Selfless Seaweed, Master of The Ego

Ego:  The self, especially with a sense of self-importance (Ed. Note: I'm calling bullshit on any definition that uses the word that is being defined.  Bullshit.)

Perhaps necessary for survival in some evolutionary bygone, in modern times it leads only to (albeit often disguised) misanthropic beliefs and delusion.

I got my haircut yesterday.  I don't enjoy getting my hair cut.  Part of this is because I like my hair long - it feeds some kind of self-image that I cultivate - and part is that I don't like sitting in a chair chit-chatting with someone who is hacking my hair off.  I'm too important to waste my time grooming myself.  I'm not an orangutan.  And I've not found anyone else to pick pests off the surface of my body or clean me with a vigorous tongue lashing.

Anyway, the haircut cost a very reasonable $17.50.  I generally try to tip generously.  I think most people who rely on tips for their livelihood work hard at honorable professions for which they're underpaid.  I'm blessed with some extra money and I feel it's my duty to spread a teeny, tiny, itsy bit of it around.  I gave the woman $30 and told her I was good.  She thanked me and that was that.

I, personally, was goddamned impressed with the tip.  The stylist, in my opinion, less so.  "Thanks" was indeed an expression of gratitude but I was looking for a much more effusive expression: "Wow, you are an incredible person.  This made my day.  I haven't ever received a tip this big," something along those lines.

Another good deed done by me, selflessly.

OC, Baby

Compulsion - The irrational need or irresistible urge to perform some action, often despite negative consequences.
Obsession: An irrational preoccupation; an unhealthy fixation.

"The part of our brain that deals with our needs is fragile—it’s easily disrupted and it occupies only a very small part of the brain.  In contrast, it’s not easy to disrupt the activation of an intense want.  Once people want a drug, it’s nearly permanent—it lasts at least a year in most people, and may last almost a whole lifetime.”  Berridge’s ideas explain why relapse is so common.  Even after you come to hate a drug for ruining your life, your brain continues to want the drug.  It remembers that the drug soothed a psychological need in the past, and so the craving remains."

This is a re-post of a recent post but it has had a lot of significance for me lately.  I really experience this kind of thinking, this kind of behavior in my life.  Momentum is hard to stop whether it be removing something harmful from my life or adding something helpful.  I imagine that most people are trying to change direction in a small Korean car traveling slowly - I'm the engineer of a long, long freight train moving way, way too fast.  I'm an aircraft carrier under full steam.  I have trouble getting stopped, reoriented, and moving in a different direction.

I haven't done anything hard in a psychological sense in a long time.  I haven't had to give up anything that caused me pain in a long time.  I haven't had to turn to god repeatedly in a long time.  I'm in touch with god but not asking for help frequently during the course of a day.  It makes me wonder at how I ever gave up drugs and alcohol and cigarettes.  I definitely remember that minute to minute fight to quench my strong desires when I was giving up those cravings - it was not easy.  I've gotten soft in the mental department.  I'm cruising.  I'm not even in the locomotive.  I'm back in the dining car eating cookies.

Happiness is the state of living in the present.  Happiness is not me thinking about me.  Definitely not that.

Spend my time and energy on the things that I can still do that give me satisfaction - not on lamenting the things that I once did but no longer can.

The Four Noble Truths

“In a world of tension and breakdown it is necessary for there to be those who seek to integrate their inner lives not by avoiding sorrow and anguish and running from their problems, but by facing them in their naked reality and ordinariness.”  - Thomas Merton 

There are two kinds of suffering.  There is the suffering you run away from, which follows you everywhere.  And there is the suffering you face directly, and in doing so become free.  Of all the maps of Buddhist psychology, the Noble Truths, which teach the understanding of suffering and its end, are the most central.  The whole purpose of Buddhist psychology, its ethics, philosophy, practices and community life is the discovery that freedom and joy are possible in the face of the sufferings of human life.   -  Jack Kornfield

The Four Noble Truths

1. To live means to suffer.
Suffering.

2. The origin of suffering is attachment - the attachment to the desire to have (craving) and the desire not to have (aversion).
The cause of suffering.

3. The cessation of suffering is attainable.  Nirvana, baby.
The end of suffering.

4.  There is a path to take.
The path.  (Ed. Note: There are eight steps to take to get through the fourth step, or something.  I can barely keep four things straight in my mind.)

