Who I Am

I often run into people in The Program who seem to have a hard time releasing their Pre-Alcoholic Downfall persona.  These are folks who manage to work in the details of their various triumphs and successes into their comments each and every time they share.  These are good people, too, by and large: kind, friendly, willing to pitch in and help anyone who asks.  But I get to see how the ego is a tricky master.  I know it was for me.  I was like a lot of drunks: a promising young guy who didn't live up to that promise in the long run or the short run or even a short stroll.  But I was still eager to let you know how smart I was and how accomplished and what I had been on the verge of achieving.


I'm sure people were saying: "Little Stevie Seaweed?  That guy who's living with his parents? And doesn't have a girlfriend or a car or a job or any money?"


Yeah, that guy.  I was totally fooling everyone.


It's hard for me to hide my ego.  My ego is big and boisterous and very comfortable telling you all about it, even if "it" is mostly lies and innuendo and bullshit.  It has been a slow process for me to let go of the need to tell you how impressive I am.  What I want you to know is not what's important.  What's important is transparent and right there in front of you.  I don't have to make stuff up or emphasize my strong points so strongly.  You like what you see or you don't.   I'm not fooling anyone.


I'm sure I've told this story before, but not in the last 20 minutes, which is the length of my short term memory.  I earned my living as a salesman.  I enjoyed it, too, and I was good at it.  I was honest and helpful and a little lazy.  But it's not an impressive sounding career; certainly not as impressive as the career I was close to achieving before alcohol took me down.  Little kids in grade school don't respond, when asked what they want to do when they grow up, with: "I want to be a salesman!  I want to sell power transmission components to plant engineers working in heavy industry!"


Because my ego was so dented I ran through a whole gamut of impressive sounding titles on my business cards: Technical Sales; Senior Territory Manager; Filtration Expert; Account Executive.  Like people didn't know what I was trying to do.  I was trying to sell them stuff.  I wasn't trying to manage their territory or execute their accounts.  I called them up and got an appointment to show them something that I hoped they would buy if it fit their needs, and at the start I didn't even care if it met their needs.  Buy this, goddammit!


For many years at the end of my sales career I handed out cards with embossed with a company name and what to call me: Little Stevie Seaweed.  It helped me.  It took away some of the pressure to be someone who was long, long gone, and start to be the person who I actually was.  Nobody is hanging out with that guy.  That guy never was.  This is the guy.  This is the guy right here.

Untitled (Because I Can't In Good Conscience Use "Problem" Again)

Solution:  In medicine, the termination of a disease.

“There is a solution.  Almost none of us liked the self-searching, the leveling of our pride, the confession of shortcomings which the process requires for its successful consummation.”

Yeah, no shit.

“But we saw that it really worked in others . . .  When, therefore, we were approached by those in whom the problem had been solved . . .”

Oh, now I’m starting to get it.  I'm among people who have the same kinds of problems that I do and they have solved these problems.  That’s why I have to do the solution work.  We’re solving problems.  We’re making them go away because we have found . . . well, a solution.

My lovely wife points out frequently that she would have done NONE of the work that The Program requires did she not see that it was “intensely practical.”

I'm going to repeat myself: I am a Problem Person who hates solutions to my problems, for a myriad of unknowable reasons that I cannot begin to understand.  This is why I need to keep referring to The Book.  I need to be reminded over and over that there is a solution to ALL of my problems, and not just alcohol.  ALL of them if I buy into the simple premise underlying our take on recovery: “ . . . there was nothing left for us but to pick up the simple kit of spiritual tools laid at our feet.”  

Laid at our feet!  We don’t even have to walk  across the room to receive the benefits of The Program.  The tools are simple and we’re going to step on them if we’re not careful because they’re almost under our feet.  We have to be careful not to trip on them.

