Shuffling Off This Mortal Coil

  Relaxed:  Free from tension and anxiety; at ease.

Whoa, those are bullshit words, man, and not in my lexicon.  You'd think that this would be internalized into my machinery after 65 years shuffling around this mortal coil but it's never easier for me to go slowly, quietly into the night.  I have been applying tension to my person for my entire life and while I've learned over the years - through diligent, exhausting practice - how to torque the tension down a great deal it's still a big part of my make-up.  The status quo is meant to be pulverized is how I see things.

So I get a lot done.  I do a lot of things.  That's great if I could let it be but there's always more to be done and this attitude can lead to frustration at the end of the day.  In my work life I looked at a lot of machinery with a lot of moving parts.  The designers were always trying to balance tension with life span - the more tension that they applied the more power and speed the machine could deliver but the more tension placed on the equipment would lead to shit breaking.  It was fascinating looking at some of these systems, marveling at the violence of the operations.  I'd watch, expecting something to break every time a big piece of metal would index.  Fascinating stuff and I'll tell you I keep my hands and feet and face way the hell out of the way.  I was quite careful about moving through those environments.

So this is inside my head.  Big pieces of metal clanging together at high speed.

More, more, more!!

"Shuffling off this mortal coil" is from Hamlet should you be interested.  I looked this up after hearing it in an episode of Bosch, if you can believe that.  And Bosch's first name is Hieronymus or Harry for short.  Look up some of that dude's paintings if you want to see how an apocalyptic mind works.

Free Coffee!

  I took a walk today to the local hardware store to pick up an odd, circular fluorescent light bulb that I had to special order.  I didn't need one, mind you - I just felt like buying something weird.  A light bulb in the shape of a circle.  I had to have one of those.  I might put it in my Discarded Items Garden which is currently populated by old cell phones and camcorders, little chess pieces molded in the shapes of Simpson's characters, a wooden electric clock stuck at ten past five - A.M. or P.M is anybody's guess - and other pieces of flotsam and jetsam.  There are also a bunch of cactus and palm trees that are defended by an impressively vicious array of thorns and needles and stickers.

Anyway, I stopped in for what I used to call my Overpriced Specialty Coffee Drink with my tongue firmly in my cheek but now - Jesus! - these drinks really do cost too much.  (BTW, tongue-in-cheek originates from the idea that one is biting one's tongue to keep from laughing as one tells a whopper although I'd say tongue-between-teeth makes more sense).  As I do from time to time, as the mood strikes me, I ordered my coffee and turned around to the next person in line and said "And whatever she's having," hoping the next person isn't ordering drinks for the entire office.  I do this primarily to see the look on people's faces.  I'd say the look is akin to tossing a live hand grenade back or releasing a particularly toxic fart.  People freeze.  I can see the thought process: "OK, what's the game here?"  They don't process the idea that it's a few bucks out of my pocket and often look a little wary.

The woman thanked me again, ordered something ordinary, and froze again when I said: "No, that's too expensive."  Alright, that was one extremely dry and weird quip too far but I had to give it a whirl.  The woman behind the counter said: "Well, that was sweet."  It all makes me ponder the very real possibility that this just never happens.  When did we get so self-absorbed that buying a coffee for someone unbidden is such a shocker?  I know half the reason I do it is that it forces me to quit thinking about myself for one fucking minute.  Yeah, and the shock value is way up there, too.

Dynamic Seaweed

 Energy:  Dynamic Quality.

I find myself returning again and again to the idea of an energy force or feeling that I sense coming from people I'm in contact with.  I believe that the years I've spent meditating and trying to see a greater purpose in the universe has slowly, slowly, slowly given me insight into other people.  I notice a lot more quickly than I used to whether someone gives off a good vibe or a negative vibe.  I believe I can size someone up in short order.  Maybe most people can do this normally, I dunno, but I sure couldn't before I began my spiritual journey.  I was either astoundingly easily to bullshit or I chose to ignore the bullshit some people were flinging around.  But no more.  There are people I'm drawn to, people that I want to interact with, and there are people I hope spend their time away from me.  Life can be challenging enough without being dragged down by people that are at war with the world.

Intuitively

Locomotion:  The power or the act of moving from one place to another. 

I cannot stress how important this idea of moving carefully and mindfully through the day is to me.  That I'm responsible for locomotion and that God is responsible for results.  That I'm responsible for moving forward even when the destination isn't clear to me.  That - if I'm steady and aware and in contact - I'll do the right thing even if it leads to a result I find to be painful or unwelcome.  I'm not in the business of avoiding pain anymore.  I don't like it, of course, but I see the beauty and necessity in it sometimes.  It's a great teacher, pain is.  If I'm in a burning building the pain of the flames tells me to vamoose.

