The Dude Is Rude

Rude:  Bad-mannered.

I went to my regular Wednesday evening meeting yesterday.  Attendance was a little light, befitting the night before a major holiday.  The young woman who led the meeting was very newly sober so she simply told a little bit of her story.  I was feeling a little thick in my head - not bad thick, just Quaalude thick - and not that I had taken one or more Quaaludes, rather that I'm trying to convey the sensation of being sluggish mentally, which Quaaludes most certainly accomplished  - so I didn't have too much to share.  Plus, I do think the pain of getting sober is fresher for the newer members, making them more sympathetic to the raw emotions of sobering up.  This allowed me to listen instead of preparing my amazing, funny, profound, wise, kind, insightful remarks for public consumption, an activity that takes up most of my available brain power and does not permit me to hear anything anyone else is saying.

It was a nice meeting.  We're funny.  We're kooky.  I don't know how most of us manage to exist in the adult world based on the anecdotes I heard last night.  I loved 'em all.

SuperK spent a lot of years trying to connect with her pretty dysfunctional family.  I thought she was pissing into the wind, so to speak, nevertheless lauding her efforts.  Those of us in recovery, trying to follow a spiritual path, have a responsibility to be the bigger person: "Seek to understand, rather than to be understood."  She spent many frustrating years trying to be the bigger person, never getting anywhere, an obvious result to me as a disinterested observer, until she finally did some good recovery work that has allowed her to step back and let the crazy people alone.

My family - while not as quite as crazy - has most definitely written me out of the daily ebb and flow of their lives.  I think I'm mostly OK with this but, like SuperK, feel an obligation to be the bigger person and make an effort to stay in touch with them.  SuperK, disinterested with my family, has no doubt been rolling her eyes at me.  I sent my sister - with whom I have a distant relationship - a couple of text messages and also actually rang her up.  She has responded to neither, not surprisingly.  

I told SuperK.

"Well, she's a dick," she said, and I'm quoting directly here.

My sister doesn't work and her kids are at school so she has the time for a 5 minute phone call or to tap out a short reply.  I can be understanding, be the bigger person, but rude is rude.  Then again, who's making the calls, sending the texts?  If I keep touching a hot pot does it make sense to blame the pot for my burns?

I don't think so.

Anonymous: Of unknown name; whose name is withheld. 

The topic this morning was anonymity.  I thought the group tore it up.  Anonymity is not an easy concept and it's made even harder by the fact that the room is full of complicated, opinionated people trying to make their voices heard over the voices of everyone else, which is kind of why we have the principle of anonymity.  We discussed personal anonymity, both our own and that of other members; anonymity on social media; anonymity at the level of press, radio, films, and the Internet; anonymity as it pertains to attraction rather than promotion; and, what I believe to be the most important component: anonymity as a tool to help us lose some of our total fascination with our own selves.  The quote is this: "This tradition is a constant and practical reminder that personal ambition has no place in The Fellowship."

I had to laugh as I tried to pay attention to other people as they talked, fighting back the urge to speak myself and set the record straight for everyone else in the room while reading a Tradition that tells me not to think I'm so important.  What a beautiful, complicated, infuriating, wonderful Program we have found.  I looked around and saw a handful of folks that I love like family; a bunch more that I get along with just fine; and a couple of people that drive me to distraction.

I need 'em all.

The Fellowship to me is like one of those controlled skyscraper demolitions where the building collapses straight down through some strategically placed high explosives.  Secretly, I think, we hope that the thing will topple sideways but they always go right down, like a slinky.  There's a lot of fire and noise and smoke, and there's usually some minor damage to surrounding structures, broken windows, car alarms going off, and the like, but basically it all goes off well.  The Rooms are like that to me - controlled chaos, straining to stay together, threatening to fly apart.

Hill of Beans

I had a nice long talk with my sponsor this morning.  He talks, mostly.  It's not unpleasant at all, even though I'm talking to someone who is very clearly, most definitely, no-doubt-about-it dying. He has some lovely spiritual flights of fancy.  From time to time he veers into topics that have been a source of irritation between us in the past, but I simply don't take the bait.  The guy is terminal - I'm not going to argue politics with him.  He has earned the right to talk about whatever he wants to talk about and it makes no sense to me to ruin this time over things that don't amount to a hill of beans.

