Spiritus Frumenti

Spirit: Real meaning; true intention; a pervading animating principle, essential, or characteristic quality, or prevailing tendency or attitude.


Here's the opening paragraph of an email I received today: "As you are well aware, we have spent this entire year allocating resources where they can provide the best revenue return to the company." First of all, the original note was dated August 28th and today is, I might point out, October 3rd. This would indicate to me that I'm not front and center with this organization. I'm not in the front and I'm not in the center. I believe I'm in the third balcony, obstructed view, next to the men's room.

The letter continues: "In that spirit, I am announcing . . . " followed by some uninteresting gook. What spirit would that be? The spirit of sacrificing people for corporate profits? The spirit of not giving a shit about anything but the bottom line? Look, I understand that business exists to make money but can't we at least pretend that there's a little something more going on? Somebody should teach this guy how to write a letter. He was probably the snotty kid sending a note to Aunt Blanche thanking her for the ugly socks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kon-Tent-Munt

Contentment: The state, quality, or fact of being contented; a satisfying or being satisfied.


I'm in a good spot right now. It's kind of freaking me out. I'm going to have to think up some scheme to wreck everything. I'm more comfortable with chaos and pain. I know how to manage things when I'm going down in a ball of flames, pieces flying off, the whole structure coming apart. Alcoholics, we're good at problems. Contentment is a whole 'nother story.

Every now and then I hang in a place where I'm content with what I have. My stuff seems pretty interesting. I'm happy with my stuff and my circumstances right now. I don't need anything else and I'm not particularly afraid that someone will get in and mess with what I have. This will change, of course. I'm not an idiot. Ironically, I have a couple of big things going on that would have been grounds for murder not long ago. Today it's like: "Eh." I don't have the energy to pound my little fists of rage.

Maybe I'll pick a fight with SuperK. That always spices things up.

Instant Karma

Karma: The totality of a person's actions in one of the successive states of his existence, thought of as determining his fate in the next.

More insanity.

When something bad happens to me I'm sure that I deserve it. I assume that I did something wrong and I'm being punished for my actions. I'm never surprised when things go south. It seems to be in the natural course of life for bad, bad stuff to happen. I expect it. I almost enjoy it, these difficulties. And this is despite the fact that bad things don't happen to me all that often and I exaggerate the bejesus out of them when they do. "Oh, no! Ohmigod! It's raining today and I bought a carton of eggs with a broken egg in it! Why do bad things happen to me!"

Woe, woe, woe.


Even more perplexing, when good things happen I figure I don't deserve them. I feel guilty, like I'm driving a stolen car. I'm afraid that the good things are going to be snatched away by a cruel and vengeful god, toying with me and enjoying it very much. So I'm not very appreciative of the good things I have, preferring to ignore them most of the time and wondering why I don't have more. You can dump a $100 in my lap and I'll bitch that it's not more.

Guilt, guilt, guilt.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that The System isn't set up like that. Good things and bad things are going to happen. It's inevitable. However, there is a karma out there, I believe, which does seem to reward us for right thinking and crack our shins when we're selfish. And the rewards don't often show up as things but with a sense of purpose and belonging, a feeling of contentment and all that crap.

Next time, I'm going to look at the eggs first.

The System is Calling the Shots

Random: lacking aim or method; purposeless; haphazard.

When I'm doing The Work I have to laugh at the unpredictability of life. I have absolutely no idea what's going on most of the time and that's a lot of fun when I'm not fighting The System. It's like getting up in the morning and finding out that there was an unexpected snowfall -- I can bitch about having to shovel the driveway or I can go out and make a snow girl, with anatomically correct breasts and a demure look on her face. This doesn't change the essential fact that there's snow on the ground. I can marvel at the snow or I can rail at the sky that disgorged it. Makes no difference to the snow. The snow is part of The System. There are rules that I can't make go away.

Herr Luber has drifted, with some gentle nudges and bumps, into a little swirling backwater of life. One of those spots we all get caught in from time to time. We can see the big, exciting River of Life as we float around, maybe getting dunked by a small waterfall now and again, but mostly just swirling, bumping into the walls. It's not that unpleasant but it's not that interesting, either. Dunk, swirl, look at the River longingly, repeat.

"The Random Meter is pegged at the top," he said. What a great image. Fully Random. That is a great metaphor for total lack of control. It's the loss of control that's frustrating. It's managing the expectations that's hard.

Run Away!

Fight or Flight. They say that great stress impels an organism to stand and fight or to run like hell. The Fight or Flight Response, they call it. This makes sense. It's a good name, if a little bit unimaginative.

I have been battling another individual in my organization who is trying to get me to do something that I don't want to do. Imagine that: me not wanting to do something that someone else wants me to do. This is not the first time I have engaged in this behavior. By nature I don't want to do things if I'm told to do them. Good things, bad things, saving my own life things, I don't like to do anything if I'm told to do it. Technically, I don't have to do these two particular things, either, which confounds the situation and swells my own sense of power and self-satisfaction.

To refuse the assignment, I had to call this guy and tell him that I didn't want to do the work. To prepare for this, I had like four million arguments in my head, using up the better part of two weeks to avoid a half day's worth of work. This makes sense to me when I'm using brilliant and unassailable logic to win an argument with someone who isn't actually present. SuperK chips in, too. I try an argument out on her. She tweaks it. We pop into each other's office from time to time with refinements. This isn't all bad -- some of the stuff that I say to myself really sounds terrible when I'm talking to someone else. Finally, we come up with an airtight solution. Two alcoholics coming up with an airtight solution. Double the fun.

