The Rant Continues

Fucking (name redacted to protect the innocent) meeting has irritated and frustrated me more than every other meeting I've ever attended . . . combined.  The group that split off to start a live meeting  in a "church" where they are not paying rent is really getting on my last nerve even though it's none of my business and I don't like so many of the attendees that I'm glad they're gone.  Generally I like smaller groups so this should be to my liking.  If I had my druthers I would have voted to split the group into two smaller factions.  Ya'd think I'd be happy by this development but ya'd be wrong. 

We get so used to death in America: opioid overdoses, gun violence, drunk driving, and now CoVid-19.  After 9/11 - when 3000 people died - our outrage at the insult led to two lengthy wars meant to avenge the carnage but now the 2000 a day we're losing produces a collective societal yawn.  It's one thing to be frustrated at the inability to socialize and another altogether to begin the socialization as the virus cases in our area spin out of control.  Now that our state has instituted a three week full shutdown - no private gatherings of any kind permitted - it'll be interesting to see if the group continues to meet.  We're not rule followers so I'm assuming that they will.  Again, none of my business.  But if I ever hear one of these people complain about someone not following the meeting format or fracturing a Tradition I'm going to unload my mental 12 gauge shotgun.  

This is why during the last two business meetings I took a Vow of Silence.  If I can't speak reasonably and charitably I don't permit myself to speak.  The shit that comes out is never good.

Again, why is this upsetting?  Because they're idiots?  Because the things that I love to do have been curtailed because of the restrictions that I'm following but some others are not?  Because I'm not getting my way?

Whenever I have a personal conflict my goal is simple - to show you that you're wrong and that I'm right.  The resolution of all of my personal conflicts is Winning.  

I'm only partly kidding here.

Two days later . . . .

I'm still pretty worked up about this.  I see the new meeting as the equivalent of joining the opposing political party, a faction I find nearly intolerable.  A line has been crossed, a line I saw forming several months ago.  A. A. and politics - wow!  The line was pretty faint and indistinct before The Breakaway but now it has been chiseled into the concrete.  The political/pandemic references are now on full display.  There are some hard feelings here.

Fuck you, Reuben!

And the live camera phone shots of people clearly not wearing masks after the meeting ended.  I find this idea of personal freedom, of getting to do whatever I want to do, the moral equivalent of saying: "I don't care what happens to you."

The other factor, beyond the politics, is that a lot of these types are BMOC - Big Men on Campus.  Big personalities, strutting, making themselves the center of attention, cocksure in their attitudes and beliefs, dismissive of yours.

Who made me the Center of the Universe?

Good, Good, Good, Good Vibrations

Energy:  An intangible, modifiable force  (often characterized as either positive or negative) believed to emanate from a person, place or thing and which is (or can be) preserved and transferred in human interaction.

Many years ago a player from one of the sports teams that I follow signed with a different team.  He then spent some time publicly trashing the team I follow.  A reporter asked the coach of my team if he had any comment: "I don't discuss players from other teams," he said.  He wasn't rude or abrupt; he just didn't want to spend any time on things out of his control.  I've thought of this many times over the years.  It's a variation of the "Do you have a snake in this snake fight?" line of thinking.  If my snake is not in the fight then the snakes in the fight are none of my business.

My friend Suburban Bill has talked about Energy a lot over the years.  Good energy, bad energy, in people, in places, coming off of objects.  Being an incredibly literal, practical man, schooled in the hard sciences, I often rolled my internal eyes when the subject came up.  But I'm also a person who has learned to investigate new things, see if anything's there, and I've come to believe quite firmly in the whole energy aura thing.  I find that I can quickly pick up on bad energy coming from negative people and good energy coming from positive people.  

I was talking with a guy who does some work on my cars a few years ago.  We had just met, and I liked him immediately.  It was early in the morning and I was dropping my car off after attending my morning meeting.  He paused at one point and said: "Man, I'm really digging talking to you - all of this great energy is pouring off of you.  I feel jazzed."

That's what I want.  I want people to feel good, positive energy when they're in my presence.  I want to think positive thoughts.  This isn't always easy to do for a Problem Person adept at finding the negative in everyone and everything.

I went on to my Facebook page yesterday and found the "Fuck You, Reuben" character and de-friended him.  I'm not a big FB guy anyhow, but I simply don't want to see his face on my electronica.  He's a Bad Energy guy, an Angry Energy guy.  I'm in an existential battle with the forces of Evil on a good day so I don't see any reason to suffer fools in my life, fools putting out negativity.  I was going to say I like this guy well enough . . . but after yesterday he's got a hole to dig himself out of.  

F*#K You, Reuben

My regular morning meeting is called KIS - Keep It Simple.  For a while I thought that the name was tongue-in-cheek because it is the most complicated meeting I've ever attended.  The format sheet that the day's secretary uses to get the proceedings started is a little shorter than War and Peace and I'm almost not kidding.  It takes 15 minutes to wade through all the boilerplate and actually get to the . . . you know . . . actual meeting part.  And then - for some reason that remains opaque to me - we stop the sharing part at ten 'till the hour.  For a while I rationalized that this was to enable working people to get to their jobs but most of us are retired or work odd shifts or are ne'er do wells so that doesn't seem plausible.  Mostly I don't think about it too closely.  I'm trying to reduce dissonance so that I don't go insane.