Then I relapsed with my family.   I took the bait hook, line, and sinker.  I have been trying to call them less and less because I don't think they really enjoy talking to me all that much.  They never call me, that's for sure.  I almost feel like I'm asking out a girl in high school who has told me very clearly, most definitely, no-doubt-about-it that she hates my guts.  While it is my prerogative to keep calling I can hardly express shock and outrage or profess hurt feelings if the call doesn't go well.

The same topics keep coming up, the same stories are shared, the same intractable positions are staked out.  They continue to do things that I don't agree with and they continue to do them without asking me.  I can only assume that they aren't interested in my opinion on these matters based on the fact that they do them all by themselves.  OK, then.  Today, however, I felt like explaining why the perfectly normal things they're doing without asking me aren't in their best interest, like having that ridiculous auction that brought in approximately 3000% more money than I thought they would get if the auction went miraculously well.

Funny, the relationships we have.

Dicking Around With The Program

So here comes the big Thanksgiving holiday.  Please hit me with a shovel.  

A very nice woman that SuperK and I know from a couple of different meetings asked us to join her family for the big holiday meal.  This very nice woman kind of disappeared for a number of months - she stayed sober but I can't imagine that she was doing too much in the Working a Program department.  She mentioned that she and her husband did some entertaining when she was drinking and that she wanted to start doing this again.

Here's the thing: SuperK and I are very nice people - well, we're nice-ish, anyway - so it has not been unusual for us to be invited to do things by other couples.  The problem is that often these are not the healthiest couples on the couple farm.  I think people see our very nice relationship and think: "Hey, let's practice on these people.  We're nice, too!"  They don't see the years of effort and work we've put into our relationship.  So SuperK and I have had a lot of pretty crappy evenings with people who aren't really doing too much in the spiritual growth department, if you know what I mean.  Just because we're nice and fun to be with doesn't mean you're nice and fun to be with.

I realize this may sound a little arrogant.  I don't mean it to be that way.  Trust me - we've had plenty of stops and starts on our couple road to recovery.  But we can see past the flush of the nice invitation to what may lie ahead.  We've got a woman dicking around with The Program; her husband who we've never met, who probably has a whole attic of codependent baggage; a few teen-aged children; that we've never met;  all sitting around a dinner table on a holiday that can be loaded with booby-traps for the healthiest of families.

Uh, no thanks.  We're not holiday test-dummies.

We politely declined, suggesting that perhaps a cup of coffee and a muffin or a lunch might be a more appropriate place to start.

This, of course, pissed off the apparently somewhat less nice woman, not a surprising response by someone dicking around with recovery.  This made our decision easier.  We're not trying to be rude - we do things as a couple all the time - but we don't want to be held hostage by someone trying to regain a semblance of a normal life without being bothered by the work part of the reconstruction.

We're going to go to a meeting and take a hike instead.  I'm going to pack a picnic lunch of turkey sandwiched (turkey), Craisins (cranberries), potato chips (mashed potatoes), sweet potato potato chips (sweet potatoes), and pumpkin cookies (you can figure this one out).  I don't know what to do about the stuffing yet.

Listerine Man II

I've been pondering the dilemma of Listerine Man.  It's so difficult to get sober, isn't it?  I'm glad I'm on this side of drinking, to be honest with you.  But if I find myself in a situation where the solution appears to be drinking anything with alcohol in it, let alone mouthwash, I'm in a situation that is intolerable, a situation that must be changed.  I know this for myself but how do we convey that to someone who thinks that he has a lot to lose?  I feel sorry for the guy - he has a nice house that he doesn't want to leave and he has two small children that he loves a lot who live in the house and he works out of a home office in the house, all nice stuff, important stuff.  I struggle somewhat on how to tell a guy that this is all stuff that he may have to lose.  The Book is very specific about this - never let someone tell you that they have to restore family, finances, career, anything before they can get sober because it ain't true.

