We Become Merlin, Lord Of The Geeks...

the Man is no longer a Man
in this day and age
he is a strange Middle-Aged Boy
an Aging Adolescent
hair going grey
with the hours whittled away
on Xbox video games

the Man that is a Man
is of a bygone age
The Real Man in the films of old
Age-ed Anachronism
strong and proud and brave
standing tall to face the day
and keep the wolves at bay

that I am a Man-who-is-not-a-Man
a product of this modern age
has vexed my Heart and Soul
my Arrested Ascension
how can I always play
when a Real Man works all day
but really who's to say?

the Boy is also a Man
in our culture at this stage
in truth both young and old
Advancing Adolescence
we get to play our lives away
yet still have bills to pay
the balance of the middle way

I am a Boy and I am a Man
by internal and external age
work only to play is my road
an Admirable Aspiration
that I get to live My Way
a little boyhood every day
is the great gift of this age

Fuck it
I'll be okay

Goodbye, Mork...

I had to add just this one more, for posterity.  It's just too perfect.

Carpe Diem, My Captain...

I really don't understand why the death of Robin Williams is hitting me so hard.  As shocked as I was to hear of his death, I was (and still remain) almost as shocked by the depth of my reaction to it.  I mean, sure I've felt saddened by the death of other celebrities before.  I remember being particularly saddened by the death of Heath Ledger, and more recently, Philip Seymour Hoffman.  But I've never been moved to tears like this before.  Celebrities are, by nature, almost fictional characters to us themselves; always removed from our actual lives by cameras and screens.  (I think that might have something to do with why it feels so strange whenever you see one in person - it's almost like TV or a movie coming to life!)  And since we don't really know them personally, there's only so much their death can move us.

Or so I thought.

I don't know why this one hurts so much.  Maybe it's because I grew up with him?  Because I've enjoyed him so much for my entire life?  I remember the rainbow Mork suspenders I had when I was five years old.  (My first cosplay, I guess?)  I remember seeing Popeye in the theaters with my parents just a few years later, and loving it completely.  I have the same memories of Good Morning, Vietnam.  And Hook.  (Oh, Peter Pan!  Why did you have to grow up?!)  I watched Mrs. Doubtfire and Jumanji over and over, just because of the way it delighted both the boy and the man in me at the same time.

And I've seen Dead Poets Society so many times I can practically quote the whole movie.  I don't know when I'll be able to watch that one again now.  At the very least, I know I'll never be able to see it the same way again.

Maybe it's because it was apparently a suicide?  It's possible.  Might be the connection to my own mother's death.  But I haven't reacted this way to other suicides or overdoses, so why this one?  Maybe it's just the fact that suicide adds that final crack of heartbreak to the story.  We didn't just lose one of the greats forever; we lost him to himself, to his own demons, to his own sickness.  It feels like there must've been something that could've saved him.  It feels like it didn't have to end this way.  And it touches us all because, let's face it, haven't each and every one of us been there, or somewhere close to it, at least once in our lives?  But if we could survive it, then why couldn't he?

I think it's true that there are few things more sad in this life, than a funny man, with a broken heart.  His mentor, Jonathan Winters, knew that only too well.  But he survived it anyways.  It's too bad he couldn't be there to help his friend, who clearly needed him more than anyone knew.

Like so, so many of us today, I feel the need to pour my heart out to the memory of this funny man, who's been there my whole life, in some vain and desperate attempt to figure out just what in the fuck it means to live without him now.

Below, I've collected some of my favorites that other people have been sharing today.  Some are funny, some are poignant, some are heart-breaking.  But they all made me feel something.  And that's helped, at least a little.

Here's hoping it can do the same for any of you.

Every time I hear a siren I still say "that's my ride." Thank you Robin Williams. I wish your ride had not arrived.
— John Hodgman (@hodgman) August 11, 2014

Spontaneous tribute appearing at the bench in Boston, made famous from the scene in Good Will Hunting.

We mourn the loss of our friend Robin Williams, who always made us laugh and smile. pic.twitter.com/UOY8LTjVRA
— Sesame Street (@sesamestreet) August 11, 2014

"Robin Williams is not dead, he is just waiting in the jungle until somebody rolls a 5 or 8." -testingonetwothreetesting, via imgur



"One of the funniest people alive died from sadness." - chili1179, via imgur

Nanu nanu.
— SarcasticRover (@SarcasticRover) August 11, 2014

Come on in Rob. I got you.
— Jesus Christ (@jesus) August 11, 2014

The first comment on this image, from NancyNevada, I think says it all:  "When Peter Pan dies, don't tell us to grow up."

Goodbye pal.  Thanks for everything.
— Louis C.K. (@louisck) August 12, 2014

This was reportedly posted to Disney's FB page this morning.  Heart-wrenching.

"But doctor, I AM Pagliacci." That's the only way this makes sense. Can't stand thinking of him being that sad. #RIPRobinWilliams
— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) August 11, 2014

And finally, this is how I always want to remember him:



Your barbaric YAWP! was heard around the world, sir, and inspired MILLIONS.

And you will always be my captain.

Gaze Deep Into My Navel And Despair...

How am I supposed to grow up?

I want to grow up.  I really do.  No, more than that, I need to.  I need to grow the fuck up.  I'm almost forty years old, but I still see myself as if I were twenty-five.  That might sound appealing on some level, at first; "young at heart" and all that.  And maybe it would be, if that's what I wanted for myself.  But it isn't.  I want to grow up.  I need to grow up, because I can't keep living like I'm twenty-five.  I'm not twenty-five anymore.  I can't eat like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  I can't move like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  I can't party like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  Fuck, I can't even sleep like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  It all hurts me now in a way that it never did, and I can feel myself breaking down at an astonishing rate, as if the force of Entropy inside me were being fed by some radioaction of chemical combustion.  Accelerated Decrepitude.  But on the other hand, trying to live within my almost-forty means, while still feeling like a twenty-five year-old inside, is so monumentally depressing that I can't even fucking bother; I always just end up feeling like I already have one foot in the grave.

