and then I see that it was all for the beat.  I didn't get what I wanted because it wasn't the best thing for me.

"Thank god I didn't get that," I say, relieved.  It's only in retrospect that I can see what I wanted wasn't even in my best interests.

It's not unusual for me to see how my thinking evolves when I'm not in such a hurry to get what I think I need.  I'm impatient for everything to work out how I want it to work out when I want it to work out, but if I wait solutions present themselves.  Good solutions, not the crap I come up with.  In reality all I can do is move forward, trying to do god's will to the best of my ability, staying the course when things seem right and changing tack when they don't.  There's a lot of patient waiting required.

Not my strong suit.

Dark Meanings

When I'm not working my spiritual program of recovery I fall under the laughable illusion that people are thinking about me.  This is not the case.  Nobody is thinking about me.  I loved the fact that a lot of people didn't know that I was gone for 5 months this winter.

"Oh, you were gone?" they said.  Lots of them said this - not a few.  Lots.

It's not always even a case of working a program or not - sometimes life is stressful and it's silly to imagine otherwise.  But when I'm feeling the stress I can hallucinate up some wild stuff.  I can read dark meanings into everything.  

It Takes What It Takes

I believe that the war I've been having with myself is over.  The Great Stevie Seaweed vs. Steven Weedsofthesea has come to an end.  Millions were killed and maimed, countryside was laid to waste, cities ground into dust - all within the Seaweed brain.  We've gone from fury to anger to annoyance to self-righteous indignation to calm acceptance in only a matter of 4 or 5 days.  While this doesn't seem too impressive it is better than the amount of time it used to take which was forever.

I had some good conversations with old friends about the specifics of my cartoonishly bad treatment at the hands of a cruel and unjust world.  Some advice that comes up over and over is to try to take the long view.

"How important is this?" I'm asked.  
"Pretty fucking important," I reply.
"Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?" they say.
I've never understood that question.  I want to be right AND happy.  I want them both.  I want it all.

It took this amount of time to straighten out my thinking.  It took what it took.

Stressors

Stress:  The internal distribution of force per unit area (pressure) within a body reacting to applied forces which causes strain or deformation.

What?

Stress:  Emotional pressure suffered by a human being or other animal.

Oh.

As I've been wallowing slowly through this whole process I've had to remind myself that I'm still a human animal - I'm near godlike status to be sure - and I'm still subject to human animal responses.  I can get better at managing my outsized, oversized, over-exaggerated reactions to stressors but I can't make them go away.  I'm still a human dude despite all of the buzz to the contrary.

Seaweed!  Seaweed!  Seaweed!

I believe that I still have every single defect that I had when I started my recovery; it's just that they're mostly often caged up.  There's no lock on the cage - there's no door on the cage - there's no bars on the cage - really, it's more like a piece of cardboard lying on the ground, so the defects can definitely get out and rumble around if they want.

Strife and Contention

Struggle:  Strife; contention; great effort.

The topic this morning was about The Process of getting sober.  How it comes - the answers, serenity, sobriety, acceptance - when we quit our struggling, our ceaseless, ceaseless struggling.
I ponder again The Inspection Report.  This struggle has affected my ego AND my wallet so it was bound to provoke an outsized reaction.  I've learned so little but one less that has stuck is that "This, too, shall pass."  I need to soldier on from time to time.

On Day One my response was along the lines of "Over my dead body" or perhaps "Go $#!! yourself."  I kept my mouth shut as I have been taught to do and went to bed, secure in the knowledge that any action I took would have made things worse.

On Day Two, somewhat calmer if by "calmer" you mean "not in a murderous rage."  I was still unwilling to cede an inch but I wasn't bent out of all recognizable shape by the situation.  My attitude was still basically pretty shitty - it's just that I didn't feel so vindictive about it.  I still planned on taking these $#!! the $#!! out but I with a kind smile on my face.  Working my program on Day Two yielded the reminder that "we cease fighting everyone and everything."  I appreciated the wisdom but firmly ignored its application in my life.

The problem with all of this is that I end up hurting myself.  My ego blinds me to my own best interests because it's so unwilling to be taken advantage of in the sex, money, and power department.  I know this logically but I still can't get past it all of the time emotionally.  I'm an emotional suicide bomber.  I'll blow myself up if I take you out, too.

So on Day Three I still felt some angst but was open to compromise   I thought maybe I could split the expenses with these $#!!s I began to see that even if I get stuck with the whole expense that it's going to be in my best interests in the long run.

