A Big, Big Topic

So here's an interesting one.  Interesting for me, is what I mean, of course.  It's not like I'm sitting around wandering what you're interested in, oh readers who are hidden from sight, existing deep within the very definition of anonymous.

I am locked in this eternal struggle between the forces of It's Never Enough and It's Enough, Already.  I want to be productive but I don't want to beat the shit out of myself for not being productive enough.  SuperK is sort of standard productive - she chugs along with a moderately busy schedule.  Very steady and predictable.  I'm more of a Boom or Bust guy.  Huge bursts of intense activity counterbalanced with very enjoyable idling.  I meditate and read a lot and reserve some significant chunks of time simply to be quiet in my own mind.  Just because you see me sitting quietly doesn't mean that I'm inactive - I need this time for things to clunk into place, to make sense, to flesh themselves out, and my brain can be in hyperdrive when I'm sitting motionless with a cup of coffee in my hand except for the motion when I'm drinking some of the coffee.  For some people - the dreaded extroverts - this happens when they're around other people.  These vampires suck the energy out of people like me so that they can recharge internally.  They get answers by bouncing ideas off others.  For me the answers come - sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly - when I'm idling.

So I guess I'm a hyperactive idler.  Jesus H. Christ, it's no wonder I drank.

My writing unwinds very much along these lines.  Sometimes I sit down and just rip out a few pages, barely pausing to come up for oxygen, the whole process seeming to happen of its own accord, and I like what I've written as it is.  Regrettably, this no-editing technique is rare.  This is incredibly fun writing because it's so easy but it's a special and rare gift from god.

In a somewhat more common occurrence I sit down to write and what flows out seems to have a life of its own - a thought swerves left or up or down, this way or that, and I find myself exploring a line of reasoning that is surprising even to me, and I'm doing the fucking writing, for chrissake.  This can be frustrating and revealing and frustrating - I feel like I'm driving a car that has been taken over by an alien presence.  I really have to struggle to maintain control.  

Then there is The Grind, where I sit in front of a screen and try to find words for what I want to say.  This happens daily.  I have something to say and can't see the thought in the words that I write.  Often, when I'm making up a little anecdote or vignette, the characters and action clear in my mind, I wonder what you, o reader, are seeing?

I'm not a musician but I have this sneaking suspicion that really good musicians pick up an instrument and find that they're prodigies.  They don't have to practice, right?  Hendrix was able to play like he did the first time he picked up a guitar.  It all simply made sense.  The dude didn't evolve at all.  He didn't have to grow.  He was a finished product right out of the musical womb.

So I have these introvert things that I like to do: reading, writing, meditating, taking long hikes or swims, sitting in the sun, on my patio, soaking up heat like a cold-blooded snake, allowing thoughts to come and go.  The one I love the most but which causes me the most anguish is writing.  I think I should do it more than I do but it can be so frustrating, so much work, that I tend to do the other stuff.  It's easier.

The question that torments me is this: should I say "It's Enough Already" and be content with the pace of my writing or should I allot more time than I do and really see what I can accomplish?

My buddy Willie is a musician.  He's talented and he loves music but I suspect he knows that it's unlikely he'll ever be able to make the kind of living playing piano that he can with his current day job.  This can be frustrating but we have practical lives to live.  I often wonder if I had it all to do over again would I have said OK, I'm going to be a writer and that's what I'm going to be.  Maybe I would have hit the successful writer lottery but probably not - it's hard to make a living as an artist.  I probably would have lived a low-key, undistinguished life - sort of like the one I have now - but a life that definitely would not feature a Very Expensive Car and lots of foreign travel.

So you see?  Do you?

Here's the point if you, o reader, are still reading, searching for a point . . . 

This therapist spent most of her working life as an acquisitions editor at a famous publishing house.  Apparently an acquisitions editor is tasked with acquiring new literature, and then editing it, I guess.  She checked in on my blog a few times and was always complimentary about the quality of my writing.  We talked a bit about the mechanics of transitioning what I write to a more official, public, commercial forum - agreeing that it would take a good amount of elbow grease and some luck but that the effort, at least, would be worth it.

