Adzes and Pitchforks and Mattocks, O My

At about 10AM in my hotel room in a lovely commercial/industrial strip in The Old City I stood up to do a little light yoga.  I suppose I should be grateful for the opportunity to do this, as a middle aged guy who should be working but isn't, in the middle of a Monday morning, but I'm really not.  I figure it's my birthright to have nice things given to me with no effort on my part.  "Sweat of thy brow" my ass.

Across a 100 yards of cracked asphalt I watch a crew from a roofing company clamber up a bouncing ladder to a flat third story roof.  It's cold here -- about 30F - and the wind is blowing hard.  I'm assuming it's cold on the roof.  I could be wrong since it's 72F in my nice hotel room, but I don't think so.  They are using shovels and adzes and pitchforks and mattocks and a whole assortment of Medieval looking tools to rip up roofing material that doesn't look to be coming off too easily.

During one of my early Inventories I was bitching mightily about my work life.  My sponsor pointed to another crew installing shingles on a pitched roof in 100 degree heat.

"You don't work," he suggested.  "Those guys are working."

I saw his point, begrudgingly.

Another, Somewhat Less Funny Thing

And another thing:  I have no idea why I spend any time at all working so hard to get the things that I want, because I have NO IDEA what it is I want.  I pick something, seemingly at random, then I focus all of my energies in trying to secure it.  And on the off chance that I do secure this thing that I'm not even sure I want, I almost never enjoy having it, or I find that's its pleasures are fleeting or much diminished considering my out-sized expectations.  It's almost like I pick something at random. 

Here I am, looking at something inexplicable that I'm holding in my cupped hands:
(Perplexed): "What the hell did I want this for?  What is this, anyway?"


People keep telling me to do god's will.  Maybe I've misinterpreted that as dog's will.  Why is it so #$!%!! hard to understand that the whole goal is not to pursue my own instincts but to try to do the will of god?

A wise man of the cloth once pointed out to me that our instincts for money, sex, and a place in society were installed in us to keep us alive, not to provide us pleasure.  The belief that instincts help us secure what we want is our own corruption.  They help us secure the necessities of existence.

He said it a lot better than I just did.

Another Funny Thing

Anxiety:  Boy, it sure seems like I've already looked this one up.

I also wonder how inexplicably my anxieties vanish, blown away like dust in the wind.  There they are, burrowing deep in my mind, sinking their intractable claws deep, deep, deep, and then . . . they're gone!  I guess since they're not real they don't have to follow any of the normal rules of logic or physics or semantics.  Having an anxiety is like talking to yourself: the conversation is pretty much up to you.  Sometimes I take an action that helps but when I'm tilting against imaginary foes anything can happen.

I was tooling down the road today musing on the most ancient of my favorite anxieties -- my health -- when I took a call from Shorty.  There is some nasty shit being passed around this winter and he has had a hell of chest cold.  I mean, the guy sounds bad.  Like most alcoholics he tries to solve his difficulties alone, relying on tremendous willpower and legendary intelligence, until the difficulties appear insurmountable.  He finally asked for help from a physician, and when the help he got didn't work immediately, he became convinced he had some kind of rare African fungal infection, lifted from a rare African mango that he handled but didn't buy, and the fungus was lodged deep, deep, deep in his lungs, scarring them irreparably.

Really, it's amazing how this thing works if we just keep talking to each other.

Sleep, Horseface: Sleep

And I've been doing some more Deep Thinking about fear, my favorite subject.  Actually, I've been thinking about anxiety.  Fear I have begun to understand in my sobriety.  It's a real thing, and sometimes it's justified.  I used to drive a car fast when I was drunk or choke down a mix of different kinds of drugs or put myself in harm's way, dangerous neighborhoods and the like.  I should have been afraid when I was doing that stuff.  But it's true that sometimes it's just a case of me battling forces that are trying to stymie my overly large instincts, too.

Anxiety seems to be the fear that something unlikely and particularly awful is going to happen.  Anxiety is fear's deranged, psychotic little sister.  I can't see that anxiety does me any good at all.  It makes me fear things that are implausible.  At least when I was mixing drugs I had something real to be afraid of, not termites and monsters.