A twenty-five year-old trapped in a forty year-old body.  How incredibly pathetic.  How incredibly modern.  How incredibly privileged.

But how am I supposed to grow up?  I don't know.  My observations tell me that for most people, this happens as a natural side-effect of breeding.  That creating a child shifts all perspectives, and forces the new parent into a maturity that cannot be achieved through any other means.  That makes sense to me.  I can understand that.

But I'm never going to have any children.  So what am I supposed to do?  How am I supposed to force myself to achieve a state that, for most people, requires quite possibly the single most life-altering event they will ever experience in order to achieve?

Sometimes I think, maybe I don't actually need to grow up?  If I don't have any children, then what do I need to grow up for?  Why do I feel this need anyways?  I can only assume it is because I reflexively compare my life to the model my parents set for me.  When I look at myself, and try to judge whether I'm doing well or not, I compare it to the life they lived.  And I always feel myself coming up short.

They went to college.  They got degrees.  They worked hard.  (My father still works harder than almost anyone else I know, and while my mother never worked as hard as he did, she still inarguably worked harder than I do now.)  They bore and raised children.  They owned houses, with yards and multiple floors and everything.

But I dropped out of college.  I have no degrees, and probably never will.  Yeah, I have a career that doesn't leave me wanting to kill myself, but I still hate it, just because it's work, and I hate work of any kind; I hate being forced to sell myself every day in order to sustain myself.  I don't own a house.  I own an absurdly tiny condo that I hate and will never be able to sell for as much as I paid for it.  I am almost certain I will end up having to live in that tiny little box for the rest of my life, watching it deteriorate around me, with me - and that thought terrifies me on a regular basis.

And even these modest achievements - a well-paying job that I can sort of do well and tolerate, and a tiny little condo I'm trapped in like a prison cell - even these barely note-worthy accomplishments I never actually earned; I didn't work hard to achieve these things.  I got this job because some well-meaning middle-aged women that I worked with took pity on me, and talked to their bosses, and told them they knew this kid they thought would do well as a programmer.  And they were right - I am a good programmer.  At least, I'm alright.  But again, not because I try to be, or because I studied or worked hard or went to school or anything else.  I just have a natural talent for logic and pattern recognition and symbology, and so I am a naturally decent programmer.  I could be a great programmer if I wanted to be; if I tried to be and put forth the effort.  But I don't.  Because I don't care.  I only want to put forth the minimum amount of effort to get by, and save the rest for indulging in my life's pleasures.

And it's a similar story with my "home."  I didn't work hard and save money every day so that I could eventually put a down payment on my dream home.  My grandfather died, and since my mother (his daughter) was already dead herself, the portion of his life's wealth that should have been hers (and he had worked hard all his life to achieve that wealth) came to me instead.  And I used all of that money to buy the apartment I had been living in for almost a decade at that point.  The biggest, most "adult" accomplishment of my life - becoming a home-owner - and it only happened because I was in a position to profit off of the deaths of two of my close family members.  And so it has never felt like an accomplishment to me.  It feels like blood money.

(It's true that I performed magick to get the job and the money and the apartment, but even taking the assumption that my magick worked doesn't help the situation any.  Magick is a short-cut.  It's easy compared to actually working hard to learn or to save money.  And it's fun to do, and for that reason alone I wanted to do it, whether it worked or not.  So even assuming that I came by these things through sorcery, it still doesn't feel like an accomplishment to me.  It still doesn't feel like I really earned them.  It feels like I cheated.)

And I will almost certainly never see that much money again in my lifetime.  I can barely maintain a savings of more than a couple of thousand dollars at a time.  I live paycheck-to-paycheck, even with my fairly significant salary.  I've always been that way.  If I have money, I want to spend it on making myself feel good right now, and I can't seem to deny myself comfort or happiness in the present, in order to save it for some undefined future.  As I've written here before, I feel like the Grasshopper, fiddling away as the first snow begins to fall.

But why do I determine the value of my life by comparing it to my parents'?  They were completely different people, living in a completely different time.  And who wanted completely different things from their life than I want from mine.  And I know this.  But I still can't shake this feeling that I am somehow failing at life, because I seem to remember my parents being so much better off in their twenties than I am in my thirties; or will be in my forties.  I just want to be happy, like anyone else.  But I constantly and consistently feel that the things that make me happy aren't good for me.  That they are self-indulgent, or immature, or masturbatory.  That I am a bad person for living my life the way that I do.  But trying to live my life any other way always leaves me just as miserable, if only in a different way.

I just want to spend my life relaxing in the bathhouse, playing games, reading, writing, watching TV and movies, sleeping, eating, drinking and getting high, and punctuating the whole thing with the occasional orgasm.  That is really all I want from life.

And I feel like a worthless waste of a human being for feeling that way.  I hate myself for feeling that way.  But even so, I have no idea how to change it; I have no idea how to want anything else.

Okay, sure, I want other things.  Bigger things.  I want to have a big house with a yard and a basement and an attic.  I want to be able to support myself through writing, or some other form of creative expression.  (If only I could make a living playing games!)  I want a sense of accomplishment.  I want to feel like my life mattered, in any way.  I want to feel a sense of confidence that when I'm gone, I will have made some mark on the world that is all my own; that I will leave behind something more than a pile of carbon dust.  I do want all of these things.  But when I think about them, and I envision the monumental amount of work it would take to even try to achieve any of them - with no guarantee of success! - I lose any hope I may have had about ever actually achieving them.

Because I know that I will never do that work.  I just don't have it in me.  Achieving anything of any real significance requires a single-minded devotion that I just don't have.  Have never had.

Because deep-down, I don't want to be great.  All I really want is to be comfortable.  And I guess I am.  So I should be happy, then, right?  Then why do I feel this way?  I just wish I could learn to be happy with what I have, instead of hating myself for not being able to be great.

I guess what it all really comes down to is this:  I feel lazy, and I hate myself for being lazy, but I don't know how to make myself be anything else.  And I hate myself for that, too.

+          +          +

Or maybe I'm just depressed because winter is coming, and I'm all out of drugs, and I can feel both of these things gnawing at my bones.

Neighbors...

