Where's That Knife?

One of the things that I added to my Quiet Time each day while I was traveling was a reminder to try to keep my acceptance high and my expectations low.  You would think that such a basic tenet of The Fellowship might be more of a regular participant in my prayer life but I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer.  I'm pretty sharp, too, but a lot of the time I'm not even in the drawer.  I'm the knife that you can never find. 

"Where's that fucking knife, anyway?" people are always saying.

A few months ago I started to recite the Serenity Prayer in the morning, too.  You know the one I'm talking about?  The most famous prayer in the history of our Fellowship?  It's a pretty good prayer.  It has been helpful.  Maybe I should have been thinking about doing what I'm supposed to do and waiting when I've done everything I can do and trying to figure out which is which like thirty years ago.

It was a good trip but it's good to be home, too.

Talking Decanters of Sherry

Here's another I notice when I'm traveling: the presence of alcohol seems to be a little louder and more insistent.  I've always thought that if I should ever pick up a drink again - god forbid - it would be during a vacation.  When my back is up against the wall with some real or perceived tragedy I tend to reach for The Program.  But when I'm out of my routine, when meetings are few and far in-between, when weariness and inconvenience make attendance more problematic, I find my mind wanders ever so little.  Yesterday there was a meeting we could have attended at 8PM but we were wiped out from a long, tough hike and we would have had to go out in the dark in a strange city to find this meeting place.  It wasn't hard to say screw it.

The last place we stayed out had a decanter of sherry and little sherry glasses in our room and in the common room.  I've never had a glass of sherry in my life.  I don't even know what the fuck sherry is but I was aware of that cut glass decanter every time I walked into the room.  I didn't feel like drinking anything but I knew it was there.  Now the hotel room has a bottle of wine on top of the mini-bar which is also stocked with beer and little whiskeys.  I'm sure the wine costs like $297.  The wine in a hotel mini-bar is not a good bargain.  But I had to take that bottle and put it on the top shelf in the closet.  I just didn't want to see wine looking at me.

Time for a meeting?  Yeah, maybe

Stop!

Vacation is always a good time to verify the fact that I don't have any Stop Button.  I don't believe my Stop Button was ever installed.  If it was, I can't find the location of my Stop Button. I think that when god was putting me to together I was the last person on a Friday afternoon right before a three day weekend.  God was rushing.  God didn't have all the right parts so he just attached whatever he had left.  I think there were several GO buttons left over so he applied one in lieu of the Stop Button.

This is OK, of course.  I am who I am.

Aunt Jemma-Mima

Our guide for this day - Jemma - picks us up at our B&B. Lots of recent rains made our scheduled bike ride unnavigateable so we substitute a couple of two hour hikes instead.

"Will we have time for a flat white in between the hikes?" I ask the owner the night before when she called to suggest some alternatives.

"Sure," she said.
"Or maybe a bite to eat?"
"Absolutely!" she said brightly.

I suspected a stiff headwind when I asked Jemma - a thoroughly delightful young woman, by the way - about the bushes covered with bright yellow flowers that we say everywhere.

"I know nothing about the local plant life," she replied.  "I'm more of a rock person."  This was the first of many lies and mis-directions and slight exaggerations that we'd get today.

We drove for about 50 minutes into Tongariro National Park, stopping briefly along the way so that she could coordinate things with her boss.  The hike is called Silica Creek - it starts at a higher elevation, totally out in the open, windy, sunny, the ground covered in with low-growing native bush.  As we wind down the mountain, the verdant Hobbit forest rises around us as we follow a snow-melt fed river cranking along side us.

Jemma has a bum knee and doesn't set a scorching pace even though KK is right on her ass.  At one point I tell her that she certainly isn't moving too quickly for us.  She is limping noticeably at times.

We finish the hike and have a coffee.  Jemma is texting furiously and indicates that the hike took longer than it should have - both KK and I got the impression that she was laying the blame at our feet - and started throwing out a lot of conflicting and suspect estimates about our start times and end times and drive times.  She steps away to talk to her boss returning to suggest a couple of shorter hikes, indicating the second half of the hiking extravaganza would take her past a two o'clock stopping time.  This was the first either of us had heard anything about a time limit.  If there was a time limit then we would have expected an experienced guide to tell us to pick up the pace.  That's what the guide was there for.  To guide us.