I have not done this.  Am I lazy or afraid or dubious about the prospects of anything coming of my effort?  Yes, probably.  Sometimes I get mad at myself for not making the effort while at others I wonder if I should just enjoy what I write as a personal, creative outlet.

Should I tinker on my guitar or aspire to Hendrix-Dom?

The Show Me Guy

I've been off the therapist bandwagon for a month or so.  During this time I haven't been locked up, in one of those padded rooms with blinding white walls, while wearing a shirt with long sleeves that fasten in the back, so I'm of the opinion that things are stable.

At the start of my second appointment this woman looked at me and said: "Well.  I have to say that I thought I'd never see you again."

I laughed.  I told her I was on the fence about ever returning again so we were on the same page.  Therapy didn't seem practical to me.  There was no provable, repeatable system that I could research and verify.  The Fellowship was like that, too - a nebulous set of suggestions that I was encouraged to take to the best of my ability.  "There's no wrong way to do this."  What the hell kind of stupid idea is that?  Of course there's a wrong way to do it.

I like One Plus One Equals Two.  I can prove this.

I haven't heard back from Suicide Guy.  Two visits in the hospital and one set of texts asking when/if/how/who/why/what he was going to be doing about his recovery moving forward.  The texts were ignored even though I had been texting with him right before the moving forward question.  I deleted his phone number from my phone today.  I wish him well but I don't chase anyone, particularly those people who don't want to get caught.  I don't think my job is to harangue anyone.  I'll be happy to talk to him IF he contacts me; otherwise, I wish him good luck on his journey.

Friends and Family

I'm ruminating on the idea that when someone ticks me off this is often because they're poking at a sore spot.  One of the beautiful things about The Program is that our friends feel comfortable shining a bright light on our defects.  When I was drinking I surrounded myself with other ne'er-do-wells.  We'd get drunk and sit around, congratulating each other on how well we were dealing with all of the jerks and idiots and crooks that flooded into our lives.  Our bad luck was amazing.  Legendary.  Nothing was ever our fault.

Boy, was I irritated when I stepped into The Program and my index fingers were bent back and broken off, depriving me of the ability to point at anyone or anything else.

Family can be hard.  Whenever I think I'm making progress on my defects of character I visit my family.  I remarked once at a meeting that these people were really good at pushing my buttons.  It was pointed out that my family installed my buttons.  They know a lot about how to rile me up.

One More Time

Reiterate:  To say or do (something) for a second time, such as for emphasis.

I hate to repeat myself, to say the same thing over and over, to explore redundancy, but I don't really have that many stories so if you think you've heard it before you probably have.   I thought I had a lot of stories.  Then I started writing them down and found that I'm just repeating myself - the trouble with writing things down is that there's proof that you've already said something.  Moreover, it would be okay to repeat things if the stories were any good but they're not that good.  You can see that I'm in a tight spot.  

I never let the truth get in the way of a good story, oft-told.  I never, ever let the fact that you've already heard something stop me from saying it again.  I like the sound of my voice that much.

SuperK (conversationus interruptus): "Yeah, yeah, I've heard the story about you and Bob taking LSD and getting lost in the bear preserve."

Me: "Really?  You know that didn't ever happen, right?"

Anyway, the meeting today was on Step Eleven, the prayer and meditation step.  Meditation I get - you close your eyes and think about how you're going to fuck up all the people who have wronged you in the past.  That, and sexual fantasies run amok.  Boom.  Done.  Meditation.  What's the big deal?

Prayer:  The practice of communicating with one's god (Meh); a request, a petition (OK, much better).

Prayer is a little trickier for me seeing as I have a tendency to put word's in god's mouth.  I should barely be speaking for myself let alone for my higher power.  The Step does suggest that I should be careful that I don't ask for specific things for specific people - this is me assuming that I know better than god.  While this is true I still need to be humble about it.  The Step also warns that if I think I'm hearing specific advice directly from god I might want to check the content out with someone else - I hear what I want to hear, in other words.  I hear it even when it's patently ridiculous because I want what I want and I want to avoid what I don't want.