So I finish up with the meeting yesterday -- an excellent one as they so often are --  the irony of talking about solutions not lost on me as I pondered satisfying an idle desire to delay my dentist appointment for a little while, obviously preferring the problem part of the situation more than the solution part.  My tooth, or teeth, has, or have felt a little better lately, as long as I don’t bite into anything hard or cold or crunchy or pretty hot, and use the other side of my mouth when I’m eating, and not chewing too hard or too fast.  I’m going to hypothesize that teeth that hurt are not in the habit of repairing themselves.  I’m hopeful that my teeth will,  but skeptical.  My experience is that they continue to hurt at roughly the same level of pain until they get worse and hurt more.

I called the new dentist in spite of myself and made an appointment.  He seemed nice, or his receptionist did, anyway, but I'm sure he's not very good and he's going to over-prescribe over-priced treatment that he's poorly qualified to provide.  I’m vaguely afraid, vaguely apprehensive, and not at all vague about not looking forward to going to the dentist tomorrow.  I see in my future a vision of someone with sharp metal instruments and syringes full of chemicals jabbing around in my mouth, which is opened at an uncomfortable angle.

Or he's just going to fix my tooth.

And the sound of the high speed drill!  If I were at all mechanically inclined I would invent a drill that sounded like a trick

Hole in the Sky

Awake:  To rouse from sleep; wake; hence, to rouse from inactivity; activize.


We talked about "spiritual experience" in this morning's meeting.  The passage about the importance of a spiritual experience that the chairperson read is found in the chapter "There Is A Solution," which should be a solid clue as to the importance of said spiritual experience.  The discussion revolved around the circumstances which would indicate, or at least suggest, the occurrence of a spiritual awakening.  The popular hope seemed to be for the big, dramatic variety of spiritual experience, where the earth shakes and the sea parts and the sky is rent in two, the rent quickly filling with angels and gods and other singing beings.  The actual experience of the group was more along the lines of a steady if unspectacular awakening.  This can be very frustrating for the Big Ego crowd.  We like earthquakes and flocks of angels singing to us and us alone.


So much of my experience in recovery revolves around making progress even when I don't know I'm making any progress.  One day I'll decide to look back into the past and think: "Huh.  I've changed."  This is why I continue to hitch up my britches and go to work on my recovery every day.  I figure that I'm making progress even when I don't think I'm making any progress.

Tales From the Pool

Steady:  Constant, regular, uniform, or continuous; not changing, wavering, faltering, etc.


How about a positive swimming message?  This is theoretical, more or less, and doesn't involve any actual physical pools with actual physical people who make me SO MAD hanging around to complicate things.


Anyway, when I finally got sober I was often frustrated by the slow pace of my recovery.  I wanted to get to a better place in a hell of a big hurry.  I realize today that I was trying to make something time-consuming consume no time.  The unfortunate drawback to this technique is that a certain amount of time was needed to work through things that needed to be worked through.  I thought the good times would be awarded to me as if I had put a quarter in a vending machine and pushed A22, the selection for Twinkies.  And unless this machine was transported to my vending machine area from about 1973 I wasn't going to get any Twinkies, which cost a lot more than a quarter, even though I was being overcharged at that price.


Did you know the company that makes Twinkies is going out of business?  It's too late to rush out and buy some, too; you should have thought about supporting this iconic American brand long ago.  Did you know that a food science professor at some university tacked a package of Twinkies above his blackboard 30 years ago, and the the Twinkies look pretty much the same, except for some discoloration from sunlight?  True story.


I clearly remember that when I began swimming I spent a lot of time my laboring painfully down the lane, struggling for breath, my strokes uneven and uncoordinated.  Today I'm a fairly smooth swimmer; I don't swim too fast or too long, but I'm smooth and steady.  On occasion someone who is a swimming newcomer will remark on my speed or my stamina, the fools, and I find myself simply saying: "I've been swimming for 4 years."  The implication is that I'm not swimming well because I'm an athlete of any renown, just a guy who has been at it for a while.


