Friday, January 31, 2025

It's STILL All About Me

 KK and I are bitchy tour starters who thankfully manage to right the proverbial ship or bus or tuk-tuk or bush plane or Land Rover or river craft and enjoy ourselves but - I'll tell you we're weary and footsore and battle-torn and with each new day the turnaround is taking a lot more effort.  Today we're docked at a thousand yard artificial jetty outside of town that we have to traverse to reach our tour bus for a Cave and Mangrove Forest excursion that is termed “strenuous” with a warning about slippery paths and having to squat in caves to manuever under low overhangs of sharp limestone.  It was not a robust looking crowd straggling along with the alarming highlight being watching an obese elderly lady start to collapse about half-way down and having to be helped by her husband and a kind tour attendant, and when I say "collapse" I mean she dropped to the tarmac.  “Part of the responsibility of aging is not inflicting ourselves on people younger than us.”  I do think there’s an entitled “Fuck you - I'm going to do what I want” mindset with this well-to-do nursing home crowd.  (This woman, thankfully, did not even get off the bus when we arrived, wisely choosing to skip the festivities.)  This was unkind and frankly stressful to the Malaysian staff who had to boot her and unfair to her as Oceania gladly took her money for something she could not do.


Behavior I've seen/endured/marveled at during our travels:

  1.  A woman returning a paper to the lounge and setting it down blithely, knocking ajar the sign reading: “In consideration of the other guests please don't remove the papers from the lounge.”

  2. A woman climbing onto a treadmill and turning music on using her phone's external speaker.  I guess she gets to listen to what she wants and if you don't like it: tough shit.  I only regret that I couldn't get my heavy metal playlist to load.

  3. The people who stroll into the dining areas in tank tops and bare feet and all manner of swimsuits.  Apparently the reminder not to do this posted everywhere applies to other people.  Nothing like watching an old fat man's hairy armpits hovering over the salad selections as he ponders what to take.  Appetizing!

  4.  Queuing for buses and planes and tenders is a blood sport.  Elbows high!  Rush the door!  Take the best seats or what you think are the best seats even if everyone else has to stumble over you in the impossibly narrow walkways!

  5. I need to comment on the general obliviousness of people.  Amazing how many people I interact with - even have a meal with - who walk by me as if they've never seen me before. These are people who seem to be really, really wrapped up in themselves and the impression they're making and in painting a picture of their accomplishments and possessions to the exclusion of any awareness of the existence of someone else.

  6. Favorite topics: A. Number of houses owned. B.  Number of cruises taken/countries visited.  C.  The quality of “private” tours versus the grubby group tours.  D.  Work done and where the work takes them.  No one yet has said “Salesman” when they lay out their professional credentials but, boy, the doctors get that shit out right quick, the more humble of them using the euphemism of "being in the health care field" to temper their egos before eventually blurting out the doctor part.


All I can say is that I rarely act on these prejudices and judgements any more. I think them distressingly often but I do manage to keep my mouth shut. Whenever I'm in doubt as to the quality of my speech I default to silence. If someone thinks you a fool then open your mouth and remove all doubt.

Indeed.

Colorful Coral

 

   

We're on the Maldives, a volcanic archipelago in the Indian Ocean. About twenty-five years ago the tsunami that devastated coastal Indonesia rolled over the islands, covering some of them with sand and toxic debris to such a large extent that they were rendered uninhabitable.  I took a brief submarine ride, descending to one hundred feet below the surface, skirting the “reef” and then the following day two of us went snorkeling along the “reef, “ stopping at a couple of locations.  We saw some fish, a few lobsters, one reef shark, and lots of dead coral.  Dead dead.  There wasn't a hint of color anywhere.  As we idled right next to the coral in the sub it looked like a huge pile of gravel.  There were a few larger fish near the surface, drawn by the offal one of the crew attached to outside hooks on the sub, and a handful of varieties deeper down, but nothing in the way of vibrant coral.  The snorkeling was no better.   Shit is dead.  One of the guides said that the tsunami exposed a lot of coral to the sun and this killed it off but I dunno . . . Shit was dead at a hundred feet, too. 


