Written Inventory

I've started to make a little crisis list at the back of my journal.  I've told other people to do this for years without bothering to do the work myself.  I'm continually amazed at the power of writing things down and not only because writing is a creative outlet for me, a pleasurable release; something really clicks into place when stuff that is in my head is looking back up at me from a piece of paper.  The same thing goes for discussing issues with other people, using words actually spoken out loud.  Thoughts can seem so terrifying and insurmountable bouncing around inside my head.  I panic.  I don't know what to do; I act rashly and make wrong decisions.  When I write them down they lose a lot of power.

"Really?" I say.  "Really?  This is what's eating you up?"

This is one of the reasons our founders have us make a written inventory.  They got it.  And lest we members of The Fellowship spend too much time patting ourselves on our collective backs about the brilliance of said Fellowship, let's remember that every spiritual, moral, and religious organization in recorded history has emphasized writing stuff down.  We know because they wrote it down.  They didn't just think about like drunks do.  A drunk figures thinking about something is as good as doing it.

For my crisis list I write down the date and then I write down what's bothering me.  Then I write down what I think the solution is.  It helps to see the game plan.  Sometimes it's clear I need to do something about what's bothering me and seeing that on the paper lets me know I can act or I can stew.  And sometimes I see the solution isn't clear or it's in the future and I have to wait.  If my car is making a weird, rattling, clunking, grinding, whirring noise I need to call my mechanic and make an appointment, and then I need to wait for the appointment.

See?  Action and waiting all wrapped up in one problem.

Our Community

OK, I'm officially sick.  I'm not sick - I'm sick.  The microorganisms have stormed the ramparts and overwhelmed the defenses and are now pillaging and looting the ruins of my castle.

I'm a sullen sick guy.  I don't complain but I want everyone to get the #$!! away from me.  SuperK, on the other hand, is a bit more dramatic.  She's sure she's dying and she's going to let you know about it.  On the few occasions when we've both been sick it has been quite the funhouse.

I digress.  I've been pondering at greater length, in my woozy narcotic-like haze, the community that I belong to and how important it is in my life.  I have a group of very close friends with whom can discuss anything - and I mean anything - that's troubling me.  Sex, money, relationships, religion, all of that stuff that was strictly off the table in my family of origin.  I'll never forget the first time that I tried to talk to my blood kin about some marital difficulties, fortified no doubt with the success that I'd had with my recovery family.  Holy shit, I might as well have rolled a live hand grenade into the room.  I never made that mistake again.  I kept my mouth shut as I was taught.

Moreover, there's another larger group of friends - not close friends but still friends - with whom I can discuss almost anything.  I'll never forget the time when SuperK and I were struggling a little with our marriage - as all couples do and if you hope to avoid this you're delusional.  We started to see a counselor who was invaluable in helping us work through our Issues.  This is going to sound ridiculous but it's the truth: SuperK was much more upset with me than I was with her, but she was the one who needed to do the changing.  I don't mean to suggest I wasn't at least half the problem but the circumstances required her to adapt more so than me.  Anyway, she was dominating the air time in the office so at one point our counselor turned to me and said: "How about you?"

I said this: "I have a big group of guys that I talk to all the time about everything.  I don't really have anything I need to get off my chest."  I was about 40 at the time.  She knew I was in The Program.

"You don't know how many men your age that come in here and don't have anyone they can do that with.  No one, not even family members," she said.

Some of the time my buddies honk me off but I've never forgotten what this woman said.  I have guys who know where my steam release valve is located.  They reach over from time to time and turn the knob and a big, angry blast of steam vents and I feel better.  That's all there is to it.

And I'm repeating myself, saying the same thing over and over, but I  love the whole community I'm part of.  I love the older folks with more sobriety who have been through a lot more than me; I love the younger people that I can boss around . . . . er, share my experience, strength, and hope with, passing along my sobriety wisdom but also my old guy knowledge; I love being around women and really rich people and guys off the street, heroin addicts and meth users and weekend drunks.  I get the feeling that a hundred years ago people had stronger faith communities and social clubs and they didn't move around so much so that these ties were easier to build. 

But they didn't have what I done got.

Old Timer

We watched a documentary last night where a filmmaker sought out very, very old people to try to find out how they made it into their 90s and beyond.  Many of the reasons were well-publicized - good diet, no drug use and moderate alcohol intake for the non-drunks among us, exercise, enough sleep, and the like.  There were a few outliers represented as well - smokers and drinkers who made it past the century mark but most of the folks lived sensible, reasonable lives.