Knowing I needed to soldier on in my Program work I heard the following: "We quit struggling and we relax and take it easy.  We're surprised at how the right answers come."  I decided to investigate exactly how much this was going to cost me.  I probably should have done this before losing my shit at being screwed out of a huge amount of money.  If I'm going to object passionately to some outrageous bill the least I could do is put an actual number on it by talking to some . . . you know . . . experts in the field rather than hallucinating up some wild crap.  I took some action.  Thinking was taking me where it usually takes me: Down the Worm Hole.

Of course I found that I had grievously overestimated the cost.

Imagine that.

The Infuriation

Infuriate:  To make furious or mad with anger; to enrage.

The inspection report came back and The Inspector found some problems that Need To Be Fixed!  Right Away!!  Or Else!!!  This was not a surprise but it still managed to infuriate me.  I was all teed up to be infuriated anyway and the infuriation was instant and covered many levels and degrees of nuance.  I was infuriated in ways that I expected and in some that came as a bit of a surprise.  The intensity of the infuriation always surprises me even though I have a long history of being infuriated.  Today I explored infuriation in depth, in tone, and in timbre.

Luckily The Report came back late on a Saturday which annoyed me in its own right.  Any action items that need to be addressed will require outside expertise, people who won't be available until the work week begins, providing me with plenty of stewing-in-my-own-juices time, should I decide to make good use of this time which I almost certainly will.  I'm not going to waste a good opportunity to be angry.  Such opportunities are precious and deserve to be suckled.

The things that The Inspector wants addressed were news to me and the things I was sure he'd address were left unspoken   So much for projecting how to respond to things that ended up requiring no response.  Another example of an excellent use of my time handling future events that don't come to pass.  This is why I try not to live in the future.  I suck at it.

When I'm jazzed up I've learned to keep my fricking mouth shut.  Angry action is bad action which leads to poor results.  I did speak frankly with my real estate agent to get the stuff off of my chest with someone who's on my side - she's a friend - and was amazed and amused at how insane the stuff sounded coming out of my mouth.  I'm glad I didn't have the chance to speak them to others.  The stuff sounded terrible and ridiculous and infantile.   

I find that a lot of things resolve themselves all by themselves, without my meddling and fiddling around with them.  Things fall into place, solutions present themselves, intuitive thoughts bubble to the surface.

"We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us."

Pondering, Pondering

I have been pondering The Inspection.  I'm not a very good ponderer.  It's counterproductive for me.  Pondering in the Seaweed household is more along the lines of Imagining The Worst.  I don't have a lot of good thoughts about The Inspector and all of the faults that I'm sure he located in my two room apartment.  I'm sure that the report he gives to the buyers - who will feel very happy to find out that the place that they want to buy is riddled with serious structural and operational problems which will render their existence a living hell, a fiery pit of molten steel in which they will be dipped over and over, for all eternity - will be dark and depressing.  As you can see they would be very disappointed if everything turned out OK.

Actually I walked into the lobby two hours after these people were supposed to show up, certain that they would be gone by then.  There they sat.  I mean: two rooms.  What were they doing?  X-rays?  Infrared analysis?  MRI scans of the joists?  I pretended to look for my mail or something and I did a little minor eavesdropping, a defect of character that I pretend I don't have anymore.  I'm glad I did because it gave me the opportunity to be infuriated at the crap The Inspector was telling the real estate agent he was going to be putting in his report.

I projected that it's going to cost me a lot of money.  This got my hackles all worked up again and I decided to stand my ground.  I wasn't going to budge an inch.  Not an inch.

Did I mention that when I opened my mail there was a check for $300 from the state treasurer? Apparently I had sent in an estimated tax payment that I did not, in fact, owe.  I'll tell you this: if I throw a bitch about paying any more money to these people I should be tossed into that fiery pit.  I almost felt like my higher power sent me the check just to shut me up.

Didn't work, of course, but it was a nice gesture.

Wattles and Hackles

Hackle:  By extension (because the hackles of a cock are lifted when it is angry), the hair on the nape of the neck in dogs and other animals; also used figuratively for humans.  

On occasion I take the time to write about some terrible problem that's going to befoul my existence prior to the befouling event actually taking place.  This is the recommended technique - it allows me to see what an idiot I am before I move the idiocy forward into concrete, formidable action - only confirming the idiot moniker - and it's also an irrefutable record of how much time I spent on a problem that either never happens or is easily overcame when it does come to pass.

