Mission Creep

Complicate:  To make or become intricate, difficult, or involved.


It has been said that A.A. is a simple program for complicated people.  Boy, is that true in my case.  I can complicate the hell out of anything.  Why would I make something easy if I can make it really, really, unnecessarily hard?


Part of the rationale behind the move to The New City was to unburden myself of so many needless complications.  I moved into a much smaller living space which required me to get rid of a lot of crap that I was hoarding and storing and hauling around, but never touching.  I kid you not there were boxes that had been sealed up in the Pleistocene age and never reopened.  I don't know what was in them.  I put them out on the curb for the garbage guys.  My car situation got simpler.  The services that I required no longer seemed a requirement and were jettisoned.  I paid good money for things that seemed important yet I've lived happily for a year without any of them.


"Can you believe I paid $100 a month for that?" I'll say, my slack-jaw dropping in amazement.  "What was I thinking?"


It has been funny watching my tendency to list back into complications.  Vaguely, my living space becomes mildly unsatisfactory.  I look longingly at someplace bigger, someplace in a cooler part of town, someplace on a quieter street but in a nice neighborhood close to the action.  I can't stay up past 10PM anymore so I have no idea what kind of action I'm looking for.  Maybe a nice wheelchair store.


The military has a phrase called "mission creep."  It suggests the tendency to start out with one goal in mind then to slowly embiggen and complicate that mission over time.  I start out with something simple in mind, only to add layers and layers of complexity until I'm dealing with a huge, unmanageable mess.


Now where have I heard the phrase "our lives had become unmanageable?"  It sounds so familiar.

Silly, Silly Bankers

I rang up my sponsor this morning.  After we exchanged pleasantries I said: "I have something I want to run by you.  This is going to fall in the category of Problems of Prosperity."


"Yeah, excuse me if I don't hold my breath until you have a problem that doesn't fit in that category," he said.  I'm not sure why I call that smart-ass on a regular basis.


I have been casually looking to buy a home in The New City.  I placed the equity from the house we just sold into a savings account, resisting the urge to buy another stupid car or another stupid piece of electronics or something else stupid.  Nevertheless, I had hoped to take out a mortgage if we find something appropriate to buy, especially since interest rates are so low.  I assumed that the fact that I had enough in the savings account to pay cash for something much less expensive than my last house would earn me some Banking Good Will, should such a thing exist.


Here's the funny thing about that: because banks were so eager to loan money during the recent big bubble boom in the real estate market -- literally throwing cash at any warm body who alleged anything positive financially, with nothing in the way of factual documentation -- that they lost a lot of money on bad loans.  Hard to imagine that happening with such a solid business model.  Now, because they're so familiar with residing illogically on one end of the spectrum, they're finding it comfortable to swing wildly to the other end of the spectrum.  Ergo, they don't want to loan money to anyone.


They keep asking me how much money I earn, not how much money I've saved.  I have had no luck whatsoever convincing them that the savings part is more important than the earnings part.


"Who cares?" I say.  "I have this money saved up."


"We care," they say.  "Go away until you start to make a lot more money."


"I don't want to make a lot more money," I reply.  "That takes a lot of work and there's a lot of pressure involved."


"Go away," they repeat.


I feel like I'm in some Kafkaesque nightmare alternate reality.  These bankers must all be drunks.  They must be fucking with me.  They're having a drink right now, and a good laugh.


"Have you ever considered that there's a middle ground?" I wonder, watching them fill in little blanks on their little forms.


"Security," they say, pushing a red button on the intercom on their desk.  I half expect a trap-door to open up under me, revealing a tank of sharks or boiling oil or sharks swimming around in boiling oil.  Special sharks, obviously, to handle the boiling oil.


I don't even know if I WANT a mortgage.

My Little Man is an Idiot

Wisdom: The quality of being wise; the power of judging rightly and following the soundest course of action, based on knowledge, experience, understanding, etc;  good judgment.


Knowledge:  Acquaintance with facts; range of information, awareness, or understanding.


"We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us."


