Be Thou Quiet

There's a lot of stuff in our literature about relationships.  None of the stuff that I've read implies that we're very good at relationships.  When I say "none" what I mean is"none." There's no nuance here.  I don't believe that makes alcoholics especially unique because relationships are hard for a lot of people who don't abuse alcohol but we do take it to an art form

"Since defective relations with other human beings have nearly always been the immediate cause of our woes . . . "  There's another sentence that I'm too lazy to look up that suggests that our lousy relationship skills cause us almost all of the woe that there is.

I've been talking to a new guy who has two children with two different women and is currently living with a woman who has two kids of her own.  This dude is tinkering on a machine that has a lot of moving parts.  He's working hard on his Program and on all of these important relationships - he's doing well, but understandably struggling from time to time.  He's in a complex of situations any one of which could cause him some headaches.

The advice that comes out of my mouth sounds so obvious, yet is so difficult to put into motion. 

Thou shalt keep thy mouth shut a great deal of the time as the shit that comes out of thy mouth is generally stupid.
Thou shalt think of another before thinking of thyself.  Quit laughing - we're serious here.
Thou shalt do all of this shit even when thy opponent . . . er, loved one . . . is behaving badly which thy loved one will certainly do.  Thou must keep thy mouth shut even when thou be-ist right.

Now we stand on our own two feet as people in recovery - we don't beg or grovel or allow anyone to blame us for everything constantly.  Still, it's up to us to go the extra mile.

Twenty Billion Seems Like A Big Number

Because everyone is sitting on the edge of their respective seats waiting to hear the latest on the state of my mouth and/or the cavities - and I'm using "cavity" here in the sense of "large, open space" rather than in the "diseased tooth" sense - inside my head, especially the ones that are evolutionary mistakes that serve no real salutary purpose but can cause be quite troublesome little fellows, like the human sinus . . . 

My examination yesterday revealed no oral cavity to sinus perforation encore - Yea for me! - but did show a rather vigorous infection by unknown agents in the oral cavity under my right eye - Boo for infections!  but Hurrah for the bacteria!!  Industrious little fellows.  My hat's off to them.  I'm trying not to take it personally.  They didn't get together at a planning meeting and decide to strike deep into the heart of Seaweed's head - rather they just found a dark, wet, nutritious space and got busy.  They're in the same category as that tick that found purchase in my groin area a few weeks back - the fact that they're gross in appearance and purpose doesn't mean I get to judge them.  They're god's bacteria, after all - not mine - doing what they were designed to do.  I've heard that there are 20 billion bacteria in the human mouth.  The occasional infection seems inevitable.

The point here is not to belabor the mechanics and statistics, facts and figures, of my sinus infection or the sinus infection of anyone else.  The point is that, once again, my fears had no basis in fact.

Third Eye Blind

Third Eye:  A mystical and esoteric concept referring to a speculative invisible eye which provides perception beyond ordinary sight.  It is the extension of what the mind knowingly perceives.  

Regrettably for me I believe that the perforation from my oral cavity to my sinus - or, as it's known in the health profession: an oral cavity to sinus perforation - has re-emerged, risen from the ashes of my improving health.  I woke up from a brief nap today to The Taste.  You know The Taste - the sensation one has when one is sick and one's sinus juices are dripping down one's throat.  It is an offensive, objectionable taste.  A taste dealt with by using toothpaste and mouthwash, a taste that one tries to purge from one's body.

This was not unimaginable - it was a possibility.  This will likely require another operation on my mouth.  This is not pleasant news to me.

"Fuck!!" I said.

Then I got into the solution business.  I put on my headphones and fired up a guided aural meditation called Third Eye Chakra Singing Bowls.  I chose this particular meditation because it had the most adjectives of all of the available meditations.  As I sat there, listening to the bowls singing from a third eye perspective, I began to calm down pretty quickly.  The worst possible news is another procedure which I will be able to hack should it come to pass.  Everything else is less traumatic.  

I mean - whadda ya gonna do?  It is what it is.

