Write or Wrong

Write Down: To put into written form; write a record of.

I'm telling you that there really is something cathartic and deeply revealing about writing. The founders struck gold when they suggested that we complete a written personal inventory. I spent way too much talking about all my problems, mostly to people who agreed with me, instead of doing something about them. At the end, I didn't even bother to talk; I began the Think-A-Thon. If you want some real bullshit, ask an active drunk what he's thinking about. It's the stuff of bad movies, the kind where you want to yell at the screen: "What is the matter with you? Don't go into that abandoned saw mill where an entire family was cut into pieces yesterday and they haven't found the killer yet and you can hear the saw running right now!"


My thoughts have a way of sorting themselves out very nicely when I write them down. And I tend to dispense with a lot of the self-justification, too, especially when the writing is for my own personal consumption. What's the point of lying and exaggerating when no one else is going to see what I've written? Sometimes when I'm talking --OK, most of the time -- I can feel the boundaries of my stories start to stretch and blur. I wouldn't call it lying, despite the fact that it is pretty much lying, but I sure take some liberties with the hard facts. I make myself look just a little worse or a little better depending on how I want to manipulate my audience.

Write it down. Read it. Eat the evidence. In that order.

Unfair Though It Be, It Still Is

Punish: To cause (a person) to undergo pain, loss, or suffering for a crime or wrongdoing.

Sometimes I don't like what happens to me. I just don't. Sometimes painful things happen. Sometimes I cause myself pain by my behavior but a lot of the time the simple fact is that life comes at us furiously, ferociously, quickly. I get blindsided by a big linebacker. I didn't see it coming. That's the problem with not being able to predict the future - I don't always see it coming. There are things that, in retrospect, I see that I should have seen coming, but a lot of the time stuff happens. It hardly seems fair because it is, in fact, not fair. That's part of life, the unfairness of things.

I used to think that I was being picked on at random by a cruel and unjust god. I thought I was being punished for my behavior. Actually, now that I think about it, there were times that I was being punished for my behavior, and rightly so, I might add. It wasn't god that was punishing me, however. If I ignore my mother's advice not to stick my hand in the kitchen disposal I'm likely to lose a couple of fingers. My mother didn't punish me -- the whirring metal blades did. It's the nature of the disposal, not the nature of the warning.

I try to act well today, to the best of my ability, and then take the hits. Nothing has killed me yet.

Afraid of Heights

I'm constantly amazed at how life moves inexorably forward. It's like unraveling a big ball of yarn to get to the chewy treat in the middle. The problem, of course, is that I can't keep my hands off the yarn. I've got the end of a strand and I'm pulling as if my life depended on it. Usually the unraveling isn't happening fast enough for me so I take out my switch blade and start hacking away at the yarn. I've got ten or fifteen pieces of string in my hands and I'm pulling for all I'm worth and the ball is wobbling and spinning like crazy, then it catches on fire and blows up and falls off the end of the earth.


"How'd that work for you?" my sponsor asks, tossing me yet another new ball of yarn.

Patience is disconcerting. I want to see what's going to happen. I don't want to wait, secure in the knowledge that everything is going to work out for the best. I want to make things go forward. I want all my dreams to come true and all of my nightmares to get back into the nightmare closet, or at least under the bed.


Sometimes I feel like I'm standing in a thick fog right at the edge of a cliff. I can't see the bottom but sense great distance. I can hear waves crashing on what I assume must be hard rocks far below. And my Higher Power asks me to step out over the edge. "I'll take care of you," my Higher Power says. "You won't fall, and if you do, it'll be OK."

"What was that second thing again?" I ask. "The part about maybe falling?"


There's a famous story in the bible about some disciples in a boat, in a storm, with a lot of wild tossing and swamping of the vessel. Out of nowhere they see the main god of the story walking across the water toward the boat, which is a pretty neat trick. I don't think I can walk on water yet. I tried a couple of times, fueled with a case or so of beer and some pretty wild hallucinogens, but don't think I met with much success. That's what people told me the next day, anyhow. One of the head disciples, buoyed by his faith, took off towards the main god on top of the water, but he got afraid and started to sink, even thought the main god said he could do it.

