Check Your Motives

Flail: To thrash.
Thrash: To beat mercilessly; to defeat utterly.

To make sure that my flailing about is normal flailing - acceptable flailing - and not wild flailing I check in with my two sponsors.  I like to check in although I don't always like the results of the checking in.  Calling my sponsor is like a pee test for my mouth.  That doesn't sound right.  It's like a pee test where I don't have to pee into anything.  Maybe it's more like being hooked up to a lie detector test.

Anyway, my Old City sponsor is a very religious, very conventional man.  I'm frequently reminded to spend some solid time in prayer and meditation, taking my questions and concerns to my Higher Power, listening carefully, trying to discern the small signs and small nudges to go in this direction or that direction.  He puts a lot of stake in the consequences of behaving selfishly.  The world has rules and when I break them I get consequences.  It's not that I'm being screwed or punished or picked on, but that my actions lead to results, good or bad.  It reminds me of the story of the mother telling the child not to put his hand on a hot stove; the kid (me - I'm the kid) puts his hand on the stove and gets the $#!! shit burned out of his hand; the kid gets mad at the mother, for chrissake.  It took me a long time to understand that I didn't break my mother's rules - I broke the rules of life.  

Anyway, the point here is that my Higher Power is a good source of advice.

Coming at things from a totally different direction, is my New City sponsor, a bit of a hippie.  I'm a good church boy so I frequently battle feelings of guilt when I'm pursuing happiness or something that brings me pleasure.  It's the old Heaven vs. Hell battle - am I doing something that will get me to Heaven or am I doing something to avoid Hell?  There was a lot of black and white shit in my church, as you can see.  New City guy isn't big on guilt.  He asks me this: "Are you hurting anyone else with your actions?"  It's a good question.  Today I believe that when I pursue my own interests at the expense of others then I'm applying my will improperly and nothing good will come of it, even if I get my way.  It totally harshes my buzz when I get what I want after walking up and down the backs of my fellows.

Don't try to do this stuff alone.

Wheeeeee!!

SuperK and I have made a decision to move from The New City to Vacation Town.  We're a little embarrassed about it frankly - "new" is in The "New" City for a reason after all.  As a guy who  is totally addicted to change I have to be careful when I want to change things.  I have to subject my desires to a rigorous analysis to make sure that I'm not flailing around for the sake of flailing around, as pleasant as that may be.  I'm the guy halfway down the first, biggest, most thrilling hill of the baddest roller coaster in town thinking: "God, I am SO bored."  Making matters worse, I can often draw SuperK into my wildly flailing mosh pit of conflicting and ill-conceived desires by the sheer force of my enthusiasm.

Making a decision to move is kind of like making a decision to turn my life and my will over to the care of a higher power.  It doesn't mean I'm already doing it or close to doing it or may ever do it - it means that I've decided to do it.  I have to remember that.

I'm not a huge fan of settling for something.  I'm not great at making do or making the best of something.  This is a blessing and a curse.  I have to be careful that I'm not being restless for the sake of being restless - it's a fool's errand to constantly look for the next great thing, the next best thing, the next big hill on the roller coaster.  By the same token, I don't want to be the dude sitting in the motionless roller coaster, at night, in the rain, holding my arms up in the air, yelling "Wheeeee!"

Spiritual Kindergarten

On Saturday morning I go to an 11th Step meeting.   The format today was to read from a book that is essentially a compilation of quotes drawn from our literature.  It's pretty irritating because you tend to get a real concentrated dose of stuff that is real irritating.  It's kind of a greatest hits book.  So whatever the irritating topic is gets jammed down my throat in great, irritating detail.

The topic today was Spirituality.  When the book came around to me the title of the selected page was Spiritual Kindergarten.  I was immediately suspicious.

"Spiritual kindergarten?" I thought.  "Strange that I'm the one reading about spiritual immaturity."  I thought this while I was thinking that I'm no where near kindergarten in my spiritual development.  Pre-school, maybe but that's still a stretch.  I paused a minute and looked around.  Did the chairman deliberately set things up so that the kindergarten page came around to me?  And if you think this sounds a little paranoid you should have been hanging out with me when I was very, very high.  They were definitely coming to get me then.  Lots of them.

