WRONG!

I live in a city where the overwhelming majority of people have very different political views than I do. We disagree on matters of a moral, social, and religious nature as well, again overwhelmingly. I'm in a teeny, tiny, vanishingly small minority. It's kind of fun most of the time being a contrarian for the hell of it kind of guy, but it can also be frustrating. A lot of these folks are pretty militant about this stuff. They aren't interested in what I have to say because I'm so clearly WRONG! and they're going to have to spend the time to show me why this is so.

In a way it's like the good old days when I sought out places to drink that were filled with people who thought and acted like I did. If you sit around swapping war stories and slapping people on the back who ape your opinions it's inevitable that you're going to fall under the illusion that everyone believes the way that you do and if they don't then they're WRONG!

This is all well and good. I don't have to talk to these people if I don't want to. If I'm unhappy where I live I can move somewhere else. Where we have to be careful is in our meetings. Last night someone tossed off a dismissive, belittling comment typical of this area that suggested that I'm a bit of an idiot. Now I'm not saying I'm not a bit of an idiot, as so many of you have made abundantly clear over the years. I don't have any trouble with someone calling me an idiot to my face, as has happened millions of times. But not in a meeting. We don't criticize anyone's views or opinions on the outside world.

Shame on me for showing so little spiritual growth that this offended me, but shame on him for stomping all over Tradition 6. Now I look at this dude with a jaundiced eye, and my liver is working just fine right now. This is jaundice by choice. I'm having trouble separating his program, which I admire, from his politics, which I do not.

Early on in my sobriety I was in a meeting where people were tossing around the phrase "recovering Catholic" in their comments. I don't think they meant any harm. Some of the stuff was pretty funny. I think they were trying to explain how we can take anything good and wreck it.

One woman finally piped up: "I'm a Catholic and my faith is very important to me." She was offended by what was being said. If she had been brand new, maybe she wouldn't have come back.

I'm glad no one offended me at my first meeting. I was looking really hard for a reason not to come back.

TERMINATION!

Terminate: To bring to an end in space or time; form the end or conclusion of.

Exterminate: To destroy entirely; wipe out; annihilate.

So I've been trying to get my arms around the fact that SuperK was TERMINATED from her job. I'm sure it's a lot harder on her than it is on me but really, I'm mostly concerned about how it affects me. I wish her well all the while hoping that she's worried about how I'm doing. After all, something happened to her that's affecting me. Hardly fair to me.

To add fuel to the fire her mother is in the hospital and she's been in the middle of a Mexican Standout with her at best moderately dysfunctional siblings. Everyone is trying to avoid doing any work or spending any money while simultaneously trying to guilt and manipulate anyone else into doing the work and spending the money. If you don't think your drinking affects your kids you should watch a group of middle aged adults with well honed manipulation skills trying to run the show. It's quite a dance.


Finally, my mother has been in rare form trying to get the world to run her way irregardless of the wishes of others. I made the mistake of filling her in on SuperK's drama and had to listen to a steady stream of totally inappropriate advice, most of it geared to dealing with sane and reasonable people, which is not the case here. It's so bad that SuperK's the most normal of the bunch. Think about that for a minute.

Do I sound a little bitchy? I don't mean to. I think for the most part I've been pretty even-tempered handling all of this low grade chaos. When we really try to live the Program we do get better. We don't get great but we do get better.

Yesterday, however, I felt a little pissy all day long. I get home from my swim -- during which I had long, furious mental arguments with someone who had posted a comment on a social networking site that SuperK belongs to. It's not even my page; it's her page. I had no business sticking my nose in her business, long and big as it may be. A very stick-able nose.

I reread the aggravating post and sat down at her desk.

"May I?" I said politely.

"Be my guest," she replied, backing out of the room, making the sign of the cross.

20 minutes later I'm finishing up a brilliant, sarcastic, anger-driven grouch of a brainstorm of a reply to this individual on someone else's web page. I'm responding to someone I've never liked about a subject I can't do anything about that doesn't really affect me directly. I'm shaking with self-satisfied scorn. I post my reply while my wife is gone, just in case she objects to what I've written under her name.

I got up and walked around the room a minute.

"Good grief," I thought. "What in the hell?" I added.


Just like that, it can sneak up on you.

The Angle of Repose

I had a guy in The Program do some work in my house recently. He was a nice man and his work was beyond reproach. This was important to us because he was rehabbing a job that had been done initially by someone who needed The Program but hadn't found his way into our midst yet, and whose work was extremely reproachful. There is nothing quite as distinctive as an alcoholic cutting corners and covering up deficiencies. We are good liars. We are good at the old misdirection play. Fake right, run left.

It was funny watching another perfectionist try to do a perfect job. Are alcoholics perfectionists, almost without exception? I think so. I see it all the time. My house is as old as sin and all you have to do is look around to find defects. It doesn't take a certified home inspector, I'll tell you that. I kept trying to convince this man that it wasn't important to bevel a baseboard that would be hidden behind the refrigerator and under several lbs. of dust bunnies, to NASA standards. I was going to pay him the same amount of money for Horseface standards -- quite low, by definition -- as I was for NASA standards. I'm lucky if I can get SuperK's shoes out of the doorway. I'm not worried about the bevel angle.

I like how the phrase "perfectionist with an inferiority complex" seems to describe a lot of alcoholics. I constantly set the bar higher no matter how many times I've achieved my goals. The result is that I always seem to be failing. If I need to dig 3 holes I go ahead and dig 4, then toss and turn all night because I didn't get that 5th hole dug. Eventually I get to the point where I'm knocking out 20 holes a day -- good, big, wide, deep holes -- and still tossing and turning all night. It's never enough with me.