One woman asked the snorkeling guide at the midpoint if we were going to see colorful coral at the next stop.  This is the obliviousness of the wealthy.  They don't pay attention to climate change, often actively denying that it exists or waving it off as part of some maleficent natural cycle, or their money insulates them from its effects.  Keep eating meat and driving three ton cars and turning your A/C down to arctic temperatures and then express surprise that things are turning ugly.  Hey, I wanted to see some bright colors! You are providing a crappy tour!  I tipped the crew - five of them plus the pilot - twenty bucks and he didn't seem to have a fistful of cash.  The obliviousness of the wealthy continues to astound.  Even after we survived the Thomas fire a couple of years later everything was pretty much back to normal save for some empty lots and black, skeletal trees.  There's an ongoing project moving beachfront public parking further from the ocean downtown.  Managed retreat.  Every now and then we'll get a high surf event and it'll eat away some more of the coast.


This is what a non-expedition cruise looks like.  I knew it was a cruise on a standard ship but hoped that Africa! would make it more palatable.  Hurumph.  Still a lot of fat, entitled people hobbling between meals.  This is what it is!  Suck it up!  I know you're not bitching too much but stop even that little bit of bitching.


Wednesday, January 29, 2025

An Allergy and An Obsession

"We believe, and so suggested a few years ago, that the actions of alcohol on these chronic alcoholics is a manifestation of an allergy, that the phenomenon of craving is limited to this class and never occurs in the average temperate drinker.  These allergic types can never safely use alcohol in any form at all, and once having formed the habit found they cannot break it, once having lost their self confidence, their reliance upon things human, their problems pile up  on them and become astonishingly difficult to solve."  Big Book - The Doctor's Opinion

There were two great Greek Tragedies in my life before I got sober - one educational and one professional.  I had achieved a lot in what the world values as achievements in a short time and in both cases totally lost all of it because of my drinking and drug use.  I'm not sure which is more confounding: that I did it twice before I was 28 years old or I did it once, suffering the shame and guilt and pain and humiliation the behavior caused, and then I did it again.  I had this sense that I was slowly leaning over the edge of a high cliff, safe as long as I didn't lean over any further, then leaning a little bit more, pondering the fact that it was getting more dangerous but relieved that I hadn't yet fallen, then leaning just a little further, etc. etc. etc. until I fell off the cliff.  It's like the information the brain sends out on the rare occasions when you take a spill - "Uh oh . . . I'm going down.  I can't stop this.  I can't make my body respond in a way that is going to stop this fall."

An allergy is the condition where a person's immune system reacts in a damaging and dangerous way to a substance in the environment that is harmless to most people.  An obsession broadly defined is an unhealthy and compulsive preoccupation with something.  Doesn't this sound like you?  I take in alcohol and my body reacts in an unusual way, an abnormal way, and not only does this not convince me not to take in that substance any more I become obsessed with taking more of it in.

I get the shivers just thinking back on this part of my life.  My mother used to ask me: "Are you still going to those meetings?"  Yeah, ma, still going to those meetings.

Taking a Year Off . . . Huh.

 A friend of mine in The Program and I have been chatting electronically while I've been on this trip.  He's a really good guy, really bright, vigorous in his love of life.  Out of nowhere he mentioned that a mentor of his strongly suggested that he take a year off from Alcoholics Anonymous.  My buddy has been sober for four or five years.  Hmmmmm.


I understand that official, organized meetings are time-consuming.  I get that there are some people who live in meetings when they should be working more diligently on themselves or taking care of life situations.  If you break your arm you need to go to the hospital, not a clubhouse.  If you don't have any money you should spend some time looking for a job instead of going to five meetings.  Sometimes it can be easier to hide out in a meeting than doing the hard work of getting on with the business of life.  Still . . . this hiatus from group recovery has always seemed to be a bit extreme to me.  How about cutting your meeting attendance in half or just going twice a week? 


I pondered, I considered, I mused, and then sent along a note kindly wondering about his decision.  He did not, after all, ask me what I thought of this plan before he made a decision so I didn't do this lightly.  I'm assuming that he didn't do this because he didn't . . . you know  . . .  WANT my opinion.  Which is just fine with me.  I have no IDEA what's good for anyone else.  Sometimes people will do something that I would have advised against and it works out well for them and sometimes people's decisions are disastrous and blow up in their face and that's exactly what they needed - to suffer a setback, some pain, so that they could move on to the next appropriate phase of their lives.  I don't know what I should do half the time so I sure as shit don't know what YOU should do ANY of the time.


