The Same Old Stuff In One Neat Package

I spent some time yesterday with my best friend in the whole world, Hope the Dog.  I'm lying.  My best friend in the world, actually, is one Little Stevie Seaweed, but that goes without saying.  Anyway, the reaction of this animal to my presence is one of the most heart-warming things that has ever happened to me.  It's an absolute explosion of love.  It is love expressed physically.  She acts like she thought she was never going to see me ever again every time she stops by.

Which brings me back this morning to one of my favorite go-to topics: what the hell is love anyhow?  In my family of origin it was such a restrained emotion, very defined and doled out with great discretion and reluctance and only to people who fit a narrow criterion.  Don't get me wrong - I knew I was loved but it was often flat and dull and emotionless, something that was expected of everyone,  befitting a conservative, religious family.  This is what I had when I was launched out into the broader world.  Aware of the concept but constrained between tight guardrails.

While I began to tell people that I loved them in a much more relaxed way several years ago it was the death of my sponsor Ken that really rocketed me into the Fifth Dimension.  I've spoken about the details of his death before - this deeply Catholic, profoundly conservative guy whose beliefs offended me so much that for a few years I spent more time arguing with him than looking for the similarities in our respective programs. This changed after a while and we had a great friendship.  It was when he was close to death at the end, bedridden, taking morphine for the pain, that he began to say that he now understood God as an expression of pure love.  This really struck home with me; so much so that I now use it as a suggestion to anyone struggling with the idea of God or a Higher Power.  With a little Hope the Dog imagery thrown in to make it even simpler.  Who can get pissed at the idea of pure love? 

Later I had this interaction with a man who was a good friend many years ago, a man that I hadn't spoken with for thirty years, maybe more.  Someone asked him if he knew me and he replied: "Yes, he's a good friend.  In fact, he's one of my best friends."  This struck at my core - like Ken's awakening - rocketing me into a different (and better, c'mon!) interpretation of love.  My buddy talks about this incredibly long, incredibly thin, but incredibly strong thread that connects old friends over time and distance, that it's hard to snap this thread even with disuse.  

I have gotten to the point where love takes on so many different forms and guises.  I can't tell you how deeply, deeply satisfying this is.  It has allowed me to step out of the restrictive box and begin to tell all kinds of people that I love them.  It has shown me that there are so many forms and types of love with different degrees of intensity and intimacy and this freedom has allowed me to feel and also to express this weird-ass emotion much more freely and with a total unconcern as to whether it's reciprocated or expressed.  None of my business what you're feeling.  I sense it most of the time but not always and I am so okay with that fact.  Other people undoubtedly have their own definitions of what it is that might not jive with mine.

Hey, how about that shit?

I try to jot down one special thing I'm grateful for every day and I'm struck by the fact that it is almost always a live human being.  There are a few dead human beings in there and the occasional great travel experience or delicious type of cake but it's mostly people I see or talk to and where I can express this emotion.  It's the essence of life, isn't it?

Back to Saint Frank: "To seek to love rather than be loved."

Seaweed Shatters A Record of 35 Years ,

Gruesome:  Repellently frightful and shocking; horrific or ghastly.

As a general rule I'm not a gross person.  In my 9 years writing this blog I can't remember telling a single fart anecdote.  I'm hindered in this regard by the fact that I can't remember a single fart anecdote.  I'm not implying that a good fart joke isn't funny just that I don't think it's funny.  I am many distasteful things but gross is not one of them.  In fact, I'm quite prissy.  SuperK and I have been watching a series about some of the more disastrous battles in the South Pacific during World War II.  There are these horrific skirmishes where people are being killed and maimed, corpses littering the muddy ground, and all I can think of is where are the showers?  You're filthy.  You can't go to bed in those clothes without cleaning up a bit.

Anyway, I broke one of my longest standing records today, a streak that hit 35 or 36 years, a streak that has been intact for my entire sobriety and then some: I threw up.  I went swimming this morning - to my credit not hitting any older ladies in the face - when I began to feel a little queasy.  It got worse as the day progressed and nothing seemed to give me any relief.  SuperK and I were actually discussing the mechanics of throwing up prior to my shattering this much cherished record.

"I don't even know how to throw up," I remarked, with no irony.

SuperK - who throws up a normal amount, not frequently but sometimes - replied, in her typical understated way: "I think you'll know."

I threw up not long after this and she was right - it was time and I Knew.  Unfortunately, I had a glass of red Diet Cherry 7UP right before this so . . . well, let's say I thought I was bleeding to death.  The word "gruesome" gets tossed around a little too freely but it applied here.

Enough of this?  Me, too.  I'm getting nauseous.

Many, many years ago I was traveling in Syria with Little Westside Jonny.  We had a guide named Mohammed who made me look easy-going, a man who lives on in our memories with a crystal-clear consciousness.  One day we took a drive through the countryside to see the ruins of an old church, stopping along the way to visit an agricultural area where Mohammed picked some delicious cherries for us, cherries that were probably fertilized with livestock waste, cherries that went into my mouth and down my gullet unwashed.  Let's say I got sick and I got sick fast.  We were driving back to the hotel when I told Mohammed that it was time for me to go to the bathroom.  He mumbled something about a place coming up, leaving to state quite bluntly: "No.  I need to go NOW."

So there I was . . . my pants down around my ankles, box of tissues in my hand, 25 yards from a busy highway from which I was openly visible, leaning up against a building - rough-hewn concrete block in my memory and an unoccupied agricultural building, I think, but it didn't make any difference at the time - thinking: 

"This is as bad as it gets."