I'm back in the Old City right now, battling jet lag and my own questionable behavior.  Funny how I really get upset at people when they start nosing around in my business when my business happens to be a little shady.  Right now in my work life I'm behaving in a way that's questionable.  It could go either way.  A person could make a good case pro or con, justified or no, about my behavior.  Regrettably, I'm only responsible for my own behavior, which in my own mind is questionable right now, and that's the only mind that's important to me.  I'm leading people to believe things they wouldn't be happy to know are untrue.  I can justify lying when I believe it's justified, or when I'm not actually saying things that are verifiably untrue.  If I dance and obfuscate and you believe something that is false, sometimes I can live with it.  Not often and it's not easy but it has been done.

I'm anxious about 3 things right now.  One of them I can't do anything about; one I shouldn't even be thinking about because it is so not a problem; and one is an old standby, an old mostly irrational fear that I come back to over and over again.  If there's nothing happening to me that's upsetting, I have some tried and true topics that I can access.

And then, being a good alcoholic, I can't come back and take my time doing what I need to do.  I arrived at my hotel last night at about 2AM and had to get up 3 hours later to make a 2 hour drive in the rain, in the dark, in the night.  I was the deranged little sister this morning.  It's no wonder my temper was short and my worry scanner was picking up all kinds of weird transmissions.

I need to go to bed, and sleep a deep sleep.

Ancient Corollaries

Corollary:  A proposition that follows from another that has been solved.

And as long as I'm talking about ancient riffs, I might as well include my thoughts on ancient corollaries, such as my ability to see the worst in even the most pleasant of circumstances.  I can ferret out the dark and the dank in the Mojave desert, at noon, in the middle of the dry season.  I can miss the breezy and the airy if you put it in a bottle and stapled to my forehead.

In the New City I have noticed some things that I don't like.  And because I don't like them they dominate my thinking.  Dark thoughts are familiar and I return to them over and over again, swirling them in my mouth like a fine vintage of Diet Mountain Dew.  My natural inclination is not to line up the dark thoughts mano a mano with pleasant thoughts to see how paltry and pathetic they actually are.  Or to try to moderate these thoughts by seeing nuance or exception in them.  

If it is a certain way, then it will always be that way, unless it gets worse.

Ancient Riffs

Riff:  A melodic phrase, repeated again and again, often used as the main theme, as in a final chorus, or as background.

I have been thinking a lot -- which technically should be called obsessing, if I'm trying at all to be honest about it, which I'm obviously not trying to do -- about Doing It Right.  This is one of the most ancient of my many dysfunctional life riffs.  I tend to drift about in my own mind certain that I'm Not Doing It Right.  It's a very compelling riff.  It allows me to be unhappy with myself on short notice and with little effort.

If my schedule is full and I'm busy I wonder if I should be enjoying some reflection and down-time.  If I sit down and read the paper I'm sure that I should be out there Doing Something Productive.  And since I'm in a new environment with so much to do and so many tasks to complete it's not hard for me to feel like my effort is lacking.

So many ways to be unhappy, so little time.

Horseface Steve: Clothes Hound Dog

Back to the Old City where I'll be in a hotel room again.  It was nice, in its own way, being in a small space with few things around me that required my extensive management abilities.  A bed, an easy chair, a bathroom, and a microwave, and I was pretty well set.  Dinner often consisted of variations on the theme of heating up some packaged brown rice, mixing in a can of beans and a can of vegetables, and slicing up some fresh bread, with a Snickers bar for dessert.  I brought along about three days worth of clothes, which I had to wash every three days.  Surprisingly, I didn't feel at all deprived with my lack of pants selection.  Blue, khaki, black.  What other colors are there?  All those clothes I own seemed ridiculous and I'm not a clothes guy.  I don't have that many pairs of pants but I'll tell you I think they're all blue, khaki, black.  I can't even think of any other colors that men's pants can be.  Gray?  Maybe there's a gray pair in there that I've had for 20 years and were too tight around the waist 15 years ago.

I do this thing when I travel where I leave an item of clothing in each place that I lay my head.  It's my way of spreading my essence around the world, like a dog peeing on a fire hydrant.