I Been Working on the Railroad

Work:  Bodily or mental effort exerted to do or make something; purposeful activity; labor; toil.


This idea of work is something I'm careful to attend to.  There are so many levels of work, so much  variety in the idea of exerting effort that I had never considered.  I used to associate work with something unpleasant I had to do to make money so that I could show you how important I was.  I particularly like the idea of "purposeful" activity in this definition.


Purposeful:  Having a purpose (intention; aim; resolution; determination); determined; full of meaning.


I pay homage to the idea of Working the Steps.  I ask people all the time: "How's the Program treating you?"  Serenity Stan shot back once, tired of all the times I asked the question, obviously: "What exactly do you mean by that?"
"Tell me about the work you're doing," I said.  "Tell me what kind of work you're doing on your recovery."


I think that there's working through the 12 Steps, sequentially and with purpose, for the first time. It's very important and it's relatively easy to mark your progress.  Then there's working the 12 Steps in more of a maintenance fashion.  I know I drifted off a little bit into self-sufficiency after my first successful foray through The Steps.  I remained active, attending meetings and being of service when possible, but I quit the steady effort needed to maintain my program.  I didn't grasp the idea of how to keep forging ahead.


My sponsor asked me some questions: "You know that phrase about 'restraint of tongue and pen'?"
"I LOVE that phrase, " I said.  "Of course,  I know it."
"What Step is it in?" he asked.


I had no idea.


"You know the idea of treating someone who behaves badly as if they were a sick person?" he continued.


I knew what was coming next so I kept my mouth shut, especially since he had just reminded me I didn't know which Step contained advice on how to keep my mouth shut.  I learned from this exercise that I needed to keep studying, to keep reviewing, to keep my mind open to new truths and hints.  Just because I had made it through the formal, official, progress-easily-tracked part of the Steps didn't mean the work was done.

Horseface Steve -- VIP

Important:  Meaning a great deal; having much significance, consequence, or value.


I am splitting the responsibility of the secretary position with SuperK for a Tuesday evening 12 & 12 meeting.  The secretary is the person who gets the speaker, starts the meeting off, and makes sure the building is cleaned up and secured for the night.  When the meeting ended last night everyone cleared out to talk or head home, leaving me inside cleaning coffee pots and counters and turning out lights.


"I am way too important to be doing this," I muttered.  "Don't these people know I've been sober for 24 years?  Someone else, someone not as important as me should be doing this scut work."


The fact that I think I'm way too important to have to do almost anything but cash checks and accept praise is an old and familiar defect of mine.  Egomaniac with an inferiority complex, indeed.  When I ponder doing something for someone else I immediately calculate the praise I'll receive, the effort the action takes, and how much credit I'll get for being such a freaking saint.  My self-centeredness is beyond belief.


This has always been my instinct: to figure out what's coming back to me.  It seems so much more important than my part in making life easier for someone else.  This program constantly provides me with reminders of how critical it is to NOT TAKE MYSELF SO SERIOUSLY.   I think my life is full of millions of little chances to make a small difference and very few opportunities to make a big splash.


Our home lives are such a great place to start.  If I can't get up in the morning and treat the people with whom I live with caring and concern, then I'm not off to a very good start.  And it's not enough to simply not act like an asshole -- I need to do better than that.  I need to quit looking through people as if they didn't exist.  If I can't get to work without cursing another drive or brushing off the hello from a barista, then I'm in my own head, way too important.


Way too important.

5D

Chaos:  The disorder of formless matter and infinite space, supposed to have existed before the ordered universe.


Last night I chaired a meeting on 5D of a local hospital: The Psychiatric Ward.  The floor where you need a key to get in and a key to get out, and a different key to get on the elevator.  It's hard to get very far if you don't have access to many different keys.  A lot of people in the Pysch Ward suffer from mental illnesses that are controllable UNTIL they drink or smoke meth or shoot heroin, at which point the medications they take don't work so well and they are thrown into crisis.  Psych Ward meetings are usually controlled chaos.


I was reminded of the unmanageability of my life at this meeting.


When I left I drove to nearby clubhouse to catch the second half of a meeting that SuperK was chairing.  What was the topic, you ask?  First Step.  The original Powerless Step.


Most of the time god whispers but from time to time god puts an amplified bullhorn right up to my ear, and shouts at the top of his lungs.


Today I had a couple of conversations with friends in recovery, and I brought up the cat.  Both of them are pet owners and were very sympathetic.  Neither of them had any great, new insights or access to a magical healing potion prepared by a shaman from Bhutan, but they were supportive.  I wasn't looking for The Answer.  I just wanted some validation that I was behaving reasonably and that my emotions were understandable.  Both of these people had contacted me with no real agenda.  I encourage alcoholics to use the phone even when things are OK because you never know when you might catch someone who is having a tough go of it.