Walking home from my appointment at dusk.  Walking down my street, in my neighborhood, on my block.  Group of kids in front of me, walking slowly, taking up the sidewalk.  I walk around them, between the parking meters and the parked cars.  Passing the tiny girl up front, she yells at me, "You best say 'escuse me!'  I got kids here!  An' you don't say 'escuse me??'"  I hadn't bumped into her.  Hadn't touched her at all.  Her kids, a boy and girl about five or six years old, were on the other side of her from me; I was nowhere near them.  She hadn't had to so much as move an inch to avoid me at all.  I had simply walked around her.  And now she's angrily demanding an apology from me, as if I had done something inexcusably rude.  Never in my life has anyone ever said "excuse me" for simply walking past me.  For bumping into me, or getting in my way, certainly.  But not for simply walking by.  Nor has anyone in my entire life ever expected me to excuse myself or apologize simply for walking around them.  She's deliberately provoking me.  And I don't understand why.  I haven't done anything wrong.  But I'm suddenly very aware that each of these kids is black, and I am white.  And this confrontation we're having is our neighborhood, to the core.  This is our home.

I've lived in my neighborhood for over fifteen years now.  This girl staring me down with angry eyes looks to only be about twenty, give or take five years.  It's possible that I was living here before she was even born.  I went to school in this neighborhood when I was a child.  I feel like this is as much my home as hers.  But she has no way of knowing this.  This has been a traditionally black neighborhood for over a hundred and fifty years.  Back then, it was the Freemen's quarter; the first people to settle on this particular piece of ground were freed slaves.  This has been a black neighborhood from the very first brick.  But a few years ago, it started to get very, very gentrified.  Rich, white developers came in and swooped up cheap properties, fixed them up with marble counter-tops and hardwood floors and halogen track lights.  Sold them to rich, white hipsters who wanted to live close to the burgeoning downtown bar scene.  Back then, I was the only white person living in my apartment complex.  Developers bought it and turned it into a condo.  We all got letters saying we needed to buy our apartments or find someplace else to live.  I bought mine.  Everyone else left.  And since then the neighborhood has been this uneasy mix of poor black living side-by-side with rich white.  And I've seen it.  Seen exactly this happening before.  But this is the first time I've experienced it myself.  She doesn't know me anymore than I know her.  We're both making assumptions about each other.  She has no way of knowing that I went to school around the corner, or that I've lived on this block my entire adult life.  All she sees is another doughy white, nerdy-looking hipster who had the fucking nerve to walk too close to her without showing her proper respect.

Things escalate very quickly.  "I'm sorry, I wasn't trying to be rude.  I just walked around you."  "You best watch who you talkin' to 'for I smack yo' fat ass!"  There's no good way to respond here.  What am I supposed to do?  Fight these kids?  Let them beat me up?  Why?  So they can feel better about themselves?  So I can feel better about feeling better than them?  And there's clearly no reasoning with someone who, within a matter of seconds, is willing to resort to threats of physical violence with someone twice her size for something as minor as stepping around them.  Talking about it any further is clearly pointless.  There's no reasoning with a bully.  I learned that lesson the hard way, long ago.  No choice but to simply end this as quickly and quietly as possible.  I turn and walk away.  To more taunts and threats thrown at my back.  Victory cheers for having driven out the interloper, the outsider.  For having proved her strength and dominance to the rest of the tribe.  For having earned back the respect I somehow stripped her of by walking past her.  I'm instantly ten years old again.  On the playground again.  Having my dignity stolen by a pack of fifth grade delinquents again.  Being called "fat ass" again.  Feeling like an outcast again.  Feeling scared again.  For the first time in fifteen years, I feel scared in my own neighborhood.  For the first time ever, I feel like this isn't my home, and never will be.  I will never be welcome here.  I let them make me feel like an outsider in my own neighborhood.  I let these kids make me feel scared in my own home.  I don't feel like I had any choice.  And there's some part of me that feels I deserve it.

Lost In Recvoery...

Ok, so, in hindsight, clearly not the most righteous stance I've ever taken.  But I still don't think I did anything wrong.  And I just can't help but bristle at the idea that my attempt to view an explicit media with clear artistic merit has caused me to get lumped into the same group as the guy who spends his lunch hour spanking it in his office.  And it really bothers me that, because of this, I now have to fear for my job.  That just seems wrong to me, but I'll drop the subject now, I swear.

In other news, I think I'm going to go back to a SMART meeting tonight, if I can get home in time.  (Yesterday's Inauguration has snarled traffic all through the surrounding area.)  I haven't been to a SMART meeting in months.  It got to the point where they became more of a hassle then they were worth.  I never got very much out of the meetings, and I often felt worse afterwards, which struck me as rather counter-productive.  And having to give up every Tuesday night (and Tuesday morning for that matter, as I had to get to work early to make sure I could leave early so that I could get to the meetings on time) became rather tiresome.  I wanted to make sure I attended enough meetings on a regular basis to establish myself in the group, and to be sure to give them a fair chance (and not make any decisions based on first impressions), and get a sense of what I could expect from SMART in general, and from this group in particular.  And I accomplished that.  And if I'd felt as if I was having trouble maintaining my sobriety, or that attending these meetings would help me maintain my sobriety in any way, then I would've continued to attend.  But, as neither of those were the case, I decided to take my Tuesday nights back, knowing that this group was always there, should I ever need help again.

And now, I think I do.  I had always assumed that, in regards to my sobriety, the only person's reaction I needed to be concerned about, was my own.  It never occurred to me that other people that I care about might have as difficult a time dealing with my sobriety as I did.  I've known that my wife has been missing her "drinking buddy" since I sobered up; we established that early on, in just the first couple of months.  But, honestly, I didn't really think much of it; it just didn't seem that important.  She didn't seem all that upset about it, and my focus, frankly, especially in those early months, had to be on maintaining my sobriety, and not on whether or not She had someone to get drunk with on Friday nights.  I don't think either of us realized just how important it really was to Her, or that it was actually about much more than just missing Her "drinking buddy" - it was about my entire personality changing, again, and for the first time, changing in respect to the ways that I treat Her.  And as the months have dragged on and on, and the situation has remained unchanged, Her feelings about it have apparently grown worse and worse, until we are at the point now where it has become a painful and difficult problem in our marriage.

