Business Meeting AHHHHH!

An update on my performance at the Saturday business meeting because it is, of course, all about me.  EVERYONE wants to know how I'm doing.  EVERYONE wants my advice on EVERYTHING.  How do I know this?  It's common knowledge, an unspoken fact that doesn't need to be mentioned, sort of like the presence of gravity or the existence of the sun.  No one gets up in the morning and says: "Holy shit, what is that hot, bright orb in the sky?!?"  Similarly people are innately interested in Stevie Seaweed.  And I'm not saying this to be arrogant.  It's more along the lines of Usain Bolt knowing that he's the fastest human on the planet.  It's implied.  It doesn't have to be discussed.  Nobody begins their day wondering who can run the fastest 100 yard dash.  Everyone knows.  Usain Bolt can

Anyway, back to the meeting.  I did not speak a word and this wasn't hard to do because I had already laid the ground work for not being pissed off when EVERYONE didn't want to know what I thought we should do and then, to make a bad situation worse, to contribute to a deteriorating situation, NO ONE would think what I wanted to do was such a great idea should I be asked to speak.  

When we have our monthly in-person business meeting we're lucky if ten people out of our 100 members can be bothered to show up and a lot of these people attended the regular meeting that took place literally right before the business meeting so all they have to do, literally, is remain seated.  It's not as if you have to drive around for an hour to attend.  You just don't get up and leave.  It is literally easier to attend the business meeting than it is to avoid it.  Avoiding it takes more effort.  One has to work harder to miss the business meeting but almost everyone chooses that option.

As I've come to expect when there are any significant matters to discuss a lot of people with very strong opinions who aren't really regular members of the group show up and spout off, and then disappear again for weeks at a time, leaving the rest of us to deal with the wreckage of their decisions.  They can do this, of course, but it annoys the shit out of me.  If you aren't a regular maybe keep your fucking mouth shut when we're discussing format changes that are going to effect us but not effect you.  How about that?

And because there is a lot of political and social tension in the US right now some political and social posturing played out, mostly from people who want things to go back exactly the way they were as quickly as possible.  We can debate until the cows come home if this is ever going to happen let alone whether it's going to happen by noon next Thursday but some of these folks were belligerent about how much they disliked the way things are now and why we need to have them restored to their liking immediately.

While I wasn't upset during the proceedings I could feel my gorge rising, my spleen engorging, and a pleasant self-righteous irritation swelling into a state of engorgement.  I called my sponsor, a guy who is much more easy-going than me, and he laughed about a couple of the more egregious violations of our Traditions.  He also brushed off my predictions about why things weren't going to work out if they weren't done my way.  These two character traits are important for me in a sponsor: someone who handles the world with a lighter touch and someone who prefers to give something a shot instead of rejecting it for reasons that haven't occurred yet and may never occur.

I'm OK now.  I know you were concerned about me but I'm just fine.

Happy Seaweed

Happy:  Favored by luck or fortune; enjoying or characterized by well-being or contentment.

Happiness shouldn't require effort on my part, and it should come as a kind of peace.  All I have to do is sit back and let it wash over me.  Life gives me what I need if I'm wise enough to see that.  Old Guy.

Happiness is not something to go out and seize.  Happiness is taking satisfaction in what is available right now, not hitching it to the future.  Too often my definition of happiness looks forward.   The future is tricky - the future might not come.  Someone who is probably old.

I don't understand happiness only as someone just always smiling and laughing.  It's more like inner happiness, where you feel you have done everything right in your life, you haven't made anybody unhappy.  You have a certain kind of peace and balance in yourself, and you are not anxious abut what will happen the next minute or the next day.  You let it go and you don't worry and you lead a balanced life.  If you want the next moment where everything will be better, then you'd better do this moment right.  Old person.

Am I happy?  Of course I am.  Yet sometimes I think I enjoy being unhappy because I put so much effort into finding things that assault my serenity.  Yet . . .  I am drawing a lot of happiness from small things that ordinarily would be quite irritating.  For instance I was unhappy when my gym closed, depriving me of the opportunity to burn off some of my unhappiness through strenuous cardiac arrest . . . er, exercise.  But a few days ago the directive came down from On High that outdoor pools in closed complexes may open while large indoor commercial pools may not.  OK - my community has a pool - a pool that I normally sniff at because it's only 2/3rds the length of a normal-sized gym pool.  Still, better than nothing, right?  I swam there for the first time today and it was pretty irritating . . . I mean, great and funny.  I'm tall so it was like . . . stroke . . . stroke . . . stroke . . . run into the wall.  Stroke . . .  stroke . . . stroke . . . hit the wall with my head.  To get my normal swim completed I need to do like 2,897 laps even though I only swim like 100 yards during a normal workout.  But this is an outdoor pool and it's pretty great to be able to swim outdoors but I'm approximately the palest human being this side of the Arctic Circle so I got sunburned.  This harshed my buzz, to coin a phrase, washing away any joy I got from not being irritated.