Ignoring me when making a decision is groovy. I'm good with that.  The more sinister reason for not involving me may certainly be that he didn't want any blowback from someone else, some judgement, some opinionated bloviation.  I was a master of telling you what you were doing wrong (the log versus speck thing again) when I was drinking and still today I'm prone to passing judgment on other people.  I work hard on this character defect, I really do, and I'm better but not great.  Just . . . better.


Looking forward to hearing from him.  That is, of course, if he replies at all.  It's up to him.


Monday, January 27, 2025

My Mind Can Be A Real SOB

 Meditation Thoughts . . .  

As I notice my thoughts in meditation, I discover that they aren't in my control very much of the time - I swim in an uninvited constant stream of memories, plans, expectation, judgments, regrets.  My mind likes to show me how it contains all possibilities, often in conflict with one another - the beautiful qualities of a saint and the dark forces of a dictator and a murderer.  There's my wild and irritating mind, planning, imagining, creating endless struggles and scenarios for changing the world.

I think that the very root of this chaos is dissatisfaction.  I want both endless excitement and perfect peace.  My thoughts dominate my experience with ideas of likes versus dislikes, higher versus lower, self versus other.  My thoughts tell stories about my successes and failures, plan my security, habitually remind me of who and what I think I am.

An egomaniac with an inferiority complex.  Buddhism teaches me that this dualistic nature of thought is a/the root of all my suffering.

Am I listening to my heart today?  Or am I listening to my mind?  I can always trust my heart.  My mind, on the other hand, can be a real son of a bitch.

From the Doctor's Opinion in the Big Book: "He confirms what we who have suffered alcoholic torture must believe - that the body of the alcoholic is quite as abnormal as his mind.  It did not satisfy us to be told that we could not control our drinking just because we were maladjusted to life, that we were in full flight from reality, or were outright mental defectives.  These things were true to some extent, in fact, to a considerable extent with some of us.  But we are sure that our bodies were sickened as well.  In our beliefs, any picture of the alcoholic which leaves out this physical factor is incomplete."

The italics are mine because I need to remember that I'm nuts and that my body reacts to the presence of alcohol differently that the non-alcoholic.

Sunday, January 26, 2025

Merry Christmas, Belated

 Help me, Mr. Wizard!  Our connection to the staff continues to grow while our alienation with the other guests grows with few bounds . . .   It's hot today, sunny and humid, so those of us who want to eat outside would prefer the two rows of tables under the balcony overhang.  It's lunchtime and we're in the cafe so we feel like we should get a table at which we can eat lunch.  There were a surprising number of people taking up tables and drinking.  OK, OK, I get it - you're important and you can do whatever the fuck you want to but the brazen lack of consideration for other people continues to astound.  You can literally drink anywhere on the ship - they will bring alcohol to you, put it right in your hands, you don't even have to get up, you don't even have to TAKE the alcohol, they'll put it right on the table next to you, so maybe not drinking in the restaurant at a meal time is a small act of kindness?


Merry Christmas.

Times are hard.

Here's your fucking

Christmas card.


Thursday, January 23, 2025

Bill W In The Flesh

 There are twelve hundred passengers on our cruise ship and six hundred crew members but apparently no one is in recovery.  The ship has been kind enough to allow us to post a notice in the daily newsletter that there's a non-hosted meeting for the Friends of Bill W that meets in one of the lounges.  We've gone the last four nights.  We're whiffing.  No one.  Nada.  Zippo.  Radio Silence on the Regatta.  We stand there hopefully any time someone wanders into the room even though you can usually tell that we're not going to get anywhere with the wanderers.

Then, yesterday, a woman came in.

“Is this the meeting for Bill W?” she asks.

“Yes.  Yes it is,” we reply in unison, smiling away.

“I saw this on the schedule and wondered what it was.” she says.

Laughing inside we tell her that it's kind of a coded message advertising an AA meeting.

“Oh,” she says, before turning to me.  “Are you Bill?”

I can barely keep my voice under control as I explain who Bill is.  I thought briefly about fucking around with her but for once I resisted the urge to riff.


“Are you the leaders of the meeting?” she asked.  She was persistent, I'll give her that.  We surmise that in the world of the Cruisers there's a subset that does absolutely everything that the ship offers.

She totters off after telling us that she had included a note in the mid-cruise evaluation form that it would have been helpful for the authorities to explain what kind of meeting this was.


We counted it as a meeting.


