Don't Dabble In The Past

 I'm always writing down notes in my . . . well . . . notebook.  A few days ago I jotted this perplexing phrase: "Don't dabble in the past."  Yeah, no clue what memory that was supposed to trigger.

My relationships are a continual source of amazement to me.  I spend a lot of time riffing on how many people I hate and why I hate them and why I don't understand the fact that they won't get away from me . . .  I am joking, of course.  I am blessed with such a raft of friends that there's really no more room on the raft.  If you're currently not my friend and you'd like to be then you'll have to knock someone off the raft.

There's this guy I know from A.A.  He's way, way on the other side of the divide vis-a-vis politics and social issues.  We've developed a relationship over the years in large part, I think, because I have a ton more sobriety than he does so he uses me as a sounding board from time to time.  We've managed to set any contentious issues to the side and focus on common themes, although occasionally I get a glimpse of his Facebook feed which alarms and dismays me. He delivers newspapers in my neighborhood very early in the morning so if I'm up I'll pop outside, flag him down, and we'll chat for a minute.  Remember I don't really like him all that much.  We'll never be Go To Coffee friends. 

I recently took a subscription to the Sunday New York Times.  It's all I can do to get through that huge thing in a week so I decided to curtail my subscription to Sunday only.  The next Friday I got a paper with this note attached: "Happy Friday."  Now the paper splats on my driveway whenever he has an extra copy . . .  which is every day.  I presently have a pile of newspapers.  I can't read all these newspapers but I'll be goddamned if I'm going to tell him to stop.  I mean it's a free newspaper!

I've gotten bogged down in an extended free newspaper riff when the real point is: This is Alcoholics Anonymous.  This is the result of a life dedicated to growing spiritually and being of service.  This kind of stuff happens all the time.  I'm not surprised any more when it happens.  If the paper stops coming I'll be fine.  If I continue to get it I'll be fine.  When I listened to this guy drone on and on about problems of his own making, problems which interest me not a whit, a concerned and solicitous and mostly fake expression plastered on my face, I wasn't hoping for a free newspaper.  I was trying to be of service.  I was trying to be helpful.  I was trying not to think of my self every goddamn minute of the day.  Sometimes when I'm listening to people unburden themselves I'm barely listening.  I'm thinking: "I am so grateful to not be thinking about myself."

Remember this: Don't Dabble in the Past!

It's So Fine

Fine:  Being acceptable, adequate, passable, or satisfactory. 

Here's why I talk to friends one-on-one . . . 

One of my Go To dudes is a kind of mediator between disparate public agencies so he's practiced in the art of herding cats.  I'm less skilled in this arena.  I think most cats are idiots so they should all listen to me and do what I want and, thank God, the cats don't generally do this.  We were shooting the shit today about the severe polarization of our society and how this is affecting life as society begins to open back up and particularly how this affects A.A. as we transition back into a more familiar world.

One of my favorite words is fine.  It sums up so many areas of my life.  It's also remarkably hard to put into action.  When some part of my life seems out of control, unmanageable, objectionable in some way I often say: "It's going to be fine."  And it usually is.

We were talking about how different Alcoholics Anonymous groups are handing the transition from Zoom to In Person as churches and municipal buildings begin allowing us to meet again.  My trials and tribulations with the Keep It Complicated group are well documented.  The business meeting for his home group is so structured that everyone present is given the chance to speak - they go around the screen, in other words, instead of the free-for-all that occurs when my home group meets.

When it got to my buddy he said: "If we stay on Zoom, it'll be fine.  If we meet in person, it'll be fine.  If we set up a hybrid meeting of some kind, it'll be fine.  And it's probably going to be fine in a way that we don't anticipate."  It was that last phrase that really rocked my world.  It's a reminder that I can plan and plan and control and control but life usually weaves and jukes according to its own rhythms.

My home group was meeting in person for the first time today.  I decided not to attend because I anticipated the first meeting would be a little chaotic; then I decided to attend to show my support; finally I got up this morning and didn't go.

It was fine.  I'm having a fine day.

Count 'em - Four

 I think if I ever start my own multi-national company (Fair Disclosure: I don't know what this company would do or how to start a company or any desire at all to start a company) that the official motto would be: "Making Big Things Out of Small Things."  We'd run a series of commercials that featured wry actors asking:"Do you have a mouse?  Would you like to make it into an elephant?  Give us a call!  We can do that!"  In select markets we'd show a married couple puttering about the house, getting along, until one of the partners would take offense at a seemingly harmless remark and respond a little more forcefully than the circumstances would seem to warrant.  We'd show the argument getting more heated and venomous until it blows up into a fully-fledged crisis.

