Me. At the Center of the Universe.

 Easy Does It.

"Alcoholics always do everything to excess.  They drink too much.  They have too many resentments.  They hurt themselves physically and mentally by too much of everything.  So when they come into A.A. they have to learn to take it easy.

Take it easy?  Take it easy?  Tell me more about this concept, oh, master.

A.A. teaches us to take it easy.  We learn how to relax and to stop worrying abut the past or the future, to give up our resentments and hates and tempers, to stop being critical of people, and to try to help them instead.  So in the time that's left to me to live , I'm going to try to take it easy, to relax and not to worry, to try to be helpful to others and to trust God."

This is some wild shit.

"I must overcome myself before I can truly forgive other people for injuries done to me.  The very thought of wrongs means that my self is in the foreground.  Since the self cannot forgive, I must overcome my selfishness.  I must cease trying to forgive those who fretted or wronged me.  It is a mistake for me even to think about these injuries.  I must aim at overcoming myself in my daily life and then I will find there is nothing in me that remembers injury, because the only thing injured, my selfishness, is gone."

Sometimes the stuff in the Hazelden "Twenty Four Hours a Day" book gets a little too religious for me.  But then again I'm usually looking for things to object to so when I chill out and lay back I learn to see all of it from a different perspective.  I don't have a totally clear understanding of this metaphysical paragraph but I get the jist of it - I'm so worried about myself that I place everyone in the world into a category with me at the center.  It just isn't about me.  If I think you hurt me somehow then I'm looking at the situation from my perspective.  

I ask that I may hold no resentments.  I pray that my mind may be washed clean of all past hates and fears.

Immediate Cognition

 Instinct:  An intuitive reaction not based on rational conscious thought.

Rational, conscious thought.  Hmmm.  I like that.

Intuition: Immediate cognition without the use of conscious rational processes.

There are so many good hard rock band names here I hardly know where to start but Immediate Cognition is going to be hard to beat.  It sounds like something you'd hear on an old NASA tape as a rocket to the moon reached ignition: "We have immediate cognition."

Reading from Step Four in the 12 & 12 today produced these gems in the first three pages of the Step:

Instincts on Rampage.

Collision of Instincts.

Misdirected Instinct.

"Every time a person imposes his instincts unreasonably on others . . . "

Just rack up those band names.  I mean . . . Instincts on Rampage?  Are you kidding me.  That group would have like five lead guitarists.  If you had a Finnish Death Metal festival in an abandoned nuclear waste cave 2 miles underground you could do worse than leading off with Instincts on Rampage and then having Collision of Instincts and Misdirected Instinct follow them wham, bam, thank you, ma'am.  

Whenever I read about the alcoholic and his or her instincts I'm always struck by the tension between these instincts that all of us have - for sex, money, and prestige - and the overwrought application of these instincts in the average active alcoholic.  It's not that the instincts are bad but that we take them out to the Nth degree and we do it on both sides of the fucking degree.  We hoard money or we waste it.  We act like sluts and then we act like monks.  It's never in between with us.  Reading this Step always reminds me that when I came into A.A. I felt like I didn't have the basic tool kit for life that most of you seemed to possess.  I didn't get it.  I didn't get anything.  I was totally lost.

Well, that's what this literature is for.  It's the toolkit.  It contains the instructions.

Eternal Thought

 All material things, the universe, the world, even our bodies, may be Eternal Thought expressed in time and space.  The more the physicists and astronomers reduce matter, the more it becomes a mathematical formula, which is thought.  In the final analysis, matter is thought.  When Eternal thought expresses itself within the framework of space and time, it becomes matter.  Our thoughts, within the box of space and time, cannot know anything first hand, except material things.  But we can deduce that outside the box of space and time is Eternal Thought, which we can call God.

Dude Said

 I was talking to an old timer outside a meeting when I was new and struggling to stay sober.  I told him I was a partier, that I just liked to party.  "Dude, you weren't partying," he said.  "You were drinking."

Dude nailed it.

The story we read this morning from the Big Book concluded with the writer being reunited with his long-estranged family.  I like the happy endings.  The happy endings are more fun.  Our experience is that most of the wreckage we created when we were running and gunning can be repaired, and this is great news.  We don't have a tremendous success rate sobering up damaged alcoholics as it is so if we had to say to most of them at the start: "We know it's bad now but this is as good as it gets" our success rate would crater.

Resentment:  Bitter indignation at having been treated unfairly; a feeling of anger because you have been forced to accept something that you do not like; a feeling of anger or displeasure stemming from the belief that one has been wronged by others or betrayed.

I like the implication that we don't even have to be treated poorly or unfairly, only that we believe or perceive that we've been treated so.

Rictus Steve

Rictus:  An expression where someone shows their teeth in a smile, but looks strange or in pain rather than looking happy or relaxed.

