Be Thou Quiet

There's a lot of stuff in our literature about relationships.  None of the stuff that I've read implies that we're very good at relationships.  When I say "none" what I mean is"none." There's no nuance here.  I don't believe that makes alcoholics especially unique because relationships are hard for a lot of people who don't abuse alcohol but we do take it to an art form

"Since defective relations with other human beings have nearly always been the immediate cause of our woes . . . "  There's another sentence that I'm too lazy to look up that suggests that our lousy relationship skills cause us almost all of the woe that there is.

I've been talking to a new guy who has two children with two different women and is currently living with a woman who has two kids of her own.  This dude is tinkering on a machine that has a lot of moving parts.  He's working hard on his Program and on all of these important relationships - he's doing well, but understandably struggling from time to time.  He's in a complex of situations any one of which could cause him some headaches.

The advice that comes out of my mouth sounds so obvious, yet is so difficult to put into motion. 

Thou shalt keep thy mouth shut a great deal of the time as the shit that comes out of thy mouth is generally stupid.
Thou shalt think of another before thinking of thyself.  Quit laughing - we're serious here.
Thou shalt do all of this shit even when thy opponent . . . er, loved one . . . is behaving badly which thy loved one will certainly do.  Thou must keep thy mouth shut even when thou be-ist right.

Now we stand on our own two feet as people in recovery - we don't beg or grovel or allow anyone to blame us for everything constantly.  Still, it's up to us to go the extra mile.

Twenty Billion Seems Like A Big Number

Because everyone is sitting on the edge of their respective seats waiting to hear the latest on the state of my mouth and/or the cavities - and I'm using "cavity" here in the sense of "large, open space" rather than in the "diseased tooth" sense - inside my head, especially the ones that are evolutionary mistakes that serve no real salutary purpose but can cause be quite troublesome little fellows, like the human sinus . . . 

My examination yesterday revealed no oral cavity to sinus perforation encore - Yea for me! - but did show a rather vigorous infection by unknown agents in the oral cavity under my right eye - Boo for infections!  but Hurrah for the bacteria!!  Industrious little fellows.  My hat's off to them.  I'm trying not to take it personally.  They didn't get together at a planning meeting and decide to strike deep into the heart of Seaweed's head - rather they just found a dark, wet, nutritious space and got busy.  They're in the same category as that tick that found purchase in my groin area a few weeks back - the fact that they're gross in appearance and purpose doesn't mean I get to judge them.  They're god's bacteria, after all - not mine - doing what they were designed to do.  I've heard that there are 20 billion bacteria in the human mouth.  The occasional infection seems inevitable.

The point here is not to belabor the mechanics and statistics, facts and figures, of my sinus infection or the sinus infection of anyone else.  The point is that, once again, my fears had no basis in fact.

Third Eye Blind

Third Eye:  A mystical and esoteric concept referring to a speculative invisible eye which provides perception beyond ordinary sight.  It is the extension of what the mind knowingly perceives.  

Regrettably for me I believe that the perforation from my oral cavity to my sinus - or, as it's known in the health profession: an oral cavity to sinus perforation - has re-emerged, risen from the ashes of my improving health.  I woke up from a brief nap today to The Taste.  You know The Taste - the sensation one has when one is sick and one's sinus juices are dripping down one's throat.  It is an offensive, objectionable taste.  A taste dealt with by using toothpaste and mouthwash, a taste that one tries to purge from one's body.

This was not unimaginable - it was a possibility.  This will likely require another operation on my mouth.  This is not pleasant news to me.

"Fuck!!" I said.

Then I got into the solution business.  I put on my headphones and fired up a guided aural meditation called Third Eye Chakra Singing Bowls.  I chose this particular meditation because it had the most adjectives of all of the available meditations.  As I sat there, listening to the bowls singing from a third eye perspective, I began to calm down pretty quickly.  The worst possible news is another procedure which I will be able to hack should it come to pass.  Everything else is less traumatic.  