It's that way with my alcoholism.  I've been doing it for a while.  It's a process, not an event.  I'm pretty sure that I'll get through everything that I need to get through -- which is everything that there is -- if I simply keep at it.  I have a few bad days and a lot of ordinary days but I keep stroking forward.  


Choking down an occasional mouthful of pool water, sure, but never drowning.

Enough With The Pool, Already

Progress:  To continue toward completion; come along.


So I'm back at the pool where I seem to have most of my problems with people (not true, on second thought  -- I have plenty of really excellent problems with people wherever they lurk).   A wiser man might try a different type of exercise; maybe one that he could do all by himself on an uninhabited planet in a distant galaxy far, far away.  Unfortunately, swimming is the only exercise left for me that doesn't hurt everything on my body that still works, which is a diminishing list.  I'm sure my problems at the pool, which occur when most adult men are working at a job, make for fascinating reading with everyone very sympathetic to the difficult life that I'm forced to endure.  That's why I continue writing about them.  It's not about me anymore.


Anyway, let's set the stage: there are 3 double width lanes at the pool, which means that 6 people can comfortably swim at the same time.  Well, I don't mean to imply that they are swimming comfortably but rather that they fit into the lanes comfortably.  The 2 lanes I try to avoid are the outermost ones abutting the pool wall; the hard, hard, unforgiving pool wall.  When I arrived today there was a single person in each of the 3 lanes so I jumped into the middle lane, the non-wall lane, hoping to share with the man swimming there already and avoid repeatedly bashing my hands and feet on the hard, hard wall.  I could see that he had Down's Syndrome and was swimming with great purpose but having trouble staying to one side of the double lane.


"Could you swim over there?" he asked, pointing to one of the outermost lanes.  "I have trouble swimming in a straight line."


This pissed me off.  I pointed out that there was someone in that lane.  He ducked his head and continued to swim.  I'm assuming that he quickly saw that I was an ass and that he would be better off not wasting any more time with me.


I sighed dramatically and moved to the outermost lane.  Oy, what a saint.


I swim 4 sets of 15 laps for my exercise.  I was honked off my first set, so preoccupied with how unfairly I had been treated by that man that I bashed my hands and feet against the wall more frequently and with greater violence than I normally do.  During my second set my anger began to subside as I decided how to point out to him how unreasonable his very reasonable request had been.  For my third set I realized that I should keep my %$!! mouth shut while still nurturing some delicious, delicious, scrumptious self-righteous indignation.


The 4th set?  I was embarrassed for myself.  


I finished my work out and hopped into the sauna for a few minutes.  This swimmer finishes shortly afterward me and makes his way to the steps that exit the pool.  I quit thinking about myself long enough to notice a pretty fancy motorized wheel chair sitting at the pool's edge.  The man labors up the stairs slowly and with great effort, leaning heavily on the railing for support.  He composes himself for a minute before taking several rapid, unsteady steps on his significantly deformed legs to get to his wheelchair.  He belts himself in and buzzes off to the locker-room.


I'm a work in progress.  I'm glad that my higher power is kinder to me than I am to my fellows.  I'd have a tough go of it if I was getting what I deserved for my behavior.

A Zinger

Denial:   A refusal to believe or accept.


I think I need to go see a dentist, but I don't want to.  Something people probing around my mucous membranes with sharp stainless steel diggers.


My teeth have given me a fair amount of problems over the years even though I'm a tad on the obsessive-compulsive side when it comes to care of said teeth, as you would expect from a tightly wound, control-freak obsessive-compulsive kind of guy.  I could add a few more unflattering adjectives but my limit is 3, maybe 4 if I'm rolling pretty good, pejoratives in a single phrase.  I don't think I have the best enamel in the world or something like that because I brush, floss, and rinse after every meal and when I get up and right before I go to bed.  I think sometimes I floss in my sleep.  It's a rare medical condition called "sleep-flossing."  It can actually be dangerous.  Qualified experts warn never to wake up an individual who is sleep-flossing or even sleep-brushing, although there isn't a consensus on what to do with someone who is rinsing in their sleep.  Sleep-flossers have been known to lash out viciously when their sleep-flossing is interrupted.


