Seaweed: Quitter

What exactly is the anxiety doing for me?  What is it preparing me for or protecting me against?

YOU are the show.  Love yourself with all of your defects and craziness.  Embrace the insanity.

I am definitely not turning anything over.  I am definitely trying to shape things to my liking.

I am afraid of decline.  I am afraid that my back is going to feel this way forever - Forever! - and that is not what I want.  I would like to feel splendid physically and relaxed emotionally.

I feel good!

Quit:  To stop; give up.

I believe this is the worst experience I've ever had as a sober person.  I don't know that I've ever felt worse than I do now.  The anxiety is unbelievable.  My back is unbelievable.  At this point I don't know whether my anxiety is making my back feel worse or my back is stoking my anxiety.  It is a venomous feedback loop.

I feel great!!

Anyway, I have to believe that I'll get through this.  I need to take the Long View.   It isn't forever.  I'm going to give myself until the end of the year - four and a half months - to slog through this crap, all of this crap, whatever this crap is.  My life is a bad movie right now.  I should just tell myself that the movie is four months long.

I have always felt a little sheepish when I'm talking to someone in recovery who is going through something painful and all I can think of to say is: "It's going to be OK."  That's all I got.  I don't got anything else but that fairly obvious platitude.

I feel a bit like a quitter right now.  Where's the fight?  Where's the fucking fight?

More, More, More About ME

I think that my sore back is a manifestation of my worst nightmare: an illness or injury or disease that changes things in a Big Way.  This back injury has the feel of something a little more severe.  It may have some staying power.

Maybe my play needs to be the realization that this is the new normal - tight back, a different exercise paradigm, some discomfort.

There's a lesson here.  I can't hear it yet and I don't want anything except to have my back feel the way it used to, and not so long ago.

But then again.  I've continued to exercise every day - an "off" day was some extensive stretching.

Show me the lesson.
Gratitude list.
Positive affirmations.
Work The Steps again, maybe on this physical obsessiveness that I have.

Breathe.
Posture awareness.

I think I'm afraid of dying.
I think I'm afraid of The Big Decline.

I think I'm terrified of getting old.  Everything has been slowing down over the last few years.  My energy level has declined; my mouth was a disaster area and so were my legs (Needles! So many needles!); I had a hell of a case of shin splints after NZ; the whole sinus perforation nightmare; and now my achy back.

All of this on top of the deaths.  All of this stoking the coals of mom's nursing home fires.  It certainly brought my mortality front and center.  The thought has popped into the back of my mind: maybe I'm next.

Most of my journal entries over the last few months have been about my back - in great detail.  The focus is incredible.  The obsessive concentration on my sinus perforation - despite many assurances that the damage could be repaired - and now on my back.  It is a white-hot, laser-like focus.  I think a tornado could blow my house away while I was sitting at my desk and it wouldn't distract me for a second in my obsessive musings on my health.

After a few months of pretty extensive mullings I'm not so sure that the grief component about the deaths is the accelerant here.  I'm beginning to suspect that The End is encroaching on my serenity.  How powerful is the emotional component of our lives - overwhelming the physical part more often than not.

Man, we get some shit wedged in deep.   Be careful what you're telling your kids.

Seaweed: Life Warrior

I have not surrendered.

I have not turned my life and my will over to the care of my higher power. 

I don't understand what people mean when they tell me to "take it easy."  Take what easy?  Take it where?  What are they talking about?

I regularly put my canoe in the stream and promptly begin paddling against the current.  Why? Because it's where I want to go.  Yes, I know it makes sense to "go with the flow," to not fight the movement of the water, but I can't help it.  I have even been known to take my canoe out of the water and carry it over a mountain, through brambles and sticker bushes, leaping off a cliff to land at the same place that a gentle although longer canoe ride would have provided.

Maybe life is my enemy.  Maybe everything is my enemy.  I'm certainly a fighter.

The Appeal of Suffering

Suffering:  The condition of one who suffers; a state of pain or distress. 

What is it that I'm anxious about, exactly?

Death and dying?  The decline that happens as we age?  Pain?!  Hell, yes, pain - I hate pain. Pain sucks the big one.

Have I reached the top of the roller coaster and I'm now on the way down, plummeting toward oblivion?  After all the average age of Death in the US of A - for men - is 76.3 dog years and I'm 60.7 years old!  That's getting uncomfortably close.  I can see a dude in a black hoodie, holding a scythe firmly in a skeleton hand, peering at me over a copy of the Sunday Times.