Something about a lack of faith, or "O, ye of little faith," or something like that.


I want what I want when I want. Screw all of this patience shit.

Regretfully Yours

Regret: Sorrow or remorse over something that has happened, especially over something that one has done or left undone.


The Seven Deadly Sins. The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. Venial sins and mortal sins. We sure have a lot of lists of things that we can do wrong and get punished for. Has anyone ever put together a list of good stuff? Seriously, I'm not aware of anything. There must be people who sit around all day and come up with things that you can get punished for. Do we really need these lists? Do I really need someone to tell me I acted like an ass and then give it a ranking? Man, you were a total ass last night.

I can't even imagine what we would call all of the nice things. The Four Ponys of the Have a Nice Day in the Park? What is the opposite of sin? Maybe we should build a place that you would have to go if you did something nice. "I'm sorry, sir, but you were observed petting a puppy. You're going to have to come with us. That's a class 4 felony in the state of Ohio."

I wonder how many hours in my life I've wasted considering what could have been. I'm not a productive person when I'm wallowing in my own guilt. And it's becoming easier to do as I get older. "If only I'd . . . ." Then when I get tired of making myself feel miserable with this hobby, I drift into the "why did I do what I did" line of reasoning. I also take a perverse pleasure in this. Regret is like sitting in a cold drizzle without a raincoat. It's not going to kill you but it's not pleasant, either. It's a toothache. It's underwear that are too tight. You can get around but you can always feel that waistband digging into your soft, white belly flesh.

The Steps really try to get us to bite off manageable pieces of life. We do things, make some mistakes, then try to right our wrongs. After that, we're instructed to move on. Buckeye Mark says that if his wife tries to dredge up old behavior that he has apologized for, he doesn't take the bait. We don't have to keep making amends.

I think I need to figure out what the Seven Undeadly Anti-Sins would be. I bet they wouldn't be too manly.

One Day . . .er . . uh . . What's That Slogan Again?

Mull: To cogitate or ponder (usually with over).

The more I mull over our slogan of One Day at a Time the more amazed I am at the beauty of this concept. Mind you, I have been mulling this concept over for 22 years so I'm not a quick study in the mulling department. From day one people in A.A. told me that the key to a happy life was staying in the moment. Our literature is full of this suggestion; we make plaques adorned with the slogan; our trusted elders and twisted sisters and bad boys state the fact over and over. But I have to think about things. I have to try them out. "Don't stick that metal fork in an electrical socket, Horseface." How many times have I heard that? Not enough, apparently. I have a whole drawer of melted forks.

I have re-engaged with The Serenity Prayer after a long absence. I used to say it frequently, slowly savoring every word, trying to extract all of the meaning that I could from its three parts. But I got bored with that and started in on the free-form meditation. I thought that I could tame the bucking bronco that is my brain by sitting quietly and peacefully. I'm not saying no good came of this but it isn't the easiest thing in the world to do. The brain does not want to be tamed. It wants to run the show. It wants to buck.

Now I'm simply saying the words of the prayer over and over. I'm not thinking about it too much. I think that I'm just trying to jam up the works so my brain can't ramble off on its own. It's like turning up the TV to drown out the sounds of your kids. Your kids are still making noise you just can't hear them anymore. Maybe they get tired and wander off. Maybe my brain will just stop shouting at me.

It's worth a shot.

Practice What I Preach? No Way, Not Me.

Blowhard: A person who talks much and foolishly or boastfully.
Jackal: A person who does low or dishonest work for another: from the notion that the jackal hunts game for the lion and eats the leavings.

Do you remember the saga of THE BLOWHARD and THE JACKALS? Trust me, I do, because it's another one of those sagas where I don't get my way. Unfortunately, I find that the definition of the jackal and the blowhard apply to me with some regularity. This is probably why they annoy me so much.

