Blotting Out My Miserable Existence . . .

Blot:  To remove with absorbing material.

I like it when people use the word "blotting" to describe their drinking.  There's a phrase in the Big Book along the lines of "blotting out our miserable existence to the best of our ability."  People think alcoholics drink alcohol to have fun because that's what normal people do - they want to relax and be social.  Alcoholics simply don't want to feel anything.  Consider the blackout drinker, the person who doesn't remember hours at a time.  Is this fun?  Or is this someone trying to avoid reality of any sort?

Learn the lesson - remember the past but don't shut the door on it.  There is valuable instruction there, remembering the dark, terrible places alcohol took me.  I have a new life today to hold onto and enjoy.

In A.A. we have The Four Hideous Horsemen: Terror, Bewilderment, Frustration, and Despair.  There are to be found in the Bible, of course, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Famine, Death, and Pestilence.  I'd rather face the hideous ones, frankly.  Bewilderment?   Frustration?  I think I could take those two down.  The Biblical Horsemen are pretty imposing.

I'm turning 65 this year.  I've been joking about getting old for a long time but I just got my Medicare card in the mail.  They should replace Frustration with a new terror and call it: Medicare.  He wouldn't even get a horse.  He'd get a walker.  The other three would be ravaging some village and they'd go: "Where the fuck is 65?  That dude is useless when we're doing some good terrorizing."  You'd see him slowly laboring over a hill, clutching his left knee and limping noticeably.

I've never passed by a milestone birthday without some suffering in the run-up.  SuperK made the excellent suggestion that I talk to some people who are my age or older and get some feedback on how they did it/are doing it.  Great suggestion.  And I followed it which is unusual for a know-it-all like me.

Three guys yesterday:

Tom R - 73 (filling in for my real sponsor who is still pissing me off by going maskless to a live meeting in defiance of local ordinances).  "This is mostly a state of mind, an attitude."

Barber Dave - 76 (my barber, natch).  "Life is precious and I'm grateful for every day."

Art - 64 (hot tub buddy here at my mobile home park).  "I was a little upset when I hit 21 because I wasn't a millionaire yet.  That's really the only one that bothered me."  Art weighs like 300 lbs.  Art is definitely morbidly obese so he's probably just grateful to be alive.  And he's one of those people who just always seems to be up, positive, cheerful.  Jerks.

Good advice, good sharing, eh wot?  Nobody said you're going to feel fine until you die.  That I did notice.

When I Talk to God I Know He Understands . . .

 "When you call on God in prayer to help you overcome weakness, sorrow, pain, discord, and conflict God never fails in some way to answer the appeal.  When you are in need of strength for yourself or for the help of some other person, call on God in prayer.  The power you need will come simply, naturally, and forcefully.  It will raise the quality of thought and word and bring order out of chaos."

As I go through the angst of physical discomfort - really one of the only things that frightens me at all - I'm struck by how poor a job I do reaching out to my Higher Power when I'm uncertain of the answer or - better yet - I'm afraid that the answer will not be what I want.  I pray every day and I try to pray mindfully, paying attention to the words I'm saying, letting the deeper meaning sink in but when I need some immediate relief the idea of praying for it vanishes like fog in the sun.  I don't want to hear what God has to say when it doesn't coincide with what I want.

"When I talked to God,

I knew He'd understand.

He said: 'Stick by Me,

I'll be your guiding hand.' "

"But don't ask me what I think of you,

I might not give the answer that you want me to."     Fleetwood Mac

Now, granted, the second verse was probably directed to a lover who had jilted the singer rather than the voice of God talking to someone praying but I like the idea of being ready for whatever answer comes.  Personally, I'd rather know.  If my wife is pissed at me I always encourage her to let it rip, a decision I regret sometimes.  I'm going to bend all credulity and say this is what God is saying to me when He's frustrated.  He doesn't yell it or anything but . . . for instance . . . if I act like a jerk around SuperK and she gets mad at me then I shouldn't spend a lot of timing asking her what the problem is.  I know what the problem is.  I don't need to get a clearer answer.  One question is enough.

