Powerless - In My Craw

Powerless, powerless, powerless. SuperK is engaging me with an early morning reading of The Daily Reflections. As this is January, the first month, the one that comes at the start of the year, before all of the other ones, the topic is Step One, The Powerless Step, I'm getting powerlessness stuffed down my throat where it is firmly sticking in my craw, normally a piece of anatomy only found in birds.

I have not felt as out of control as I have felt recently in a good long time. This is due to the fact that I am really, really out of control. I am in control of almost nothing. I don't even have control of drinking water and that's pretty out of control. The traveling here doesn't help, either. I can't imagine that it would be much different if you gave a lot of adolescents a lot of LSD and told them to drive sports cars around as fast as they could. It is the ultimate game of Death Chicken here. I mean: Blink and you die. Blink and all is lost. People in vehicles do whatever they want on rutted, narrow streets clogged with bicycles, pedestrians, CNG powered three wheel scooters, all manner of motorcycles, and everything moving at a high rate of speed. There are no sidewalks. There are traffic signals but they are mostly switched off, and they're ignored when they're not. I tried to cross a street last night and it was a surreal experience. It was like trying to walk across the river that feeds Niagara Falls right before it goes over the edge with missiles being shot at you. I literally could not believe it.

I am alternately terrified that I'm going to eat something that causes me to have diarrhea and then I'm worried that I'm never going to poop again. It's pretty amazing that as one gets older one becomes more obsessed with one's toilet habits. Money? Eh. Food? Who cares? Sex? Well, sex's still important. I don't know how to tip and I don't know about airport security and what the hell is the rupee to dollar exchange rate? The agony and ecstasy of traveling.

They do it different here, I'll say that much. Not better, not worse, just different.

Welcome To The Uncomfortable Zone

On my first night in India I suffered a good old-fashioned full-blown anxiety attack.  In the middle of the night.  In the dark.  I have only had a few of these in my natural-born life and I can say with a great deal of honesty that they're not a lot of fun.  It's kind of taking a normal amount of anxiety over an understandable situation and then compounding it with all kinds of weird, implausible anxieties until there's a huge ball of jangled nerves bashing against each other.  I enjoy doing different things from time to time but I hope it's a while before I have another one of these.  

I could feel my mind piling on.  It's hard to get the mind to shut down when it's on a paranoid roll.  I began to take totally trivial worries and blowing them up until they were monstrous in size.  I was awake for a number of hours once things got rolling, unable to dissociate from what I logically knew were illogical.  Momentum can be a terrible thing.

Welcome to pushing the comfort zone.  From time to time I push right on through to the uncomfortable zone.  Well, so be it.  That's the price that has to be paid from time to time if I want to be comfortable with myself.  Long ago SuperK and I were in Italy and we had to arrange for a couple of train rides to get to Venice, which we very much wanted to see.  We were new to traveling and the prospect was so daunting that we almost didn't go.  One of us said: "I'd hate to think we're going to miss Venice because we're afraid of a train ride."  The trip was fun, Venice was great, and we haven't looked back since.

Take the A Bus, Transfer to the 42

Many years ago I took a trip to the jungle in Ecuador with Little Westside Jonny.  We were way, way back in the jungle and it was courtesy of kind of a sketchy outfit.  God love 'em they were trying but they just weren't very competent.  The first night we were trying to settle down a little bit, rats scurrying to and fro in the palm frond rafters of our jungle hut, seriously wondering if we were going to make it out alive.  Jonny was hyperventilating and in a misguided attempt to help him calm down I said: "Well, it's not like you can take a bus out of here."  The intent was to help us both make the best of the situation but he thought: "Holy shit, he's right - I can't take a bus out of here."

I woke up this morning in New Delhi feeling the same way.  The trip from vacation city was pretty exhausting - flights of 3 hours, then 10 hours, with a big 7 hour coup de grace, all in the spacious confines of coach class, which they now call "economy."  Why not just call it "cheap ass" or "jammed in?"  It's not like those brutalizers who design planes worry very much about hurting my feelings.  

I was sitting in my Quiet Time chair thinking: "Holy shit, what am I doing?"  Mind you everything is going fine - I have a tendency to be overwhelmed by the first couple of days of vacation, especially when I'm pushing my comfort zone a little bit.  I was close to hyperventilating.

I don't grow much unless I push myself sometimes.  I don't appreciate the ordinary until I'm in the extraordinary for a while.  I need to stretch out my metaphorical wings. 

Keep on pushing, straight ahead.

I Hope I'm Not Dying

Here is some more on the will situation . . . 

Shorty sent me a note thanking me for putting him in a position of such trust.  It IS an honor, isn't it?  I say again: this is an amazing fellowship that we're part of.  I was at a meeting a few weeks ago where a friend of mine - someone I know casually but really like and hope to get to know better - mentioned some things that I had said last November that helped him out.  It almost brought tears to my eyes, partially because I was so grateful to be in a position to help someone else, instead of just thinking about myself,  and partially because this guy took the time to personally acknowledge me.  That's all there is to it.  I make everything so complicated when it is, in fact, pretty simple.

Shorty also mused about death and dying, in a very healthy, self-aware manner.  We need to think about the temporary nature of life while not getting morbid about it.  It takes some courage to make plans that ensure a smooth transition if I die.  I don't expect to die and I'm not worried about it, but it could happen, and if it does, my affairs are in order.  The Fellowship teaches me that it's a fool's errand to run after pleasure and to run away from pain.  Keep it all in balance.  I'm going to get some of both so it's not worth obsessing over.