Being a slightly miffable guy I began to get slightly miffed.  Kindly, I think, I suggested that it might be better to just head back to the ranch rather than try to fit in less desirable activities to fit an arbitrary time slot.  At this point it seemed that she picked up on the vibe that the customers might be getting a little miffed, and she started to get awfully chatty.

KK and I are nice people.   We didn't make her feel bad.  We didn't let it ruin the day, either.  It's a long trip and there are going to be ups and downs, victories and defeats.  This is The Program working in my life.  I don't get too up or too down.  I get miffed but the miffed-ness doesn't take me to A Dark Place anymore.

Stale Thoughts

There is something to be said about the thrill of overcoming the difficulty of trying something for the first time.  It isn't so much that it's fun or enjoyable all of the time when I'm doing it but that it does make me a different, better person.  I think it's hard to change when I'm doing the same thing over and over again.

Bit of a Chat

I had a bit of a chat yesterday with Spandex who's upset about a large societal issue over which he has no control.  I feel his pain - this large societal issue is sticking in my craw, too.  I spent some time afterwards composing an email that I forwarded to him, emphasizing the usual and time-tested coping techniques of The Program: don't try to predict the future, manage what is in your ability to manage, dwell on the positive and not the negative.  For some odd reason I have been able to take this stuff to heart more quickly than he has in the present circumstances.  I don't know why this is - god knows there are all kinds of weird, small things, much smaller than this episode, that I can't get past without a mighty effort.

So I've been pondering the balance thing again.  I want to use these coping techniques while simultaneously not being an idiot about the facts of life, either.  I can "accept" things a lot better and a lot faster when I'm getting my way.  If I break my leg I'm not quite as accepting.   And if you break your leg I'm a whole lot more willing to accept the event.  Most people don't want to hear my tired crap about acceptance when they're the ones struggling to accept something.

The point is to try to be positive without sticking your head in the sand.  It's OK to be upset about things especially if they're upsetting things.

I recall vividly a story this sales manager guy shared in a meeting when I was trying to get sober. Proactive to a fault, he was always studying and reading and trying to do what he could to be more successful.  He starts reading all of these books about assertiveness.  He's just going to get you do to what he wants by being enthusiastic and in charge.  Then he moved on to books about positive thinking whereby he began slaughtering people with cheery good will.  He's on the golf course one day, playing abominably, and projecting an air of assertive positivity.  After several holes of this tiring routine, one of his business colleagues says: "What's the matter with you?  You do know you're in the sand trap, right?"

Big Disasters, Little Miracles

So I'm at my 7AM meeting today.  It was a very good meeting - a feisty friend of mine kicked things and then called on people who don't often talk instead of letting the aggressive loudmouths who think their message just HAS to be heard fall all over each other clamoring to be heard and I'm looking at YOU, Seaweed.

I'm slightly distracted by the fact that I have an appointment to have a tire repaired on my Very Expensive Car.  I ran over a screw.  I don't know where all of these screws are coming from.  I'm starting to think that some shadowy character knows my routine and is scattering construction debris on the roads that I normally use.  I'm slightly miffed by the fact that I recently replaced all of my Very Expensive Tires due to normal wear and tear, ran over a screw almost immediately and had to re-replace one of the tires which survived a few months before I ran over another screw - or maybe it was the same screw, what do I know?  I suspected this event would result in a re-re-replacement of the tire.  My car has Run Flat tires or what we in the business call Tires That Can't Be Repaired.  Personally I'd rather have tires that go flat when they ingest screws but then can be repaired.

The meeting finishes up and I head down to take a walk on the beach before my mid-morning car appointment.  I get a hundred yards or so before popping into a public restroom that mostly serves as sleeping pod for our local homeless population.  My timing is good - the stall has just been cleaned.  I put down the lid , unfasten my trousers, and sit down . . . on a nice, warm seat.  I mean, it was nice.  It was luxurious.  I felt pampered.

"WTF?" I thought.  "Have they installed some of those new hi-tech toilets that vibrate and massage your rear and cleanse any unpleasantness with a stream of soothing water before gently swapping your posterior with gardenia-scented toilet water?"  It seemed an extravagance for a beach toilet but I wouldn't put it past the public works folks here in Vacation City.  We know how to party.

Turns out, after some sleuthing, that the source of the toasty toilet seat was the morning sun, pouring through the open door and right onto the future throne of one Little Stevie Seaweed.  I took it.  Oh, yes, I did.

Tire was ruined.  Still enjoyed the pooping.