I Need It, I Want It.

Want: To wish for or desire; to crave or demand.

Need:  To have an absolute requirement for; to be necessary. 

"Outline the program of action to new prospects, explaining how you made a self-appraisal, how you straightened out your past, and why you are now endeavoring to help them.  It is important for them to realize that your attempt to pass this on to them plays a vital part in your own recovery.  The more hopeless they feel the better.  They will be more likely to follow your suggestions."

"Offer new prospects friendship and fellowship.  Tell them that if they want to get well you will do anything to help.  burn the idea into the consciousness of new prospects that they can get well, regardless of anyone else.  Job or no job, spouse or no spouse, they cannot stop drinking as long as they place dependence on other people ahead of dependence on god.  Let no alcoholic say they cannot recover unless they have their family back.  This just isn't so.  Their recovery is not dependent upon other people.  It is dependent on their own relationship with God."

This new guy asked me if we could exchange phone numbers at my last meeting.  He has mentioned - every time we've talked - that at one point he had a year and a half.  I assume this means to him that he's somewhat of an expert on what we're doing in Alcoholics Anonymous.  He said he needed someone to be accountable to, someone to check in with every day.  That evening he sent me a text: "Still sober."  I had to laugh.  He's done it every evening so far and even first thing on a Sunday morning - I just picked up the phone and called him when I got that morning text but it was a short conversation as it was clear he didn't want to get into a long conversation.  This is all fine with me.  Help is providing something someone wants, not what I want to give.  I'm not going to cut him off the next time he brings up the year and a half, either, by pointing out that we all start from scratch when we come back in because whatever we tried the first time obviously didn't work.  That year and a half is apparently important to him and what do I care, anyway?

God kind of works that way.  He gives me what I need and not what I want.  He doesn't check in with me.  He isn't interested in hearing how I think things should go.  It's like watching a long football game where your team is getting beat up - which makes the whole watching experience excruciatingly painful - but then your team stages a big comeback and scores as time runs out to win the game.  Your joy at that moment is bigger and better than if you had just gotten the score on the evening news after the game ended.  I'm always trying to remember that there is a difference between what I want and what I need.  I forget this lesson when I'm not getting what I want.

A Daily Reprieve

 "We especially ask for freedom from self-will, and are careful to make no request for ourselves only.  We may ask for ourselves, however, if others will be helped.  We are careful never to pray for our own selfish ends."

" 'Thy will (not mine) be done.'  We can exercise our willpower along this line all we wish.  It is the proper use of the willpower."

This idea of my will versus the will of my higher power and the proper use of willpower is rife in the A.A. literature.  I confuse what I want a lot with what's good for me or right in the present circumstances.

"Here we ask God for inspiration, an intuitive thought or a decision.  We relax and take it easy.  We don't struggle.  We are often surprised how the right answers come after we have tried this for a while."

"It is easy to let up on the spiritual program and rest on our laurels.  We are headed for trouble if we do, for alcohol is a subtle foe.  We are not cured of alcoholism.  What we really have is a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition."

"In meditation we ask God what we should do about each specific matter.  The right answer will come, if we want it."

One enduring legend in human history is of the Fountain of Youth.  There are mentions of this implausible place in literature dating to the time before Christ.  People actually went out and looked for it, led by the Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon, who was actually chartered to find the fountain, believed to be on a place called Bimini.  None of his writings ever mentioned it so we can surmise he was too smart to waste a lot of time trying to find such a ridiculous place.

Another one is alchemy - turning a base metal into gold.  This was widely investigated in the scientific community for hundreds of years and the results of the research carefully guarded.  Think of it - if you could turn lead into gold then right quickly you'd have boatloads of gold so it would lose it's value immediately.  It would become worthless.  Still, each society thought if only they could find the answer they'd be able to mine gold and thumb their noses at everyone else.  They would become unimaginably rich.  Only them.