Anyway, there's this great short story called The Lathe of Heaven.  The protagonist is a man who finds that if he directs his thoughts at the end of each day his wishes manifest themselves in his dreams, which then become reality.  For instance, he hates a co-worker and wishes that he didn't have to work with him anymore - this emotion leads to a dream where he murders this person.  When he wakes up he finds that the co-worker died the night before in an automobile accident.

Understandably rattled he begins to see a psychiatrist and the two of them - good men with good intentions - decide to try, through auto-suggestion, to direct the dream sequences for the betterment of mankind.

They start with eliminating world hunger.

The protagonist dreams that a wicked virus kills 95% of the world's population.  Boom.  Plenty of food for everyone left.  World hunger solved.  Obviously the intent was to increase the food supply, not reduce the eaters, but you gotta be pretty precise when you want to control god.

OK, next on the hit list is world peace.  What can go wrong with that, right?  The dream sequence for this problem starts with a large group of alien spaceships landing on the moon and beginning to build an outpost.  Their intent is sinister.  The result, of course, is that the people left on earth quit bickering and begin to work together to defend the planet.

Our main characters are frustrated.

"Just get the aliens off the moon and we'll start over," they yell.

The evening's dream features the aliens launching their attack.

This is me and prayer.  I'm really careful about the specifics of my prayers.  My god has a weird, twisted sense of humor.

Be careful what you pray for - you might get it.

The Hammer of Thor

Sponsor:  A senior member of a twelve step or similar program assigned to guide a new initiate and form a partnership with him.

Wow, that definition was not written by someone in The Program.  I like the concept of a "senior member."  It has an official feel to it.  It suggests that the senior member has some idea what's going on.   This may or may not be the case.  I also like the idea of an "initiate."  That has a vaguely religious feel to it.  My experience is that the whole set-up is pretty random.

I also like that this is the second possible definition listed on Wiktionary.  That's awfully high up on the importance scale.

Here's Urban Dictionary's take on the matter: "In various 12-Step groups a sponsor is someone who has some time in the program and has worked the steps who is willing to be there for newcomer.  Sponsors generally take the newcomer through the steps, are there to listen when a newcomer calls, and encourages him or her to get involved in the group.  Sponsors expect nothing in return except that the sponsee does the sane for the next person needing help."

That's a little more accurate.

I would also add that a sponsor is not your friend although a friendship often develops after a while.  But at the start most of us don't need our sponsor to be our buddy.  We need someone to tell us the truth, a thing most of us don't want to hear.

So I contacted my suicidal sponsee one last time, biting back big time on my inclination to come in wielding the Hammer of Thor.  I dunno . . . I was in Chicago for my formative years and people there weren't overly concerned about my feelings.  They were concerned about my sobriety and to transmit this concern they were direct.  I don't think they were upset when they pissed me off.  He responded in the affirmative when I asked if he was being released from the hospital today.  To my follow up question - whether he still wanted to get together on Monday to read The Steps and, less plausibly, whether he would be able to make it to today's Step Study - the silence was deafening and definitive.

Fire and Chaos

Chaos:  (Ed Note: I know this is going to be a great definition before I even look it up).  Any state of disorder, any confused or amorphous mixture or conglomeration.

(Ed Note: even the math definition is outstanding).  Behavior of iterative non-linear systems in which arbitrary small variations in initial conditions become magnified over time.  (Ed Note: think on this for a minute.  It's a small variation on the theme that a small step off the path repeated continuously leads one far into the sticker bushes).