So far everything has gone swimmingly in the selling of The Real Estate.  It didn't take very long at all; it was minimally disruptive to my busy, busy life as an amateur philosopher; we received an offer well above what we actually paid for the place; we have an extra month before we have to move out, important because we don't exactly know Where We're Going!  an error I've made before without learning any helpful lesson.  Today the buyers are having The Inspection.  This is the part of the process where people hire someone to find any hidden problems that the scumbag sellers are trying to sweep under the carpet.  Not surprisingly someone who is hired to find problems is usually going to find a few problems.  What's he going to say: "Eh.  Looks fine to me."  The buyers would feel gypped.  They'd think: " I could have found no problems all by myself and at considerably less expense."  If someone is going to give $300 to a certified inspector who drives around in a beat up pickup truck then it's important to be upset about someone trying to screw you over by not disclosing serious defects.  

I could feel my hackles rising this morning.  Fortunately, I have some excellent hackle-lowering devices even though I don't actually have any hackles.  I took a nice walk downtown for my morning meeting, where I was asked to share, not a common event.  It's amazing how often I'm called on to talk when I need to talk.  I didn't need to share the details of The Real Estate with anyone - I just needed to be an active part of the group.  Then I called some friends who have a similar perspective - I want to make sure my great big old ego doesn't spring up and ruin things over the matter of a few dollars.  It helps to have friends of all stripes and stations.  I need to talk to someone who has experienced a similar outrage at being taken advantage of and walked back from the Precipice of Rage.  It's nice to hear someone say: "How important is that (fill in the blank) going to be in a few (fill in the blank)?"

"How much (fill in the blank) are we talking about?" 

Running My Mouth

Instinct:  A natural or inherent impulse or behavior.

The negotiation process for our Real Estate was a good reminder of exactly what kind of person I am.  Now to be fair, I'm a hell of lot better than I used to be and I'm working steadily at becoming better still but the old Seaweed is still down there, alive and kicking.  He isn't running wild anymore but he is intact and functional.  He wants Money! Power!! Sex!!! and he isn't afraid to take out the occasional eye or break the odd arm  or try to run through the un-run-through-able wall once his instincts get revved up.  I saw that as the Buyers and I diddled around with pretty meaningless things.

"Yeah?"  I got ready to say. "Well, #$!! you, you worthless piece of *&%!!.  I want to move out on the 27th, not the 28th."  

I believe we call this shooting oneself in the foot or cutting off one's nose to spite oneself.  It's a perfect example of the ego asserting itself; as in, "I know this is too much food for me to eat but I'm not going to give you any of it."  This type of behavior is exactly why I'm kept chained in a small, windowless box most of the time, and I still manage to muck things up.  I can't help it - I want to win even if I don't care anything about what I'm winning.

The spiritual part of my program has really helped me with this.  I'm opinionated and competitive, mentally, emotionally, physically.  I'm intensely competitive.  I have a tendency to separate things into right or wrong, good or bad, black and white and if you don't happen to agree with me then I'm going to show you the error of your ways.  I'm going to convert you to the correct way of thinking and believing.

Yeah, well, that's fucking great.  Who appointed me Ruler of the Universe?  Well, I did, of course, an action that falls well within my authority as Ruler of the Universe.  

I have this sponsor who reminds me to place principles before personalities.  He does this even though it's a concept firmly ensconced in our Traditions - he knows my tendency to avoid reading our literature or, more egregiously, try to change anything in the literature that I don't like.  When I'm growing spiritually I try to see things from a different point of view.  Often I learn something valuable.  Mostly, though, even if I don't change my belief structure much I don't fall into the trap of ridiculing someone else or trying to convert them.  I try to see things from their point of view.  What usually happens is I get to a nice place of acceptance.

Fake Estate

Real Estate:  Property that cannot easily  be moved, usually buildings and the ground they are built on.

I like this definition a lot.  It explains that you are going to be looking at something that is real.  This is a great comfort to someone who is going to spend a lot of money to buy something that they want to live in.  If a thriving market in Fake Estate springs up I definitely want to be on that wave.

For something as large and momentous as the selling of real estate the owners of the property should feel free to make use of various secret weapons.  All's fair in love and war and whatever 
I'm trying to manipulate, an endless category that expands and shrinks as I see fit.  Some of the secret weapons are very well-publicised and therefore not that secret: keeping the place clean; no dirty underwear hanging from the light fixtures; no clean underwear hanging from the light fixtures; nothing whatsoever hanging from the light fixtures.  There's a whole chapter in the selling of real estate book about the dos and don'ts of light fixtures.

