Time Takes Time

A friend of mine recently lost her only brother to a drug overdose - he was a young guy when he ODed.  Recently  her sponsor told her that she should be moving on as far as her grief and depression is concerned.  I would never get between someone and her sponsor - who knows far, far better than I do - but I take some mild exception to this comment.  I get the sponsor's point - after all alcoholics are pretty good at wallowing in misery and self-pity.

That being it's a mistake to think everyone can be put in a neat little box as far as grief is concerned.  There are a million different kinds of people who have experienced a million different kinds of loss.  To assume that it's going to take a fixed amount of time to heal is ridiculous.  It's going to take as much time as it takes.

I was one of those people who didn't feel very much grief right away.  I had been hoping for Ken to die - as had he - and I was happy that my ailing mother died quickly and painlessly - avoiding her greatest fear: The Nursing Home.  I sort of enjoyed her funeral, catching up with old friends and neighbors, many of whom I hadn't seen for years.  Denial, I guess is the first of the five stages of grief.  Now I'm kind of treading water, not drowning but not getting closer to dry ground very quickly, either.

So be it.

Some Fava Beans and a Nice Chianti

I favor the term "Free-Floating Anxiety," or as Little Westside Jonny might phrase it: "I'm prone to anxiety."  This has all been exacerbated by the twin deaths.  Should you wonder what FFA means or feels like ponder the following . . . 

I have jury duty this week, a civic function that no one, including me, looks forward to doing.  Most of us see a few days of boredom but I see weeks of potential terror.  I'm sure I'm going to be chosen for a capital murder case where some sociopathic psychopath gang member - gang leader - has dismembered a rival, cut out his liver, and eaten it with some fava beans and a good Chianti.  To make this free-floatingness a little worse the old woman who lives behind me has started to blast her TV for a few hours each night starting at about 10PM, my bedtime.  Because she lives in a particularly old trailer home - excuse me: manufactured home - and because my bed is 15 feet from her flimsy bedroom wall I'm picking up this muffled Spanish dialogue as soon as The TV springs to life.  Now, mind you, if I turn on a fan I don't think I can hear anything but I'm starting to imagine that I hear something, even over the roar of the fan.  SuperK looks at me like I'm losing it - I'm the guy who can go out like a light sitting up in a cramped airplane seat, the guy who's last house was on a terrifically busy street, ambulances and motorcycles and the like roaring up and down it 24 hours a day.  But this gentle mumbling has become a real problem.

I try not to talk to much to real earth people.  I can see them pull out their cell phones and start to dial 911.

Seaweed: Bush-League Pinch-Hitter

Power:  Ability to affect or influence; control or coercion.

Try everything and THEN ask for help from my higher power.  That is so completely hilarious in its brilliance that I can't see straight.

"We began to get over the idea that the Higher Power was a sort of bush-league pinch hitter, to be called upon only in an emergency.  The notion that we would still live our own lives, God helping a little now and then, began to evaporate."

A pinch-hitter is usually a baseball player that isn't good enough to be on the starting team, someone who comes in to bat once for a really terrible hitter.  And the bush-leagues are the really crappy leagues ("a low-ranking or inferior level among groups, professions, organizations, etc").  So the implication is - if I understand it correctly, dubious as that may be - that I consider my higher power to be an inferior, secondary substitute playing in an inferior, low-ranking league.  That sounds about right for me.  That sounds just about right.

I got a long way to go . . . 

There's a Point Here Somewhere

I do try to listen, I really do.  It's hard to discern this because I always seem to be talking and it's usually about myself.  The message I'm perceiving right now is that helping someone else instead of thinking about myself might be a wise plan.  Pshaw, I say.

There was a blip in my life once when I wasn't feeling very good and Ken suggested that reaching out to someone less fortunate than me might be helpful.  I protested, maintaining that I didn't think I had anything to give at that point.

"Maybe that's when you most need to reach out," he said.

(Ed. Note: a guy just stopped by my table here at he overpriced specialty coffee shop, where I'm lolling in the sun - he's a sad, sad case, someone I know from my morning meeting before we had to ban him from the group because he kept disappearing into the interior of the church, hiding out, an action frowned upon by the church staff who would bump into him from time to time.  His face and arms are covered with what I assume must be meth sores.  He rambled on in a marginally coherent fashion for a bit.  Apparently he's a sharp guy when he's on his anti-psychotic medicine which he clearly is not).

There's my service work presented to me on a silver platter.  I've always been nice to him and he recognizes me although I don't think anything I say is sinking in very deeply.

Anyway, when I'm off my game my main impulse is to go off alone and think, and not about someone else, I'll tell you that.  My M.O. is not to think about how I can be of service.  I'm here to be the one being serviced.

One of my buddies last night shared about how he first has to try everything - absolutely everything - before he's willing to let go of whatever is bothering him.

Man, oh, man.

"Be the change you want to be in the world."  Gandhi

PO'd

Pissed off:  (comparative more pissed off, superlative most pissed off)  annoyed, upset, angry, browned off, cheesed off, peed off, pissed, PO'd, teed off, ticked off, torqued off.

So I pitched a bitch and didn't go to my men's meeting to protest the selection of current reading material.  I'm sure I showed them.  I'm sure they could barely manage to hold a meeting with me absent.  I'm sure they didn't know what to do without me because it is . . . no doubt about it . . . all about me.