Irritating, right?

Hang On To The Pain

Anxiety:  An unpleasant state of mental uneasiness, nervousness, apprehension and obsession or concern about some uncertain event.  (Ed. Note: I've looked this word up so many times I have it memorized.  There's a picture of me on the page, for chrissake.  Alternately, when I opened the definition for gratitude I hear crickets chirping.)

Here is some stuff I wrote to myself after mom, dad, and Kenner died:

I release my anxiety into the universe.  (Ed. Note: My anxiety totally ignored this request.  It went precisely nowhere, roughly speaking.)

This is MY anxiety - it is not THE anxiety.  It is part of me.  It has a message that it wants me to hear.  It isn't trying to punish me or torment me or kill me.  (Ed. Note: I just added the kill part to that last sentence.  It isn't in the original document but I thought it might heighten the dramatic effect.  Kill is a word that grabs your attention but since you don't have access to the original you can't tell if it's in there or not.  Perhaps if you went on a pilgrimage to the Middle East you could find the original on a papyrus scroll, preserved from decay by the hermetic environment of a cave hidden below sea level.  The Dead Sea Scrolls of Seaweed.)

Uh, where was I again?  Oh, yeah: 

I'm not angry at it or afraid of it and I'm not trying to make it go away.  (Ed. Note: Bullshit, bullshit, and big bullshit to those three lies.)

I can sit quietly with it.  (Ed. Note:  Well, I can sit with anyhow.)

One of my things is to try to learn a lesson from every experience I experience.  I find the lessons are particularly hardy with a negative experience.  Pain focuses my attention.  Five years after these deaths I've got a thicker skin and a hardier constitution and a deeper wisdom.  When the pandemic began to put a crimp in my self-indulgent lifestyle my initial reaction was . . . well, I was pissed and annoyed that all that pleasantness was being . . . well, fucked with.  But I cycled through my recovery cycles to get to the good in the situation and I cycled at a significant clip.  I got there awfully quickly.  I learned about hanging onto something that was gone and how detrimental to my serenity this was.  I don't mean to suggest that this was instantaneous but it happened and it happened right quick.

Temporary Friday Internet Secretary Seaweed

Discordant:  Disagreeing or incongruous; harsh and jarring because of a lack of harmony.

So society is beginning to slowly open back up with audible creaks and groans and black-snake moans.  It's tentative at best.  And we're going to have to decide, as a Fellowship, what this means for us.  I'm guessing, like society at large, that some of our members are going to want to proceed with an excess of caution while some are frustrated that things aren't back to "where they used to be" already.  I can see the potential for discord.  Imagine that: discord in a discordant Society.  It's not like alcoholics have ever disagreed with each other about anything.

My large morning group is going to have a business meeting two days from today.  I generally avoid these cesspools of discordant punk rock because I have enough of a tendency to seek out the low point of my serenity without getting together with a bunch of idiots who can't see how right I am about everything.  Like I need to get into a prolonged discussion about the proper procedure for getting a cake ordered for a birthday celebration.  Seriously - this topic ended up heated and lengthy.

Complicating matters is that this group is downtown so it gets a steady stream of the homeless and people from halfway houses and treatment centers.  They aren't a large percentage but they're measurable.  While these folks are certainly welcome, by god, they can also be problematic with their grubby, unwashed hands and tendency to use the bathrooms and dig into the cookies and coffee.

I'm the Temporary Friday Internet Secretary for this group - whatever the fuck that is - so I'm obligated to show up and, befitting my position as the Ruler of the Universe, I've worked up a lot of suggestions as to how we start the meeting rolling again.  One would be to count off into a few smaller groups that would be dispersed to different corners of the room and - yeah - that's not happening.  Another would be to stagger the meeting so that the early risers could come at 6:30 instead of 7:00 which would allow a second wave to start at 7:45 and - holy shit, yeah - that's not happening either.  A solid suggestion might be to announce some rules about mask-wearing and social-distancing and - boy, alcoholics love someone telling them to follow a rule - so not a prayer for that working.  And that last suggestion would imply someone might need to point out to rules-flaunters that they were flaunting the rules.  I can see that working well - a woman secretary, who weighs 105 pounds, telling some belligerent dude without a mask that he has to leave.

I was initially ready to present these choices at the business meeting.  I was getting worked up - pre-worked up - that these outstanding choices would not be accepted even though they're all fucking outstanding.  My time in The Program has taught me to seek counsel when I'm unsure of myself, of my motives, to bounce my incredible, infallible thoughts off other members, especially when I'm girding my loins for mortal combat.