I've looked up the definitions of pain and suffering, and found them to be remarkably similar.  Lot of cross-breeding.  A more nuanced look at the words would separate the concepts by defining pain as a physical reaction to a stimulus in our world - and thusly unavoidable - and suffering as focusing on the pain and trying to avoid it - apparently avoidable, to some higher life form than me.

Pain is inevitable - suffering is optional.

Clean As A Whistle

Clean As A Whistle:  The old simile describes the whistling sound of a sword as it swishes through the air to decapitate someone, and an early 19th century quotation does suggest this connection: 'A first rate shot. (his) head taken off as clean as a whistle.'  (Ed. Note: Did not see that coming).

My ability to focus on my aches and pains is a continuous source of amazement to me.  I can say truthfully - and this is not a statement to be taken lightly given my love of lying, embellishing, storytelling, rounding up, filling in the cracks, and just general bullshitting - that there are very few things in the world that get under my skin so frequently and with such staying power as my ability to concentrate on how I feel physically.

This is bad enough.  It is egregious, however, when I consider the actual state of my health, which is a blessing and not a curse.  I don't have any serious illnesses or conditions or injuries, and my family history is as clean as a whistle in the deadly arenas of cancers and heart disease and high blood pressure.  If my progenitors are any indication I can look forward to many more years of active living.

It's my mother.  She did this to me.  Sorry, mom, wherever you are, exactly, but I'm still blaming you for my problems.  And, mom, as Willie tells me, you're probably laughing your ass off.  Good for you.  I hope Jesus and the Heavenly Father and Buddha and Ganesh and Kenner and Dad and whoever else is sitting around the coffee table with you are also getting a kick out of my troubles.

The other weird oddity is that I can not remember anyone in my family ever complaining about their health, ever.  Even my mother - as she forecast gloom and doom - never made a peep about how she was feeling.  I continue to approach my elders with casual questions about how they're feeling and I continue to get accepting, measured responses, full of perspective and gratitude.  This is helping, too, especially when I hear the real things people go through.  I get a backache and I want to kill myself - dude yesterday, who seems happier than me, had a heart attack several years ago that put him into intensive care for three weeks.  Jesus Christ, I'd be afraid to get out of bed if that happened to me.

It's just not helping fast enough.

Pray For Me, Please

One of my mildly amusing jokes du jour has been to offer myself up to newcomers in general and - more specifically - to people struggling with the concept of spirituality as a temporary god.  Temporary sponsorship is be more commonly offered but this is beneath me yet I'm not so arrogant to assume anyone will want to make me their permanent god.  What I'm suggesting is that I'm A god, not The god.  This is what passes for humility for me.

A surprising number of people have taken me up on this, with an even greater number agreeing to think about me all day.  I'm skeptical they're actually following through but I'm still proud.

One of my friends who takes an inhuman amount of abuse from me - everyone, in other words - finally exasperated, said: "Why don't you try praying for me every day for two weeks."

I thought this was a great idea.  I'm an ass but I do take direction.  I forgot all about my promise the first couple of days but I see him frequently - his reminders were welcome and jogged my memory enough so that after that I really did pray for him every day.  It was a surprisingly helpful exercise.  I'm good at self-examination and meditation but I suck at prayer.  It's simply not hip enough for me.

"There is a direct linkage among self-examination, meditation, and prayer. Taken separately, these practises can bring much relief and benefit. But when they are logically related and interwoven, the result is an unshakable foundation for life."  12 and 12 

Once I got into the habit I was amused to see how much I had been missing by not having a more robust prayer life.  I found that I quickly began to think more about other people that I knew and to add them to my prayer list.  Just in my morning meeting I realized I knew people with health issues and family problems and new jobs and on-going divorces.  I began to pray for them, too, and they are becoming bigger presences in my life.

More Things That Are Lost On Me

I've started to attend Al-Anon, an organization that helps individuals deal with the collateral damage of being exposed to the alcoholism and addiction of loved ones rather than with recovery from these diseases directly.  I'm the only man so far in a group of twenty or twenty-five women.  This is weird in its own right but not off-putting or uncomfortable in any way.  I've heard nothing but good things about Al-Anon over the years, both in its ability to help individuals cope with alcoholism as well as detaching from other people in general.