It's Hard To Change When You're Perfect In Every Way

I like to think that I'm making a token effort to grow as a person.  I may be phoning it in.  I may have decided that it isn't worth the effort, that this is as good as it's going to get.  It's hard to change, especially when you are totally in love with yourself.

"What's the point?" I muse.  "I'm perfect in every way."

I'm glad SuperK is, at best, a casual reader of this stuff, for she would be annoyed that I keep bringing up the INTJ shit.  I really am trying to keep an open mind about information that may not paint me in the best light.  I really do try to keep the spotlight trained on myself although, lord knows, I'd rather slice and dice the character defects of other people.  They are SO obvious.

I'm reading a modern translation of one of the world's great spiritual books.  A lot of it I find kind of boring.  There's a lot of stuff about why this particular religion's modus operandi is the best one; indeed, the only right one.  But there's a lot of good, solid spiritual sense in there, too.  I'm trying to look past the stuff I don't like and absorb the stuff that I do.

Here's a few verses, mixed up a little for continuity's sake: "You have no right to criticize you brother or look down on him.  For god has accepted them to be his children.  They are god's servants, not yours.  They are responsible to him, not to you.  Let him tell them whether they are right or wrong."

And from our literature:  "Putting out of our minds the wrongs others had done, we resolutely looked for our own mistakes.  Though a situation had not been entirely our fault, we tried to disregard the other person involved entirely.  Where were we to blame?  The inventory was ours, not the other man's.  Where other people were concerned, we had to drop the word 'blame' from our speech and thought."

I mean really, how different is the thinking here?

The Doom Project

Regret:  To feel sorry about (a thing that has or had not happened), afterthink; to wish that a thing had not happened, that something else had happened instead.

I like the idea of wishing that something else happened.  That's me - I don't even know what I want as long as it's something different.  Most Earth People don't understand that for an alcoholic - especially one who has been drinking for a long time - the goal isn't necessarily to feel better.  We're just trying to feel different.  We don't want to feel whatever it is we're feeling.  We hate it so much that we do things that make us feel worse.

Else:  Other; in addition to previously mentioned items.

Projection:  A forecast or prognosis obtained by extrapolation.
Doom:  Destiny, especially terrible; an impending severe occurrence or danger that seems inevitable.

There's a great Black Sabbath song called Hand of Doom.  It's on an album called Paranoid.

Paranoid:  Exhibiting extreme and irrational fear or distrust of others.

I don't have much regret in my life but I still have a powerful capacity for projecting doom into the future.  That's not true - I have an ability to see doom in the future as a subset of my projecting skills.  The first sentence made it sound like I was shooting doom from the present into the future.  The fact of the matter is that I have very little doom handy.  This is why I'm forced to imagine implausible outcomes.  But Shooting Doom or Doom Projectiles would both be excellent names for rock bands.

Basically I'm just looking up cool words here.  I have no real point to all of this.  The thread that presented itself to me today is one of my endlessly recurring loops - why so little regret for what has transpired and why so much fear of a bad outcomes?  My history, my experience would suggest that I have little to fear in the future. Yet there I am - living in pain.  I don't get it.  It's irrational.

The Car Guy

So I finally talked SuperK into letting me replace my 2009 year Very Expensive Car.  You know - the one with Very Expensive Tires that attract nails and screws from distant galaxies, far, far away.  The perfectly fine car that's working just really perfectly fine?  And when I say "talked" I mean "bitched, whined, complained, go to your thesaurus and find other synonyms for boorish behavior, etc." until she was very close to driving to the nearest car outlet and buying something, anything to get me to shut up.

As an ex-salesperson I try to be open and honest when I'm dealing with current-salespeople. For instance, the first guy I spoke with worked at a distant dealership so I told him that it made sense for me to drive a car much closer to my home and - if I did that - I would give the guy who did all the work the benefit of the doubt.  I don't mean to suggest that I would take it in the shorts to be accommodating - rather that I'd at least let the worker guy know what was going on.  The guy who did the work was good at what he did but the dealership was a little stingy with their trade-in allowance.  I sent a couple of leading emails to this guy to see if he would budge on the price but didn't get anywhere.