I think part of the problem for those of us with some sobriety is that our lives are usually pretty stable.  We're not losing big things anymore.  Not very often.  I can imagine that having someone with a nice house and a stable marriage and some money in the bank tell you that you have to Let Go might be irritating.

It made me reflect on my own life a bit.  Like a lot of alcoholics I was a very promising young man - like a lot of male alcoholics I should point out as the women among us, to a large degree, were not promising young men.  I digress.  I did well enough in high school to get a full scholarship to a good college, where I excelled.  In fact, I did so well that I was accepted early into optometry college - most of my classmates had degrees but I slipped in early by taking summer school and loading up on extra classes during the school year.  One time I had 7 final exams - 7!  So here I am, cruising along, drinking more and more, struggling more and more to complete my coursework - it's hard to remember in the morning what you've read the night before when you're drinking 3 quarts of Colt 45 and smoking a couple of joints every night - until my 5th year of college, when the drinking took me down.  I just couldn't keep up with the coursework and still drink as much as I wanted, so I did what a good drunk does - I chose to drink.

Yeah, they kicked me out.  4 1/2 years of college down the spit sink.  4 1/2 years of working toward a very specific goal and I didn't care enough to right the ship.

I drank uncontrollably for about 5 years until I somehow managed to pull it together enough to get a decent job managing a small office for a home health company.  Hard-working, bright, and charismatic like most drunks, I excelled again and was promoted 2 times in quick succession, ending up running a much larger office with more employees.  Again, the drinking became more important than the job and I was demoted in a very public and humiliating fashion.

When I came into The Fellowship I had no illusions that I could hang onto anything and still get sober.  Mostly because I didn't have anything left to hang onto.  I think the point is that I've earned my chair and I can tell someone that sobriety is more important to me than anything else I've got.

Various Departments

I received an update this morning - early this morning - from the Visa application center from hell.  They seem to enjoy sending distressing notes out at times when a response is impossible.  It almost seems willfully cruel.  Our documents remain unaccounted for so the employee from hell has forwarded our inquiry to something called the Concerns Department.  Our stuff was being pondered by the Escalation Department before.  It's hard to tell if this new department is a better department to be in.  At one point the responses came from the Incomplete Documents Department.  They seem to have a lot of departments devoted to correcting mistakes.  I bit my tongue and didn't suggest that they get the Find My Fucking Passport Department involved. It would seem to be the most appropriate department to engage at this point.

So we wait.

I called my sponsor this morning.  He is in pain until he takes some pain medication at which point he drifts away.  I feel like I'm sitting in his room holding his hand.  He talked a little today but mostly he wandered around lost, throwing out comments about whatever was on The TV or offering general expressions of discomfort - this from a guy who never complains about anything except the government, a very popular thing to complain about.  I told him a few stories - mundane stuff that he seemed to enjoy, maybe because it takes his mind off of the pain he's feeling.  He has been trying to meditate and pray but it's hard because of the pain.  He said that yesterday he was thinking about god's love and was struck by the enormity of this love and our almost total inability to grasp even a tiny part of it.

One of my favorite meditations involves a visualization of a scene that includes both a night sky full of stars and a large, well-lit city, full of people.  My attention is directed back and forth between the two conflicting images - the idea is to wonder at the beauty and power of limitless nature while imagining how connected one is with all of the life here on earth.  I was struck by how similar my sponsor's images were to mine.

And here's the bad thing - the conversation took longer than I thought is was going to take.  I had something that I wanted to do - some stupid, crap thing - and my brain was urging me to finish up with my friend and move into my day.  I knew how selfish this was even as I was fighting off the distraction.

I did not move into my day.  I sat down, with my earplugs in, closed my eyes, and sat with my friend until he asked to be excused.