My friend ElderLow had some back surgery a year or so ago.  He has been healing albeit slowly.  He was grousing to his physical therapist, a young woman, about his bad back, especially stiff in the morning.

"Of course your back hurts," she said.  "You're old."

He groused about some of the physical activities he was no longer able to do: golf, jogging, cage fighting.

"Do you see anyone else your age cage fighting?" she asked.  "There are very few men your age out there cage fighting."

She wasn't done.

"Most men begin to have some trouble with their backs," she said.  I don't know why she's such an expert on this except she probably spends half her day dealing with people grousing about their backs.  I mean why do you think there are nine masseuses for every man, woman, and child in Kettering, OH?

We're all looking to escape unpleasantness.    Here's what our Book has to say: "Until now, our lives have been largely devoted to running from pain and problems.  We fled from them as from a plague.  We never wanted to deal with the fact of suffering.  Character-building through suffering might be all right for saints, but it certainly didn't appeal to us."

Appeal: To be attractive.

Here's a thought for some fun - suffering as a means of growth!  Does that appeal to you, too? It has a great deal of appeal for me.

I think my body is telling me some things that I'd rather not hear.  I think that this mudslide of death has made me acutely aware of my mortality.  I think 60 is bullshit.  Bullshit!  60.7/76.3 = 79.5%.  That is terrible, the thought that I may have lived 80% of my life already unless of course I die sooner which is definitely possible.

Positive Affirmations.

Gratitude Lists.  

I had a friend join me in the hot tub the other day and we talked about such matters.  He's relentlessly optimistic.  He makes gratitude lists as a matter of habit.  He doesn't concentrate on the negative.  He finds work-arounds for obstacles.  He gives it to me straight.  Quit Complaining is sort of the point.

I shall try to balance my expectations with my acceptance.  

Hands Where I Can See 'em.

Surrender: To give up possession of; to yield; to resign.
Capitulate: To end all resistance; to give up; to go along with or comply. 

Today I have been sober for 30 years.  That would be alcohol AND drug free sober.  I actually haven't had a drink for an additional six months but I still managed to convince myself that a little non-addictive marijuana wouldn't be a bad idea until I realized it was a very bad idea.  In many circles this is known as the Marijuana Maintenance Plan, The Seaweed Plan.

I've been sober for almost half of my life.  That's some symmetry.

SuperK strolled in last night and said: "Anyway . . . what makes YOU think you can get away with no pain?  You've been living this charmed life and now you're mildly hobbled and THIS is the reaction?"

What can I tell you?  There is intellect and there is emotion - all the reasoning in the world can't overcome a powerful emotional reaction.  It's like trying to explain to a little child that there is, in fact, no monster under the bed.  It's difficult to assure the child that there is absolutely no chance that there could possibly be some kind of monster under the bed in the near future.

A drunk is wandering along the top of a cliff when he stumbles over the edge and begins plummeting toward certain death on the rocks below.  Miraculously he grabs onto a small shrubbery sticking out of the cliff face and hangs there perilously.  He begins yelling for help.

"I can help you my son." A booming voice.

"Who's there?" asks the drunk.  "Who is that?"

"It's god, and I can save you, but first you have to let go of the branch."

The drunk takes a minute to ponder this turn of events.  

"Is there anyone else up there?"

We don't live in a surrendering kind of society.  We hold onto this ideal that if we can keep on persevering long enough, heroically pounding toward the goal line or surmounting the heavily fortified hill under withering machine gun fire then we'll Get What We Want.  We don't celebrate folks who say: "Eh, I'm runner-up.  That's pretty good.  I'm going to have a Popsicle." The camera never pans back down the hill to show all the bodies piled up, cut down in the hailstorm of bullets.  No, we look at the one guy who made it all the way up.

I'll tell you this: god has a HUGE machine gun.  God has the best ordnance.

Boxing with god is not a good idea - god has longer arms than you do.

Have you ever seen that movie: "Knute Rockne - Pretty Good Coach?"  The movie starts with a slow pan around his office which is festooned with pennants and banners and trophies celebrating all of his second place finishes.  The big denouement, the final scene, shows Knute running out onto the field, 1 minute left in the game, the opposing team driving for the go-ahead score . . . He gathers his troops around, thrusts his fist into the air, and shouts: "OK, men, let's go out there and surrender!"

