Merry Christmas, Belated

 Help me, Mr. Wizard!  Our connection to the staff continues to grow while our alienation with the other guests grows with few bounds . . .   It's hot today, sunny and humid, so those of us who want to eat outside would prefer the two rows of tables under the balcony overhang.  It's lunchtime and we're in the cafe so we feel like we should get a table at which we can eat lunch.  There were a surprising number of people taking up tables and drinking.  OK, OK, I get it - you're important and you can do whatever the fuck you want to but the brazen lack of consideration for other people continues to astound.  You can literally drink anywhere on the ship - they will bring alcohol to you, put it right in your hands, you don't even have to get up, you don't even have to TAKE the alcohol, they'll put it right on the table next to you, so maybe not drinking in the restaurant at a meal time is a small act of kindness?

Merry Christmas.

Times are hard.

Here's your fucking

Christmas card.

Bill W In The Flesh

 There are twelve hundred passengers on our cruise ship and six hundred crew members but apparently no one is in recovery.  The ship has been kind enough to allow us to post a notice in the daily newsletter that there's a non-hosted meeting for the Friends of Bill W that meets in one of the lounges.  We've gone the last four nights.  We're whiffing.  No one.  Nada.  Zippo.  Radio Silence on the Regatta.  We stand there hopefully any time someone wanders into the room even though you can usually tell that we're not going to get anywhere with the wanderers.

Then, yesterday, a woman came in.

“Is this the meeting for Bill W?” she asks.

“Yes.  Yes it is,” we reply in unison, smiling away.

“I saw this on the schedule and wondered what it was.” she says.

Laughing inside we tell her that it's kind of a coded message advertising an AA meeting.

“Oh,” she says, before turning to me.  “Are you Bill?”

I can barely keep my voice under control as I explain who Bill is.  I thought briefly about fucking around with her but for once I resisted the urge to riff.

“Are you the leaders of the meeting?” she asked.  She was persistent, I'll give her that.  We surmise that in the world of the Cruisers there's a subset that does absolutely everything that the ship offers.

She totters off after telling us that she had included a note in the mid-cruise evaluation form that it would have been helpful for the authorities to explain what kind of meeting this was.

We counted it as a meeting.

You're Probably Annoying Me, Too

 As I move through my days a topic for a posting will occasionally pop into my head and when it does I try to jot down a brief note that will hopefully jog my memory when I'm ready to do some writing.  Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't.  A lot of the time I can't read my own writing.  “Jellyroll astronaut?  What the hell does that mean?”  Anyway, as you can imagine, there are a few topics that reoccur.  Number One on the hit list is some variation of People Annoy The Shit Out of Me. 

Repeating myself, I hope, in my affirmation that it's not because they ARE annoying but rather that I FIND them annoying.  Perhaps they find me annoying.  I'm okay with this.  I'm good with this.  I don't really care if they find me annoying and there are times that I'm annoying on purpose.  Today, in the Executive Lounge, early in the morning, there were a couple of stupified, slack-jawed men in there eating their pre-breakfast (apparently they needed something substantial in their protruding corpulence to tide them over until they can have a good, solid, PROPER breakfast when one of the breakfast venues opens up in like twenty minute) and watching a news program that I find repetitive and consistently stupid.  I pondered briefly and then decided not to say something like this: “So what are we supposed to be afraid of today?”  I could substitute “outraged about” in place of “afraid of” and still get my point across.  Fear and Anger is what partisan news organizations peddle.  It gets people watching and it absolutely hooks people who won't take five minutes to check in with anyone who might disagree with these pre-arranged sentiments.

I remained silent while judging deliciously in my own mind.The next day I walked back into the Executive Lounge - still windowless, small - to grab some coffees yesterday and was not surprised to see a highly partisan news program blaring away with a couple of different slack-jawed men eating their pre-breakfast breakfast, eyes glued to the screen, transfixed, zombie-like.  I take the time to look at sites that broadcast opinions-masquerading-as-news just to get a taste of opposing viewpoints.  It's clear that the best way to get people engaged with your organization is to piss them off or scare the shit out of them.  There were three bits that I caught a whiff of - two were Outrage! at some minor social gaffes (or probably mischaracterizations) that this particular source overlooks when it's their guy and pinpoints when it's not.  There's an old Bible verse about tending to the log in one's own eye before trying to pluck out the speck in another's.  The bit that was designed to make people Be Afraid! was some ridiculous made-up story about aliens hovering over the East Coast and why wasn't this being clearly enunciated to all of the dangerously threatened citizens?  Why the cover-up!?  Where's the military?!  The government - never trust the lying government!! - has repeatedly stated that the aliens were actually airplanes with total clearance or small personal drones with a perfectly legal right to be in that airspace.  

Facts are such bullshit when they get in the way of what we want to believe.

Go Talk To Someone

"Almost everyone who undertakes a true spiritual path will discover that a profound personal healing is a necessary part of his or her spiritual process.  Wise spiritual practice requires that we actively address the pain and conflict of our lives in order to come to inner integration and harmony.  We cannot run from ourselves, so we do well to include any depression or loneliness that we feel in our meditation.   We should also remember that healing cannot come from ourselves alone.  Because many of our pains come from past relationships, it is through our experience of a wise and conscious relationship that these pains are healed.  These relationships become the grounds for our opening to compassion and freedom of the spirit for it's when we allow our darkest fears and worst dimensions to be witnessed and compassionately accepted by another that we learn to accept them ourselves."  Some Jack Kornfeld and some Stevie Seaweed

I always seem to be surprised when a spiritual meditation practice involves other people.  It's counterintuitive.  It's also surprising still to this day that this practice involves staring pain in the face.  That is SO not what an active alcoholic does, preferring to run like hell from anything unpleasant.  It's all good.  It's all part of the process, part of the plan.  The good, the bad, the pleasant, the painful, all of it, we get to and we have to experience all of it.  We'd hardly be human if we were spared these life lessons.