This is how I know that there is no God or - if there is a God - he has a tremendous sense of humor: the meeting today was on Joy and Happiness again.  Two days in a row.  That would try anyone's patience . . . talking about being happy one day and then having to talk about it again the very next day.  I could possibly deal with it if there was a one day break in between but two days running?  It was a left hook followed by an uppercut.

Happy people make me nervous.  My favorite T-shirt reads: "Get Away From Me" and in case the shirt isn't arresting enough to make you look it's bright purple with bright red lettering.  I once saw a coffee cup that read: "Have A Nice Day Elsewhere."  I was seeing a counselor early in my sobriety - and I cannot speak highly enough of these mental health professionals because I was fucking nuts at that point - when she asked me if I was happy.   When I replied in the affirmative she mentioned that she had never seen me smile.  Taken aback, I went home and practiced in front of a mirror.  It was not a familiar look.  It was not natural in appearance.  The word rictus comes to mind.

Today I was called on to share, of course, further evidence that God has a twisted sense of humor.  When the topic of Gratitude comes up I usually start by remarking that nothing pisses me off more than having to talk about being grateful.  It still feels like an alien state of mind to me, something I'm not especially good at.  I still see the flaw more quickly than I see the attribute.  What's wrong and not what's right.

My comments are mostly tongue-in-cheek I'm happy and grateful to report.  But I do know that it isn't my default position.  I was brought up in a fearful household, I am wired in a fearful fashion, and I think that trying to anticipate problems is pretty much the human condition but . . . c'mon . . . after a while, after being showered with blessings . . . you'd think I'd be better at it.

This and That

Happy:  Having a feeling arising from a consciousness of well-being or of enjoyment; enjoying good of any kind, such as comfort, peace, or tranquility; blissful, contented. 

Content:  Satisfied; happiness in one's situation.

From The Daily Reflections: "Happiness is not the point."  This is the kind of shit that drove me to distraction when I was first attending meetings.  In my world of broken toys and deranged clowns happiness was the entire point.  The only two things worth achieving were getting what I wanted and avoiding what I did not.

From one of our members this morning: "I was always pursuing my mistaken idea of what I thought was going to make me happy."  How about I divorce myself from self-pity?

Willingly: Of one's own free will; freely and spontaneously.

From the musings of Bill W: "When pain comes we're expected to learn from it willingly."  Also, an infuriating concept.  First of all, I'd like to pass on the pain.  And then I'm going to pass on learning from it, preferring to bitch and moan loudly, pausing only to plan on how to avoid it at all costs.  Learn from it?  Willingly?  Who are these people?

From a friend: "You are confusing boredom with serenity."

Me, talking to the select group of friends who won't take a swing at me, after listening to them share the details of a particularly painful experience which I have absolutely no idea how to ameliorate: "Boy, you're really going to be able to help someone at some point."  I'm not trying to be snarky when I say this, either, but I'm just speaking from my experience that sometimes when I'm going through something difficult and unwanted I'm gaining the knowledge that might help someone else down the road..

Keep It Complicated

"Try saying: "God bless her (or him)" of anyone who is in disharmony with you.  You should only desire blessing for them.  Leave God's work to God.  Occupy yourself with the task that He gives you to do."

Boy, the bullshit is thick this morning.  I'm planning on occupying myself with myself today.  It's Sunday - the day set aside for total self-absorption.

Next Saturday is the big Business Meeting for the Keep It Complicated group when we'll be discussing how and when the group should start meeting in person - the church has given us a tentative go-ahead - and how and if we should try to engage the malcontents in the breakaway group.  As you might imagine I have a lot of definite ideas as to how this should go.  I'm suppressing the fact that it won't go this way.  I'm really suppressing the fact that when it doesn't go this way I'll be somewhat ticked off.  I spoke briefly yesterday to my wife's sponsor who is also the moderator for the Business Meeting and a member of the Steering Committee that met recently to discuss how and what should what should be brought up at the Business Meeting, a meeting which will be poorly attended by the group members, who are apparently a lot smarter than I am as I plan to attend.  Yeah, sounds complicated, don't it?

First of all, my wife's sponsor is great woman.  The only flaw in her participation - and the participation of most of the other non-Eastern U.S. members of the group - is that she will bend over backwards to make sure every fucking last scrap of minutiae is flogged to death with a cat-o'-nine-tails.  People are so nice out here they make me sick.  Everyone should be flogged with the cat-o' before we start just to make sure they're paying attention to what I want to have happen.

Seriously, though, sometimes we take a simple thing and make it complicated.  Currently the members are meeting on Zoom.  Now the church has offered the meeting space again for in-person meetings with plenty of understandable conditions such as wearing PPE and strict attendance limits, in accordance with state and county regulations.  Fine, open the meeting up to whoever wants to attend and let anyone who is still uncomfortable attending in person stay engaged on Zoom.  Boom.  Adjourn the meeting.  The problem, of course, with all of the varied and sundry and deranged personalities in any Alcoholics Anonymous group is that the opinions and desires are going to be all over the place.

Brother Seaweed is going to take a Vow of Silence.