It made me reflect on some of the benefits of The Program.  Certainly we stop drinking and drugging and many of us give up smoking; we try to eat well or at least remember to eat at all, not always a given when we were ingesting thousands of calories of processed glucose as part of our daily alcohol intake; we try to give our bodies some exercise above and beyond popping  open cans of beer or walking to the car to drive to the Kwiky Mart to buy more beer; and we get enough sleep at night and some of us get to take naps, for chrissake, as opposed to having to drink a case of wine coolers just to fall asleep.  This is not subtle stuff.  It's not surprising that people who do these things live longer, healthier lives.

Old folks usually have an active social life - they aren't sitting by themselves in front of the idiot box, drinking alone.  I never take for granted the friendships I make in my recovery - the young people I can parent and the old timers who help guide my behavior and everyone in between.  People with a lot of friends are happier and happy people live longer.  And we see a lot of tangible benefits to having a faith in some kind of a Higher Power, even if it's only the group.  It was hard trying to navigate a world that I thought was hostile and rudderless.  It was stressful.  It didn't make any sense.  And this giving back to repay a program that helped save our lives is very satisfying - it gives meaning and purpose to life.

However, the reason I heard over and over that really resonated with me was around the concept of grasping.  As my spiritual life has expanded I've learned how deeply unsatisfying it can be to try to get things and then hold on to them; this makes the most sense to me when we're talking about things I can see: cars, houses, jobs, relationships, STUFF!  But the old people talked about being happy with where they were in their lives.  They didn't mourn their lost youth or concentrate on the death  that was certainly going to come.  They weren't struggling to hold on to their life.

I spend too much time doing that.  I'm aware of some of the limitations I have today that I didn't have 10 or 20 years ago.  Too often I think: "I've got X number of good years left."  That implies that I have bad stuff to look forward to, that I've really got to be productive before the good goes away and the bad comes rushing in.  That's terrible.  That's the kind of thinking that make me focus on the negative.

Why would I want to go back to my youth?  I was miserable, I was terrified most of the time.  Why would I want to regain that?  If I'm not happy with what I got now I'm never going to be happy.  If I think I can avoid some of the bad things that are surely going to come, if I focus in on them, then I'm one hosed dude.

On Death's Doorstep

I picked up some kind of bug this week.  I didn't do it on purpose and I'm an unwilling, hostile, adversarial host to this intruder.  Strangely enough, I have to battle the urge to say: "This is a waste of my time."  I want to get out of this vale of tears without ever getting sick ever again.  I would prefer that pain and suffering be optional, and I would opt the hell out.  I can't shake the absurd feeling that I've failed somehow when I get sick, that if I had taken the right course of action I could have avoided all of the unpleasantness entirely.  I did something wrong.  I should have done something better.  I get depressed when I get sick.  Catching a cold is not a moral failure.  It is not a character defect.

Whenever several trillion of these little bastards take up residence in me they invariably ride some kind of express train to my lungs.  It may have something to do with the fact that I smoked enough weed to carpet a two lane highway from Waukesha to Menominee Falls.  For the record I have no idea how far that is - those are just funny sounding words.  So I get the death cough - a ticklish, unproductive wheezing.  The problem is that it keeps me awake.  I don't feel that bad but I cough myself awake every time I try to fall asleep.  I'm on like no sleep.  I'm a jerk when I'm well rested so you can imagine how I'm behaving right now.

When I was in college I took microbiology.  I remember almost nothing about the class except for this one experiment we did.  Everyone was given several petri dishes full of agar - a food source for microorganisms - and a packet of Q-Tips.  We walked around and touched various surfaces with a QT and then inoculated the agar with whatever crap we had picked up.  I remember swabbing door knobs and handles on drinking fountains and the like.  Holy shit, those dishes exploded with mycobacterial growth.  It was a slaughter.  I have no idea how any of us make it through any day without contracting several fatal diseases.  It must be total armageddon going on inside my body all of the time.

I'm pretty sure I'm going to die from this one.

Am I on my death bed?  No, I'm on my regular bed.

Buddies

I spent a little time talking with one of my buddies after the meeting yesterday.  He's in the same class as me -  someone who got sober at roughly the same time as I did.  I get help from old timers and from new people but I especially enjoy a nice synergy with guys who stumbled in about the same time as I did.  We go through a lot of the same things at the same time in recovery and it builds a real bond.