I've always held on to the promise that I'm going to intuitively understand things that used to baffle me.

If you want a parking spot you should really try driving around the block and looking for a parking spot.

Proverb-a-geddon

Courtesy of my current morning meditation book . . . 

There is more to life than increasing its speed.  - Gandhi

We come into this world crying while all around us are smiling.  May we live so that as we exit we're smiling while everyone else is weeping.  - Persian Proverb

There are three things that only God knows: the beginning of things; the cause of things; and the end of things.  - Welsh Proverb

I guess the message here is don't change anything, ever.  - Rob B

And my personal favorite this week:

Pray to God but row away from the rocks.   -  Indian Proverb

I did NOT attend the business meeting yesterday.  I may have mentioned that already.  I did not MISS being at the business meeting.  I really can't remember HAVING business meetings in sincity or Chicago, at least not regularly.  If something needed to be addressed the members would take a quick group conscience and make a quick decision.  If you weren't there, well, tough shit.  Show up every week and you won't be cut out of the loop.

I feel a little weird as an old-timer being involved in these kinds of decisions, anyway.  Just because I've been sober a long time and have attended meetings regularly this doesn't give me some special influence or power.  Life in A.A. - life in general - is much different than it was in the late 80s.  If I'm overly involved in deciding how things should be run then I'm depriving the newer people of their say in how the Program is going to look going on.  People have cell phones and social media account now.  They text and chat online.  When I was getting sober (there it is again!  when I was getting sober, whippersnapper) the only way to get in touch with another person without seeing them in person was to make a phone call, from your dwelling, to another person who also had to be home and who didn't have an answering machine or voice mail.  This seems right to me.  A sponsee checking in with a one line text message doesn't do it for me.  But what am I going to do, in my dinosaur phase.

The homeless issue - the cookie-chomping, coffee-guzzling, washroom- bathing homeless people issue - was solved by the people that went to the business meeting in this fashion: it was decided that because we've got some "scary people" showing up we need to make sure that more than one person is in the room before the secretary locks up and leaves the building.  Me?  I would get rid of the fucking scary people.  The group?  Make sure no one is left alone in the basement with the scary people.

2/4 or 4/4 or Wild Improvisation?

 There's a dude that attends my regular meeting who has been sober over 40 years.  Like many of us he marches to his own weird, abstract drummer.  We don't have a lot of people that march to normal, 2/4 beat drummers.  There's a lot of improvisation going on.  Every few years he goes on a hiatus from Alcoholics Anonymous, as in: no meetings at all.  He doesn't stop a recovery program, he just stays out of The Rooms.  Personally, I never thought this was a great idea.  It might work for him but I never liked the suggestion that not attending A.A. was the best idea for most of us.  

A few years ago I grabbed him after a meeting to get a more in-depth take on his strategy.  His belief is that A.A. can become a mindless time-filler for him, a habit without much depth to it, where he isn't paying close attention to the substance of the meetings.  I started to get a better understanding at where he was coming from.  I mean . . . I can read How It Works in a meeting while I'm holding an internal discussion with myself.  I'm not paying any attention at all to the text I'm reading.

On these two long trips where I had no access to meetings I found that my mind relaxed without the time constraints of the whole meeting experience.  I picked up new habits, I worked on different things, I had time for activities that may have been helping me grow spiritually, mentally, emotionally because I wasn't tied in to this routine of sitting in meetings that had become increasingly rote and uninspiring and consequently frustrating and unfulfilling.  

Business Meeting Blues

 One of my major beefs with my meeting has been the constant presence of a cadre of homeless people.  I seem to be a lot more annoyed at these folks than most of the regular attendees, all Super-Nice California types, so this is my issue to deal with.  Still, having several individuals wander in and out of the meeting, slurping multiple cups of coffee half full of creamer and sugar, scarfing cookies, taking mini-baths in the restrooms, mumbling to themselves and waving their hands about, is so distracting to me that sometimes I have trouble paying attention to the . . . you know . . . meeting going on.