I got to talk to Shorty a few years back when his mother was dying.  She was a woman of great grace and faith and she passed away peacefully, surrounded by a group of women from her church.  His father was not able to be so accepting when this was happening.  Even though I didn't have any direct experience with what he was going through I knew that the things I was hearing, his experience, strength, and hope, was going to serve me in good stead some day.  I didn't particularly enjoy the topic and I'm sure he didn't either, but I'm a better person for it today, better able to talk to my dying sponsor.

It's really that simple.  I don't know why I make it so complicated.

FREAKING OUT Before a Big Trip

SuperK and I have a will.  Because we had the will drawn up about 20 years ago and our circumstances have changed we knew it was time to have a new will drawn up.  (Ed. Note: I like the phrase "drawn up."  Apparently the word "written" isn't good enough for the lawyers.)  We decided to do this right before our last big trip and I mean right before. so we didn't get it done because it's a little important and complicated and it was hard to jam the task into a busy FREAKING OUT BEFORE A BIG TRIP schedule.  And after we got home frankly, we didn't give a shit anymore.  I guess, lurking in both of our sub-consciences  is the notion that we're going to die in a flaming plane crash; preferable, of course, to surviving the crash landing far, far out to sea, lingering in a life raft until we're almost dead from dehydration, grateful for the sharks that finally take us off this mortal coil.

Our current will makes each of us the heir if only one of us dies.  Given the murderous glint in SuperK's eyes when I sing Black Sabbath songs I have a pretty good idea who the survivor would be.  My stance has always been if I'm dead I really don't care at that point.  Dead is dead.  SuperK can dump me in a shallow grave behind our mobile home if she wants, as long as she's sure that the close proximity won't allow me to easily arise and haunt her as she takes a hot shower.  I wouldn't put it past me.  I've done worse, and recently, too.

Somewhat seriously I do think that a big journey, out of our safe and secure routine, does make us think about the transitory nature of life.  So we got the will redone.

Our previous will split our insignificant amount of money between our parents who were all healthy and in good spirits at the time.  If they all died then the money would have passed down to all of our siblings.  Like most people our relationships have grown and strengthened and fallen apart and soured and rekindled and changed in all kinds of ways that we barely understand.  Some people who needed money 20 years ago don't need it now.  A few have died.  And there is a snowball's chance in hell that we're included in the wills of a few more.

So the new will directs our inheritance to a few nieces and a brother and sister, and the rest to charity.  The big are-you-kidding-me? is the piece we left to our friend Shorty.  He and I have talked about how we would donate a chunk of money if we ever had the chance, the opportunity, the obligation, and we're on the same page.  So, at this point, he'd receive a check.  He could go out and buy a new TV if he wanted - I'm dead, remember - but he would never do that.  He would use the money wisely to help people who need it.

This is The Fellowship.  These are the relationships we form.  I can't think of anyone else in the world that I would do this with.  This is trust.

Project - A Jutting Out

Projection:  The ability to look into the future and see all of the terrible, awful, really horrible things that are going to happen to one with absolute certainty and omniscient clarity.  (Ed. Note: I totally made this one up - the real definition is something about a forecast or prognosis obtained by extrapolation, another word I had to look up and then I finally said fuck it, this isn't getting across the Fellowship definition which is imagining that all of the terrible things that have never happened to me are, in fact, going to happen this time).

Getting close to trip time which means getting all worked up about nothing.  A tempest in a teapot.  A fart in a skillet.  Someday I'm going to look into the future and see wonderful dreams coming true.  I don't believe this is going to happen anytime soon, however.  I have a well-developed and truly innate ability to imagine the worst.  I do think that there's a human tendency to kind of get wrapped around the axle about big adventures that isn't restricted to alcoholics.  I'd be curious to know what the evolutionary reason for this might be

We have, to be sure, managed to elevate it to an art form.

FREAKING MYSELF OUT!

As I ponder the upcoming trip I see 3 possible outcomes: an average, nice uneventful trip; a trip so weighed down with overwrought expectations that it sinks under the waves like a scuttled skiff, doomed by its own optimism; and the most likely possibility: A Trip From Hell, a nightmare, full of death and disaster and great misfortune.

My take is this: I have spent zero time reflecting on the nice trip; I've dabbled in ruining the trip by imagining such wonders that the reality cannot meet the fantasy but haven't overdone it here; mostly, I've managed to FREAK MYSELF OUT! by seeing into the future where terrible things are happening to me.

This has been counterproductive.  I admit that it's a natural human tendency to prepare for the worst but fret that it's a natural Seaweed tendency to allow this tendency to run hog wild.  My wife doesn't help me in this area - and I don't help her - by imagining all sorts of new possible disasters.  "I never thought of THAT," I say, when she shares some monstrous possibility from her inner self.  And she'll say: "Are you kidding me?  THAT'S what you're worried about?"  Between the two of us we manage to imagine a lot of bad stuff while simultaneously reassuring each other about nothing.

She's worried about what to pack and what to wear and riding an elephant.  I'm worried about getting murdered and getting robbed and being wedged in a small airplane seat for approximately 807 hours.  I worry about The Seat Defender and I don't even know what that is, for chrissake.  She thinks she's going to go to the bathroom too much and I think I'm not going to be able to go to the bathroom enough, while conceding that going too much is worse than not going enough.  I'll probably have both things happen to me.  We listen closely to the people that warn us about the things that can go wrong and barely pay attention to the people who tell us it's going to be a great adventure.

We're taking three suitcases: one for clothes, one for medicines, and one for food.

We're not very smart.