I didn't cause - I can't cure it - but I can cope.

I've enjoyed the sharing so far, for the most part.  I have been happy to see that most of the dialogue has centered around not letting other people get under your skin and not with specific stories about how to survive some chaotic, violent alcoholic environment.  The funny thing is that I don't let others agitate me overly much in my day to day life, the exception being my home group where a significant cross-section of people are annoying the shit out of me.

I noticed a woman in the meeting fucking around with her cell phone.  This annoyed the shit out of me.  The irony of being annoyed at someone else while at my first meeting of a group that is supposed to help me avoid being annoyed at someone else was not lost on me.  This woman then had the gall to share.  She began by telling the group that she was using her cell phone to make some notes about information that she found particularly helpful.  The irony of being annoyed at someone who wasn't doing the thing that I find annoying was also not lost on me.

Pretty much everything else was lost on me, though.

Some More About Me

Self:  An individual person as the object of his own reflective consciousness.  (Ed. Note: Whew.)

"Drinking is a manifestation of the wish to escape from reality.  The illusory charm of drink comes from the fact that the mental reactions to alcohol are extremely satisfying to certain psychological urges.  Let any man reflect on his sensations subsequent to taking a drink and I think he will agree that the resultant feelings consist (1) of calmness, poise, and relaxation; (2) of self-satisfaction, self-confidence, and self-importance."  Richard Peabody

I'm often taken aback at how often the prefix "self" presents itself in our literature, and not often in a complimentary fashion.  More along the lines of "boy, do you think about yourself a lot."  The implication is that we should stop obsessing with self, that we're going to be happier if we think about someone besides ourself.  Other people, in other words.  Those other people that we (if by "we" you mean "I") find objectionable.

"In order to achieve peace, tranquility, and real friendship, we must minimize anger and cultivate kindness and a warm heart.  You may be rich, powerful, and well-educated, but without these healthy feelings of kindness and compassion there will be no peace within yourself . . . "  The Dali Lama

To paraphrase the Dali Lama who apparently is not considering my circumstances, my specific circumstances, who is not taking all of my hardships and wants into consideration, thinks I hold myself in too high a regard.

What a feckless attitude.

Hell is Other People

Solitude:  State of being alone or solitary; by oneself.
Isolation:  Set apart or cut off from others.

"I do not want people to be agreeable - it saves me the trouble of liking them."  Jane Austen

As I ponder the current state of my always metastasizing angst I have come up with some answers.  They are probably not the correct answers but I never let truth or effectiveness or reality interfere with the solutions that my brain presents to me.  The thoughts are mine, thusly very good and powerful and right.  The tricky thing about my angst is that can be cancerous in a growing, malignant sense - the solutions that have been effective in the past often don't work in the present.  My angst is like a relationship that way - always growing, always changing, never very far away, impossible to ignore.

Angst:  Emotional turmoil; painful sadness; a feeling of acute but vague anxiety or apprehension often accompanied by depression, especially philosophical anxiety.

"I don't hate people - I just feel better when they aren't around."  Charles Bukowski

Anyway, it's becoming clearer that I have metastasized from healthy solitude to troublesome isolation.  This is not unusual - I do this from time to time, part and parcel of being an introvert combined with my general disdain for most human life forms.  It's becoming clearer that I need to shift into People Mode with some vigor, even with things that can be done alone.

"I love mankind - it's people I can't stand!"  Linus

Bunnies, Kittens, and Small Children

I stopped by my battery store this morning.  I love Vacation City - it's a smallish city that's hemmed in by the mountains and the ocean, thwarting all efforts by developers to make it into a biggish city.  I almost never go out without seeing someone I know.

Anyway, this young man helps me get the weird sized battery I'm looking for.  I inquired after his well-being.

"I'm good - how are you?"  he replied.  A couple of beats later he says: "And thanks for asking."

"I take it not many people ask you that?" I said.

He snorted and fairly rolled his eyes in derision.  "No," he said.

I do pray every morning that I be of service to someone, somewhere, in some way, during my day.  I have such an inflated opinion of my value to the world that I'm always looking for big, showy, splashy, public acts of service.  I say again - if no one knows that you've done something nice why make the effort?  What's the point?