You're Probably Annoying Me, Too

 As I move through my days a topic for a posting will occasionally pop into my head and when it does I try to jot down a brief note that will hopefully jog my memory when I'm ready to do some writing.  Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't.  A lot of the time I can't read my own writing.  “Jellyroll astronaut?  What the hell does that mean?”  Anyway, as you can imagine, there are a few topics that reoccur.  Number One on the hit list is some variation of People Annoy The Shit Out of Me. 

Repeating myself, I hope, in my affirmation that it's not because they ARE annoying but rather that I FIND them annoying.  Perhaps they find me annoying.  I'm okay with this.  I'm good with this.  I don't really care if they find me annoying and there are times that I'm annoying on purpose.  Today, in the Executive Lounge, early in the morning, there were a couple of stupified, slack-jawed men in there eating their pre-breakfast (apparently they needed something substantial in their protruding corpulence to tide them over until they can have a good, solid, PROPER breakfast when one of the breakfast venues opens up in like twenty minute) and watching a news program that I find repetitive and consistently stupid.  I pondered briefly and then decided not to say something like this: “So what are we supposed to be afraid of today?”  I could substitute “outraged about” in place of “afraid of” and still get my point across.  Fear and Anger is what partisan news organizations peddle.  It gets people watching and it absolutely hooks people who won't take five minutes to check in with anyone who might disagree with these pre-arranged sentiments.


I remained silent while judging deliciously in my own mind.The next day I walked back into the Executive Lounge - still windowless, small - to grab some coffees yesterday and was not surprised to see a highly partisan news program blaring away with a couple of different slack-jawed men eating their pre-breakfast breakfast, eyes glued to the screen, transfixed, zombie-like.  I take the time to look at sites that broadcast opinions-masquerading-as-news just to get a taste of opposing viewpoints.  It's clear that the best way to get people engaged with your organization is to piss them off or scare the shit out of them.  There were three bits that I caught a whiff of - two were Outrage! at some minor social gaffes (or probably mischaracterizations) that this particular source overlooks when it's their guy and pinpoints when it's not.  There's an old Bible verse about tending to the log in one's own eye before trying to pluck out the speck in another's.  The bit that was designed to make people Be Afraid! was some ridiculous made-up story about aliens hovering over the East Coast and why wasn't this being clearly enunciated to all of the dangerously threatened citizens?  Why the cover-up!?  Where's the military?!  The government - never trust the lying government!! - has repeatedly stated that the aliens were actually airplanes with total clearance or small personal drones with a perfectly legal right to be in that airspace.  


Facts are such bullshit when they get in the way of what we want to believe.


Go Talk To Someone

"Almost everyone who undertakes a true spiritual path will discover that a profound personal healing is a necessary part of his or her spiritual process.  Wise spiritual practice requires that we actively address the pain and conflict of our lives in order to come to inner integration and harmony.  We cannot run from ourselves, so we do well to include any depression or loneliness that we feel in our meditation.   We should also remember that healing cannot come from ourselves alone.  Because many of our pains come from past relationships, it is through our experience of a wise and conscious relationship that these pains are healed.  These relationships become the grounds for our opening to compassion and freedom of the spirit for it's when we allow our darkest fears and worst dimensions to be witnessed and compassionately accepted by another that we learn to accept them ourselves."  Some Jack Kornfeld and some Stevie Seaweed

I always seem to be surprised when a spiritual meditation practice involves other people.  It's counterintuitive.  It's also surprising still to this day that this practice involves staring pain in the face.  That is SO not what an active alcoholic does, preferring to run like hell from anything unpleasant.  It's all good.  It's all part of the process, part of the plan.  The good, the bad, the pleasant, the painful, all of it, we get to and we have to experience all of it.  We'd hardly be human if we were spared these life lessons.

Sunday, January 19, 2025

World? What World?

From a writer named Jess Walter there's this description, one of the finest I've ever read to describe what happened to me: 

"But as a major CNS depressant liquor has its advantages.  It struck my reptilian brain square on its diamond head.  Booze - the ancient dimmer of fear and sorrow.  The granny  of all psychoactive meds, a blunt old hag toddling down out of the mountains with a demented smile and a club.  World?  She sneers.  What world?  And swings her cudgel at your skull." 