So I call the guy. I'm not confrontational. I'm not upset. I ask a lot of questions and let him do a lot of the talking. I find that when I talk things turn out badly. I figure maybe he'll hang himself with his own rope. I dodge and feint and don't commit to anything but don't refuse the assignment, either. I chalk this up to my kindness and sense of fair play.

Yeah. I was afraid. I was afraid of the confrontation.

P.S.: I received an email this evening "thanking me in advance for helping out with the project."

Talk Talk

Talk: To put into spoken words; utter; to speak emptily or trivially; chatter.

It comes as a shock to me to realize that I am not as interesting to other people as I am to myself. I try to remember this when I'm around someone with nothing to say who nonetheless insists on doing a lot of talking. I was at a large meeting last night where the same few people share every week and frankly, they'd be better off keeping quiet and listening to what someone else has to say. And I notice this, of course, because I think I have something profound to share but don't because I'm too humble, even though my thoughts are profound and revealing and spiced with hilarious and insightful anecdotes from my past.

I can't listen to what someone else is saying when I thinking about my reply. I see this in people's eyes all of the time when I'm talking; my experience as a sales guy has helped me perceive when someone is paying attention and when someone is not, which is distressingly often. I can almost hear the wheels turning and the gears grinding as the other person prepares his response. It's not worth talking to someone who is busy working on a brilliant riposte.

This is what I wanted to say last night. It's not nearly as profound as I thought it was at the time. And it took me most of the meeting to come up with it which means I wasn't listening to anyone else. It's unclear to me why I thought they weren't profound. I wasn't listening. Maybe they were saying things that I needed to hear.

This Program solves a lot of my problems as long as I'm diligent in working the principles of the 12 Steps. The spiritual principles of the 12 Steps. I came in with all kinds of difficult psychological and social deficiencies as a result of my drinking, and I was in a big hurry to solve them all. Some of them were deep-seated and wedged in but good, and I needed professional help to de-wedge them, but I learned to seek out this help in the process of working The Steps. I never had any luck in solving my problems if I wasn't trying to apply a spiritual solution. It's very tempting to say: "OK, I'm having a relationship problem and I'm going to concentrate on it and dabble in The Program on the side, because this is more important and I don't want to waste any of my valuable time screwing around with all of this arcane crap when I could be screaming at my wife."

I think that there are 12 Steps.

The Talented Mr. Face

Falsehood: Lack of accuracy or truth; falsity; deception.

I was idly thinking about lying when I was cleaning the kitchen yesterday. Not lying about cleaning the kitchen or planning some specific future lie -- I don't need to plan for that seeing that I'm an accomplished and creative liar who can lie at the drop of a hat -- but reminiscing over some Lies in my Past.

When I was still in college Herr Luber and a couple of friends joined me for a camping trip in the Red River Gorge State Park in KY. And by "camping trip" I mean "passing out in a tent after a night of drinking and drug use in the woods." I don't recall specifically if drinking alcohol was permitted in this particular state park but it's highly doubtful. It was probably a dry county. I remember nearly coming to blows with Herr Luber because I kept compulsively whistling Ted Nugent's "Dog Eat Dog." There's not much to the song even if I had known any of the words or the course of the tune beyond: "Cat Scratch Fever, Dog Eat Dog." Maybe the song was called "Cat Scratch Fever." All of his songs kind of sound the same. I think that the chorus was: "Dog, dog, dog eat dog" repeated ad infinitum, and that was all I whistled.


At some point we decided to play a game of Frisbee-by-Moonlight on the country road twisting through the park. It was quite thrilling to stand there, clueless, and have a Frisbee suddenly appear, traveling at a high velocity, right around teeth level. Inevitably, a cop or park ranger swung around the bend and stopped, got out of his cruiser. He had a flashlight with which he probed our sweating, reddish faces.

"Is that your beer?" he asked one of us, pointing at the cold, sweating beer can straddling the double yellow line. I can't remember who answered although the response is right out of the B-Man playbook. I might as well take credit for it.

"No."

I could hear someone down at the tents flinging drugs and drug paraphernalia and just smoked drug detritus into the woods.

The officer poked around for a while before leaving, warning us that: "We don't like to have any of that beer-drinking or pot-smoking going on here."

Being polite boys raised in the suburbs we didn't have much of a history of confronting the cops, so we wisely kept our mouths shut until the guy was out of sight. Then did we come up with some zingers. Stuff that we should have said but are lucky that we didn't.

Herr Luber suggested an aggressive stance, maybe jab the cop's chest with an index finger, and bark: "Yeah? Then what DO you like?" That was very popular. I thought that maybe we should suggest he go someplace else if he didn't want to drink or smoke pot, because that's what we were doing. "Yeah? I'd suggest you get back in your car and get moving because you are in the wrong place."

Wasn't it great to be able to look down at a beer can at my feet, miles from anyone else, in the back woods, in the middle of the night, reeking like a brewery, and say with a straight face that it wasn't mine? What a talent.


Do you think I fooled the cop? Do you think he thought: "Eh, maybe someone else left it here."

I don't think I fooled the cop.