My comment got a dialogue started as he was helping me with my purchase.  He seemed to have a bit of a cold.  My follow-up question revealed that he actually was having an allergic reaction to his dog - normally he keeps this under control by keeping the dog out of his bedroom but last night the animal snuck in somehow.

"When we were getting the dog my mother and I decided it would be best to get a small, short-haired dog because of my allergies," he said.  "But my mother shows up with a big, long-haired golden retriever."  We both laughed.  He assured me he loved the dog but he had to be a little careful not to spend too much time in a high-dander zone.

What a great story that was.  It made my day, thinking about this big Hispanic man, barely out of his teens, suffering cold-like symptoms because he loves his dog.  Young men don't generally care to admit love for bunnies, kittens, and small children so I got a kick out of it.  Of course, I'll remember our talk and abuse him mercilessly the next time I visit the store.

Reveal something personal to me at your own risk.

Jack

All this talk of who's better than who (and no one's better than me) triggered a memory of a man I knew for many years, the father of two of my best friends in the world.  I hung out at their house a great deal when I was younger so I got to see this man drink a whole shitload of alcohol.  I mean . . . he was clearly one of us and I could see this when I was not yet one of us.

I move to a new city, get sober in a tenuous, dude's-not-going-to-make-it sort of way, before eventually getting deadly serious with my recovery.  I would periodically come home to visit my family and knew it would be a good idea to get a road sponsor, so to speak, someone I could contact when I was out of my regular meeting loop.   This was during a time when long-distance phone calls were no small matter so making contacts with the locals was more important than it is today.  My friends' dad had gotten sober a few years before me so I gave him a ring and asked him to stand in when I was traveling.  His response could not have been more fervent and excited had I told him he had won the lottery.  He immediately offered to take me to a meeting that night.

The angle here is that this guy existed in a social circle far, far above mine.  He could have treated me like I was not worthy. that I was a twerp kid who hung around with his sons.  He did not do this.  Granted, I knew him fairly well over the years but we weren't buddies.  As I am pondering my different-ness at my morning meeting an image of him picking me up that night and driving me to a club house surfaced through the miasma of self-centered fog that usually envelopes me.  We arrived at the end of a speaker meeting.  He shook a few hands and introduced me around, mortified, then bundled me into his car and off we went in search of a different meeting, despite my protests that my time with him had calmed me down real nice and good.  The second meeting was well under way when we arrived but we did manage to get a half in.  He introduced me to a few people here, too, before driving me home.  I'm sure we sat in his car outside my house and talked some more.

I don't think I ever attended another meeting with him.  He died a few years back, extremely sober right to the end.  I have never forgotten this effort at helping a newer person get sober, someone with long hair and no money and liberal attitudes.  It's an extraordinary thing to people not in The Fellowship but very ordinary to those of us trudging the Happy Road to Destiny.

More About Torsion Angles

Gauche:  (chemistry) describing a torsion angle of 60 degrees (Ed Note: Just kidding - the primary definition is awkward or lacking in social graces; bumbling.)  

So one of the reasons I like to scribble electronically is that it allows me to say things anonymously that I would never say in public.  For instance, I may or may not be impressed with the size of my genitals or the size of my bank account or the size of my car engine but I wouldn't bring that up as a suggested meeting topic or toss it into the mix when I'm eating lunch with friends.  It would be gauche.

I have reached a point in my social life - which unfortunately centers too much on my recovery life and this at a meeting that has migrated away from me, personality-wise - where I'm not being stimulated, being challenged.  I'm not finding the people with whom I'm interacting to be sufficiently interesting.  I have always considered myself sort of a fringe intellectual, in a low-grade fever kind of way.  I'm not reading Proust or studying fingering techniques on a 15th century lute but I do like art and music and literature and theater.  My interest in these things, my knowledge of them, my retention of their essence is partly due to my pursuit of them but also, I think, to a large degree, because I have a natural aptitude for them.  

