More SuperK

I was working in my home office this morning when SuperK walked in and said: "I want a divorce."

"OK," I said, not looking up. I peeked out of the corner of my eye and saw that she was still there. "Right now?" I asked. "I'm kind of busy."

"Yes," she said, somewhat vaguely.

"Any particular reason this time?" I wondered.

"No, not really," she replied. "Same old stuff, I guess."

"Well," I said. "We've talked before about whether you would want to get married again and, if so, the dating. Remember? Putting on make-up, pretending that you're interested in someone else, all that?"

She thought for a moment. "God, you're right. That sounds awful."

"What about the cat?" I asked. "I'm willing to let you walk but I'm not giving up the cat."

"That's fair, " she said. "The cat likes you better."

Happy Enough

Happy: Having, showing, or causing a feeling of great pleasure, contentment, joy, etc.; joyous; glad; pleased.



Curious definition. I feel like some devil has reached into my mouth and grabbed my tongue, and is waggling it furiously. I can really put my finger on what makes me mad or what makes me furious or what really pisses me off but I become strangely silent when I think of happiness. One minute my brain is filled with screaming, insistent committee members yowling for revenge or sex or something shiny and new to play with and, in an instant, all you can see is a lonely tumbleweed bouncing across a devastated landscape, a thin wind blowing, coyotes yipping in the distance.


In a movie we watched last night the stereotypical perky waitress asked the stereotypical crusty but strangely lovable cook if he was happy. He looked at her and said: "Happy enough. I don't ask much, I don't give much, and I don't get much. Happy enough. Why do you ask?"


I think he's missing the boat with the not giving part but everything else made sense in kind of a neat little Hollywood wrap-life-up-in-one-sentence way. I'm happy when I don't expect much. Those freaking expectations can really get in the way of a decent life. How easy is it to feel frustrated at the end of the day because something tremendous didn't happen? I place a lot of pressure on an ordinary day to really come up big.

Happy enough.

Till Death Do Us Part

SuperK and I were sitting in the backyard today reading. She had a book and I was working on the NY Times. I read an article about a woman who writes a column about relationships, how people fall in love, when they "knew." The reporter hadn't done too well in the relationship department and was bemoaning this fact.

I put down the paper. "When did you know you wanted to marry me?" I asked.
SuperK looked at me: "Are you kidding me? This is what you've got for me?" She thought for a minute. "I have no idea," she said. We laughed pretty hard.

"How about you? When did you know you wanted to marry me?" Then she answered for me as she often does. I don't have to say much most of the time. "You never wanted to marry me. I dragged you into this kicking and screaming." Then she told me what she considered my worst character defect. We both laughed pretty hard again. She was dead on and it didn't bother me at all.

"Tell me something I don't know," I said.

"How about me? What do you think my worst character defect is?" I had no idea how we got from "when did you know" to "why do you hate me" but I couldn't stop the momentum.

I thought for a minute. "There are so many to choose from," I said. "I can't pick."

"Tell me something I don't know," she said.

We resumed reading.

I'm Talking the Talk

Boredom: The state of being dull, uninteresting, or monotonous.

Boredom is a kind of low level depression, the selfish luxury of people who have too many good things and no appreciation of any of them. When I'm bored I'm not grateful. I'm expecting life to deliver -- on a silver platter with a couple of cookies -- even more things that I don't deserve and will promptly ignore.

Willie and I had a cup of coffee yesterday -- when we both should have been working, I'll point out -- and made our case about who was most bored. It was a real Bore Down. He showed up after an alleged sales call in shorts, a T-shirt, and tennis shoes.

"Working hard?" I asked. His reply was unprintable. He did graciously inquire, though, what I was doing in a coffee shop in the middle of a work day afternoon. I told him where to go, or what he could do to himself, I don't remember which.

We decided after a while that we weren't behaving too well. I suggested that while I didn't know if he was going to go to Hell that it was going to be pretty hot wherever he ended up and that there would be a lot of bad people there. He wondered why I didn't just pour gasoline over myself and strike a match. "That way," he said. "You won't be so shocked when you end up at your final destination."

The funny thing is that this really was the gist of the discussion. The benefit to me in talking to old friends in recovery is that I have to hear how ridiculous my thinking can be. Some of the stuff that makes perfect sense when I'm all by myself sounds hilarious when I say it out loud. A few times yesterday Willie just looked at me, didn't say a word.