So there I am, sitting down with a third guy.  We sort of agree on the price of his car and he starts to figure out a value for my trade-in.  I had taken the time to visit a used car lot so I had a number he needed to beat or I was going to go back to the used car place before I bought anything else.  I wasn't trying to force his hand - his offer was his offer - but I wasn't going to turn any residual money down, either.

"What was the number they gave you?" he asked.

I replied with a pretty honest number.  It was about 5% higher than the number that I . . . you know . . . actually got.  I didn't feel too bad about this . . . you know . . . minor lie.  It wasn't like I said the number was 6 or 7% higher - that would have been an inexcusable lie.  In my lying defense I wouldn't have expected him to show me the paperwork detailing the mark-up of the vehicle based on what they paid the previous owner.  Nobody's lying here - although technically I was indeed lying.  I soothed my soul by considering the fact that I wasn't putting him in a position to lie - I didn't demand to see proof of the dealer profit.  If he had asked what I needed as a trade-in allowance instead of what the offer was it would have been easier on me in the lying department.  So obviously this is all his fault.

He got close to what the actual offer was.  I thanked him, and said I'd go get a check from the used car place and then give him a call to set up another visit.  

"If I can make up the difference do we have a deal?" he asked.  Sure, I replied.  He made up the difference.  I was confident that he didn't want me to leave the dealership.  When he was talking to his management about the extra money I decided to tell him that I was going to get in touch with the second guy, the guy who did all the work.  I felt slightly bad that the work guy wasn't going to get the business, but not bad enough to toss a few thousand dollars down the drain.

I think I got a fair deal.  I'm happy with the number even though I realize I probably could have gone somewhere else and played everyone off of everyone else and gotten a slightly better deal.  I like to sleep a dreamless sleep.

I drove that dude one hundred miles an hour on the way home.

Take The Cake

A friend of mine took a ten year cake this Saturday.  That's what we do here in Vacation City to celebrate a recovery birthday - we "take a cake."  We "get a chip."  The tradition is for the person celebrating an anniversary to ask a few close friends and advisers to bring the cake in from the kitchen while the group sings Happy Birthday.  Saturday I was in the posse.  I like the guy who was celebrating the milestone - he's an inflexible, intolerant know-it-all like me - so I abuse the shit out of him.  If you read a transcript of what I say to this man you'd think: "What an asshole."  Not him - me.  I'm the asshole.

There's a lot of probing of defects that goes on among the guys I hang out with.  The birthday man and I share a lot of defects - when he talks to me about his bad behavior I can I-Den-Ti-Fy. This only means, however, that every time I see him I dig around in his shortcomings with a red-hot, razor-sharp poker.  He is making a mistake if he thinks he can share his vulnerabilities with me - the only thing he's doing is providing me with fuel for abuse. 

Actually, I only do this with a select group of friends.  This dude knows I love him and that the critiques are coming from a good place, and he also knows that I dish it out because I can also take it.  I never get upset when someone points out one of my many shortcomings - I'm trying to get better and I need all of the help I can get.  It was like the torrent of tick disease advice I got - these people know I worry about my health so they're going to try to help me get over worrying about my health with some pretty funny humor.

Last night I sent a couple of texts to a friend of mine.  SuperK read them and then made me apologize, deeming them too inflammatory.  My friend responded: "Tell SuperK that I am immune to your irony."  I thought this was a very nice turn of a phrase.  Somehow I'll find a way to jam it back down his throat.  Nothing is coming to mind right now - he was quite clever - but I'm very patient and very persistent.

Ticks and Such

First of all, thanks to everyone who pointed out all of the diseases that can be transmitted by a tick bite - these are all very helpful in adding to the mountain of irrational fears that currently occupy most of my waking hours.  One can never have enough shit to worry about, to paraphrase my mother, god rest her soul.

This from our text this morning: "You might think I'd tell myself, 'If alcohol causes so much harm, I will stop drinking.'  But I found countless reasons to prove to myself that alcohol had nothing to do with my misfortunes.  I told myself it was because of fate, because everyone was against me, because things weren't going well."

Boy, I'm telling ya, it was never my fault when I got myself into trouble with my drinking.