I mean - whadda ya gonna do?  It is what it is.

It's Hard To Change When You're Perfect In Every Way

I like to think that I'm making a token effort to grow as a person.  I may be phoning it in.  I may have decided that it isn't worth the effort, that this is as good as it's going to get.  It's hard to change, especially when you are totally in love with yourself.

"What's the point?" I muse.  "I'm perfect in every way."

I'm glad SuperK is, at best, a casual reader of this stuff, for she would be annoyed that I keep bringing up the INTJ shit.  I really am trying to keep an open mind about information that may not paint me in the best light.  I really do try to keep the spotlight trained on myself although, lord knows, I'd rather slice and dice the character defects of other people.  They are SO obvious.

I'm reading a modern translation of one of the world's great spiritual books.  A lot of it I find kind of boring.  There's a lot of stuff about why this particular religion's modus operandi is the best one; indeed, the only right one.  But there's a lot of good, solid spiritual sense in there, too.  I'm trying to look past the stuff I don't like and absorb the stuff that I do.

Here's a few verses, mixed up a little for continuity's sake: "You have no right to criticize you brother or look down on him.  For god has accepted them to be his children.  They are god's servants, not yours.  They are responsible to him, not to you.  Let him tell them whether they are right or wrong."

And from our literature:  "Putting out of our minds the wrongs others had done, we resolutely looked for our own mistakes.  Though a situation had not been entirely our fault, we tried to disregard the other person involved entirely.  Where were we to blame?  The inventory was ours, not the other man's.  Where other people were concerned, we had to drop the word 'blame' from our speech and thought."

I mean really, how different is the thinking here?

The Doom Project

Regret:  To feel sorry about (a thing that has or had not happened), afterthink; to wish that a thing had not happened, that something else had happened instead.

I like the idea of wishing that something else happened.  That's me - I don't even know what I want as long as it's something different.  Most Earth People don't understand that for an alcoholic - especially one who has been drinking for a long time - the goal isn't necessarily to feel better.  We're just trying to feel different.  We don't want to feel whatever it is we're feeling.  We hate it so much that we do things that make us feel worse.

Else:  Other; in addition to previously mentioned items.

Projection:  A forecast or prognosis obtained by extrapolation.
Doom:  Destiny, especially terrible; an impending severe occurrence or danger that seems inevitable.

There's a great Black Sabbath song called Hand of Doom.  It's on an album called Paranoid.

Paranoid:  Exhibiting extreme and irrational fear or distrust of others.

I don't have much regret in my life but I still have a powerful capacity for projecting doom into the future.  That's not true - I have an ability to see doom in the future as a subset of my projecting skills.  The first sentence made it sound like I was shooting doom from the present into the future.  The fact of the matter is that I have very little doom handy.  This is why I'm forced to imagine implausible outcomes.  But Shooting Doom or Doom Projectiles would both be excellent names for rock bands.

Basically I'm just looking up cool words here.  I have no real point to all of this.  The thread that presented itself to me today is one of my endlessly recurring loops - why so little regret for what has transpired and why so much fear of a bad outcomes?  My history, my experience would suggest that I have little to fear in the future. Yet there I am - living in pain.  I don't get it.  It's irrational.

The Car Guy

So I finally talked SuperK into letting me replace my 2009 year Very Expensive Car.  You know - the one with Very Expensive Tires that attract nails and screws from distant galaxies, far, far away.  The perfectly fine car that's working just really perfectly fine?  And when I say "talked" I mean "bitched, whined, complained, go to your thesaurus and find other synonyms for boorish behavior, etc." until she was very close to driving to the nearest car outlet and buying something, anything to get me to shut up.