On a side note I looked up the phrases "Buck Naked" and "Butt Naked" last night.  Buck Naked came first, believe it or not, and the origins are murky.  There was a lot of chatter about it having some Native American connection, the idea being that male deer normally run around without any clothes on.  Seems sketchy to me.

"The first requisites of an abundant life are the spiritual things: honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love.  Until you have these qualities, quantities of material things are of little real use to you."

The Four Absolutes: Honesty (Is it true or is it false?); purity (Is it right or is it wrong?); unselfishness (How will this affect the other person?); and love (Is it ugly or is it beautiful?)  These were benchmarks of behavior in the early days of Alcoholics Anonymous.  I particularly like the qualification for love: Beauty versus Ugliness.  That's simple and it's clean.

Here's another funny contradiction in the spiritual life that we pursue: that the longer we're sober, the longer we're on a spiritual path, the more stuff we seem to accumulate and the less important it is to us.  This is manifestly unfair.  The exact opposite is true, of course, in the realm of our personal relationships: they get better and better, more abundant, and we value them more.  But the stuff, the money, the houses?  We don't seem to attach as much importance to them as when we were drinking.

Resentments

 "Try never to judge.  The human mind is so delicate and so complex that only its Maker can know it wholly.  Each mind is so different, actuated by such different motives, controlled by such different circumstance, influenced by such different sufferings.  You cannot know all the influences that have gone to make up a personality."

Resentment:  Anger or displeasure stemming from belief that one has been wronged or betrayed by others; indignation.

"Never forget that resentment is a deadly hazard to an alcoholic."  Bam.

"But with the alcoholic . . . this business of resentment is infinitely grave."  Boom.

"Resentment is the 'number one' offender."  Badda Bing.

"The elder statesman is the one who sees the wisdom of the group's decision, who holds no resentment over his reduced status, whose judgment, fortified by considerable experience, is sound, and who is willing to sit quietly on the sidelines patiently awaiting developments."  Judas, Mary, and Joseph, please leave me alone.

I'm pondering my resentment over the break-away Keep It Complicated group.  I've been trying to convince myself it's not a real resentment, that it's not a serious, deadly resentment.  I'm looking up words, reading from the literature, talking to other alcoholics whose wisdom and experience I respect, and I gotta tell ya I'm getting slaughtered: I got a resentment.  I can soften it by calling it mild or justified but then again I used to justify drinking 18 beers and then driving a ton of steel and glass at 70 MPH.

I don't think I'm resentful about the group itself - SuperK pointed out I don't even know who's attending the meeting.  I'm pretty sure I'm resentful at the ringleaders who started the meeting.  I see them as grouchy, grumpy, bitchy old men who don't like to be told what to do and if you explain why they're being told to do something they don't want to do they brush the explanations off with facile reasoning.  And I perceive - maybe correctly, maybe not - that this kind of behavior has taken an awful public health emergency and worsened it and extended it, and this has affected ME.

It gets worse.  My sponsor also attends this meeting.  I don't put him in the same category as the ringleaders but he's still attending the meeting.  And when the ringleaders do something I find particularly irritating he sort of laughs it off.  This irritates the shit out of me.  It sounds like one of those laughs that came out of me when I would say something like "those 18 beers?  boy, I don't remember the drive home last night" or "I gave that woman gonorrhea but she thought she caught it from her boyfriend."  It's humorous if you're soulless.  

I'm having trouble talking with my sponsor at the moment because "how's your Program going?" is a standard part of my stump speech with any alcoholic.  It's a way to keep my friends accountable and a way for me to remind myself that I better be taking care of my Program.  The good thing for me is that I have a ton of close friends who have a ton of sobriety so my sponsee-sponsor relationship at this point is a lot less fraught with importance . . .

Still . . . infinitely grave . . . 

Justified

Justify: To provide an acceptable explanation for; to make an argument to prove that one is in the right. 

I have a Facebook account which I try to avoid.  While I enjoy the occasional  humorous reflection there is too much ill will and political bullshit and general mendacity for me.  I do check in from time to time to see if there are any funny cat videos but that's about it.  Imagine my consternation one day to see a distant A.A. friend holding a bottle of some kind of non-alcoholic beer.  He included a long, somewhat defensive sounding post about why it was OK for him to drink a non-alcoholic beer.  He's a smart, considering guy so his rationale was well-thought out.  And it sounded to me suspiciously like an alcoholic drinking alcohol and justifying it.  A lot of people chimed in with a lot of atta boy, good for you kind of comments but they also sounded like they were justifying drinking alcohol.  One guy said he just really enjoyed a nice hoppy tasting beverage after work, that you can only drink so many seltzer waters.  I'd point out that there are many thousands of other non-alcoholic drinks out there but this crowd was on a roll . . . 