Listerine

A friend of mine has been struggling with his marriage.  He has two small children and a wife who does a little alcoholic drinking on the side as well as in the front with the side yard not being out of the question.  He has been trying to hold his family together but it isn't going very well.  I applaud his efforts - seeing a counselor on his own and also with his wife in addition to the usual Program outreach.  As a man who generally can't find his ass with both hands I try to stay out of the advice business.  My track record as a low-grade idiot doesn't qualify me to tell people where to get a good hamburger let alone pass out marriage counseling or career advice.  He's doing the right legwork and he has a sponsor that the talks to on a regular basis.  Our conversations are much more infrequent so I tell him to listen to people that are getting the frequent updates.

A few days ago he told me that he had been having the occasional nip on the Listerine bottle. Drinking mouthwash is dicey business for just about anyone but this dude is a diabetic so god in his heaven only knows what kind of risks he's taking.

This time I gave out some advice with a Capital A, along the lines of: "If there is something going on in my personal life: marriage or child-rearing issues, problems with my parents or financial difficulties or anything at work - I don't give a shit what it is - that's leading me to a plastic mouthwash bottle on a regular basis I'm going to take a long, hard look at the situation."

There is nothing worth dying for.

Additional Particulars

SuperK and I are trying to take a vacation to India.  This morning the operative word is "trying."  We will go as long as the Indians permit us access to their country which is dubious at the moment.  We sent in our laughably long application a couple of weeks ago - faithfully, to the best of our honest ability, completing everything required: the application itself along with many, many forms, copies of forms, a lengthy check list, and two copies of the fucking checklist.  I thought the checklist was for the sender, not the receiver - are they telling me they don't know what forms they're supposed to get?  They also required our passports and copies of our passports - which they were getting - and FedEx pre-paid return envelopes and copies of the pre-paid return envelopes.  There was something called an Additional Particulars form.   I didn't see a Particulars form anywhere so I don't know what the "additional" referred to - why didn't they just put everything on the Particulars form and be done with it?

I'm guessing these people don't have a copy machine.  I'm surprised we didn't have to send in an entire copy machine with the application.

My In Box contained a message from the Visa people - I opened this email which detailed our shortcomings right after I got up.  As you might imagine, this information wrecked my Quiet Time.  It was 6 in the morning, long before the office opened, and a Monday as well, usually the worst time to try to call some totally screwed up contracted company servicing a foreign country in a city far, far from mine.

Our 11th Step suggests that a logically interlinked program of prayer, meditation, and self-examination is going to produce more powerful results than any of the three taken alone.  Being Too Cool For Prayer I had neglected this leg of the stool for most of my sobriety.  Then, because I try to stay teachable, I started to hear some people in Vacation City talk about prayer changing the person doing the praying, not the thing or person or whatever being prayed to.  I liked this approach so I started some very tentative praying, trying to be careful not to tell my Higher Power what to do or to pray for specific results or to ask that other people be cured of any maladies or defects they might have that are annoying me.

The Step includes this phrase: "Just saying (a favorite prayer) over and over will often enable us to clear a channel choked up with anger, fear, frustration, or misunderstanding, and permit us to return to the surest help of all - our search for god's will, not our own, in the moment of stress."

I used my own little mantra to great effect on my current Problem of Prosperity.  Every time a negative, bothersome, worrying thought entered my head I spoke the series of words I use to try to calm myself.  Remember when you were 3 years old or maybe a cable news commentator and you'd try to win an argument by simply shouting louder than your opponent?  That's kind of the idea here - talk over the negative thoughts with some positive ones.  It's not especially deep or creative but it works, and some times the simplest ideas are the best.

When All Else Fails - Pool Story!

How about a pool story?  I usually get a good pool story every couple of months.  I'll probably tell my sponsor about it later on, probably more than once - he's a little forgetful at this point.  He'll get to say "Principles before personalities" which is one of the things he tells me all the time, a strong indicator that I suck at it.   

There's this little old man that shows up at the pool from time to time.  He does some walking and he also does a hilarious imitation of a back stroke - he looks like a baby bird trying to peck its way out of an egg - where he takes up both sides of whatever lane he's hogging.  I almost ran headlong into him a few weeks back when he jumped into the lane I was using without giving me a heads up.  I could be more aware of my surroundings, I guess, but I have on befogged goggles and mostly I'm trying not to drown or strangle for lack of oxygen.  I don't mind sharing a lane in the least but please alert me so that we don't conk heads.  I was a little pissed.  Two men swimming in opposite directions running into each other is not in my exercise routine, and I've done it a couple of times.  It's no fun.