The pressure in my self-righteous balloon has been relieved.  I will take a Vow of Silence.  Frankly, I think the direction of any meeting should be set by regular members who have in the range of 2 to 10 years of sobriety.  It's their meeting.  They should set the agenda.  When I was getting sober there weren't even car phones let alone texting and cell phones and Facebook.  These people are going to have to live with the consequences of the decisions so let them call the shots.  Elder Statesman rather that Bleeding Deacon.

From my casual conversations I think what will happen is that our younger, healthier, braver members can start the process by showing up in person and the rest of us will continue online.  This seems appropriate.   And I think that the group will come up with suggested attire and seating arrangements and if someone doesn't follow them so be it.  I guess anyone who doesn't like this can leave.

It'll be alright.  We'll get there.

Self-Centered Everything

Self:  One individual's personality, character, disposition, or demeanor.

"The chief activator of our defects has been self-centered fear - primarily fear that we would lose something we already possessed or would fail to get something we demanded.  Living upon a basis of unsatisfied demands, we were in a state of continual disturbance and frustration."  P 76 12&12

So . . . am I not getting what I want?  Or I am being forced into a situation that is not to my liking?  Continuously disturbed.  I demand something!  You . . . are . . . . SO . . . . frustrating.

"We consider our plans for he day.  Before we begin (our meditation), we ask God to direct our thinking, especially asking that it be divorced from self-pity, dishonest or self-seeking motives.  We ask especially for freedom from self-will, and are careful to make no request for ourselves only.  We may ask for ourselves, however, if others may be helped.  PP 86-7 

I'm pretty sure I enjoy being unhappy.  There's no other explanation for all of the time I spend trying to make myself unhappy, especially focusing on why I'm not getting what I want or why I'm being made to do something I don't want to do.  That and focusing on people I barely know - or don't know at all - and all the ways that they're screwing up existence.  There is so much pleasantness inherent in my existence, yet I look elsewhere, I look away, look away, look away.

Do you have a dog in that fight?

Confusing Seaweed

Quiet:  With little or no sound; free of disturbing noise. (Ed. Note:  I did not see the adjective "disturbing" as a possibility.  It's nice.)

Time: The inevitable progression into the future with the passing of present events into the past.  (Ed. Note: You knew this was going to be a cool definition.)  The indefinite continued progress of existence of events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.  (Ed. Note: God, this is like eating M&Ms or good, salty, vinegar potato chips.)

Quiet Time: (Ed. Note: I'm not even going to try to come up with a definition that would marry those two concepts into a coherent ham sandwich.)

My morning Quiet Times have definitely evolved over the years.  While I was working - especially when I had early reveille so that I could get on the road to a distant factory - I had a strict 20 minute policy.  Whatever I needed to get done I got done in 20 minutes - this ended up being mostly praying and trying to stay awake.  Meditation or sitting quietly turned into a semi-hallucinatory state, a fugue recovery experience (Ed. Note: "Fugue" was my Word of the Day on Saturday so I had to work it in.) so I tried to avoid it.

Now that my time in the morning is a lot more unstructured I find that meditation is possible and, even more importantly for me, that free-form mind time can be quite pleasant.  I try to sit and see what happens.  I try to avoid too much thinking but I don't try to force this - sometimes good, positive solutioney things happen.  I know that the brain is working away beneath the level of consciousness so as long as I give it some space to ramble it often comes up with better solutions to all of my horrible conundrums better than I can accomplish by actively trying to solve them.

Most importantly I avoid screens.  Screens, on the whole, are pretty evil and pretty destructive.  Our brains, which have been evolving for a long time in a screen-free environment, are not equipped to handle the crush of information thrown at them and are especially not equipped to handle the speed with which this information changes - part of the addiction, of course, is trying to keep up with the newest, hottest bit of crap, even though that crap is often wrong - and especially ESPECIALLY crap that is being manipulated by people who have PhDs in behavioral psychology from really impressive universities and have absolutely no interest in truth or reality or anything except getting you to return to look at their advertisements.

Yes, I understand the irony of this rant that I'm composing on a screen.  Piss off, OK?

Grateful Seaweed

Grateful:  Appreciative; thankful.

An extensive study was done where a group of people was asked to record their thoughts about gratitude while another group wrote down the stuff that annoyed them.  The results?  The group that kept a Gratitude List began to report a greater sense of optimism and well-being, and the effect actually began to show up in their blood pressure and heart rate and sleep patterns.  The longer the gratitude people persisted at this exercise the more pronounced the results.

One important caveat must be pointed out: "It was not enough to be conscious of one's advantages; one had to be grateful for them.  Advantages alone - even awareness of them - weren't enough, perhaps because they can be lost.  Gratitude, on the other hand, was an affirmation that the world gave you things, and might continue to do so."

Boy, those sponsors and their gratitude lists.