I used to bask in the glow given off by these talents with some arrogance.  I used them to justify my belief that I was better than someone else but I don't believe I do this any more.  My paternal grandfather has always been a symbol of inclusion for me.  He had an eighth grade education - he was the oldest boy in his large family and he was expected to contribute to the family income when he was growing up in the Great Depression.  He didn't have time to read or listen to music and he didn't have the money to travel so we never had those experiences in common.  But I could bring a bicycle or radio or lawnmower to him and he'd fix it.  Mind you he never studied these things in a formal way but he would peer at the thing for a while, ponder it, mull it over, then get the right tool from his huge workbench, take it apart, put it back together, and it would work.  Sometimes he'd have to give it a go from a different angle if his first intuition wasn't correct but he usually got to the solution.  He didn't think he was better than me - he simply had a mind that could comprehend these devices and because he worked with them all the time he got better and better.  He acquired knowledge and experience which augmented his natural abilities.

I reflect back on the athletes I knew in school.  They had a certain swagger, a certain arrogance.  I am not an athlete.  I'm slow and uncoordinated, with a body that was never destined to be strong and flexible - this is not of my doing, it's not my preference, it's not a fault of mine.  I snorted in derision at the attitude of these guys, convinced that their pride in their athleticism was undeserved.  Sure, they practiced their sports and got better but they had an innate set of tools and skills that I was never going to possess.  From time to time I'd apply myself to a sport and I got slightly better, but not much.  It wasn't in my tool box to be an athlete, I didn't have the genes to thrive in that arena.  It was in my tool box to be an intellectual.  I don't know why I have a mind that retains facts and figures and absorbs what I read any more than an athlete knows why he has good fast-twitch muscle response or my grandfather could see inside the soul of a machine.

I had a long talk with a good friend of mine after the morning meeting yesterday.  This dude far outpaces me in the intellectual department but our interests merge.  A few years ago I had a handful of friends like this who attended the meeting regularly but circumstances have changed so I don't see them very often, leaving me with a different set of recoverees at a meeting that has gotten increasingly large and unmanageable.  This routine and a few others have lost their potency, their ability to please me on a deeper level.

It was a good talk and much appreciated.  He had, of course, no ready answers to these very complex  questions.  He pointed me to a few books, a solution that I loved: "Read this book by someone smarter than me" is always good advice when given to the bookishly inclined.  "Something similar happened to me in this set of circumstances and this is what I did" is always a good response, too.  Not: "Do this and you'll see the light!"  

That never works for me.

Something . . . Then Something Else!

Change:  To make something into something else.  (Ed. Note: it seems to me that the definition makers really threw in the towel here.  I think it's against some rule to use the same word twice in a definition, especially when it's a vague word to begin with.)

An alcoholic doesn't just get into a rut.  An alcoholic decorates the hut, buys furniture, and signs a long-term lease promising to live in the rut in perpetuity.

An alcoholic is a battleship, full-steam ahead.  An alcoholic is a brakeless freight train with 200 cars loaded with coal, moving downhill, and never mind why someone would design a freight train without brakes.  Probably an alcoholic.

These are things that have a lot of momentum.  You don't tap the brakes and come to a complete stop.

Breaking a habit is like trying to tip over a Coke machine.  You don't walk up to it and just tip it over on the first try.  You have to rock it back and forth a few times - THEN it goes over.

I continue to feel stuck in my behaviors.  I'm doing a few things that aren't great for me at the level I'm doing them - coffee, exercise, sugar - and I'm not doing a few things that I should be doing.  I've fallen into the trap of relying on The Fellowship for most of my socializing and this is not a good thing - it's not a social club, it's a 12 Step recovery program.  And my regular meetings have shifted a little bit so I feel like too much of an outlier.  I don't want to only go to meetings that are stuffed with newcomers and I don't want to go to ones that are dominated by long-timers - I need a mix, and I'm not getting that right now.  I'm not connecting with people on a deeper level intellectually or socially right now.  I don't mean for this to sound arrogant or dismissive - I don't think I'm better or worse than anyone but it's a fact that sometimes we need to swim with the same kind of fish.

Deciding to Change

Decision:  A choice or judgment.

When I find something unacceptable to me I turn this person, place, or thing over to my Higher Power.  Unfortunately it's only after I've done everything humanly possible to bend this person, place, or thing to my will.  While it's great that I usually get to the point that I turn things over it's perplexing as to why I make myself totally miserable before doing the turning over.  An impartial observer might suggest turning things over and then taking some appropriate action.

And of course I find that many times the turning over is done for me.  The turning over as a thump on my head and a slap in my face, and it happens whether or not I want it to.  Some examples are getting fired before I change my behavior; getting dumped before I change my behavior; getting sued before I change my behavior; and sleeping on the couch because I didn't change my behavior.