Yesterday, as I was enjoying a post-swim soak in the hot tub, I watched a friend have a confusing conversation with the bird back-stroke guy about who owned which towel.  The towels were close shades of pewter or beige or something.  Eventually, they got it sorted out. Always the funny man I suggested to my friend that he needed an interior decorator if he wanted to be sure that he got the right towel.  He leaned over the hot tub and said that bird guy likes to use the end hook so he just moves anything that may already be there - towels, gym bags, goggles - and hangs up his own stuff.  My buddy didn't exactly remember what color towel he brought.  He seemed a little pissed - there are like 45 hooks in the pool, most of them empty.

Here's where I come in. . . 

There are 8 showers in the locker room and 8 hooks, leading one to believe that each shower user gets one hook and one hook only.  Nobody gets 2 hooks and 3 hooks is right out.  However, if one should find no hooks available one would be within one's rights to bitch up a blue streak unless maybe someone left something by mistake on one of the hooks, and that stuff could just be dumped on the floor or pitched into a garbage pail - if you can't remember to take your shit with you then maybe you should stay out of my shower room.  When I got into the showers the room was completely empty so I took two hooks, an extravagance that seemed reasonable given the lack of shower-ers.  A few minutes later, shampoo running into my eyes, I see bird man holding my gym bag through the translucent curtain, asking: "Is this yours?"  I just looked at him, debating whether or not to point out that there wasn't anyone else in the fucking room and could he please replace my fucking gym bag?

"Yes?" he pressed, busily rearranging my towel and my gym bag on one hook so he could use the shower right next door and claim the extra hook that I piggishly had taken, a hook which in fact belonged to the shower he was preparing to use.  I had to hold my tongue.  I was trampling on my own shower room rules and had no right to complain, even though the guy reminded me of someone coming into a completely empty movie theater and taking the seat right next to yours.  Yeah, the seat IS empty but really?

I have no idea what the message is here.  Send me a note if it makes sense to you, unless you happen to be the bird back-stroke guy.

More Cancer Stuff

I'm trying to talk to my dying sponsor every day, and I'm getting close.  He spends a fair amount of time on the phone with me.  He's always attended a lot of meetings and is a pretty social guy so I'm guessing it's pretty boring lying in a hospital bed, trying to fight off the disease that's going to kill you.  That was a topic of discussion today - exactly how the cancer kills a person.  Amazing some of the things that two guys can talk about.  It's wasn't about how the cancer kills just anyone, either - it was about how the cancer is going to kill him.

He mentioned recently that the doctors decided to prescribe the pill form of medical marijuana to try to stimulate an appetite that has been compromised by the cancer and the treatment for the cancer - sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.  You don't eat you lose your ability to fight off the attackers, but when food tastes like metal and it makes you nauseous you don't want to eat, and ya gotta eat.  We had a giggle over the pot pill.

"Man, I think you lost your sobriety," I offered.  He giggled.  He's been giggling a lot lately.  He wonders if it's the pot pill - I suspect that the hydrocodone he's taking to combat the cancer pain is probably overwhelming whatever effect the THC is having and he needs both of them, by the way.

He tells me that story every time I call.  I don't care - it's a good story.  I tell him what chores I'm running and what I had for lunch.  I think he enjoys the stories.  I enjoy talking about myself, anyway.

Girly Guy Vs. Guy Guy

Tolerant:  Tending to permit, allow, understand, or accept something.

My sponsor continues his downward slide.  If you ask me I'll tell you that this is NOT what I signed up for.  I think more along the lines of good things - sunny mornings and fresh-baked cookies and kitty cats, that kind of stuff.  Death?  Not so much.  I still labor under the illusion that pain and suffering should be optional and No . . . I am NOT 5 years old.