By The Glass or By The Bottle


I feel like a weirdo malcontent when I decline wine or beer.  It's not that easy getting something to drink other than the standard still or sparkling water and even then you're most likely to get still water no matter what you order because the sparkle of the sparkling water is muted at best.  I feel like pointing out that there should be some fucking BUBBLES in sparkling water.  Sometimes we order a can of soda water - it can show up warm and unopened, still in the can, dropped off dismissively as if it was something offensive; sometimes it's a warm can accompanied by a glass of ice; but most often a partial can poured into said glass of ice before it makes to the table.  Someone ought to explain the chemical reaction that happens when a warm beverage is poured into a glass of ice; that the ice melts quickly and dilutes the drink; and that the drink is then less appealing. 


Probably, as a non-drinker, I'm a cruiser deadbeat, like someone who pays off their credit card each month without accumulating any fees or interest charges.  Which is what I do.  I'm guessing the people who buy the drink packages are subsidizing the rest of us.  The cheapest package is a whopping forty dollars per day per person.  That's eighty bucks a day for two people which is an astounding twenty five hundred dollars for a thirty day cruise.  If you want an unlimited top shelf package you can double that.  Five grand.  Five thousand dollars.  Unbelievable.  I'm an alcoholic and I think that's unbelievable and if I was still drinking I'd make those fuckers lose money on my package.  This is probably why you see old people drinking two glasses of wine at lunch just to get the party started.  I’m an alcoholic and if I had two glasses of wine at lunch I'd either have to go sleep somewhere or use it as an accelerant for a day-long binge.    


Despite the twelve hundred passengers onboard we're amused/amazed/appalled that no one besides yours truly have shown up the last two days for the scheduled, non-hosted onboard AA meeting.  The constant presence of alcohol whenever we're not in our room is a bit annoying especially given that we're stuck in this recurring sea day cycle due to inclement weather, political unrest, and quarantine restrictions. I've never felt like drinking but I'm becoming increasingly aware of the presence of alcohol. If everyone walked around naked on the ship it would start to become less shocking and more quotidian. Eh, maybe not, given the girth and heft of some of these people but you get the point. Maybe not. I get the point which is that the alcohol being front and center is annoying after a while. I've been on a ship where alcohol is included and this pisses me off because I'm subsidizing the drinkers. And I've been on a ship where the alcohol costs cash money and this pisses me off because the staff is incentivized to push alcohol.


As you can see I'm easily pissed off.


Saturday, January 18, 2025

Recurring Problems

 


I have this recurring problem with people.  Namely, that they annoy me.  I'm not totally sure why this is.  I don't think it's because most people are annoying - although I have my suspicions - and I don't think it's because I find myself fascinating - although I'm not being entirely genuine there, either, as you may have deduced from the ongoing fascination I have with all things Seaweed.  The mystery is why I approach most people with the “you're going to be annoying” attitude.  I suspect I enjoy the comfortable feeling of superiority it gives me.  Who, after all, doesn't enjoy feeling a little better than everyone else?


I'm on a ship with a lot of wealthy people.  They're also older than me to a large extent and most of them haven't been too diligent in taking care of their bodies.  Sometimes I wonder if I spend too much time minding my physical self so seeing what happens when you don't is somewhat gratifying  . . .  no, not gratifying as that implies I enjoy seeing overweight people lumbering from buffet to buffet but more affirming.  It's better to read than to watch TV and it's better to meditate than to doom-scroll on your mobile.  Take care of the body, mind, and spirit or fade away.


Anyway, we ate at a shared table on Night One.  There was a steady stream of competitive traveling - one boring woman tried to convince us to change hotels at our last stop because she knew the best hotel in that city.  We picked our hotel by parsing a number of parameters - cost, services, location, etc - and did not try to find the “best” hotel.  There were a steady stream of references from both couples concerning their “second homes.”  I would have talked about my mobile home but SuperK would have killed me.  Jobs were front and foremost, too, with a lot of mentions of where the job required the individual to travel to.  When I was asked what I did I said “I inherited a lot of money from my father so I didn't have to work.”  I really said that although I did come clean after a few beats.  Kids and their accomplishments was de rigeur as a relentless topic of converation . . . Who gives a shit?  Do you think I want to see pictures about your kids’ belongings.  As my neighbor Hank the Curmudgeon once quipped: “No, I don't want to hear about your grandkids.”


Part of the deal for me is that I'm so used to the real, deep, heartfelt relationships we have in Alcoholics Anonymous where when someone asks me how I'm doing what they want to know is how I'm doing.