It's also very important for the seller to vacate the premises when prospective buyers visit.  I'm not sure I understand the reasoning behind this; who better to answer questions about the real estate than the people who live in the real estate?  And from what I've seen about the real estate agents I don't think I could do any more damage or cause any more confusion or delays than they do.  Then again, maybe I'm not the kind of person you want wandering around a house when other people are in it.  SuperK, sure - that seems reasonable.

There are other techniques unique to each selling individual.  Many years ago SuperK and I rented a cabin in upper MI that the owners had obviously furnished with crap that they bought at yard sales or that they dug out of the town dump.  On top of the kitchen cabinets, nearly invisible, was this small, green ceramic sculpture of the head of a frog or other reptile.  It was beyond crude.  SuperK and I howled with delight that someone put this out as a decoration and then we stole it.  I don't generally steal things but this I could not resist.  We named the demon Mr. Head and he has traveled the world with us.  We frequently turn to him for counsel and advice.

When we listed our condo for sale we stuck Mr. Head in a small plant in the kitchen.  He wasn't flamboyantly displayed but he wasn't hidden.  We alternately asked him to charm the buyers or put them under a hex or spell, answer questions, turn out lights, provide information on the average monthly utility bill, whatever needed to be done.  He tried but he wasn't cutting the mustard.  He's more of a traveler than a resident advisor.

Under duress SuperK allowed me to reintroduce a small glow-in-the-dark figurine that I bought in a toy store in Sunderland, Mass for $1 many years ago.  He must have been on sale.  SuperK had relegated this Senor Mysterioso to a table drawer as part of our staging process.  Senor M is purported to have many hidden powers so I prevailed upon her to allow me to let him once again see the light of day.

"Do what you gotta do," she sighed.

Someone offered to buy the real estate a couple of days later.

Goats and Their Getting

Get My Goat:  A commonly repeated story which purports to explain the phrase's origin is that goats were placed with racehorses to keep them calm. When ne'er-do-wells who wanted the horse to race badly removed it, i.e. they 'got someone's goat', the horse became unsettled and ran badly.

I was getting annoyed yesterday at the people who are buying our condo because they are very annoying people who are doing deliberately doing annoying things to get my goat.  You could very well say that they're cads and ne'er-do-wells.  Now in my defense I have my ego right-sized most of the time . . . well, some of the time . . . um, it's not out of the question to have my ego right-sized once a year.  I did my writing which usually helps but in this case only served to show me in black and white how unreasonable these bounders were.  So I picked up the phone.  My phone has gradually shed most of its original 1000 lb weight so that I actually reach for it on a daily basis.  It's liftable.  I can manage it and I'm a 98 lb weakling.

Not to change the subject but why would a goat keep a racehorse calm?  I have no experience in animal husbandry but if I wanted to really piss off a horse I think a goat would be a reasonable choice.  It's like the idea that all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again.  I have this mental image of these huge thousand lb animals with big clumsy hooves trying to repair a broken egg.  If I wanted to smash the shit out of an egg I'd use a horse.

One of the men I called works a remarkably simple program.  He has some truths that he holds dear and he is loyal to them.  I personally see the world with a bit more nuance which can sometimes be a good thing and sometimes be a bad thing.  Nuance allows me to justify bullshit.  It leads me to justified bad behavior.  Anyway, my buddy trotted out the phrase: "And we have ceased fighting anything or anyone even alcohol.  For by this time sanity will have returned."

This was a good passage to consider - the sentences which follow mostly deal with alcohol which is as it should be.  However, the phrase mentions "anyone" - people in other words.  It took some of the stress off of me - it freed me from the need to ascribe motives to someone else's actions.  I didn't have to fight it.  I let it go, let it come to me.

They sent the paperwork.  It was fine.  They weren't thinking about me.  They were probably golfing.  The weather has been very nice. 

Out To Get Me

Confirmation Bias:  A tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses.  

I was doing some reading on the subset of our population consumed with the belief that the world is riddled with big conspiracies.  I'm often flabbergasted when I hear people vehemently proclaim that something that's patently false is the absolute truth.  I can't understand how something so ridiculous can be taken as fact.  Confirmation bias occurs when folks who believe something surround themselves with other folks who believe the same thing.  They watch The Television programs that support their beliefs.  They hear new, even weirder things when they hang around people who believe what they believe until they seem to be getting their news reports from aliens on Pluto.