And I don't know what to do about it.  I thought things had unarguably changed for the better.  I'm much more even-keeled now than I ever have been before.  Yes, I still have my ups and downs, but everyone does.  But whereas before every emotion was turned up to eleven, now I never get much higher than a four or five.  I used to be full volume every minute of every day.  Every high was the highest high possible, and every low was the lowest I could get.  And in terms of how I treated Her, that meant that when I was happy with Her, she was the Sun, Moon, and Stars to me, and I loved her more than Romeo ever loved Juliet; my entire world revolved around her.  (Which sounds beautifully romantic at first, but try living up to such ridiculous and fantastical standards for ten years.  It can't be done.  And I did a lot of damage to our relationship trying to keep her up on that pedestal for so many years.)  But it also means that when I wasn't happy with her, I hated her, because she was completely ruining my entire fucking life.

Now, my feelings never get that ridiculously, over-the-top intense.  I still love her, and I still sometimes get angry with her, but I don't treat her like the be-all-end-all of my existence, nor do I treat her like the worst thing that ever happened to me.  All of my feelings for her, both good and bad, are much softer and quieter, much more reasonable and responsible, much more practical; and so completely fucking boring.  Because while both of us are clearly glad that I no longer feel such intense anger at her every time she makes me feel anything bad, from her point of view, my world used to revolve around Her.  And now it doesn't.  And that hurts her.  It hurts in a way she has a very difficult time understanding, or articulating.  And it's very confusing.  Because while she's certainly glad that I don't yell at her anymore, and while she is definitely very proud of me for all that I've accomplished these past eight months, she's also really hurt and upset; she feels rejected, because, from her point of view, I don't seem to love her as much as I used to.  Which isn't true at all; I still love her just as much as I used to, I just don't express it as intensely.  But how can she be expected to know what I'm really feeling, if I've completely changed the way that I express those feelings?

And then, on top of all of the hurt and rejection she's already feeling, she ends up feeling very guilty, too.  She feels guilty because she understands that my sobriety is clearly a good thing for me, and she wants to be able to support me in that and feel proud of me.  And by feeling hurt and upset in response to my sobriety, regardless of how else she feels about it, she feels like she is doing something wrong, and hurting me, and undermining my sobriety.  Which, unfortunately, I have to agree with, in a sense.  It definitely hurts me to know that I'm hurting her.  And it definitely makes me want to drink, because I feel like that would make her happy (and I'm kind of hard-wired to want to make her happy).  But I don't think she's doing anything wrong; on that point we disagree.  I can't blame her for how she feels, at all.  I would almost certainly feel the same thing in her place.  And I think it can be said that, almost certainly, she has been the one the most hurt, she has been the one who has lost the most, she has been the one who has sacrificed the most, for my sobriety.  And I could never expect her to just be a hundred percent happy about that.  I feel horribly naive for not anticipating it ahead of time.

But now, what do I do?  How am I supposed to respond to this?  How should we deal with it?  What can we do about it?  In the addiction/recovery cycle, most people end up feeling like they lost their loved ones to the addiction side of things, when the addict reaches the point where the only thing they are capable of caring about anymore is using.  We're really fortunate that we've never had to face that problem.  But I've never heard of anyone feeling like they lost their loved one to sobriety.  In all of my experience with addiction and recovery, I've never heard anyone say, "Now that you're sober, you don't love me the way that you used to."  And now that we're unfortunate enough to be faced with that problem, I have no idea how to deal with it.  I have no experience to draw on.

And, so, back to SMART.  I'm hoping someone there has some experience with this, or has at least heard of it before.  At the very least, I'm hoping to come away with some perspective.

Will me luck.

I'll Stand Before The Lord Of Song...

I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty in the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

Baby I have been here before
I know this room, I've walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you.
I've seen your flag on the marble arch
Love is not a victory march
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

Maybe there’s a God above
But all I’ve ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
It’s not a cry you can hear at night
It’s not someone who has seen the light
It’s a cold and it’s a lonely Hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

There was a time when you let me know
What's really going on below
But now you never show it to me, do you?
Remember when I moved in you
The holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

          -"Hallelujah"
            Leonard Cohen, Various Positions

When We Fall...

It's amazing how quickly you can fall back out of shape.

Just a few weeks of not working out (one week at the AGM, one week recovering from being sick, one week having all free time and energy eaten up by work, etc.) and suddenly I feel like I'm back to square one.  I know it's not that simple, and experience tells me that I will actually bounce back into form a lot quicker than it took to get into shape in the first place - but, still, this morning was... kinda scary, if I'm honest.

I thought I was taking it light.  Not even considering the weights at this point, since I'm just trying to get back into the swing of things after such a long absence.  Just figured I'd do my usual fifteen minutes on the elliptical (with a five minute cool-down afterwards) that I start every workout with.  Maybe I'd push it to twenty minutes, if I was feeling up to it.  That is really not much at all; I used to do thirty to forty-five minutes on the elliptical, before I started incorporating the weights into my routine.

But this fifteen minutes was hard.  Much more difficult than I expected.  I was really pushing myself with everything I had just to get through it.  But I did it; I made it through the whole thing, and was relieved to reach the cool-down afterwards.  (No way was I going to try for twenty!)  But as soon as I slowed my pace, I knew something was wrong.  My heart was racing much more than I'm used to.  And I could feel my pulse in my head.  I was having a hard time catching my breath, and I was starting to get dizzy.

Pretty immediately, I climbed down off the machine, and went and sat down on the floor with my back to the wall.  I held my water bottle (which, thankfully, I fill with ice-water before every workout) all around my neck, to cool down the blood in my carotid artery, going to my brain.  I tried to breath slow and deep and even, and waited for the dizziness to pass.  Which it did after just a couple of minutes.