Today the group has its business meeting, a typical A.A. affair where people talk endlessly about unimportant matters before voting to think about it some more and revisit the issue at the next business meeting.  Wash, spin, dry, repeat.  I had decided, in my self-righteous, self-important, pedantic way to bring up beef with the homeless today.  Because they steadfastly refuse to change their behavior the only solutions I could see would be to stop serving food and drink for a month or two or to banish a couple from the meeting.  The latter choice is so drastic that we have to be careful that we don't deprive someone a chance to get sober, no matter how small.  Nonetheless and despite the attitude of all most all of the Super Nice People I believe this can and should be done on rare occasions.  The group is more important than the individual for without the group most of us are going to be in the shit.  Frankly, some of these people have been coming to the meeting for 10 years and until and unless they get their various mental illnesses addressed they've no chance of getting sober.  We're Alcoholics Anonymous, not CAL Social Services.

I say the Serenity Prayer in my Quiet Time each day or my version of it: If I'm supposed to do something help me do it; if I'm not supposed to do something help me to wait patiently; and show which is which.  I started wondering what my motives were because I didn't see the group making any changes.  I was probably going to make some members angry or irritated, at least, and I was going to make myself irritated for sure.  So I didn't go.  I bet they did fine without me.

If you want a resentment go to a business meeting.

Self-Supporting

 Ah, yes, the Seventh Tradition.  Everyone knows what it says but how many of us have taken the time to understand why it's so necessary?  What it means.  The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous was written in 1939 but the Traditions didn't come about until 1946 and the 12 & 12 - where the Steps and the Traditions were fleshed out in much greater detail - first appeared in 1953.  These Traditions - called Twelve Points to Assure Our Future initially - were born out of hard experience in the chaos that is A.A.  None of them were tossed out casually.  All of them were necessary to make sure we didn't eat ourselves alive.  Those first several years were the wild, wild West in A.A.

I've heard it said the Steps are for the individual and the Traditions are for the groups for without the group the individual is in a whole lot of trouble.  Individuals get to do what they want as long as they don't threaten the group and the group gets to do what it wants as long as it doesn't threaten A.A. as a whole.  I'm always struck by the fact that both the Steps and the Traditions key on those core ideas of money, power, prestige, those things that can destroy both the individual and the group if left unchecked.

Some interesting anecdotes: at the start I bitched mightily about putting money in the basket but I always - ALWAYS - had the cash for drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes.  If you can afford an overpriced specialty coffee drink you can afford to contribute to your group.

When I was getting sober I set a jar near my front door and every day I tossed in the money I would have spent on those three staples.  I was flabbergasted by how fast it added up.  I should mention that I was drinking quarts of Colt 45, not Chivas Regal, so the daily contributions were pretty meager.

Have you checked out the prices for alcohol at a restaurant lately?  Holy shit, who can afford to drink that stuff?  I should be throwing a twenty into the basket.  I'd still be getting off cheap.

Some Distancing, Dude

 I've taken two six week vacations recently into areas that are remote enough so that they don't support A.A. meetings or where English isn't the language spoken.  And on the rare occasions where I had an opportunity to attend it would have required me to drive at night on roads that seemed to have been designed by insane meth addicts.  In the U.K. driving on rural roads - which were usually about a lane and a half wide and twisted unconscionably left and right constantly while popping up over blind rises with never a verge in sight - took all of my driving skills during the day when I was fresh and hyper-alert.  I suppose I could have looped in a Zoom meeting but I'm through with that worthy medium and back into The Rooms.

The point is this: I didn't really miss it.  In the past a prolonged, forced absence from meetings ended up with one increasingly squirrelly dude but I was just fine this time.  I'm having difficulty at the moment overcoming my impression that a lot of meetings are taking a stance one way or the other on controversial issues.  The content isn't always overt but the subtext is palpable and it makes me uncomfortable.  Now, God forbid I become one of those long-timers who make up crap like "when I was getting sober we made due with dry Sanka - we chewed on the crystals and we didn't use any water, either" and share other apocryphal stories but . . . this is not the atmosphere I remember as a newcomer.  Part of this, I guess, is that I've been sober 35 years and I hope my diligence with my recovery has paid some dividends so that a daily meeting is no longer required and also I readily admit that I'm a lot less willing to get up too early or stay up too late for my meetings.  I'm more likely to be dozing off at 9 PM than listening to a drunk share at a meeting.

I never thought I'd find myself at a point where not being at a meeting is often more enjoyable than being at a meeting.  I'm not quitting entirely but I've cut back and to no ill effect that I can see.  I have been careful to talk about this with some of my trusted A.A. advisors and counselors and co-sponsors - not Willie, of course - so that they can help me ferret out any hidden justifications and have gotten a clean bill of health so far with the suggestion I stay on top of this rapidly developing situation and continue my other recovery/spiritual growth work.

Who'd a thunk it?