As an ex-salesperson I try to be open and honest when I'm dealing with current-salespeople. For instance, the first guy I spoke with worked at a distant dealership so I told him that it made sense for me to drive a car much closer to my home and - if I did that - I would give the guy who did all the work the benefit of the doubt.  I don't mean to suggest that I would take it in the shorts to be accommodating - rather that I'd at least let the worker guy know what was going on.  The guy who did the work was good at what he did but the dealership was a little stingy with their trade-in allowance.  I sent a couple of leading emails to this guy to see if he would budge on the price but didn't get anywhere.

So there I am, sitting down with a third guy.  We sort of agree on the price of his car and he starts to figure out a value for my trade-in.  I had taken the time to visit a used car lot so I had a number he needed to beat or I was going to go back to the used car place before I bought anything else.  I wasn't trying to force his hand - his offer was his offer - but I wasn't going to turn any residual money down, either.

"What was the number they gave you?" he asked.

I replied with a pretty honest number.  It was about 5% higher than the number that I . . . you know . . . actually got.  I didn't feel too bad about this . . . you know . . . minor lie.  It wasn't like I said the number was 6 or 7% higher - that would have been an inexcusable lie.  In my lying defense I wouldn't have expected him to show me the paperwork detailing the mark-up of the vehicle based on what they paid the previous owner.  Nobody's lying here - although technically I was indeed lying.  I soothed my soul by considering the fact that I wasn't putting him in a position to lie - I didn't demand to see proof of the dealer profit.  If he had asked what I needed as a trade-in allowance instead of what the offer was it would have been easier on me in the lying department.  So obviously this is all his fault.

He got close to what the actual offer was.  I thanked him, and said I'd go get a check from the used car place and then give him a call to set up another visit.  

"If I can make up the difference do we have a deal?" he asked.  Sure, I replied.  He made up the difference.  I was confident that he didn't want me to leave the dealership.  When he was talking to his management about the extra money I decided to tell him that I was going to get in touch with the second guy, the guy who did all the work.  I felt slightly bad that the work guy wasn't going to get the business, but not bad enough to toss a few thousand dollars down the drain.

I think I got a fair deal.  I'm happy with the number even though I realize I probably could have gone somewhere else and played everyone off of everyone else and gotten a slightly better deal.  I like to sleep a dreamless sleep.

I drove that dude one hundred miles an hour on the way home.

Take The Cake

A friend of mine took a ten year cake this Saturday.  That's what we do here in Vacation City to celebrate a recovery birthday - we "take a cake."  We "get a chip."  The tradition is for the person celebrating an anniversary to ask a few close friends and advisers to bring the cake in from the kitchen while the group sings Happy Birthday.  Saturday I was in the posse.  I like the guy who was celebrating the milestone - he's an inflexible, intolerant know-it-all like me - so I abuse the shit out of him.  If you read a transcript of what I say to this man you'd think: "What an asshole."  Not him - me.  I'm the asshole.

There's a lot of probing of defects that goes on among the guys I hang out with.  The birthday man and I share a lot of defects - when he talks to me about his bad behavior I can I-Den-Ti-Fy. This only means, however, that every time I see him I dig around in his shortcomings with a red-hot, razor-sharp poker.  He is making a mistake if he thinks he can share his vulnerabilities with me - the only thing he's doing is providing me with fuel for abuse. 

Actually, I only do this with a select group of friends.  This dude knows I love him and that the critiques are coming from a good place, and he also knows that I dish it out because I can also take it.  I never get upset when someone points out one of my many shortcomings - I'm trying to get better and I need all of the help I can get.  It was like the torrent of tick disease advice I got - these people know I worry about my health so they're going to try to help me get over worrying about my health with some pretty funny humor.

Last night I sent a couple of texts to a friend of mine.  SuperK read them and then made me apologize, deeming them too inflammatory.  My friend responded: "Tell SuperK that I am immune to your irony."  I thought this was a very nice turn of a phrase.  Somehow I'll find a way to jam it back down his throat.  Nothing is coming to mind right now - he was quite clever - but I'm very patient and very persistent.