I change my behavior only when the pain of doing what I'm doing that's causing the pain becomes greater than my resistance to change.  I've read studies that suggest that changing a behavior - eliminating something that is making you uncomfortable or picking up something that you know will be good for you - changing a habit, in other words - takes people a few months to accomplish.  For some of us the inclination to go back to the old ways hangs on for many months, years even.

Something about changing my behavior is resonating in my head right now . . . .

Principles Before Personalities

Principle:   A fundamental assumption or guiding belief.

"What does 'principles before personalities' really mean?  It means we practice honesty, humility, compassion, tolerance, and patience with everyone, whether we like them or not.  Putting principles before personalities teaches us to treat everyone equally."

The funny thing about meetings is that they shall not run eternal.  I've been grousing about a regular meeting of mine for an uncomfortably long time.  The meeting is just fine, mind you, it's that I've allow it to get under my skin.  From time to time I find that my impression of a group becomes dominated by personalities rather than by principles.  I start to concentrate on the individual who's speaking instead of what the individual is saying.  The message is colored by my pre-conceived notion of what the person is going to say.  I'm willing to bet that if you provided me with the written text of a share that annoyed the shit out of me when it was being shared by someone who is annoying the shit out of me I'd be fine with the content.  Sometimes I find myself closing my eyes and concentrating on the words so that my focus isn't affected by an annoying person.  Irritating the shit out of me.

This general flaw runs in most of us and I say this to apply a thick salve of self-justification on the oozing sore that is my intolerance.  

Over the years my meeting schedule changes periodically, but only after I've let my intolerant resentments free to rape and pillage and burn.  I change - my schedule changes, my Program has different needs and requirements, I'm a different person, at least marginally - and the meeting changes - new people come, old people go, formats are tweaked.  So it's time to try something different.

It's so hard to try something different.

Saylor Park, West Virginia, Northern Wisconsin

I'm in an interior lobby of a big chemical plant.  July heat and humidity percolating outside.  Big, noisy A/C unit pumping dry, cool air about.  I'm vaguely discontented.  I have a moderate sized bomb in my briefcase.  Waiting for the right moment.  I kick off my wingtips and shinny up a dilapidated, rusty downspout.  Hanging on with one powerful forearm, I remove my tie and affix the incendiary device to the crossbeam of a critical piece of chemical process equipment.  Sweat pours into my eyes as I pause for a second and watch blood pulse in an engorged vein, sinews and tendons grotesquely distended.  I swing down the gutter with chimpanzee-like dexterity and melt into the gloom.

Ever been here?  Nice people.  Major poverty.  Little towns, dead or dying, hunched in valleys, clusters of ramshackle trailers and huts twisting along the spines of ridges.  There appear to be a fair number of fires - the destroyed buildings are left to collapse in on themselves in a sad, reflective way.  Great mining complexes abandoned, rusting in hollows stripped of vegetation. The houses following the roads share space with rivers or streams and ubiquitous railroad tracks.  Long, long trains pound by, 3 or 4 or 5 locomotives pulling an endless line of coal cars. 

Johnsonville, WI.  The Johnsonville Sausage plant, second shift appointment.  I pull into town well after dark on a brutally cold night after having made my way down narrow country roads pinned between piles of snow left by the plows, heaped 10 feet high - it was almost literally like driving in a tunnel.   Huge clouds of steam billowed out of the plant, the smell of cooking meat, bright arc lamps bathing the facility in a weird, yellow glow.  Johnsonville was small, dominated by the plant.  I paused on the hill above town, looking at the monstrous sausage-maker, looking at the bar across the street with seductive neon beer advertisements glowing in the windows.  There were a few pick up trucks parked in the snow-covered lot.  Nothing else was moving anywhere.  The steam would drift straight up for a while before a gust would drive it down and across the road.

I thought about it more seriously than I would have liked.

The Three Instincts

Money, power, and sex, indeed.

I left the meeting this morning and drove to a nearby gas station.  I have a leak in one of the rear tires on my Very Expensive Car.  Needless to say - the tires are also very expensive.  Everything on this car is very expensive.  The idea was to fill the gas tank and then top off my leaking tire.  One would think that a better idea might be to replace the fucking tire instead of driving around topping it off, bit by bit, worrying whether or not today will be the day when the leaking tire will be all leaked out, but then one would be wrong.