Now, admittedly, I was having a hard time getting a decent reading off the heart-rate monitor on that machine.  (For the whole workout it had been giving me all these low-ball readings that I knew could not possibly be correct, and that made me mistrustful of the other readings that seemed like they could possibly be reasonable.  And then at the end, after not giving me a reading higher then 155bpm for the entire workout, it suddenly gave me a reading of 180bpm, which is way into my red zone, and much higher than I would ever usually let myself get to.  So, was that an anomalous reading, like all the low-balls?  Or was that the first true reading I'd gotten all workout?)  But, still, just a matter of a few weeks ago this was my warm-up, for crying out loud.  And it just floored me!  Literally!

So, obvious lesson-learned is that I need to take it easy, and start slower.  At the same time, my little brother and his girlfriend just challenged me to a contest to see who could be the first one to lose fifteen pounds.  And that's definitely a motivator.  But I have to remember to be careful.  I'm not twenty-five anymore.

And I won't be able to gloat if I'm dead.

What I Should Have Said...

I realize now that I failed at SMART last night.

Because it was my last meeting before the AGM, I felt like I should continue talking about my concerns about that (which unfortunately I can't discuss here - erg).  But, since my meeting with my old Temple the weekend before last, and my reflections on that meeting over the last week, I largely don't have any more concerns about the AGM left to discuss.  I feel pretty confident and excited about it right now.  So, I mentioned that.  And talked a little about how tired I was because of work lately.  And that was about it for my sharing.

But now I know that what I should have talked about, was the fact that throughout the entire meeting, I couldn't stop thinking about how badly I wanted to get the Tuesday night ribs 'n' wings dinner special at the bbq place around the corner as soon as the meeting was over.

I have a serious love/hate relationship with this bbq place.  They are Satanic.  Even their name sounds sinister:  Black Hog.  Their bbq is so good and it is so not what I should be eating right now.  I live very nearby the place, and it seems as if they've intentionally timed their cooking to coincide with my commute, because every night when I get home from work, the first thing I notice is the smell of woodsmoke and charred meat.  Fucking bastards.  Here I am, trying to eat right and get in shape, and every night they viciously assault me with their deliciousness.  It's cruel.

And last night was no different.  As soon as I got out of my car - BAM - like a smack across the face, there came that intoxicating aroma of flame-scorched flesh.  And what's worse, I had a pretty shitty day yesterday, and by that point I was tired and wasn't in a very good mood.  And all I had to look forward to for the rest of the night, was a SMART meeting that I really didn't feel like going to, and a pre-packaged, frozen dinner afterwards.  And that made bbq seem like an even better idea.  A little treat, just to pick myself up.  I deserved it, didn't I?

But that's exactly the problem, and exactly why I couldn't stop thinking about it all through the meeting.  I wasn't really hungry, and I wasn't really craving bbq.  I was trying to make myself feel better.  I was trying to elevate my mood.  And I've found that now that I'm no longer using mood-elevating substances like drugs and booze, I'm more and more lately turning to food to achieve the same results.  It's just another example of my inability to endure any unhappiness at all, and my compulsive use of external influences (or substances) that I know are not good for me in the long run, just to make myself feel better right now.

And it's really pissing me off.

I'm working really hard to try and get in shape right now, and every time I give in to my need to make myself feel better by eating some totally-delicious-and-totally-bad-for-me food, I feel as if I'm un-doing all of that hard work, and making all of that pain and sacrifice worth nothing.  And more and more I'm feeling like a failure whenever I do this, for once again failing to endure even the most minor of emotional discomfort, and for sacrificing my health and shooting myself in the foot just because I cannot abide any unhappiness.  And those feelings of guilt and failure end up tainting my experience of the meal, so in the end, I don't end up feeling better anyways.  It's the exact same cycle I'm experiencing in my recovery from drug and alcohol abuse.

So, I sat there throughout the meeting, dreaming of ways to get out of there early and sneak off to get high on bbq, and knowing full-well that I shouldn't.  But I managed to stay until the end.  And then the whole walk home I wrestled with it.  I wanted so badly to keep walking and round the corner and pick up a bag of ribs and wings and bring them back home and devour them.

But I was too aware of the problem.  Too aware of what I was really doing, and what it really meant.  In the end, I couldn't bring myself to do it, in the exact same way that I can't seem to bring myself to take a drink, even when I really want to:  it would cost me so much self-esteem and self-respect to do it - to fail at this task and take that drink, or eat that nasty-delicious food - that it's just not worth doing anymore.

So, instead of making myself feel better with food, I tried to make myself feel better by focusing on the positive aspects of my decision.  I tried to feel good about the fact that I was saving money by not eating out, again.  (We eat out every week, sometimes two or three times.  There are a dozen great restaurants within a two block radius of us, and it is so hard to make ourselves eat our crappy grocery-store dinners when we have money in our pockets and stupid-delicious food all around us.)  I tried to feel good about the fact that I wasn't undoing all my pain and effort from my workouts.  I tried to feel good about the fact that I was making progress, and actually succeeding in my efforts to endure unhappiness for a change, rather than immediately balming it away by any means necessary.  And I did feel good about those things.  But none of them helped to improve my mood the way I wanted, and I was still feeling like a grumpy old shit when I went to bed last night.

But today?

Today I feel good.

Today, I'm proud of myself for what I accomplished last night.

And just like with my working-out, I feel stronger today for the pain I forced myself to endure yesterday.

We May Just Go Where No One's Been...

This is a song about magick, life, and the endless possibilities inherent in humanity.

Black
then
white are
all I see
in my infancy.
Red and yellow then came to be,
reaching out to me.
Lets me see.

As below, so above and beyond, I imagine
drawn beyond the lines of reason.
Push the envelope.
Watch it bend.

Over-thinking,
over-analyzing,
separates the body from the mind.
Withering
my intuition,
missing opportunities and I must
Feed my will
to feel that moment.
Drawing way outside the lines.

Black
then
white are
all I see
in my infancy.
Red and yellow then came to be,
reaching out to me.
lets me see
there is
so much
more and
beckons me
to look through to these
infinite possibilities.

As below, so above and beyond, I imagine
drawn outside the lines of reason.
Push the envelope.
Watch it bend.