Just do your best today. Screw it.

Drifting on a Sea of Air

Two days ago I used Carl at the coffee shop. It felt good. I felt like a Carl. Then, yesterday, they didn't ask me for my name. The place was pretty empty but I'm wondering if a conspiracy is afoot. Maybe this violates Starbucks ethics. Maybe I'm going to be whisked out of there by Men in Black.

"Excuse me, Carl, or whoever you are, you're going to have to come with us."

They'll carry me out by my elbows in disgrace, blacklisted, banned from Starbucks.

All I want to be is a Rock and Roll superstar. I don't want to learn how to play guitar, though. It looks hard, but I realize that the guitar player is top dog in the rock and roll universe, except maybe for the lead singer, and I can't sing at all. I have never even hummed a line of a song and had it sound reasonable. It sounds awful.

There was a brief confrontation at the espresso machine in the Horseface kitchen this morning. Maybe I should bring it up as a topic at the jail.

I want to be rich. Rich as shit. I don't want to do any work, though. I'm sure I would handle my money well if I was obscenely wealthy.

I'm sure of it.

I Intuit Disaster

Intuition: The immediate knowing or learning of something without the conscious use of reasoning.

I with that I could see into the future. It would be comforting to me to see how things are going to play out. Of course, if something bad was going to happen it wouldn't be such a great plan. At that point I'd rather stay with the old system. I guess I'm saying pass along the good news but keep me in the dark if I'm going to be facing some bad stuff.

I'm not sure how practical this system would be on a day to day basis. If I couldn't see into the future on any given day then I'd know something unpleasant was going to happen. I would imagine that would dampen my enthusiasm for the day. I'd be wondering if it was going to be bad like a bad piece of fish or bad like getting hit with a truck bad. Then again maybe knowing something bad was going to happen would be better than assuming it was going to happen, which is my current modus operandi.

The Book talks about how we develop an intuitive ability to make the right decisions as long as we have a regular connection with our higher power. I'm not sure how this works, either. I know from my own experience that if I don't careen through the day like an out of control race car that I start to make the right decisions. This is the whole idea behind The Quiet Time. It's my feeble attempt to get my mind . . . well, quiet. This at least gives god a chance to get a word in edgewise.

Like I listen to god anyway.

The List

List: A series of names, words, numbers, etc. set forth in order, usually in writing; catalogue; roll.

I'm a big fan of The List. It helps me to jot down what I'd like to accomplish on a daily basis so that it's looking back up at me, like the shadowy face in a crystal ball, floating in a cloud of mist and smoke, talking in a moaning, spooky voice. I get myself in trouble when I try to organize a group of tasks in my head. They ricochet around in there and compete for my attention, each one of them screaming: "I'm the most important! Do me first! Do me NOW!"

Stupid tasks.

I find myself rather suddenly in a position where a lot of tasks have presented themselves, most of them rather important and some of them on the mildly urgent side. This has historically not been a good spot for me. I'm like the captain of a rickety boat. I'm putting along just fine when all of a sudden I spring a leak, a fire breaks out in the galley or in the kitchen, at least, and some pretty black storm clouds are forming on the horizon and a large seabird of some kind -- maybe an albatross -- has landed on the bow or the front of the boat and is pecking at my organic groats. I run around like a chicken with its head chopped off yelling: "Shoo! Fire! Ahhh! Run away!!!" and nothing gets done.

I don't have a sense of proportion. I don't have any patience or focus or the ability to take a deep breath and assess the situation calmly. I'm a panicker. I'm a panicker in a big hurry.

The list helps me see what is important and what is not. It helps me see what I can do quickly and what is going to take some time. Some of the things on my stupid lists require multiple steps, not all of which can be accomplished immediately. Sometimes I have to wait for someone else to get back to me. Sometimes I'm not sure what to do. I don't always get to sit there and steadily tally up accomplishments. Sometimes when I start digging around on a task that I thought was going to be easy it gets all nasty and complicated.


One thing at a time. I've heard that somewhere.

Just Like That . . .

Lose: To bring to ruin or destruction.

SuperK lost her job yesterday.

Actually, she got fired. It's not like she couldn't find her job anymore. She didn't come home and say: "I don't know what happened to my job. I went to where it normally is and it wasn't there any more." Maybe she should call Lost and Found. Maybe it wandered off like a lost child instead of being accidentally misplaced, like a wayward set of keys.

We try to soft pedal everything these days. We give it the old soft shoe. Fired sounds like a violent action. Fired out of a gun, a cannon, a missile silo; fired off a quick retort or witty comeback; fired up the bong; fired up the troops so they could rush off, yelling, to sack and pillage.

Personally, I prefer "down-sized." If I ever get down-sized, I'm going to object.
"No, you're mistaken. I'm the same size I was before you fired me."

"Letting go" is not bad, either. It makes it sound like they're really doing you a big favor.
"We know you really, really want to be here but we're not going to detain you any longer. You can toodle off now."

While technically I wouldn't consider this good news, it wasn't a total surprise. Things used to sneak up on me all the time when I was drinking. I would behave poorly and suffer some unpleasant circumstances that I would be unprepared for. Now I drive too fast and get a ticket and think: "Huh. I deserved that."

And it's not like we have to behave badly to suffer some consequence. Sometimes we get ground up under the massive leather jackboot of life. Mostly I stay out of grinding range but sometimes I'm asleep at the wheel and get crushed. Sometimes that jackboot just moves faster than I do. It's surprisingly nimble despite the weight of all that leather.

What can you do? People lose their jobs.