Now, as a guy who used to sit in dark bars getting shitfaced with other guys doing the same thing, all of us patting ourselves on the back at how much fun we were having and how messed up the world was and why in the hell did we deserve such a bum deal in life, anyhow? I may have a glancing knowledge of conspiracies.  People were Out to Get Me.  One of the greatest benefits of my personal inventory - my honest, searching, and thorough personal inventory - was that I tried to put down on paper what was really going on.  It wasn't a pretty sight.  It looked kind of irrational even to me, to be honest with you.  Still, I could justify most of it if I really worked at it. But then I had to sit down and talk to someone else about it.  My Chicago sponsor quickly disabused me of the notion that any of it was acceptable.  Vehement is a word that comes to mind.  

So here I am, a paragon of acceptance and mental health, world-renowned for my wisdom and insight and compassion, in the midst of this potential financial transaction.  I'm dealing with people who almost certainly aren't thinking about me at all and I'm ascribing all kinds of evil, bitchy motives to them.  They are . . . Out to Get Me.  I am going to be Taken Advantage Of.

I'm doing this writing because I'm pretty sure all of this is going to look Fairly Ridiculous up on my computer screen.  And I have messages out to my sponsor and a couple of other guys who aren't as dumb as I am.  I think I'm going to hear vehement things.  I'm pretty sure of it.

Contingent Seaweed

Contingency:  A possibility; something which may or may not happen.

So we received an offer on our little condominium, and it was just fine and perfectly acceptable, meaning I wasted a lot of time projecting something that didn't happen, one of my most favorite-ist pastimes  It was a bit less than we wanted to get and a bit more than we would have settled for so we signed the paperwork and sent it back to the buyers.  In The Old City there was always some negotiation back and forth on the final price for a piece of real estate - possibly so that both sides can get bitchy and irritable and feel put upon in equal measure.  In the remarkably polite New City the seller sets a price and the buyer pays close to that price or moves on to another property.  Our buyers, with their "not perfect" offer, sent us a note justifying why they were offering less than exactly what we wanted - it was a long, well-researched tome with references and pictures and points.  I personally didn't even read it.  Maybe SuperK did - I really don't know.  You'd have to ask her.  Buy the condo or don't buy it is my analysis - don't waste my time whining otherwise.

The contract we sent back had a couple of minor changes - "contingencies" in the circular semantics of real estate logic - which the buyers had the right to accept or reject.  A contingency can be anything.  It can be very reasonable or you can make something up to screw around with the other person and muck up the whole process.  Adding a contingency can be a little scary because it alters the original signed offer or contract and gives the buyers the ability to say: "Well, go screw yourself because we changed our mind."  Plus, the person receiving the contract with the contingency - it can be either the buyer or the seller; anyone can pluck contingencies out of the thin air to annoy the other party - has a certain period of time to reply to the contingency.  All of this dialogue is channeled through the two real estate agents primarily so there are like 400 people involved and it all becomes very complicated and slow.  It reminds me of two people arguing and asking a mutual friend to pass along the message, even though everyone is sitting right there.  "SuperK, could you tell Suburban Bill that he's really acting like an ass?  And to please pass the salsa?"  

The buyers had until noon today to respond to our particular contingencies and their real estate agent called our real estate agent at 11:59.  I'm not making this up.  If I wanted to be a total dick - which I do so often I'm embarrassed to give you an exact percentage - this is what I would have done.  It was a Dick Move of impressive proportions.  Either that or they went golfing and forgot to do it.  I have to remember that other people are thinking about me as much as I'm thinking about them, which is never.  In my mind these people are deliberately trying to annoy me; in reality they're almost certainly not thinking about me at all.

How could you not think about me?  There aren't enough hours in the day for me to think about myself so I need all the outside help I can get.  Good thoughts, bad thoughts, I don't care as long as you're thinking about me.  Just don't ask me to think about you because that ain't happening.

The kicker is that they added a couple of little pissy things onto the contract, things that could easily have been on the original contract.  I started to get annoyed.  I could feel my ego start to bubble up.  When my sexual gratification or my money is being tampered with I'm clear as to what is going on - when my ego gets tweaked I'm not so sure what's going on.  I think that I've gotten my ego in check until my ego gets tweaked.  I can tell when I start doing things that may harm myself because I don't want someone else to get something over on me.  

I'm my own personal suicide bomber.