Everybody's against me!

I believe my own bullshit.

Introvert Or Asshole?

Probably:  In all likelihood.

So I'm a little self-absorbed if by "little" you mean "totally."  We're all self-absorbed to a degree - it's how we survive the mean streets of Vacation City - but I've got my self-absorption groove working overtime.

I spoke to a friend at my morning meeting about these personality tests.  Her reactions to life mimic mine more often than not, and she lives too large a part of her life in her own head, so I was not surprised to find out she had a very similar personality profile.  

I told SuperK - who sponsors this woman - about the conversation.   She was not impressed.  She believes that I have a tendency to use information like this to justify shitty behavior.  I argue my point all the while suspecting that she's probably right.  In my opinion, however, I try to make use of all kinds of information in an honest attempt to become a little better as a person.  I think I do this but I also think Black Sabbath is the greatest rock band of all time, both opinions open to a whole lot of discussion.

So I took the personality test again, the first time in a few years.  I flew through the damn thing, not hesitating, not considering, just gut reaction - answer - go go go.

INTJ.

The interesting thing is that it listed my introversion as the least dominant of all of my personality traits.  Here's where I hope that this information is actually a force for improvement.  Try to stay with me here - self-justification can get torturous.  I have for many years used my introspective nature to explain my sometimes less than, sort of not as good as . . . well, asshole behavior - in social situations.  I do a reasonable number of social things and I enjoy them for a while and then I'm ready to go. 

"I'm an introvert," I'll say to SuperK, explaining why I stood up abruptly to leave the party or dinner or concert or whatever.

So maybe I'm being a jerk rather than an introvert.  I have a tendency to be somewhat arrogant and dismissive of other people so maybe I'm just being rude.  Maybe I think I'm better than you are.  Maybe I should suck it up when I'm tired of being around other people and try to be nice about it.

Maybe I'm just a jerk some of the time.  The Horror!  The Horror!!

Seaweed V Nature

Slog: To walk slowly, encountering resistance.
Trudge:  To walk wearily, with heavy, slow steps.

A few days after SuperK and I returned from our China trip - 30 hours door to door with a 15 hour time difference - I drove out to my favorite hiking grounds, figuring to burn off some of the jet lag and some of the let-down, the depression that I always fight when I make that jarring transition from hectic, non-stop movement back into my fairly ordinary life.  The older I get the harder the reentry becomes.  I really did feel like shit when I started my hike on a familiar trail, one that climbs steadily up to a great jumble of huge boulders, my stopping point overlooking the river valley a few thousand feet below.

It's going to be difficult for me to convey what a miserable time I had.  As we say, when we're trying to move something forward when we've got nothing: "I got nuthin'."  I was tired and loggy, lacking the energy I normally have, crucial to completing this somewhat challenging hike.

I'm moving along when I hear - alarmingly close - one of the most distinctive sounds I've ever heard: a rattlesnake rattle.  This part of the trail was winding through shade and sun and had a heavy coating of dried leaves that are often rustling as billions of small lizards flee my approach, so it was hard to clearly see what exactly was on the ground.  Plus, I was zoned out.  I almost stepped right on top of this gentleman.  I imagined a rattlesnake rattle sounding like two or three large beads shaking around inside a dried gourd  - in reality it was more like a ton of BBs being quickly tossed back and forth.

I, as they say, Stepped Off.  My first thought - after I had put some distance between me and the snake - was to get a closer look, maybe snap a picture.  My second thought was that my first thought was really, really stupid, and I pranced away.  It was a pretty big snake and I had no idea what their striking range was, so the thought that it was a good idea to get closer exited my brain as quickly as it entered.  I realize he was afraid of me.  He didn't want to bite me - he wanted me to go away.  I also realized I was afraid of him.  He had sharper teeth and was lighter on his feet - or would have been had evolution gone his way.

Have you ever seen a snake locomote?  It's mesmerizing.  Those dudes can move right along.