It's not always about you.

Horseface Reality

Justify:  To free from blame; declare guiltless; acquit; absolve.


I needed to laugh at myself yesterday.  The obstacle was that any humor would interfere with the righteous anger I was carefully nurturing.  I was like a freezing hiker trying to start a small fire, in a windstorm, with wet matches, in 6 feet of snow, and someone kept blowing on the match.  I couldn't let the humor overwhelm my humorless need to be right.


I had another conference call with my handler from The Evil Empire that I work for.  I know I'm repeating myself, being redundant, saying the same thing over and over, but this is the organization that treated my poorly a while back (they really did -- I'm not making this up) which cost me a bunch of money.  So I took some income from them while technically upholding the terms of my contract (I really did -my behavior would stand up in a court of law) which evened the score.  It wasn't the right thing to do but I thought about it long enough and hard enough to justify doing it.


Unfortunately, when I use the phrase "even the score" then I'm doing something that a good prosecuting attorney would completely savage during the cross examination in The Horseface Court of Law, which is really the court of law that's the most important court to me at this point.  Not that I'm out there breaking the real law, either; a pretty guy like me, with my horseface and all, wouldn't do too well in prison.  


It was another one of those conversations where I try to deflect and dance and direct the conversation to places where I don't have to reveal what it is that I'm really doing.  What I'm doing, while technically correct, is violating the spirit of our arrangement.  They wouldn't say: "Horseface, you gorgeous beast, that's OK with us."  I would be disciplined, if not removed.  


In Horseface Reality, a really lousy kind of reality,  I justified this for a while.  I really believed they had screwed me out of money -- and yes, I'm aware that the 12 & 12 devotes several pages explaining how to correct bad behavior that arises out of a selfish pursuit of money -- so I thought it was OK to behave this way, as long as I technically, legally behaved well.  Ethically - not so much.


At this point I knew that I had totally pooped on the concept of "To Thine Own Self Be True."  I mean, it's easy to forget this concept -- it's only on the !!##!! recovery coin that I carry around with me all of the time.


Of course, being a failed Director I could only manage to steer the conversation out of dicey waters for most of the hour it took.  Of course, eventually it washed up into a fetid back eddy where I was trapped in a foaming whirlpool for a while.  I couldn't get the conversation to move back into the main part of the stream and I had to really dance.  I wasn't lying, per se, but I was making someone believe something that wasn't true, which I believe is the definition of lying, unless you're floundering around in Horseface Reality.


This is stressful for me so I begin to get defensive and being a guy, of sorts, defensive works best when mixed with anger.  People back away from me when my anger starts percolating.  I've got a lid on it most of the time but it's not gone, not by any means.  


I muted the phone and found SuperK.
"Help me," I pleaded.  "I'm getting pissed."
"Shhhhh," she said, with a gentle downward motion of her hands.  "Calm, calm."


Eventually, the logjam broke and I was free again.  I walked out of my office and said: "Look."  I raised my arms, showing large circles of perspiration.  It wasn't hot.  It wasn't humid.  I wasn't sick.  This was all stress related sweat.  It's stressful being deceitful.  I wish I wasn't so good at it because it really screws with my serenity.  I'm a TREMENDOUS liar.  It really comes naturally to me.  The truth -- not so much.


We discussed the wisdom of resigning my position with the organization.  It would be the right thing to do.  It's somewhat frightening because there's some little amount of money involved, but not enough to justify those big circles of sweat.


I'll tell you this: I feel free today.  I don't need this in my life anymore.  My serenity is EXTREMELY valuable.


I'm waiting a few weeks, of course.  I have another commission check coming.

Going, Going . . .

Death:  The act or fact of dying; permanent ending of all life in a person, animal, or plant.


I do not like the idea of permanence.  I bet that some of that can be explained by my resistance to The Original Permanent Fact, the one that I need to avoid; namely, the expectation that I'm never going to drink again.  After 24 years of sobriety it still makes me nervous to think that way, and rightly so, because it deflects me from the Original Spiritual Purpose; namely, to live One Day at a Time.  I do like Dr. Bob's comment when asked what he thought about never drinking again: "I believe that if I continue to do what I'm doing today that I don't ever have to pick up a drink again."  Maybe he said that -- maybe not.  I'm not the most trustworthy source of information.  Sure sounds like something a man with a profound spiritual existence would say, or something that a man with a profoundly warped ego would make up.


Anyway, we have an old cat -- seventeen years old -- who is struggling with her health.  Seventeen cat years equals . . . well, I have no idea how many human years that is.  We're not sure if she's just old, or having some serious health problems.  She's not saying.  She's playing her cards close to the vest.  She's always kind of been a bitch that way.  Last night we weren't sure if she was going to make it until morning but she seems to have rallied a bit.