I also am intrigued by how the eventual, inevitable downfall of many powerful societies has come about because they overextended their reach.  You'd think that once you controlled half the world - like Spain once did and the Romans and the mighty English - that you'd be satisfied.  If Germany had left Russia alone in WWII then they might still be in control of all of Western Europe.  But no . . . always reaching for more, more, more.  It reminds me of a billionaire bitching about taxes.  It's clearly not about the money - it's about the status.  Clearly no one can spend five billion dollars.  They want to get to ten billion because there's some billionaire in Texas who has seven.  I think most of us believe that once we had an unimaginably large fortune that we'd just start giving it away.  I bet most of us wouldn't.  I bet I wouldn't be satisfied with one Ferrari - I'd want a whole garage full of Ferraris.  I'd build a dedicated structure to house all of my Ferraris.  My desire to help the less fortunate would go right out the window.

These thoughts came up after I wrote down the italicized quotes from The Big Book and the 12&12 - passages I used when I led a meeting a few days ago.  It makes me ponder how much of my motivation is to get what I want and avoid what is painful.  I think that's very human but not very spiritual.

" . . . a daily reprieve based on the maintenance of our spiritual condition . . . "

Boy, it doesn't get any clearer than that.

Trials and Tribulations

 Depressed:  Unhappy; despondent.

I'm sure glad I don't get into these swirling anxiety shitstorms too often.  They're very uncomfortable.  Profoundly uncomfortable, as my friend from Massachusetts would say, describing a panic attack.  It's as if I'm in a whirlpool being sucked further and further down into the vortex.  It's gentle at first but becomes more frantic and maddening the deeper I go until I feel like there's never going to be a way to get out.

Passages from the Dali Lama:

The application of Buddhist meditation to aging is another application of the ahimsa spirit.  Our increasingly fragile and infirm bodies and minds are sacred, and worthy of the greatest kindness and care.  To respect our aging at every stage is the greatest kindness we can offer to ourselves and those we love. 

(The ahimsa spirit is a Hindu principle that literally means "non-injury." It contains the principle of not causing harm to other living things.) 

I do not refer here to the promise of perpetual youth peddled by golden oldie consumerism.  Those of us who are financially comfortable and live in prosperous high tech cultures have access to so many external fixes that we tend to develop a “fix it” mentality.  We become totally dependent on external solutions and feel particularly frightened and vulnerable when these are not available or do not work any longer.  Awareness practice is learning to open up to powerful emotions without either letting them discharge themselves (as anger or self-pity, for example), or suppressing them (perhaps by trying to rationalize them or otherwise get them under control). 

For older generations people could frequently appeal to a secure belief in the God in heaven and the promise of an afterlife.  While such a belief is still available to many, for most moderns, those distant gardens of the skies have faded.  Instead, for most of us today, the search for relief from our common condition has shifted to the fantasy that through vitamins, health practices, cosmetic surgeries, right thinking, and right conduct, we can prolong life, avoid aging, and perhaps cheat death itself.  The avoidance of our mortal, transient condition is pathological.  To be mindful of our fragile fate each day in a non-morbid acknowledgement, helps us remember what is important in our life and what is not, what matters, really, and what does not.

We are implicitly asked: How am I to enlarge consciousness in this place; how embrace life here amid peril; how find the meaning for me in this suffering?  Identifying and accepting this task contributes to the enlargement of soul; flight from this task perpetuates our sense of victimization and keeps us on the run from the gods and from our own larger life.

When a human is stressed it produces a hormone called cortisol. This substance is used to help us quickly respond to an external threat - such as a monster or an angry wife or a huge monstrous being - by increasing the supply of glucose to your brain and activating chemicals that can repair damaged tissue. Your thinking quickens and your body prepares to repair injuries. But chronic stress causes the cortisol levels to remain high instead of dropping after the threat has passed. If cortisol is constantly coursing through our bodies all kinds of side effects can occur because it is meant to activate a quick, heightened response and not to maintain a normal steady-state equilibrium.