I opted instead for a different men's meeting near my house, one that I had tried before and found personally to be a poor fit.  Nothing the matter with the meeting, mind you, just didn't scratch my itch for a variety of mundane reasons.  I walk in, sit down, eye the very young secretary approaching.  He introduces himself; asks if I've new to the meeting; asks if I'm new to The Fellowship, which pisses me off even though it's an excellent and entirely appropriate question.  I'm pissed off when I go to a meeting and no one asks these questions.  You can see I'm pissed off fairly easily when everything's going my way so I've really go my finger on the trigger right now.

Then he asked if I wanted to lead the meeting which also pissed me off - I hate people who wait until the meeting is about to start to find a leader, believing it to show a certain amount of laziness on the part of the secretary.  I ignore the fact that many of my friends like this technique, believe that off-the-cuff remarks come from the heart and not from the head - alcoholics don't like too much time to think about things.  I ask for one of our Books to help me select a topic - it's better to hear the wisdom of our founders than the wisdom of Seaweed.  They don't have any literature available - pissing me off - although they agree to let me use one of the new books that they have for sale, somewhat begrudgingly, I thought.  Maybe they thought I was going to share and then take off with the book at the cookie break.  I'd be more likely to take off with a couple of bags of cookies.

Because I'm a little anxious and shut-down right now I talked about the two deaths that I believe are still affecting my mood, the low-grade depression hanging over my head like a little storm cloud.  The funny thing about losing my sponsor is that Ken is exactly the guy I'd call to say I'm upset over losing my sponsor.  I did say that I had a Vacation City sponsor, admitting that because I don't have the depth and strength of a connection with him that I did with Ken that it's harder to pick up the phone and call.  The section I read out of The Book talked about the fact that most of our problems are of our own making, that we act like directors of a play who want to control the sets, the lighting, the music, the performers, and that everything would be OK if people did what we wanted.

So what did people want to talk about?  How to find a sponsor.  I'm often amazed at the disconnect between what I say in a meeting and what people hear.  When I think I'm tearing it up nobody says boo; when I stumble around, trying to collect my thoughts, I seem to hit a nerve.  This turn of events, of course, really pissed me off.  Why weren't these actors reading from my script?  I tried to open my mind, to hear what people were actually saying instead of what I wanted to hear, and realized that there were 5 or 6 guys at the meeting who had announced less than 30 days of sobriety.  Of course - my message was meant to spark a conversation about how to accomplish the difficult task of asking someone to be a sponsor instead of one revolving around the fact that someone who should know better isn't reaching out for help.  It also made me realize that I need to ramp up the effort and get some more phone numbers instead of criticizing the people who I'm not calling anyway.

That kind of pissed me off.

This and That, Stupid Stuff, Mostly

I'm not going to go to my men's meeting tonight.  I can't get past those quotes from the religious book that battered me in my youth.  I would be very upset if the group took this decision with anything more than a big, collective: "Meh."

I'm still dancing around with the generalized anxiety despite the fact that everything in my life is totally fine.  The only source that I can come up with is the death of these two major figures in my life.  I keep wanting to pick up the phone to call Ken to tell him that I'm still struggling with the fact that Ken is dead, and I can't tell you how much I wanted to call my mom when I had that chest cold just to hear her assure me that it was, in fact, some terrible new disease.  I think I'm mad that they died without my permission.  I know that I'm mad that I have to experience discomfort in my life, especially discomfort that I didn't bring upon myself.  I'm much better at advising other people how to deal with discomfort when I'm not personally going through any.

I have jury duty next week.  I'm going to assume you know how excited I am about this.  I'm sure I'm going to get asked to help adjudicate a case involving violent drug cartel members who are going to come to my house and threaten to kill me and my wife and all of my houseplants if I don't vote - you know - the right way.  It has taken us a long time to get our houseplants up and running.  That would be the real tragedy.

I drink too much coffee.  I'm sure this has nothing to do with my generalized anxiety.  Right out of chute, still in my jammies, I slam down a cup and a half of a stimulant that I don't need in the least. 

Why Don't You Try Recovering From Yourself?

Recovered: (simple past tense of recover) - to get better, regain one's health.

There's a sentence in the one of our main books that says ". . . men and women who have recovered from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body."  It's a good sentence, a good, solid, proud sentiment.  Every now and then I hear a member introduce themselves in a meeting by saying "Hi, I'm Seaweed and I'm a recovered alcoholic" in lieu of the standard "I'm an alcoholic" greeting.  Frankly, I think these people are under the impression that they're a little more special than the rest of us but really . . . who gives a shit, right?  Say whatever you want.  I had a buddy in The Old Town explain that saying the "I'm an alcoholic" part was a personal affirmation for his ears,  not the group's ears.  He didn't care if the group thought he was an alcoholic, which still makes me laugh today

There are a handful of people here in Vacation City who have taken this weird, militant stance about saying "recovered."  Whenever one of them chairs a meeting the talk inevitably gets around to how much crap they've taken for saying using the qualifier "recovered."  Frankly, I don't believe them - I've never heard anyone object to that word in my time in The Program.  I think these people want to stand out.  In Chicago I used to say that I was an alcoholic and an addict - true words but I see today that I wanted to be worse than everyone else, a dude who heroically overcame two obstacles.

Seaweed.  Garden Variety Drunk