Over-thinking,
over-analyzing,
separates the body from the mind.
Withering
my intuition,
leaving opportunities behind.

Feed my will to
feel this moment
urging me to cross the line.
Reaching out to embrace
the random.
Reaching out to embrace
whatever may come.

I embrace my
desire to...
I embrace my
desire to
feel the rhythm, to
feel connected
enough to step aside and
weep like a widow, to
feel inspired, to
fathom the power, to
witness the beauty, to
bathe in the fountain, to
swing on the spiral, to
swing on the spiral, to

swing on the spiral of
our divinity and
still be a human.

With my feet upon the ground
I lose myself between the sounds
and open wide to suck it in,
I feel it move across my skin.
I'm reaching up
and reaching out,
I'm reaching for
the random or
whatever will bewilder me.
Whatever will bewilder me.
And following our will and whim
we may just go where no one's been.
We'll ride the spiral to the end
and may just go where no one's been.

Spiral out. Keep going.

Spiral out. Keep going.

Spiral out. Keep going.

Spiral out. Keep going.

               -"Lateralus"
                 Tool, Lateralus

The Thirtieth Olympiad Of The Modern Era...

I know the Olympics are cheesy.  I know this.  But I can't help it.  I love them.

I love everything about them.  The spectacle, the melodrama, the simple poetry of humans from all over the world gathering together for the sole purpose of doing amazing things.  I spend every fourth year looking forward to them.  And when they finally start, it's like two weeks of Christmas in July.

It started when I was a kid.  The '92 Summer Olympics in Barcelona.  The summer in between my sophomore and junior years of high school.  The two weeks of our vacation at the beach happened to coincide that year with the two weeks of the Olympics.  As a teenager, I was living a nocturnal existence; staying up all night doing nothing, and then sleeping all day in order to rest up for another night of doing nothing the next evening.  There's nothing to do in the middle of the night in the small beach town where we stayed, and the TV in the cottage we were living in only got about six channels.  And, of course, the only thing on was the Olympics.  They played Olympic coverage almost all night.  (And all day, but who was awake to see that??)  I literally had nothing better to do, and a night full of hours to kill, so I started watching.

Late-night coverage of the Olympic Games at the time tended to favor the less-popular sports, giving recaps of the events of the day that hadn't made it into the daytime and primetime broadcasts.  Handball.  Water Polo.  Badminton.  Archery.  Women's Volleyball.  Sports that you'd never see on television back then.  And I found myself, quite despite my desire to be an apathetic misanthrope, getting really, really into it.  I fell in love with the stories of the athletes, and I cheered their amazing accomplishments.  And I felt a sense of pride in my country (a completely foreign and somewhat nauseating experience for me at the time, I assure you) whenever Team USA triumphed.  It didn't matter if it was a sport that I would never have cared about in a million years if I'd had anything better to do.  It was about being fortunate enough to witness humanity's best, doing their best - pushing themselves as hard as they could, striving to be the very best in the whole world - and having the results of all their efforts and hard work displayed on the single greatest stage we have ever constructed, for all the world to see, whether they fell short, or were victorious.  I was hooked from that moment on.

I've always been a drama-queen, and never more so than when I was a teenager.  And, as cheesy as it was, and is, it was also, undeniably, the greatest drama I had ever seen.  Have ever seen.  And that is in no small part due to the fact that it is not a story, crafted artfully from a fertile imagination.  Better than that, this drama is real.

Men and women from all over the world pushing themselves as hard as they can every single day for four years with the single-minded purpose of being the very best in the entire world at what they do.  And every four years the entire world gathers to watch these people, the best in the world, compete and crown their champions.  The best in the world.  None faster.  None stronger.  No one.

What a great fucking story!

And that amazing story is made up of countless other single, just-as-amazing individual stories.  Kerri Strug sticking her landing on a sprained ankle to win gold at the '96 Atlanta games.  The '04 games returning to Athens.  Michael Phelps at the '08 Beijing games winning eight gold medals, more than any other person has ever done before or since, and breaking his own World Record by more than two seconds!  (He set new World Records in six out of the eight events he swam in!)  And Usain Bolt in the same games, setting new World Records in both the 100m and 200m.  (Whenever I remember that, I can't help but think of one of my favorite scenes from the pilot episode of Sports Night.  As a runner half-a-world away is setting a new world record, Casey McCall, an anchor for a late-night Sportscenter-like TV show, calls his young son, waking him up in the middle of the night, and instructs him to hurry up and turn on Daddy's channel.  Then he says, "I'll call you tomorrow and tell you all about it.  But for now, you just watch him run.  He's not doing much.  He's just running faster than any man's ever run before.")

And those are my absolute favorite Olympics moments - when I see that "WR" flash up on an athlete's results, and I realize that I've just seen a human being expand the boundaries of what is possible, and push themselves to do something that no other human being has ever been able to do before.  It is literally awe-inspiring, and I absolutely love it.

And I don't care if that makes me a cheeseball.

Good SMART...

Another part of getting back into my routine, was getting back to a SMART meeting last night, after missing the previous two weeks.  Rather surprisingly, this one actually made me feel a little better.

Talked about my recent relapse and depression, and my struggle to learn endurance, and to allow myself to simply accept unhappiness in those situations where I can't find any relief, rather than falling back into the habit of using drugs to create a synthetic happiness to relieve those feelings.  (I feel like I've made progress, because drugs used to be my first response to those feelings, and now they are only a last-resort when all else has failed.  But, still, it's unhealthy, and more to the point, it doesn't work - it doesn't actually relieve the feeling or make me feel better - and I'm tired of it, and I want to break this habit and learn to accept pain and unhappiness when I have to.)  I tried to keep it brief, because one of the last times I talked, the Facilitator actually cut me off after fifteen minutes for taking up too much time.  But despite my efforts, my check-in seemed to spark a rather intense and lengthy discussion that involved almost the entire group, and ended up lasting for a full half-hour.

And in that thirty minutes, I actually got some good advice.  For instance, not to even bother to give people a reason that I'm not drinking, etc.  And if they press me for a reason, to just say that I don't feel like it right now.  There's no need to say any more than that; and, in fact, often times giving people a reason will only invite them to debate said reason in an effort to try to convince you to join them.  So, don't give them a chance.