I spoke to a neighbor yesterday who has a husband suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, one of the lovely aftereffects of a lifetime of smoking. The previous night he had an acute episode of shortness of breath, despite the supplemental oxygen he uses. The inability to breathe resulted in anxiety and then a series of panic attacks which makes it even harder to breathe. Six hours later they finally got authorization for a larger dose of morphine to calm him down.

First of all, this put my achy back in perspective. Secondly, her perspective on this trial and tribulation was great - she opined that she had led a charmed life, by and large, even though the last several years had been a pain in the ass. Finally, I felt like I was of service to someone else. She seemed disappointed when I got up to leave so I wondered if maybe she needed to talk about this. I'm always trying to make myself available to help.

Tribulation: A state of great trouble or suffering.

Trial: A difficult or annoying experience.

True Friends, Real Relationships

I was friends in Cincinnati with a man who got sober in Youngstown, OH.  Alcoholics Anonymous had a big presence in New York but it was really in the Cleveland-Akron-Youngstown triangle that it flourished and spread.  As a general rule people from that area are pretty cocky about their particular flavor of 12 Step recovery, in a very good-natured manner.  They're not saying for sure that their way is the best but you can see the knowing twinkle in their eyes from a mile away when they tell you where they got sober.

So I was listening to my buddy talk and disagreeing with the content.  Because he's a good friend I felt comfortable speaking my mind, unsolicited, if I don't agree with him, especially when it's something I feel strongly about.  I prefaced my remarks with the standard line I use when I'm about to take someone's inventory but don't want to be blamed for weighing in on how someone else should live their life: "I don't mean to take your inventory but . . . "  (It's the " but" that gives it away.)  He interrupted me: "Take my inventory!  Please, take my inventory!  If I'm acting like an ass or an idiot let me know so I can stop.  I spent my whole drinking life around people who let me act like an ass and an idiot without saying anything."

This struck me as a great truth about my relationships with people who are my friends  -how I prefer these relationships to be.  My friends can say anything that they want to me without feeling like the friendship might be damaged.  That's what friendship is.  If I have to walk on eggshells then it's not much of a relationship.

I spoke with Willie this morning about an issue in his family life.  I really didn't agree with his stance but I didn't interrupt or yell - I listened patiently because when I quit thinking about what I want to say then I can hear what someone else is saying, and hopefully now and then learn something.  THEN I interrupted.  Seriously, I did explain my somewhat contradictory point of view about the matter - turns out he agrees with me, anyway - without being judgemental or belittling.  His family will do what's best for themselves which is what they should do.  I didn't insist that they follow my viewpoint and he didn't say that they would.  It was some friendly advice.  That's all.  I don't know what they should do.  He probably doesn't, either.

EZ Does It

Live and Let Live

"This, of course, means tolerance of people who think differently than we do, whether they are in A.A. or outside of A.A.  We cannot afford the luxury of being intolerant or critical of other people  We do not try to impose our wills on those who differ from us.  We are not 'holier than thou.'  We do not have all the answers.  We are not better than other good people.  We live the best way we can and we allow others to do likewise."

I am better than everyone.  Everyone needs to hear what I think about everything because I have some great advice how you can do everything better.  I DO have all the answers.   I don't even need the questions.  Tolerance?  Yuck.  Intolerance?  Hooray!  Criticism?  Let's get started!

Easy Does It

"This means that we just go along in A.A. doing the best we can and not getting steamed up over problems that arise in A.A. or outside of it.  We alcoholics are emotional people and we have gone to excess in almost everything we have done.  We have not been moderate in many things.  We are not running the world.  I am only one among many."

"I pray that I may go each day to God as a refuge until fear goes and peace and security come."  (Ed. Note:  As an English minor I have to say this should be "I pray that I may go to God each day . . . "  Just sayin'.)

Italicized quotes are always from the Hazelden book "Twenty-Four Hours a Day."