There is always something brewing at KIS from a minor kerfuffle to a major conflagration.  The business meetings resemble a Texas Chainsaw Death Match.  A few years ago a group of malcontents broke away and started a competitive meeting at the same time of day.  This caused some hard feelings.  I keep this in mind whenever my actions indicate I'm rejecting the status quo of anything I get involved with because these actions say, in effect: "I know better than you - you're doing it wrong."  The people who stay - the people who think everything is just fine and see no reason to change - can develop resentments.  This is what happened.

Some of our current members, hungry for face to face contact in this isolating pandemic, found a "church" building that agreed to let them use a room for in-person meetings.  I think this is a stupid idea in a rapidly worsening pandemic but that's really none of my business.  No one from this group asked me for my opinion so I didn't give it.  In fact, even when people ask for my opinion I'm suspicious as to whether they really want to hear what I have to say.  I think they're patronizing me most of the time.  The group broke away without telling anybody who is staying on the Zoom platform.  The group also liberated for their own use all of the supplies from our regular meeting room - closed because of CoVid - again, without telling anyone.  And some of the people who left have commitments on the Zoom platform that they didn't bother to honor.

So, at a joint business meeting today, there were hard feelings.  If you didn't see this coming then you're too stupid for me to associate with.  Some of the resentments were heartfelt and touching - one man expressed sadness that no one let the entire group know that this move was being planned. Several people were annoyed that the supplies were liberated without clearing it with the group.  When one of our members called this stealing - a pretty harsh judgement that might have been best tempered a bit - someone off camera at the live meeting yelled: "Fuck you, Reuben."  This came through with exceptional clarity.  There was no need to electronically enhance the audio.  I've been attending meetings for 34 years and that was a first for me.  Clearly, the political divide in our country and the coarsening of our civility and respectfulness, driven by some of our top politicians, is seeping into Alcoholics Anonymous, and this makes me sad.  I hope the seep doesn't become malignant.

In my opinion this is a different scenario than the original malcontent break-away.  There are people who don't like virtual meetings and/or are eager for a more personal setting.  I truly believe that once the pandemic ceases to rage and society returns to a more familiar setting that these folks will come back to the one room.

But at what cost?  "Fuck you, Reuben?"  I hope that guy has a good sponsor because he needs to make an amends and not a quiet, personal amends, either, but one in front of the whole group.  I took some phone calls today.  People were jazzed.

Thanks for letting me get this off my chest.

Problems of My Own Making

 Problem:  A difficulty that has to be resolved or dealt with.

I personally believe I encounter three kinds of problems.

1.  Problems of my own making.  (This is a huge category.)

2. Problems that are common to everyone such as an illness or a death of a loved one.  (This is a big category.  Not as big as #1 but still big.)

3.  Problems of an unfair nature; to wit: getting screwed, fucked over, or otherwise treated poorly.  (This category is small.  Vanishingly small.  It's a faint afterimage seen at the extremes of your peripheral vision.  It's so small as to be statistically unmeasurable.  A mathematician would discount its validity outright.)

Here's the funny thing: in my mind category 3 is monstrous, gargantuan, Godzilla-like in size.  To everyone else's it's not even a category it's so small.

Perspective, baby.

Homer To The Rescue

 We don’t remember every single thing that has ever happened to us.  There’s a mistaken belief that it’s all in there somewhere and that if we could only properly and efficiently access the memory files then we could relive each instant of our lives.  Our brains are too smart for this.  Our brains fill in cracks.  The simplest analogy is our eyesight - there’s too much going on in the world and it’s happening too fast so our brains fill in the gaps.  There are plenty of studies done on people who have had retinal tears or an optical disease that deprives them of a chunk of their eyesight but they’re unaware of this - the brain combines the images of both eyes and glosses over the missing visuals so that the person manages well enough.

What’s even more interesting is that our brains seem to screw around with our memories to make them conform to our current perception of ourselves.  For instance, if you were cruel to an animal long ago and you’re no longer cruel to animals that sets up a dissonance in your head.  You’re uncomfortable with the fact that you were cruel.  It’s incompatible with the image you have of yourself so your brain begins to subtly alter this memory so that you think you didn’t behave the way you actually did.  Often this dis-remembering leads to some outrageous and easily disproved lies.  We look at people who have been caught making something up with our mouths agape and our eyes agog.  “How could he/she think she could get away with that bald-faced lie?” we think.  It very well may be that the person isn’t lying but rather listening to the crap his/her brain has made up.

Some people, of course, are actually lying.  There are lying liars out there.

Our brains have a lot going on.  The speculation is that some of this rewriting of history is a way to make sure that we don’t go absolutely batshit crazy.