After much reflecting I posted this on his page: "I think the non-nonalcoholic beer crowd would point out that regular beer is typically 5% by volume while nonalcoholic beer can be as much as .5%. Very low alcohol, yes, at no more than 10% of the alcohol of most regular beers but it still does contain alcohol. Perhaps it's like comparing a shot of whisky with a shot glass that has 90% water and 10% whiskey.  To me drinking 12 oz of non-alcoholic beer is the same as just taking a couple of sips of regular beer.

My general philosophy about social media can be summed up by saying: "My page - my prerogative."  Everybody gets to post whatever they want and if I don't have anything supportive to say I generally leave it alone but I felt strongly enough about this bullshit to chime in.  I'm assuming if this guy was interested in my opinion he would have asked for it . . . which he did not.  The next time I checked in I was flinching a little, ready for some flame-throwing.  Nada.  Nothing.  Not a peep.  For the next few days I looked at my post which was totally, completely ignored.  Who knows why?  Although I wonder if my rationale was a little embarrassing for the non-alcoholic beer crowd.  I mean . . . why the fuck would you even do that?  It would be like me saying I found this vegetation that looks like weed, smells like weed, tastes like weed, and has 5% THC content - very low, but still present - and I was smoking it in a 3 foot long purple bong.

 I guess the great thing about quitting drinking is that it's an individual decision.

Doctor Seaweed

"Calmness is constructive of good.  Agitation is destructive of good.  I should not rush into action.  I should be 'be still.'  Then I should act only as God directs me through my conscience.  Calmness is trust in action.  I should seek all things which can help me to cultivate calmness.  To attain material things, the world learns to attain speed.  To attain spiritual things, I have to learn to attain a state of calm."

Speed, baby.  It's what makes the world go round.  Fast is good, faster is better, fastest is what I'm shooting for.  Get there fast.  You don't even have to know where you're going as long as you're in a hurry.  Nothing ever goes sideways for me as long as I act quickly and without considering the consequences.

What do I think I am?  An emergency room physician?

Full Acceleration

"God can work through you better when you are not hurrying.  Go very slowly, very quietly, from one duty to the next, taking time to rest and pray between.  Do not be too busy.  Take everything in order."

I've always said that I have two speeds: Full Acceleration and Completely Stopped.  I either have the accelerator mashed to the floorboards or the car is sitting in the garage, up on blocks, with the battery disconnected.  Back to balance, Seaweed.  Get in the middle.

"In dealing with personalities, it is a mistake to step out too much on your own.  You must try to be guided by God in all human relationships."

I can't even comment on this passage today.  How powerful is the thought that if I turn my relationships over to a Higher Power then they'll work out fine?  This has been particularly relevant for me as the Keep It Complicated group has been holding a series of interminable business meetings to decide how everything is going to work as we transition back to live meetings.  There are members who are eager to start meeting in person again, as soon as possible; others who want to keep Zoom going, people who don't drive or have kids at home or are sitting in from out of town; and a faction who would like to see some kind of hybrid meeting where a monitor would be set up in the meeting room so that Zoom people could virtually attend the live meeting.

Thank God I wasn't in charge of this clusterfuck.  East Coast Seaweed would have been out of control in his attempts to be in control.  My attitude has always been to get things started as simply and quickly as possible and then work out any kinks as we go along.  The church is undoubtedly going to be changing the requirements for using their room fast and furiously as society starts to reopen so to my thinking we needn't try to work out how stuff is going to be working six months down the road.  It's hard enough trying to imagine everything in a month let alone next year, especially since we're probably imagining incorrectly.  The group, alas, has a different agenda which seems needlessly involved to me.  In my mind a well-run business meeting should last about 20 minutes so I didn't feel overly guilty bailing out 45 minutes into the last two meetings, both times before anything of substance had even been voted on.

Surprisingly enough, they got along fine without me.

"We alcoholics used so little self-control when we were drinking.  We were so absolutely selfish that it does us good to give up something once in a while.  Using self-discipline and denying ourselves a few things is good for us."

This is always good advice.  Deny yourself something every now and then.  Doing something just because you feel like it doesn't mean that it's a great idea.