This guy is a friend; this means he gets to hear my opinions.  I don't tell him what to do but I tell him what I think he should do from time to time.  As we are all aware, there is nothing more precious, more cherished than unsolicited advice.  The saving grace is that I expect my friends to do the same with me.  I don't want to spend any more time listening to people tell me what I want to hear.  When I took that kind of advice I usually ended up passed out on the floor - it wasn't great advice what with the overkill and mixing of different substances and the like.  I don't always like the unsolicited advice that I get and sometimes it pisses me off but that's OK - it doesn't change the friendship.  I get over it.  When I was drinking I didn't get over anything.  If you pissed me off then you were put on The List.  Once on The List it was nearly impossible to get off The List.  The List was the Siberian Gulag of Seaweed relationships although I'm not sure that banishment to that frozen tundra was all that upsetting to very many people.

My friend was going to see a movie and then eat dinner with his son.  His son picked the movie and suggested a restaurant.  My friend told me that he was going to veto the restaurant selection seeing as he didn't get to pick the movie.  I assumed this drunken stumble bum was lucky to be spending quality time with his kid, so I said: "Go to the restaurant he picked."

I could see that he didn't care for the suggestion.  Actually, it wasn't because I was picking up any subtle clues; it was more along the lines of him telling me he didn't like the advice, tossing in a handful of very, very bad words.  He was laughing but I could tell he was pissed.  I didn't tell what he should do - I told him what I thought he should do, assuming that he would do whatever the #$!! he wanted to do anyway.

He sent me a note the next day: the movie sucked and they ate where his kid wanted to eat.  He thanked me for my advice.  I don't know that he wouldn't have done what I suggested on his own.  I certainly had no idea what he should do.

Buffing Out the Conundrums

Buff:  To clean or shine with a buff.

I'm a car guy.  I really like cars.  I've bought a few of them over the years and I've loved most of them.  I don't consider myself really all that materialistic - kind of standard greedy, a common sentiment among pretty materialistic people who are trying to convince you that they're not  - but I love the cars.  I wax them and wash them and try to park them out of harm's way.  I bought what very well may be my last new car here in The New City - that explosive grinding sound you here is SuperK laughing and cursing and choking with rage all at once - and people have beat the hell out of it.  The agony and the ecstasy of the urban lifestyle.  

I went on a long, beautiful hike in an old growth forest yesterday with SuperK and a few friends from The Program - wonderful day, wonderful people - getting back to this car late in the afternoon.  The note on the windshield, written on a min-sized paper plate, an odd selection in my opinion, was from a woman apologizing profusely for hitting the parked car some time during the day.  The damage didn't appear to be too bad but it was still a stinker of a note.  I called the woman and she called back.  She told me to have the damage buffed out and to send her the bill.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet.  I'm not sure I want to screw around taking the car somewhere to repair the minor damage, which pales with some of the more egregious thwacks by shadowy miscreants who did not leave notes.  

Anyway, it just made me feel good about life.  Such simple things, responsibility and honesty.  On the way home from the hike, before I was confronted with the mini paper plate,  we stopped for coffee.  While I was washing the bear repellant off of my hands SuperK ordered 3 cups of coffee, noticing after the fact that she had left her wallet in the car.  There were people in line that she didn't want to hold up but she owed the money which was not in her possession.  A conundrum.  The guy behind her said: "The coffees are on me."  She offered to fetch her purse and return the favor.

"No," he said.  "I had a great day.  I just finished a round a golf and it was a great day."

It's not that complicated.

The Man Purse

Focus:  To fix on one object; concentrate: as focus your attention on the case of cans you just picked up.

I came back home from my swim yesterday and parked The Tank in front of our apartment.  I opened the back hatch to get my gym bag and my Man Purse, which had fallen behind a 12 pack of empty pop cans that I put in the trunk, which I intend to take to the recycling center to give to the bums - we have a nickel surcharge per returnable can or bottle here in the very Green New City.  I magnanimously donate my cans to whatever guy is feeding the contents of his huge shopping cart into the can crusher - I'm a big, generous man, as you can see, handing off 60 cents to some homeless man.

Man Purse:  A bag of indeterminate size and shape that a man who has no focus begins to carry around so that he can keep all of the stuff that he normally forgets with him.

Anyway, I get inside and begin to struggle with all of my bags, trying to get my key out to unlock the door.  Finally, I give in and set down my gym bag and my Man Purse, noting the case of empty cans still in my right arm.

"What in the hell?" I mutter.

I had picked up the cans to get to my Man Purse, promptly forgot what I was doing, and carried them across the street, up the stairs, through the entryway, and down the corridor to my door, with no awareness of what I was doing.  I couldn't maintain my focus for the 15 seconds it took to retrieve the Purse and put the cans back down.  My mind was wheeling at such a high rate that I was off on some other mind trip before I knew it.  I could have climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro with those cans.

Is it any wonder that I drank?  I should be on Thorazine.