I assume that eventually I'll give in here.

On The Other Hand . . .

Grateful:    Showing appreciation, being thankful.  (Ed. Note: I'm appalled that I have never looked this word up for inclusion in my blog.  Figures).

Here's my life . . . 

I'm a very healthy man.  I take no medication.  I have no serious injuries or funky diseases and my family history is free of some of the hereditary conditions that might reasonably be expected to eventually strike me down.  In fact, some of my progenitors have lived until they were nearly 100 years old.

My back is sore and out of sorts but doesn't appear to have any structural problems.  I'm taking good action - trying some new exercises and seeing a masseuse.  I'm attempting to learn from this - not exercising every day, picking up a class or two at my gym, substituting stretching and/or weights instead of my relentless aerobic exercise.  I don't need to exercise this much.  I need to keep moving but not as if some predatory animal is nipping at my heels.

I have a wonderful partnership with my long-suffering wife.  It has been a bit rocky over the last six months but that's mostly on me - I've commenced a long delayed sweeping of my side of the street  - and that is mostly understandable given what I've gone through.  I've been distant and unemotional and disengaged - not a good framework for a relationship.  We're working on this.  It has taken some time to dig this hole and it's going to take some time to get out of it.

My relationship with my sister has settled into a nice, historical equilibrium.  Not too close but close enough for both of us.  This is fine.  Not every family is as thick as thieves.

I'm blessed with a lot of friends and acquaintances.  A lot of people know who I am in a pleasant, cordial sort of way.  Some of them are close friends.  I have close friends here, in The Old City, and from way, way back.  These are real friends, too, not the drinking companions I hung out with in the day.  These people care about me and listen to me.  I'm not alone.  I don't have to go anything by myself when I can just remember this.

I seem to have enough money to pay my bills and to do some fun and nice things for myself.  The fact of the matter is that a lot of people are living check to check, one illness or car break-down or lay-off from disaster.  A lot of people have more bills than money.  I need to remember this more often, too.

I live in a nice mobile home.  We've got it fixed up OK.  It has enough room for the two of us and tons of light.  It's warm outside in the winter and cool in the summer.  I don't have an air conditioner - and don't need one - and I rarely run the heat.  That's pretty amazing.

My wife has a new very expensive car.
I have an almost new very expensive and very impractical car.

I'm aware that I've given my age too much power.  I'm a healthy, vibrant man with a lot of interests.  Focusing on a number is a negative, self-fulfilling affirmation.

Here are some positive affirmations:
This is the best time of my life.
It's going to be a good day.
Everything is going to work out.

There is a lesson here.  I'm still very resistant to the message.  If the message doesn't come from me then it's a bullshit message.

Shake My Booty

Teach:          To show (someone) the way; to pass on knowledge to.
Lesson:        Something that serves as a warning or encouragement. (Ed. Note: My, that covers                        each end of the spectrum).
Surrender:  To give up into the power, control, or possession of another.

I still can't figure out what the lesson is.  Maybe the lesson is to quit trying to figure out what the fucking lesson is.  

Maybe it's that pain is inevitable but suffering is optional.

One of the troubles plaguing people like me is that we're used to applying ourselves systematically in an effort to accomplish something, and frequently accomplishing it. This can be a good thing and it can be a curse.  I'm the guy lying at the base of a brick wall, bloodied and unconscious, because I couldn't admit that my plan of busting through to the other side by ramming my head into the wall, repeatedly and with great force, wasn't a very good plan.

"But it's my plan!" I wail in protest.  "I thought it up all by myself.  It'll work if I just stick to it!"

Maybe the lesson is that I don't always get what I want.  If so I say this: What a stupid lesson! 

Maybe it's that I need to be patient until I understand what the answer is.  No!  I know what all the answers are already!  The problem is god isn't following the script that I've so carefully put together. 

Reminds me of listening to one of my brothers in recovery give some annoying spiel in a meeting and fuming about its content.  My lesson isn't contained in the words - my lesson is that I need to practice tolerance and patience and compassion.  My higher power delivers my lessons with some subtlety.

Maybe the lesson is that a roadblock in my path leads me down a different path.  Maybe a better one.  I don't change anything until I'm under duress.  Change is hard.  It's hard to change behavior.  

Sometimes I need a kick in the booty.