Here's what I see in The Rooms: a collection of tremendous talent.  Seriously.  The average drunk/addict is talented, clever, smart, and charming.  We stagger in and begin to listen to other people and we read the books and we collect the knowledge.  All well and good.  Problems arise when we fail to execute this knowledge or worse yet, execute it poorly.  We consume the knowledge, then skulk off and think think think about it by ourselves, applying a twisted filter of alcoholic reasoning until we justify some bizarre course of action that only makes good sense to someone who is used to living in an alternate reality.


I'm in the midst of dealing with a situation that I have researched heavily.  I am heavily armed with facts, yet I have no idea what to do.  I vacillate wildly from extreme to extreme.  Things that made a lot of sense yesterday seem ridiculous today, and I'm guessing I'll be scratching my head tomorrow, wondering what the hell I was thinking when I discarded my first plan.


Very frustrating for this methodical, logical, diligent German peasant.  I figure if I do the research then I'll make the "right" decision.  Now, mind you, I'm not scoffing at the research, just my belief that this will make things become crystal clear.  Sometimes in my sobriety I have to go with my gut.


One of my favorite scenes from Seinfeld is an exchange between George, who is conflicted about a decision he has to make, and Kramer, who is dispensing counsel:
K: "What does your little man say?  You HAVE to listen to your little man."
G: (hesitating) "My little man doesn't know."
K: "Listen to your little man, George!"
G: (disgustedly) "Ah, my little man is an idiot."

Middle of the Road

Center:  A point considered as the middle or central point of activity.


One of the reasons I was at all conflicted about the music documentary is that I have a long, storied history of saying I was going to do something and then not actually doing what I said I was going to do.  I frequently exacerbated this bad habit by not telling anyone I was changing my plans.  At the last minute I would decide to do something else I thought was going to be more fun or I'd forget or pass out or just not get up off the couch and make the effort.  


I tried to continue this technique when I was getting sober.  I really stuck with it as far as phone calls were concerned.  Someone in The Program would call and I wouldn't call back.  A lot of it was simply fear; I was afraid of dealing with other people.  My buddies confronted me about it, though.


"Did you get my phone call?" they'd ask.  "Pick up the phone and call back."  They brushed off my excuses, explaining that actions like returning phone calls was part of the social contract between adults.  It wasn't negotiable or weird or an unreasonable thing to expect.  Someone calls and you call back.  Move to a cave if you don't like doing this.


The flip side of the coin is that nobody likes to deal with rigid, inflexible people.  All of us make plans then change our mind, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes for trivial ones.  Who among us hasn't agreed to do something and decided later on that they didn't want to do it?


Yes, you in the back there, with your hand up?  No?  I didn't think so.


All of us get to bail every now and then.  I'm OK with it when it happens to me.  I understand.  I do it, too.  I don't do it terribly often, though, because I think I need to be reliable with my commitments, which is another area I wouldn't mark as one of my strong points.


More middle of the road stuff.

Progress Not Perfection

Progress:  To improve; advance toward perfection or to a higher state.


Here's what 24 years and 1 month buys you:


I made plans a few days ago to join some guys in The Program for a rock documentary or "rockumentary," if you want to sound really cool.  I didn't know too much about the band being featured so my friend who was organizing the get-together burned some CDs for me to listen to.  While the music was good it wasn't really my bag, man, so I started to regret my decision to go.  Plus, the movie started at 9:30 -- at night, mind you -- when it would be quite normal for me to be going to bed, not going out.  I'm definitely not cool anymore, or "cool" as it were.


How to do this, I wondered?  LIE!  LIE!! LIE LIE LIE!!! That's what came to mind.  That's always what comes to mind when I imagine being uncomfortable and wonder how I can squirm out from underneath this feeling.  "That's the ticket," I thought.  "Not a big bad lie but a little pleasant unoffensive lie."  I didn't think that wouldn't smell too bad rotting in my garbage can.  I could profess being tired.  I could say "something came up."  I could, of course, blame SuperK.  This is why most people get married: to have a built-in excuse whenever we need to lie about something.  That way my friend could develop a resentment against my wife and I'd come out smelling like . . . well, not a rose but not a rotten rutabaga either.