Didn't have to.

Horseface Steve -- Servant

Service: The occupation or condition of a servant; helpful, beneficial, or friendly action or conduct; act giving assistance or advantage to another.

Let me see if I understand this: my goal as a recovering alcoholic -- as a decent human being -- is to be of service to other people? My question is: how is this going to benefit me? I don't see the upside to doing something nice for someone else unless they are going to be doing something even nicer for me. I'm not willing to trade nice act for nice act: I need to receive something nicer. And you can stuff a sock in the idea of being of service for no reward at all. A servant?!? I see myself in the master class. Servants do things for me, not the other way around. That way I have plenty of time to do all of the important things that I do, like sit at the coffee shop, staring into space, slack-jawed.

Shorty harangues me about service all of the time. He's almost as important as me. He told me one day that he stopped doing all of the very important things that he was doing and went to visit his father. He asked his dad if he needed help with anything. He was imagining great, important things. His dad asked him to change a light bulb on the front porch. There he was, an important man with an advanced college degree, doing the work of a servant. That's what it's all about: doing something nice for someone else that they want done, not what I think I should do for them.

Last Saturday SuperK and I picked up dinner and visited my parents. After we ate my folks asked if she could install a digital converter box on a couple of totally ancient TV sets -- that should be thrown off a cliff somewhere -- so that they would work when commercial TV makes the switch to an all digital format. I was irritated, and I didn't even have to do the work. I envisioned witty conversation about deeply personal or intellectual matters, and my folks wanted us to rescue a couple of decrepit TVs.

It's all about me.

This is Almost Funny

Something: A thing not definitely known, understood, or identified; some undetermined thing.

Something or another will go wrong today. Some one who is out to get me will break through my defenses, stout as they are. I hope that when the ramparts are breached the defeat is not centered around a thing, an object, a piece of stuff. Man, I have a whole house packed with stuff. I have a couple of cars -- big pieces of stuff -- in a garage with more stuff in it.

I don't think I care about too many of these things any more, unless one of them breaks or is damaged, or someone takes one of them without my permission, or I see something new that I want. I tire of things so quickly. I put them in a box and down to the basement they go. I move them from house to house, secure in their little caskets. I pull them out from time to time and peer at them curiously. I can't always remember what some of these things are even used for.

Life is not about stuff. Nobody is going to peer into my grave, look at my ravaged corpse and say: "Wow, he had a great car." People remember acts not things.

Apparently god doesn't think that I'm absorbing this information. He has been dispatching his agents to slightly mar my things lately. The city is replacing the gas lines which run under the street in front of my house. Today I watched a man maneuver a backhoe up a hill and into my front yard. I recently hired someone to plant ivy on this hill. It wasn't a fair fight. Ivy is a tough plant but not that tough.

I had to laugh.

What is the Deal with this Thingumabob?

Thing: Any matter, circumstance, affair, or concern; that which is done, has been done, or is to be done.


Today I'm thinking about things. Big things, little things, things that you can see and touch, real things. What am I going to allow to get under my skin today? People? Of course I'm going to let people get under my skin. I think that's why other people were put on the face of the earth -- to annoy me somehow or to resist my attempts to control their every move. Is it the people or is it their actions? In my case it's clearly both. Irritating people doing irritating things to me is pretty much the story of my life.

I wonder how much of my time I spend worrying about unimportant things or about things that will never happen. I bet I would be APPALLED at how much time I waste doing this. I bet it would add up to years and years of my life. I know that when I imagine that something bad is going to happen to me it almost never comes to pass. That makes all this time wasting even more galling. Not only do I spend a lot of time worrying about unimportant stuff most of it never happens. And then there's my preoccupation with stuff. Worrying about stuff is the height of madness.


Would it be worth my time today worrying about how the N.Y. press would treat me if I struck out to end the game, with the bases loaded, to lose the World Series? As if someone could get something past me? Or worrying about the condition of an object or someone else's opinion of me. If nothing is actually going on that is a problem, I make things up. I project implausible outcomes arising from an improbable series of events far, far in the future.

Man, there's a lot of stupid stuff that can preoccupy my time.