I had a meeting yesterday with THE BLOWHARD to discuss in greater detail the transfer of some of my responsibilities to THE JACKALS. As you might surmise, I didn't look forward to this. In fact, my preparation included trampling all over one of my cardinal rules: "Restraint of Tongue and Pen," or the more familiar "Keep Your %^*!!# mouth shut." I tell people to practice this rule and I intend to do so myself, but there is a certain distressingly irritating group of individuals (Note to self: do some writing to confirm that these individuals are mostly indistinguishable from own self) who bring out the worse in me, which is pretty bad and lurking just a millimeter below the surface.

Both of us tried to maneuver the other into a time slot and location for this meeting, which I didn't want to attend, that was personally convenient. I have to hand it to THE BLOWHARD. He hung in there. He's almost as much of a control freak as I am. But he doesn't have my finely honed skills in the ancient art of feng shui manipulation. He's good but he's no Horseface.

I should admit, I guess, that I spent a lot of time muttering and spluttering as I tried to direct him where I wanted him to go even though it made almost no difference to me one way or the other. I just wanted to be The Controller and not The Controlled. Frequently, when I get control of a situation I find that the outcome isn't to my liking after all. And I get upset trying to gain this end.

The point is that on the way to my meeting I returned a phone call from Mr. Ubiquitous. We laughed about it, and he told me to pray for the guy. I replied with a comment that is unprintable in even this profane blog. And as I was leaving the meeting, walking out into the parking lot, Shorty buzzed in, and we laughed some more. Shorty's shtick is writing, and he asked if I needed to do some and then make an amends. I was able to honestly say no, despite my murderous, self-righteous judging.

What makes the whole exercise difficult for me is that THE BLOWHARD comes by his moniker honestly. He reminds me of a smarmy televangelist dressed in a $2000 suit or one of those infomercial dudes selling one implausible scheme after another. As I listened to the unbroken string of bullshit coming out of this guy's mouth, I thought: "He really believes what he is saying." This from a guy who evades work like it's the plague, takes credit for anything good while shifting blame for anything that's a failure, and is so politically connected that you it's dangerous to screw with him.

It isn't really a lie if you believe it.

Eyes Turned Inward, Looking Outward

BMOC: Big Man On Campus.

Let's start off with the facts. I'm not a big man on campus. In fact, I was called into the dean's office many years ago and told to get off the campus. I was about 20 lbs underweight because I thought that eating solid food was optional. This looked very nice on my tall, naturally bony/skinny frame. I was going for the Heroin Chic look: gaunt, dull eyes, greasy hair, unsteady gait. Nobody screwed with me, I'll tell you that. They didn't want to catch whatever it was that I had. Now I am a man, although I have a very pronounced feminine side and bet that I would look fantastic in panty hose and cocktail dress.

What does that make me? Not a BMOC that's for sure. I want to make a big splash. I want to be highly visible. I want to donate 10 million dollars and have a hospital wing named after me (The Horseface Steve Memorial Wing for the Advanced Study of The Androgynous), but only if the 10 million was a small part of my vast fortune, leaving me a huge pile of cash for selfish pursuits of the flesh.

One of my favorite hobbies as I flee headlong into the night, screaming at the top of my lungs, is to avoid work. I put on my pork pie hat and mirror shades and head down to a local coffee shop to sit outside, slack-jawed, and watch the traffic go by. I have become friends with the young people who staff the place. Apparently the pork pie hat is not as threatening as Heroin Chic. They seem pleased that I'm there.

This never would have happened in the old days. I wouldn't have made the effort. I looked right through people, partially because I was unable to focus my eyes most of the time, but mostly because I wasn't interested in other people. I didn't really care how anyone else was doing. I discovered that one of the women that I know is an actress. I went to see her in a George Bernard Shaw play last night and she had the lead role, and she wasn't half bad. I'll be able to say something nice to her tomorrow, about something that is important to her.

I never would have known.