Someone described my condition as a "relief-seeking missile," which I thought was rather amusing.

Also, someone suggested that these past two weeks of depression are actually an example of the endurance I'm struggling to learn.  I hadn't thought of it that way.  In thinking about it, it occurred to me that I'd been able to endure these past two weeks because I felt like I had no other choice.  I wanted it to end, and the only way to do that was to let it run its course, and then jump up at the very first sign of emotional elevation.  And at the cabin, I hadn't been able to endure, and (probably not coincidentally) I believed then that I did have a choice; that I could choose to get high and that would make me feel better.  And, of course, that's not really true.  It made me feel a little better, sort of, for a very short time, and then made me feel much, much worse for a good, long while after that.  So, I think part of the key to getting through those triggering situations like the cabin, is to tell myself that I don't really have a choice.  I want to be happy and healthy right now, and the only way to do that is to endure those periods of suffering when they arise.  Just like I did for the past two weeks.

I was also reminded of the simple truth that the good times only exist because of the bad times; they only exist in relation to one another, so one can't exist without the other.  And therefore, the bad times only serve to make the good times that much better.  And that if I ever want to be happy, I have to allow myself to be unhappy once in a while, too.

And there was also a lot of general encouragement and congratulations and I'm-proud-of-you's just for being honest and telling my story.  (I guess this is difficult for a lot of people?  Because everyone seemed to be particularly amazed by it and proud of me for doing it.  But it's just really easy to be honest when you're shameless and generally don't care what people think of you.  Besides, if I'm not honest during these check-ins, then I'm just shooting myself in the foot and wasting my time, so what's the point of even being there?  If I'm not going to be honest, then I've got much better things that I could be doing with my Tuesday nights.)

After it was all over, I found that I felt a lot better about the past few weeks, and a lot better about myself.  Enough that I was actually surprised by the feeling.  I realized I'd actually made some progress with this experience, and that it wasn't just a setback.  And I felt a lot better about this process going forward.  I realized I was more hopeful about my chances of success now.

And all that made me realize that, for once, I was actually glad to be there.

Taking It...

Picking up my computer on the way home tonight, and spending the bulk of my night setting it up again.  I'm so happy I could shit my pants!

The yang to that happy yin seems to be my SMART meeting last night.  Every time I do my "check-in" lately (what they call taking your turn to speak) I just end up feeling embarrassed, and like I made an ass of myself.  And worse, I can't tell if I really did make an ass out of myself, or if I'm just being self-conscious.  Either way, the net result is that I end up feeling like I really don't want to go to these meetings anymore.  But I don't feel like I can stop, either.

I'm really not enjoying the experience; but, then again, is this an experience that you're really supposed to enjoy?  It's about learning and getting healthy, not having fun.  And I'd really like my Tuesday nights back (I could be volunteering at the planetarium if I didn't have to do this instead, which I'd much rather do), but inconvenience hardly seems like a good excuse to stop going.  You know what's really inconvenient?  A drug habit.

And I don't know if these meetings are doing me any good.  And that's the main reason why I still feel like I have to go:  I don't know if these meetings are doing me any good or not.  If I knew for a reasonable certainty that these meetings were not helping me much, then I would feel perfectly fine with deciding to stop going.  But if I stop now, without having answered that question, then I'm just quitting; I'm just giving up.  And as much as I'm not enjoying this, and as much as I don't seem to be getting much out of it beyond embarrassment, I'd be really upset with myself if I just gave up.

I keep coming back to this lesson again and again all over my life.  I think it's one of the big things I'm trying to tackle through this process.  It's not simply about not drinking and not getting high for the next year.  What I'm really trying to do, is learn how to take it.  When my life sucks, and I'm stuck doing things that I don't want to do, and I'm unhappy with the way things are going, and there's nothing I can do to change it, then just shut the fuck up and take it.  You can't be happy all the time.  Sometimes you have to do things that you don't want to do and that make you unhappy.  And when you ease those pains with chemicals, that makes you weak.  And you come to rely on those chemicals, because you're not strong enough to simply put up with those feelings of stress and depression and unhappiness on your own.

So, I'm learning endurance here.  I'm working out my "acceptance muscle," and it's getting stronger.  I'm a lot stronger than I used to be, because I never bothered to work it out at all before.  Whenever I had to use that muscle, and whenever it got sore, I'd soothe it with the painkillers of booze, and pot - and sometimes even actual painkillers.  But now I'm using it, and working it out, and getting stronger, and learning to accept that sometimes I have to just shut the fuck up, and take it, and do what I have to do, instead of what I want to do.

Like going to these stupid fucking meetings.

Requiem For A Snowflake...

Dear mother, Dear father
What is this hell
you have put me through?
Believer, deceiver
Day in, day out
Lived my life through you
Pushed onto me
what's wrong or right
Hidden from this thing
that they call life

Dear mother, Dear father
Every thought
I'd think you'd disapprove
Curator, dictator
Always censoring
my every move
Children are seen
but are not heard
Tear out everything inspired

Innocence
torn from me
without your shelter
Barred reality
I'm living blindly

Dear mother, Dear father
Time has frozen still
What's left of me?
Hear nothing, say nothing
Cannot face the fact
I think for me
No guarantee
it's life as-is
But damn you
for not giving me my chance

Dear mother, Dear father
Clipped my wings
before I learned to fly
Unspoiled, unspoken
I've outgrown
that fucking lullaby
Same thing
I've always heard from you
do as I say
not as I do

I'm in hell without you
Cannot cope without you two
Shocked at the world that I see
Innocent victim
Please rescue me

Dear mother, Dear father
Hidden in your world
you've made for me
I'm seething
I'm bleeding
Ripping wounds in me
that never heal
Undying spite
I feel for you
Living out this hell
you always knew...

NO!

                    -"Dyer's Eve"
                      Metallica

The Mighty Endorphin...

Day 3 of my new-and-improved workout routine.  Running harder and faster, really getting my heart rate up there.