The reason I tell the truth most of the time today is because I can't remember what I said 20 minutes ago.  So I figure if I stick with the truth then I don't have to worry about what has or has not come out of my mouth.  It was exhausting keeping track of all the lying going on when I was really into the lying game.  I had so many stories to organize that I couldn't hold them all together.


Dude was fine with it, of course.  "The truth is, Horseface," he sez.  "I'm going whether or not anyone shows up."  Now the deal is that I can't do this consistently.  I can't change my mind and leave people hanging at the last minute.   But I'm hardly a friend if I can't show some flexibility with others.




Since there were a few people going I didn't feel too bad about flaking out on my friend

Simple Not Easy

Easy:  That can be done, got, mastered, etc. with ease; not difficult; not exacting.


Getting pissed off at something or someone and then picking up a drink is easy.  Working on your character defects and your spirituality and your amends is not easy.  It's simple, but it's not easy.   The directions can be explained relatively quickly but the execution is going to take some time.


"But I like easy," I remarked when I came into The Program.  "Easy is the way to go."  This was the era of Half-Measures Horseface.  Easier, softer Horseface.  I was not known for my diligent work or any kind of consistent, sustained effort on anything.  I was under the impression that the benefits of The Program would be given to me all wrapped up with a fancy bow on top.


Simple:  Easy to do, solve, or understand, as a task, question, etc.


The Program is not rocket science.  There are only 12 Steps, well explained in The Big Book then flogged half to death in the 12&12.  A member with a few years of solid sobriety can give a newcomer a pretty good overview in an hour or so.


There's a lot to recommend in simple.  It can make things easy.  For instance, I'd like to own a brand new Ferrari.  A black one with a spiffy red stripe.  I'd like that a lot.  Now, I'm not that smart but I'm pretty old so I've had some nice things that I had no business having in my life and I've learned some lessons doing this.  Not a Ferrari.  I think I drove a Fiat once but that's as close to an Italian supercar as I've ever come, or ever will come if I value my marriage to SuperK.


So I see high speed tires that cost $750 a piece and two thousand dollar tune-ups and astronomical insurance rates and . . . well, you get the idea.  So I own a Subaru.  It's not turning any heads as I floor it, forcing the four squirrels that power the vehicle to really start running in their cages, but it's not causing me any angst at night, either.


Simple.  That's the way to go.

Horseface Steve -- Helpmate

Help:  To give assistance; be co-operative, useful, or beneficial.


I'm still trying to get my arms around the idea of what it means to help someone out.  The definition doesn't seem to make allowances for anything along the lines of "when I want to" or "when it makes sense to me."  For instance, I don't want any help changing the oil in my car.  I'd have to get out the operator's manual -- where that is, I have no idea, because there's not a chance in hell that I'll ever understand how that large and complicated piece of machinery works -- to even figure out to open the hood, for god's sake, or maybe I mean the trunk.  Wherever the engine is located.  Car salesmen are always trying to show me what's under the hood.  I wave them off like a caliph dismissing a slave.  I'm not getting anywhere near a confined area full of hot, loud, violently rotating pieces of metal.


So you can be the best oil-changing guy in the world, eager to help me change my oil.  You can explain how important it is to change the oil and how much money I'd save and how much fun it can be working on your own car with your own hands.  The reality is that I don't want this help.  This is not help; this is an invitation to have one of my fingers severed.  Go help someone else change their oil.  Thanks for thinking of me but I like my fingers.


I remember when I grasped the fact that when SuperK wanted to talk to me about something that she found upsetting, she didn't expect me to solve the problem.  She wanted me to listen to what she had to say.  That was the help: the listening.  As the Smartest Guy In The World, I was chomping at the bit to offer wise, effective solutions.  That was what I wanted to do, not what needed to be done.


I know there's a god up there because we have mechanics who can change the oil in my car for a very reasonable amount of money.