I found the air pressure on the air pump system to be suspect.  Indeed, when I tried to fill the tire it seemed to me that air was exiting the tire rather than entering it.  Indeed, when I got back into the car the automatic tire pressure monitoring system - god only knows what that feature cost me - indicated that the tire had less air in it than before.  At this point I should note that a few months back I took the car into a tire store and had the tire repaired - it held air for a short while but was back to its old tricks in no time at all.  I also let them put nitrogen into the tire instead of air for a $5 premium.  I don't recall what advantage was purported to accrue from this move but suffice it to say that all of the $5 nitrogen is long gone, vanished into the atmosphere, replaced with ordinary air pump air, which is also vanishing regularly.  I should also note that I use this particular gas station because they provide air for free instead of asking me to put 75 cents worth of quarters into a slot that activates an air pump.

I then drove to another gas station which I found charged $1.50 to use their system.  This was unacceptable so I drove across the street to another gas station where the system also required a $1.50 donation.  Still unacceptable but now I'm getting annoyed.  I pull out and enter the freeway, headed for a fourth gas station that I know that also provides free air.  I figure I've burned up $4 worth of gas at this point.  My Very Expensive Car gets shitty gas mileage.

The air pressure system at this gas station also seemed suspect.  In a implausible turn of events it, too, drained air from my leaking tire, triggering a Flat Tire warning on the car.

At this point I simply sat in my car for while.  We talk in The Fellowship about the Three Great Instincts: Money, Power, and Sex.  Or the Three Esses if you will: Sex, Security, Society.  While I've made great progress on all three of these it's apparent to everyone that a great amount of work still remains.  It's apparent to me that when I get moving forward with too much speed that I burn up a lot of energy foolishly.

The fifth gas station charged me $1.50 to fill up my tire.  I was happy to pay.

"We do not tire so easily, for we are not burning up energy foolishly as we did when we were trying to arrange life to suit ourselves."

Marriage, Slavery, Running Chain Saws, and Me

"Marriage is slavery."  

Someone told me that yesterday.  Or maybe it was "Marriage is like slavery" or he was suggesting that "Marriage Slavery" would be an excellent name for a rock band.  In any case it was an outstanding comment about a sense that came over him one day, unbidden.  He had been discussing with another divorced guy the possibility that he might one day again marry.  Now that his kids were gone he admitted to being increasingly open to the idea, only to be told: "No, I don't think so.  I don't see it happening."  That was an even more outstanding comment.  He was bested in the commenting department, with prejudice.

This was all tongue-in-cheek, humorous banter between life-long friends that was mostly funny but had an uncomfortable grain of truth in it.  Sort of like when I say that I never think about anyone else because I'm too busy thinking about myself.  It's a joke but it's truthey.  I think a great deal about other people but it pales in comparison to the time I spend reflecting on my own circumstances.

To the suggestion that I stop doing this I invariably reply: "But I'm so fucking interesting!"  Who would I think about?  You?  Please.  It's me or I'm taking a nap.

Today a young guy at the meeting showed me this huge, long, gnarled scar, running from his hip all the way up to his armpit.  That's a long way and it wasn't a thin white scar, either - it looked like someone took a machete to his torso.  It was an angry, aggressive scar.  It spoke of big violence

"Apparently it's not a good idea to climb up into a tree with a running chain saw when you're on heroin," he said, with very little irony.

OK, I think that tops the marriage is slavery meme.  Gotta love this Program.

Working With Seaweed

The topic at my meeting today was "Working with Others."  Apparently the idea is that doing something for someone else without expecting a treat in return is helpful somehow.

I hate thinking about other people.  It seems like such a waste of time.  There's not enough time in the day for me to think about myself let alone fit someone else in.  Ponder the facts - each day has 24 hours and I need 8 hours of sleep, leaving me a total of 16 hours to get everything else in my life accomplished.  I need at least 18 hours a day to think about myself properly.  Anything less than that then I feel less than.  I feel cheated, ignored, adrift and alone.  My choice is to sacrifice sleep or to suffer from a lack of self-absorption.