I went away.  I started at any sound I heard for the next hour, imagining big snakes, out to get me, to do me grievous bodily harm.  The fact that I've hiked every week for four years and never seen a rattlesnake meant nothing to me.  The snakes were everywhere, they were massing in the hills and swarming toward the trail.  There were going to be mountains of snakes blocking my way when I tried to get back to me car.  There would be so many snakes that the mountain lions wouldn't be able to eat me.

On this hike I then saw not one but two big snakes that weren't rattlers.  They had this really cool black and orange striping alternating down the length of their body.  I don't know what kind of snakes they were but I was still a little rattled by the rattle19snake so I didn't want to get into any snake-Seaweed confrontations.  Unfortunately, one of the snakes was stretched across the trail, right in the middle, basking in the sun, not going anywhere, head kind of angled back to look at me, tongue flicking in and out.  I tossed some dirt toward him.  Nothing.  I tossed a couple of bigger clods of dirt at him, one of which stopped when it rolled up against his body.  Nothing.  I walked over to the far edge of the trail, keeping as much real estate between his non-head end - do snakes have an ass? - and the end of the trail, and successfully got around the dude.

As I finished my hike I was glad for nature.  I enjoy losing these animal to Seaweed confrontations.  I'm the interloper, I'm the one intruding on their territory.  I imagine myself getting bit by a rattlesnake and saying: "Eh.  Chalk one up for the reptiles."  Who have been around about 320 million years, or about 319 million 800 thousand years more than humans.

When I got home I jumped into the shower to wash off the trail grunge and I noticed that I had gotten a blood blister on my stomach, probably the result of some chafing as I hiked.  I gingerly probed the blister with the tip of my finger, only to see eight little legs begin to writhe.  Tick.  Really, really gross.  I've never had a tick and frankly, I would have preferred a rattlesnake bite to the site of that little fucker buried in my flesh.

What does this have to do with recovery, you ask?  What indeed.

An Active Mind

So I'm taking a walk from my old people's mobile home park to my local coffee watering hole. It's a nice day.  I look pretty normal.  I don't look too weird.  I'm not dressed aggressively.  I don't look like I'm "up to something."   I don't have a big weapon clearly visible, protruding from the waistband of my dress pants.  I look like a partially distracted dude taking a walk.

There's a condominium complex about half way that I often detour through, partly because it gets me off of a busy road and into a quieter neighborhood.  There's a sign at the entrance which states only automobiles bearing the HOA sticker are permitted to park there.  I assume this is private property but I don't really care.  It's not an important sign.  It doesn't say "Trained Guard Dogs on the Property."  That sign would get my attention.

As I'm tooling along a car slows and the passenger side window eases down, an old guy with his wife beckons to me, and he says, politely: "Excuse me, sir, do you live here?"

I peer at him for a couple of beats, my mind clicking through all kinds of possible responses, most of them not that good.  In the old day I would have just kept walking, usually fighting off the urge to say: "Fuck are you?  Maybe he was lost in there and wanted some help but, being suspicious to the point of paranoia, I figured he was a nosy old bastard who decided he was going to enforce a condominium dictate about making sure anyone on the property had an authorized reason to be there.

"I'm visiting a friend,"I said.  "So maybe you could move along."  I peered in at him again.

"Well, thank you," he said.  "You just answered my question."

"Yes," I replied.  "I know I just answered your question.  Are you just about ready to move off?"

I didn't say most of those things.  I did say the first thing, the lie about visiting a friend.  I toyed with another response: "I'm visiting a client here - my office is a block away so I thought I'd walk over on such a nice day."  I could have told them that my mother was selling her house and looking for a one bedroom condo closer to her son.  Some other ideas presented themselves as I looked at this old guy and his crone, none of them possessing a shred of accuracy. 

I also considered telling the truth, but this would have meant that I would have had to listen to his explanation on why I wasn't allowed to be where I was, a fact I already possessed, and then I might have been provoked into suggesting that he call the police if he had any problems with how his day was proceeding.  All of the possible lies - including the one that unspooled from my mouth - were a lot more fun.  I enjoy lying.  I'm a good liar.  I have a natural aptitude for lying which I've honed meticulously by lying repeatedly over many years.

I walked the rest of the way through the complex and exited onto the main road, proceeding on my merry way.