The experience of seeing something alive begin to make the transition to something dead makes me ponder what it means to be alive.  I don't like the pain of loss and when I'm in the middle of it I have a tendency to fall back on the old defense of "It's not worth getting attached to anything.  It's not worth it."  I'm reminded of the old saw we pass around The Fellowship: "The good news about being sober is that you get to feel everything again.  And the bad news is that you get to feel everything again."  It's pretty cool when things are going well; not so much when they aren't.


The other thought that comes to mind is how easy it is to take something for granted.  Seventeen years -- I can barely remember the animal not being around.  As I held my possibly dying, certainly fading, pet in my arms last night I thought of all of the times and places where her presence and behavior has been a given.  I marvel at how easy it is to ignore a lot of mostly good times and concentrate on the totally unfair reality that life must end.  As I've gotten older and my body has begun to tell me that things aren't going to get any easier for me as time marches on I have to marvel at how strongly I resist this.  "This isn't fair," I think.  "Who came up with this plan?"


I have always appreciated  how well we celebrate death in The Fellowship.  Not that we're glad that someone dies but we're not terrified at what comes next, at what we have left undone or what we shouldn't have done.  There's a lot of emphasis on all the good things in a life well lived and not a self-absorbed preoccupation on the dead part.


I was talking with Shorty about the end of his mother's life and comparing it to the death of an unhappy man that I knew, a drunk who never got sober.  I could see how someone who had lived a right life could let go when it was time, without bitterness or regret.  It was pretty cool.  And I could see how someone who had been selfish was terrified of the end, who wanted to hang on as long as he could.  Death was the enemy.  Unfortunately, you can't treat people poorly for years and year and expect them to rally around you when you falter.


Yep.

Horseface Steve -- Assistant to the Director

One of the short prayers I offer up every morning, in a cloud of incense smoke and overwrought emotion, is the request for help in being the best son, brother, and husband that I can be.  Everybody else can go to hell.  Just kidding, just kidding, sort of -- the second short prayer is help in fitting myself to be of maximum service to my fellow man and woman.


Anyway, I'm making the effort to call my parents every couple of days.  I have a hidden agenda, of course: to make them see, eventually, that I know what is best for them and that they should do my bidding.  My words, fortunately, are vague and non-threatening.  I keep my mouth shut.  I say the best things when my mouth is shut -- great wisdom pours out.  My mother is one of world's great Directors.  I can see today that I learned at the knee of a master.  That woman is On Message.  She has an agenda and you cannot knock her off that agenda.  She would have been a great press secretary.


I'm getting better at keeping my frustration under control.  The prayer, after all, is that I make myself available for whatever help is necessary.  I'm hardly a good friend if I'm making suggestions on landscaping while your house is burning down.  I might be a great landscaper and my suggestions might be brilliant but your fucking house is burning down.  Service work after a meeting is cleaning up the coffee machine.  That's the service work.  I can suggest away but that's what needs to be done.  I'm the guy suggesting that maybe we should try a coffee service or bring our own coffee or switch to tea, none of which needs to be done when there's a dirty coffee machine staring me in the face.


Pow-err-less.

The Traditions

Tradition:  A long-established custom or practice that has the effect of an unwritten law.   From the Latin root traditio, a surrender.


I attend a 12 Steps and 12 Traditions meeting in The New City.  I attended one in The Old City for many years as well, but we didn't do a Tradition every month.  I never understood why.  If the Steps tell us How It Works then the Traditions tell us Why It Works.  Whenever I attend a meeting that I don't think is very good -- let's be honest, there are some out there -- I usually find that I'm in a room where the Traditions are being trampled underfoot.  


Last night was Tradition Eight, which states that we don't charge for our services.  We can pay people who do non-recovery type work like print books and staff offices, but the face to face stuff is totally free.  I can only imagine how I would have reacted had some variation of the following scenario played out at my first meeting: "OK, Horseface, we charge $100 for an initial evaluation but we will waive that if you can't afford it.  Dues are $50 a month.  If you sign up for two years we'll drop that to $45 with the first two months free.  AND we waive the initiation fee for any family members that you bring along.  Now, I have paperwork prepared . . . "  Absent all of that I was still wary that I had joined some weirdo cult for a long time.


I have to remember that The Big Book was published in 1939 but The Traditions didn't come out until 1946, and they weren't ratified until the 1950 International Convention.  A lot of kooky drunks had complicated the hell out of everything by then.  It was the wild west for a while.  We didn't put The Traditions together calmly and thoughtfully; we put them together as a survival mechanism.


How cool is that the root of the word "tradition" implies powerlessness and surrender?