Luckily I've come up with a solution - I have begun recruiting other people to think about me, too, and I am not making this up.  I send text messages out all the time with this simple question: "Are you thinking about me?"

The responses have been gratifying.  Most people are thinking about me or they apologize for failing their responsibilities while committing to thinking about me on the spot, starting right now.  Or they're lying.  I don't really care.  If I think they're thinking about me that's all that matters because my thoughts are reality.  What I think IS.

In fact, to hustle people along, I've made myself available as a temporary god.  The accepted technique in The Program is to get a sponsor and because this can be daunting to a newcomer we offer a temporary sponsor option - just start to work with someone until you're comfortable asking someone else on a more permanent basis.

This scut work is beneath me so I've suggested, to anyone who will listen to me, an increasingly small list of people, that I'll serve as a temporary god rather than a temporary sponsor, a more exalted position that permits me to demand that people think about me.  

As our book points out "the difference between a demand and simple request is apparent to everyone."  

Down in a Hole - Feeling So Low

Hole:  A hollow place or cavity; a pit; an opening in or through a solid body; a rent; a fissure.

I'm on Day 4 with no coffee.

I suspect that very few people know exactly what this means.  The importance of this would be hard for a non-hole person to grasp.  I could say, as a fairly accurate approximation, to any queries: "Hey, I'm on Day 4 of not breathing.  How do you think I'm feeling?"  Seriously, if you gave me the option of quitting coffee or quitting the intake of oxygen into my body I would have to find a quiet place so that I could think about it for a while.  Death from asphyxiation or no coffee?  Hmmmm.  Let me get back to you on that.

(I apologize for a brief digression . . . As a baseball guy I have to point out that "hole" can also mean "the rear portion of the defensive team between the third baseman and the shortstop."  I wonder why that came to be known as a hole.)

So the whole point of the hole is that I am full of them, and they are bottomless.  I cannot throw in enough stuff to fill them up.  Trust me - I've tried.  I am trying.  I have a history of throwing in things that are clearly bad for me, like alcohol and drugs and cigarettes.  I try to fill them with things that are not, in their essence, bad for me, like exercise and sex and coffee and work.  I have no Halfway setting.  I'm all in or I abstain.  I'm stopped or I have the accelerator mashed to the floor, and I'm holding on for dear life as the car careens just on the brink of disaster.  This would be alarming for most people - it's a comfortable state of equilibrium for me.

If you could manage to only smoke a couple of cigarettes a day your body would be fine.  How wild is that?  I haven't puffed on a butt for 33 years but if I had one this morning I'd smoke a pack by the time I crawled into bed.  How wild is that?

My friend who committed suicide has been on my mind.  He had some big holes, too.  One day the size of his holes overwhelmed him.  I don't know if he finally decided it was too big or if he got tired of shoveling shit into it.

The thing with me and caffeine is that it doesn't even make me feel good - it makes me feel worse.  But the thing with filling holes is that it's not about feeling good or feeling better - it's about feeling different.  I don't want to feel the way I feel.  I want to feel something else.  Something is missing so I chuck shit at it, willy-nilly.

I'm having a cup of off-brand Orange Pekoe Black Tea right now.  I can't definitively say where it came from - we have a box of all kinds of teas snagged from hotels all over the world - but I bet it came from my mother's kitchen.  This tea is probably 47 years old if that's the case.

Yummm.   Delicious.

Da Buddha

"Suffering I teach, and the way out of suffering," proclaimed the Buddha.  Here suffering doesn't mean pain but the profound discomfiture which I experience when all of my attempts to remedy or evade pain prove futile.  It's not the pain that's important - it's how I experience it.  My sense of the pain.

It's all going to go, says the Buddha, all of it.

"When afflicted with a feeling of pain those who lack inner awareness sorrow, grieve, and lament, beating their breasts and becoming distraught.  So they feel two pains: physical and mental.  It is just like being shot with an arrow, and right afterwards being shot with a second one."  Da Buddha

"The more you think about it, the more you talk about it, the further from it you go.  Put an end to wordiness and intellection and there is nothing you will not understand.  Stop talking and stop thinking and there is nothing that you will not understand."  from the ancient Ch'an scripture On Trust in the Heart.

I have spoken, but in vain; for what can words tell
Of things that have no yesterday, tomorrow or today?