I guess I've been in a position lately to see some things in other people that I need to inspect more closely in myself.  I know the exercise: if someone is bugging me my first task is to go look in the mirror.  Boy, can I see my defects, larger than life and in technicolor, on display in other people.  All of those things that I can easily brush off when they're pointed out to me sending me into a rage when I'm see them in someone else.  I believe a ancient text says something along the lines of take the log out of your own eye before pointing out the speck in the eye of someone else

Anyway, I've been stuck on this idea that my behavior gives me a reward.  Often the reward is okay and makes sense - the avoidance of discomfort and the acquisition of pleasure.  Fair enough - this doesn't make me a bad guy and seems to me to be pretty human.  I am increasingly aware - uncomfortably so - that sometimes my behavior feeds darker impulses or, at least, more destructive, less constructive impulses.  This is why we see a lot of alcoholics, used to chaos, come into The Program and continue to make really not so great decisions.  In relationships, with their kids and families, in their work life and with the public in general.  We know chaos.  We're vaguely aware that chaos is not the way to go but we go that way anyhow.  We know chaos.  We don't know serenity.  Serenity is weird and uncomfortable and, well, boring.

As an example, 30 years into this, which would suggest some experience in trying to avoid discomfort and acquire pleasure, in a general way, one would think that I would make decisions that would spare me excess anxiety, an emotion that I am  prone to experience.  Yet, I found myself paging through a few brochures advertising trips to Mongolia this morning.  In my Quiet Time.  I'm guessing this would be something that would make a lot of people uneasy but page through I did.

I got that fire inside me.  Usually I warm my house, heat up some water for a shower, cook my food.  Sometimes I burn the fucking house down.

More Shall Be Revealed

Forthcoming:  Candid; frank.

So what do I know?  You can't bullshit a bullshitter, right?  Apparently you can.

I visited my friend of the medically-induced coma genre last Sunday.  He was relentlessly upbeat which surprised me somewhat.  I don't think I would be jokey and happy as I was coming out of a coma.  In my book a coma doesn't have the same feel as the experience I get going to a comedy club.  It isn't funny.  It wouldn't make me laugh out loud.  I assume I'd be very grateful, soberly so, but I'm not sure I'd go into an improv bit about the experience.

The next day I took a phone call from a woman that I know from The Fellowship who heard that I was this guy's sponsor from a mutual friend.  She was uncomfortable making the call, aware that she might be violating the standard recovery protocol of sponsor-sponsee confidentiality, but forging ahead because she really believed she was witnessing an acute, dangerous situation.  Because she had known the family for many years - their kids had grown up together - she wanted to pass along some inside information in case I found it helpful.

In a nutshell: my friend had attempted suicide, not overdosed accidentally on a prescribed medication; my friend had a history of suicide in his family and had attempted to kill himself in the past; he had, perhaps, been drinking, on and off, and did not have very much continuous sobriety at all; and his wife, perhaps, was an enabling practicing alcoholic.

I knew none of this.  I am surmising that this guy has not been forthcoming about the ebb and flow of his life.  I am also surmising that I'm seeing a classic case of alcoholic behavior: lying and hiding and misdirection of the most extreme sort.  I'm not getting much in the way of pertinent details that might enable me and others of my general ilk to get this guy going in the right direction, more or less.  I don't think that this is the kind of information that should have been left hidden when we sat down and read The First Step together, the one about OUR LIVES BEING UNMANAGEABLE!!  

I spoke to a few people, trusted advisers and confidantes, seers and gurus, about the situation, and received, more or less, two consistent bits of advice: That this guy doesn't get what we're trying to do, and that the guy doing this writing is powerless over the guy who doesn't get it.  Not complicated stuff.  Not new, exciting, untried advice. 

I found myself more annoyed than sympathetic.  Don't get me wrong - I wish the best for him and I'm not judging anyone on their behavior.  We do what we do and we do it for all kinds of reasons.  Clearly, this is a situation way, way above my pay grade - I don't have the education or qualifications to counsel someone on medicine and severe depression of the suicidal type, and I'm not getting within a hundred yards of all that.  Maybe he thinks I'm going to yell at him or think less of him because he's falling short of an ideal mark.  

God forbid I do that.