It reminded me of a meeting I attended when I was getting sober that was held in a grade school.  The room had a sign on the wall that was directed at little kids.  It was a list of Dos and Don'ts.  It had stuff like: "No hitting.  No yelling.  No talking when someone else is talking.  Don't take someone else's stuff.  No getting up and walking around whenever you fucking feel like it."  I always sat down in my seat, took a deep breath, and read that list, which seemed to have been drawn up just for me.

It is, as I may have mentioned, all about me.

Instincts on Rampage

Rampage - (n); a course of violent, frenzied action.
                    (v); to move about wildly or violently.

I try to never take action when my emotions are running high.  Instincts on rampage balk at investigation. And  I don't make much distinction between "good" emotions and "bad" emotions, either.  If I'm angry or depressed or really, really excited I try to wait a couple of beats and let my brain become at least marginally involved.  My head can provide some valuable advice to my heart.

And I try not to run away from those bad feelings.  They're not going to kill me.  They don't have knives or machine guns.  I don't have to make them go away.  I can sit quietly and look at them for a while.  When they're out in the bright sunlight they don't look so fearsome.  They're just thoughts.  They're just electrical impulses in my head.  They're barely real.  They certainly don't have any teeth or claws.

I don't know what's good for me and I don't know what's bad for me.  All I know is that I need to take good action to the best of my ability.

Bozo

The chairwoman at the meeting this morning had an unusual name - I've forgotten her it already because it has nothing to do with me, which is all I really care about.  This name rhymed with some unpleasant body parts, giving her childhood friends plenty of fodder for ridicule.  And it still prompts a lot of questions in her work life that she finds unwelcome.  I trotted out my story about giving the fake names at Starbucks and then forgetting what name I've provided, so that I stand there stupidly, waiting for my overpriced specialty coffee drink, wondering why that asshole Arturo doesn't pick up his drink.

"Arturo!  Arturo, your coffee is ready," they shout.
"Oh, right,"  I think,  "That's me - I'm Arturo."        

I personally find this story $#!!ing hilarious.  It's about me and I'm speaking, telling the story about me, and I find it wonderfully clever and witty.

Bupkus this morning.  Nothing.  I barely got a twitter in the meeting when I spoke, a fact that I found so disconcerting I briefly lost my train of thought, as tenuous and vaporous as those trains tend to be.  I'm knocked off my game when the little $#!! hilarious story I've come up with - working it over and over in my mind until it's perfect instead of listening to other people talk - falls flat.  I guess I think I'm some kind of undiscovered stand-up comedian instead of a garden  variety drunk.

A few people started riffing on the riff and the meeting got kind of goofy.  I spoke first.  I think the story was . . . not exactly anti-social, more along the lines of extra-social . . .  enough that everyone needed for the caffeine to start percolating before they could chime in.  One guy - who sat there with a totally deadpan, blank expression on his face when I was talking - shared that he has a brother who is a famous musician.  When this brother comes into town he takes the family out to very expensive restaurants and tells the maitre d that his name is Bozo.  That way when his table is ready the maitre d has to call out: "Bozo.  Bozo, you're table of 4 is ready."  This causes a stir in these exclusive places.

Care to guess which name I used at Starbucks this morning?

Telling Others What They Should Do, If Only Because I've Made Such a Great Success of My Own Life

There really are fewer and fewer things to complain about which makes the fact that I complain so much all that more amazing.

I spoke on the phone yesterday to my mother.  This is the very same mother who is living in a house that she is having trouble maintaining but will absolutely not entertain any suggestions to move to what I would consider, in my extremely humble opinion, in my great wisdom, in my deeply intuitive, unsparingly accurate knowledge of what's best for everyone else, to be a more appropriate place.  

I have learned that competent adults are free to do what they want.  I have learned that people are not interested in me telling them how badly they're screwing things up.  And just as importantly, I've learned not to let their decisions become my responsibility.  I don't bring up my extremely correct opinions; I don't criticize people who run into problems because they don't follow my extremely correct opinions; and I don't fall into a deep depression when and if they run into problems when what they do doesn't work out.

Sometimes, anyway.

Gratitude

I'm always blown away when the topic of a meeting centers on gratitude.  The actual topic today was a reflection on the benefits of The Fellowship - Gratitude in code.  I like hearing the old timers share on the subject.  The longer we work on our spiritual principles by working on our Steps the simpler things become. I'm so wrapped up in the accumulation of money, power, and sex that I forget about what's really important - so wrapped up in avoiding the slightest whiff of discomfort that I cant' see the forest for the trees, whatever that means.

Everything really does get simpler and simpler.