World? What World?

From a writer named Jess Walter there's this description, one of the finest I've ever read to describe what happened to me: 

"But as a major CNS depressant liquor has its advantages.  It struck my reptilian brain square on its diamond head.  Booze - the ancient dimmer of fear and sorrow.  The granny  of all psychoactive meds, a blunt old hag toddling down out of the mountains with a demented smile and a club.  World?  She sneers.  What world?  And swings her cudgel at your skull." 

By The Glass or By The Bottle

I feel like a weirdo malcontent when I decline wine or beer.  It's not that easy getting something to drink other than the standard still or sparkling water and even then you're most likely to get still water no matter what you order because the sparkle of the sparkling water is muted at best.  I feel like pointing out that there should be some fucking BUBBLES in sparkling water.  Sometimes we order a can of soda water - it can show up warm and unopened, still in the can, dropped off dismissively as if it was something offensive; sometimes it's a warm can accompanied by a glass of ice; but most often a partial can poured into said glass of ice before it makes to the table.  Someone ought to explain the chemical reaction that happens when a warm beverage is poured into a glass of ice; that the ice melts quickly and dilutes the drink; and that the drink is then less appealing. 

Probably, as a non-drinker, I'm a cruiser deadbeat, like someone who pays off their credit card each month without accumulating any fees or interest charges.  Which is what I do.  I'm guessing the people who buy the drink packages are subsidizing the rest of us.  The cheapest package is a whopping forty dollars per day per person.  That's eighty bucks a day for two people which is an astounding twenty five hundred dollars for a thirty day cruise.  If you want an unlimited top shelf package you can double that.  Five grand.  Five thousand dollars.  Unbelievable.  I'm an alcoholic and I think that's unbelievable and if I was still drinking I'd make those fuckers lose money on my package.  This is probably why you see old people drinking two glasses of wine at lunch just to get the party started.  I’m an alcoholic and if I had two glasses of wine at lunch I'd either have to go sleep somewhere or use it as an accelerant for a day-long binge.    

Despite the twelve hundred passengers onboard we're amused/amazed/appalled that no one besides yours truly have shown up the last two days for the scheduled, non-hosted onboard AA meeting.  The constant presence of alcohol whenever we're not in our room is a bit annoying especially given that we're stuck in this recurring sea day cycle due to inclement weather, political unrest, and quarantine restrictions. I've never felt like drinking but I'm becoming increasingly aware of the presence of alcohol. If everyone walked around naked on the ship it would start to become less shocking and more quotidian. Eh, maybe not, given the girth and heft of some of these people but you get the point. Maybe not. I get the point which is that the alcohol being front and center is annoying after a while. I've been on a ship where alcohol is included and this pisses me off because I'm subsidizing the drinkers. And I've been on a ship where the alcohol costs cash money and this pisses me off because the staff is incentivized to push alcohol.

As you can see I'm easily pissed off.

Recurring Problems

 

I have this recurring problem with people.  Namely, that they annoy me.  I'm not totally sure why this is.  I don't think it's because most people are annoying - although I have my suspicions - and I don't think it's because I find myself fascinating - although I'm not being entirely genuine there, either, as you may have deduced from the ongoing fascination I have with all things Seaweed.  The mystery is why I approach most people with the “you're going to be annoying” attitude.  I suspect I enjoy the comfortable feeling of superiority it gives me.  Who, after all, doesn't enjoy feeling a little better than everyone else?

I'm on a ship with a lot of wealthy people.  They're also older than me to a large extent and most of them haven't been too diligent in taking care of their bodies.  Sometimes I wonder if I spend too much time minding my physical self so seeing what happens when you don't is somewhat gratifying  . . .  no, not gratifying as that implies I enjoy seeing overweight people lumbering from buffet to buffet but more affirming.  It's better to read than to watch TV and it's better to meditate than to doom-scroll on your mobile.  Take care of the body, mind, and spirit or fade away.

Anyway, we ate at a shared table on Night One.  There was a steady stream of competitive traveling - one boring woman tried to convince us to change hotels at our last stop because she knew the best hotel in that city.  We picked our hotel by parsing a number of parameters - cost, services, location, etc - and did not try to find the “best” hotel.  There were a steady stream of references from both couples concerning their “second homes.”  I would have talked about my mobile home but SuperK would have killed me.  Jobs were front and foremost, too, with a lot of mentions of where the job required the individual to travel to.  When I was asked what I did I said “I inherited a lot of money from my father so I didn't have to work.”  I really said that although I did come clean after a few beats.  Kids and their accomplishments was de rigeur as a relentless topic of converation . . . Who gives a shit?  Do you think I want to see pictures about your kids’ belongings.  As my neighbor Hank the Curmudgeon once quipped: “No, I don't want to hear about your grandkids.”

Part of the deal for me is that I'm so used to the real, deep, heartfelt relationships we have in Alcoholics Anonymous where when someone asks me how I'm doing what they want to know is how I'm doing.