Anyway, I bit into a seed a few weeks back and got what my dentist in The Old City calls a "zinger."  This means something that hurts like hell.  As an alcoholic when something happens that I don't like or am afraid of I have a series of stages that I must go through before I squarely face the problem.  The first is a stage I call "Pretend that nothing happened."  It's a fairly stupid stage when pain is involved.  Maybe if I think I've offended someone but I'm not sure then this stage makes sense, but not when I've experienced a fairly sharp, stabbing pain in one of my teeth.  I'm patient when it comes to dealing with something that I've afraid of so I decided to wait this one out.  My teeth aren't sensitive to hot or cold and there's no tooth ache so I figure maybe it was an isolated incident. Maybe if I ignore it then it will "go away."


As you might expect I had another zinger a week or so later and this time the sensitivity has been hanging around.  So I proceed logically to Stage Two: "Investigate the problem."  In this case that involved calling my old dentist, explaining the problem, and then taking his advice.  This is another stupid stage.  My dentist had a father who died with long term sobriety so he's used to dealing with people like me.  He's a good dentist so he suggested that someone with a sharp, stabbing pain in one of his teeth needed to go see a dentist.  I believe that a bad dentist  would also recommend this.  I believe that the nice boy who bagged my groceries yesterday would suggest that I go see a dentist or shut up about it already.


I moved immediately to Step Three: "Bitching about the unfairness of a problem."  This is my favorite step.  I'm good at it.  I get my hackles way, way up when life is unfair, which it is by necessity.  I have a long history of bitching about my problems so I tackle this step with vigor and relish.  I don't see why I need to go through pain or discomfort in my life.


I'm currently dealing with Step Four, although I'm not abandoning Step Three until I'm good and miserable.  I can do Step Three while I'm tackling Step Four.  I'm multi-tasking.   Anyway, Step Four, which I surely must do in my inexorable march through these Steps of Denial, is Anger.  This Step includes both outrage at the unfairness of life and strong exceptional-ism, where I express disbelief that something bad or unpleasant is happening to me, the only person I care about, even though it's one in a series of bad things that surely must!  surely will!! happen to me as well as to most other people.  It's just that I'd rather pass on any unpleasantness.


Step 5 includes Greed and Paranoia, and Anger, too, I suppose.  I might as well toss anger in as well.  Anger is a great addition to any of my many character defects.  It's the icing on the cake.  It's a flavor enhancer, a catalyst that accelerates the growth of all of my defects.  Step 5 involves contacting local dentists, certain that they are going to overcharge me for work that won't solve the problem and will be poorly done.


There about 100 more Steps before I go about tackling a fairly straightforward problem like an adult.  I'll stop now.

With Friends Like These . . .

Criticize:  To judge disapprovingly; censure (v).
                   Analysis of qualities and evaluation of comparative worth (n).


I've been pondering the blessing of having men in my life who tell me what I need to hear irregardless of whether I want to hear it or not.  My preference is for people to agree with me.  I want them to agree with me while praising me as the greatest thing since sliced bread.  I don't want criticism.  I don't want good suggestions if they don't happen to line up exactly with what I want to do.


"My life is a tremendous success," I thought, sitting in my jammies in my childhood bedroom, stoned, unemployed, relationship-less, broke, sick, stupid, lost and blown away, and this at 30.
"Can you believe what that dick told me last night?"


I need friends who can give it to me straight and not be afraid that their honest advice is going to scuttle a friendship.  And I need friends who can take my advice without rancor.  Sure, I mutter veiled curses when I hang up the phone, but I ponder what I've heard.


Sometimes I even do it.  Not too often, but sometimes.