I would not say that tolerance for others is one of my strong suits.  Honestly, I don't know what any of my strong suits are.  I may not have any strong suits.  It may all be weak suits.  In fact, I laughed out loud when I read the definition of the word "tolerant."  Guffaw comes to mind as a qualifier.  If I had been drinking a glass of milk some would have come out of my nose.

There's a Program guy back in The Old City who was never one of my favorite people.  I wouldn't say that I actively dislike him just that he has certain attitudes about life that rub me the wrong way.  He's not a bad guy - he has plenty of friends but I don't really consider myself one of them.  More of a fellow traveler, a comrade-in-arms, someone I'd help but not hang out with.

Anyway, the dude is stopping by every day to visit my sponsor.  I wouldn't have expected this but isn't there something about expectations in our literature?  To wit: as my expectations increase so does my tendency to act like an ass-wipe?  I'm seeing the dude differently - he's making a hell of an effort.

There's Program guy here in Vacation City that I know casually but don't consider a close friend.  He's kind of a Guy Guy and I'm more of a Girly Guy so we don't meet in the middle too often - he's the kind of Guy who was always beating me up.  I was talking to my Vacation City sponsor yesterday about the death watch and he mentioned that this Guy Guy had also recently lost a long term sponsor to cancer.  At my meeting last night I had a nice talk with Guy Guy about this stuff.  It was a good talk.  Turns out he's OK.  I have learned some patience in my life, letting things come to me and evolve and clear up - I feel better about Guy Guy and I think it was a relationship that didn't have a chance to establish itself without such a common experience.

Could I maybe look for the good in someone instead of the bad?

Dammit anyway.

I am talking to my Old City sponsor every day at this point.  His cancer has a lot of momentum and is romping forward gleefully.  He's a hospice patient which means that his care now revolves around pain management and end of life quality issues.  Our conversations have been on the topic of death and dying, being prepared for what's next, spiritual certainty, and other threads that are  grim on the surface but end up being strangely uplifting, and this despite his attempts to steer the conversation back to me and my circumstances.  Alcoholics make a big deal out of standing tall and facing our problems instead of running away in fear.  It isn't pleasant doing this.  I feel weirdly disconnected as I do it.  I can't believe it's me in the middle of these talks, and I'm not the guy who's sick.

I've been swimming against the tide of some low-level anxiety the last couple of weeks.  A lot of the time I can put my finger on what idiotic, unimportant problem of prosperity is bothering me, but this spell has been of the free-floating variety.  I'm not an overly emotional guy - I'm pretty steady-as-she goes in my approach to life, never too up and never too down.  Still, I think this is affecting me in a way that I can't really appreciate right now.  I don't feel Upset!! but I think I'm upset, and I think it's the impending death of this man.

Little Westside Jonny helped a posse of guys from one of my sponsor's regular groups take a meeting into his care facility last night.  He said it was a powerful meeting, listing the same reasons that I've just finished detailing when I asked him to clarify his remarks.  Men and women on a true spiritual path inspire in so many ways.

Retreat!

I went to a men's recovery retreat over the weekend.  I thought it was a little clique-ey. - clearly a lot of the attendees knew each other pretty well from a large men's meeting in the area.  I didn't like the food, either, and the room was beat to shit.  

Other than that, it was great!

Retreat:  A period of retirement, seclusion, or solitude.

I attended a lot of retreats at a very nice retreat center in The Old City, with a lot of guys that I've known for a long time.  Obviously, this new retreat was at a big disadvantage going in.  I wasn't knocking myself out talking to people I didn't know at the old retreats when I had the option of sitting down and catching up with someone I've known for many years but didn't get to see on a regular basis.  Still, I don't think most of the guys I saw this weekend could tell you shit about me.  That's not the best way to be grow your attendance.  I'm pretty outgoing, too, so it's kind of weird when I don't fit in somewhere quickly.   

Maybe they didn't care for me.  Maybe the couldn't stand me.  Maybe some of them hated my guts.  Maybe they're not thinking about me at all.

It was a new thing I tried.  That's the thing about new things - sometimes they suck a little bit.

Eh, what can you do?  I can not go back, I'll tell you that.