“I HATE being called a liar.  Unless I’m telling a lie or I’ve just told a lie or I’m about to tell a lie.”  Homer Simpson

Shuttles and Hotels

The last time I flew into The Old City I arrived after midnight, which - taking into consideration a three hour time change - counts for the next day for someone my age.  In fact, sometimes it counts for the day after the next day.  It's not even the same week sometimes, it's so disorienting.

I made my way out of the baggage claim area and found the waiting area for the shuttle that would take me to where the car was actually located.  I suppose I could have spent a little more money and rented a car from one of the fancy agencies that have a spot right in the terminal. The airport was empty, eerily dark, as I stood there by myself, wistfully looking at the employees of Hertz and Avis, right across the street, doing nothing in their brightly lit offices, their lots packed with working cars.  No one was in line at their counters.  No one was in there at all besides the employees themselves, young people idly looking at computer screens.  They would have had plenty of time to wait on me as I signed up for one of their horrifically overpriced vehicles.

I stood there for a while, watching competitive car rental shuttles drive by, full of cheerful looking passengers going to get their cars.  Everybody but my company.  I noticed that the overhead sign indicated that I was standing in an area reserved for several of the agencies that have offices off-site, but not the one with whom I had actually reserved a car.  Apparently I had chosen a company who was even lower on the pecking order than the companies banished to remote corners of the airport; maybe this is why their prices were so low.  An arrow pointed me to a waiting area further removed from the terminals, a really creepy empty area, with no cars, no passengers, nothing but buzzing fluorescent lights circled by legions of biting, stinging insects.

A competitive company's shuttle eventually pulled up.  The door shushed open with a hydraulic sigh.

"Are you waiting for Enterprise?" the driver asked.
"Yes," I replied.
"They're closed," he stated matter-of-factly and with a lot of good cheer.
"No, I have a car reserved with them," I said stupidly.  I fished out my rental agreement and showed it to him.
"This happens all the time," the guy said.  "Hop in.  We'll rent you a car."

They rented me a car.  Sometimes I think that there's only one car rental company.  Sometimes I think there's only one airline company, too.  They just paint the planes with different logos.  How would you know?  I used to think there was one big factory that made all the various types of cars that you can buy.  It could be that each city has a huge underground kitchen which prepares the food for every last fucking restaurant, the meals coming up through a subterranean dumbwaiter system.  Thai, Japanese, Cajun, burgers . . . all made by the same group of cooks, laboring in a smoky, steamy, dirty cavern deep beneath the surface of the city.

The next time I came into town I decided to avoid the car rental agencies and just get a hotel room at the airport and pick up the car the next morning . . . when the office was open.  I'm not very smart.  The hotel offered a free shuttle with their hours listed as 7 AM to 12 PM.  I arrived at 11:30 PM and immediately called the reservations desk to make sure I was on the last shuttle.  I was immediately told that the last shuttle was at 11:30 and that I had missed it and good luck with everything.  I pointed out that their website listed midnight.  They pointed out that their shuttle driver worked until midnight but had to leave the terminal by 11:30 to get back to the agency.  They were not swayed at the logic of my arguments.  They did not pick me up.

It was okay.  Everything worked out eventually.  I got my car and I made it to the hotel and everything was fine.

The Mental Pyramid

The discussion of the Mental Pyramid is very enlightening, too.  It attempts to explain why people do things that are so obviously wrong by positing that an initial decision made long ago, a decision at the time that seemed so ambiguous and inconsequential as to be unimportant, can slowly snowball into such a huge disaster.

The perfect example is the gambler who loses $20,000 after vowing to stick within a $2000 limit.  Before he sat down at the table he assured himself that he wouldn't lose a penny over $2000.  The catastrophe isn't the last $500 he loses - it's the first $50 after the $2000 limit is researched.  Everything unfolds so slowly and so incrementally that it becomes more palatable, more reasonable.  When you see a politician caught with a prostitute it's likely that he didn't break this law his first day in office - he got away with little transgressions which became medium-sized transgressions and - suddenly! - there's his picture on the Internet in a hotel room with someone he shouldn't be with.

So back to my favorite aphorism: "Take care of the small stuff and it's all small stuff."  This is why I try to stick rigorously to the core principles that are at the heart of my make-up.  I fail every day, of course, but I strive for the goal of perfection.  Treat the coffee shop barista like a princess and I don't have to worry about embezzling a million dollars.  

The Mental Pyramid

When the person at the top of the pyramid is uncertain, when there are benefits and costs for both choices, then he will feel a particular urgency to justify the choice made.  But by the time the person is at the bottom of the pyramid, ambivalence will have morphed into certainty, and he will be miles away from anyone who took a different route.   The first steps along the path are morally ambiguous, and the right decision is not always clear.  We make an early, apparently inconsequential decision, and then we justify it to reduce the ambiguity of the choice.  This starts a process of entrapment - action, justification, further action - that increases our intensity and commitment and may end up taking us far from our original intentions or principles.