Around about the 15-minute mark, I started to notice some changes.  It was starting to hurt less.  In fact, more than that - I was starting to feel pretty good!  The music I was listening to was just suddenly so awesome!  And my eyelids were getting sooo heavy.  I was getting really drowsy, but not sleepy, and I wasn't slowing down at all.  I was still pumping away at a furious pace, to match the beating of my heart - left, right, left, right, left right left right left right bang bang bang bang.  It felt more like nodding, that state where the opiate is so overwhelmingly pleasurable that the user repeatedly passes in and out of consciousness, or "nods off."

And that's when I realized it:  I was really high!

And while I enjoyed it, and while I knew I was doing something good for myself - and so I should just let myself enjoy this, could even consider it my reward for putting in the effort - there was a part of me that still felt bad about it and felt like I was doing something wrong.  And then I was right back to trying to answer that same question I keep coming back to:  if I'm still getting high, but just in different and less destructive ways, then am I really getting better?

If my goal here was to stop getting high in destructive and/or dangerous ways, then I could easily answer that question, "Yes, I am getting better."  But that isn't my goal.  My goal is to try and stop needing to get high all the time, period, regardless of method.  Because if I can't rid myself of the need to get high all the time, then when the healthy methods stop working as well for me, or when I get into a dark place again for one reason or another (we all have them, life is full of dark places we must traverse once in a while), then I'm going to turn to unhealthy methods again to satisfy that desire.

I'm not going to stop meditating, and I'm not going to stop studying Mathematics and other Sciences, and I'm not going to stop playing video games, and I'm not going to stop having awesome sex with Her, and I'm not going to stop writing, and I'm not going to stop working out.  So, if I am getting high off of these things, then I guess that means I have to learn how to live with that.

So, then, can I adjust my goal of trying to not get high at all, regardless of method?  Is that even a reasonable goal to have set myself?  Can I reasonably expect to be able to achieve that without moving to a cave somewhere and spending the rest of my life meditating like an itinerant sage?  Is getting high just something that I need in order to make my life feel worth living?  And if so, is that true for everyone, or just me?  What if the only real choice I have is the method I use?  And is that something I can live with?  No, I can live with it.  But is it something I can learn to be okay with?

I don't know the answers.  But I know I'm not done asking the questions.

Hunger Pains...

I'm still hungry all the time.  And it's really starting to get on my nerves.

I don't know what's causing this, but it started just after I stopped drinking, so I would imagine it must have something to do with that.  But is it a biochemical reaction?  Meaning, is it my body's autonomic response to being suddenly deprived of the ethyl alcohol it had grown accustomed to?  Or is it a behavioral response?  Is it just my head trying to fill the "Pleasure Yourself" gap left behind when I stopped drinking, with some new, more readily accessible form of pleasure?  I have no idea.

I've heard that a lot of people develop an insatiable sweet-tooth when they quit drinking, because their body is craving the sugar that they used to get from the alcohol.  (Our bodies metabolize alcohol into sugar.)  But that's not what I'm experiencing.  My problem is that I simply never stop feeling like I want to eat.  Normally, I would only get that feeling when I needed to eat.  And then, once I'd eaten, that feeling would go away, until the next time I needed to eat again.  But now, I can eat until I am bloated and feeling sick from the amount of food in my stomach, and I still have that feeling of "I want to eat."  It just never turns off!  And it's so fucking annoying!  It's like when you feel like you have to pee, even though your bladder is empty.  It's just this really unpleasant, uncomfortable feeling that will not go away, and that you cannot do anything about.

And I really, really just want it to stop.

I'm so tired of constantly fighting with myself to keep from over-eating.  I'm so tired of constantly wrestling with this phantom craving.  Every night it's the same thing.  As soon as I finish dinner, I want something sweet.  So, I eat a little dessert, and then as soon as I finish that, I want something salty-crunchy.  If I give in to that craving and eat something salty-crunchy (whole-wheat tortilla chips and 100-calorie packs of cheez-its are my current drugs of choice), then as soon as I finish that, I want something sweet again.  And if I give in to that, then I want something salty-crunchy/savory again.  And that just keeps going on and on forever until I end up passing out face-first into a bag of chocolate-covered pretzels.

I'm currently working out and doing my best to eat as healthy as possible, in an attempt to lose some weight.  And I am losing weight, but much more slowly than I'd like.  And this shit is not making it any easier.

I've been trying to come up with ways to either satisfy and/or curb this craving that do not involve adding a bunch more calories to my daily intake.  Number one on the list is drinking lots and lots of water.  And I mean, to the point where I start to feel full.  That helps some, but not much, because the whole point of that trick is to curb your appetite by making your body feel full; and, of course, my whole problem is that my body is not currently responding correctly to that feeling.  And then there's the further drawback of having my day constantly and repeatedly interrupted by the painfully urgent need to piss violently.  I've thought about lo-to-no-cal snacks like rice cakes, but in the midst of these cravings, I can't bring myself to eat something completely tasteless that I am already well-aware I will not enjoy.  Still, I've found a couple of brands that are mildly tolerable, and I'm planning to try really hard to make them work.  I bought some lo-cal, high-protein jerky, as well, to try and help with the savory cravings.  The trick there is to just chew and chew and chew and chew and chew and chew until either it eventually turns to liquid in your mouth, or you feel like your jaw is going to fall off.  That way you get to spend a lot of time eating and enjoying the pleasure of tasting the salty/savory thing you're craving, but overall you don't actually eat that much food, or take in a lot of calories.  The sore jaw helps to put a damper on the desire to eat more, as well.  And at work, I've been having mid-afternoon Chai Lattes to try and help with my after-lunch cravings.  That seems to be working out ok.  It's not helping my need-to-pee-every-fifteen-minutes problem very much, though.

And there's one solution I've been trying out this week that is a little naughty.

I stopped smoking cigarettes over ten years ago.  And I cannot stand cigars.  But every Fall and Winter for the past six or seven years, pretty much as soon as the weather starts to turn cold, I smoke a pipe.  I really enjoy a good pipe during the cold half of the year.  I love the sweet, rich flavor of the tobacco.  I love its aromatic smell.  I love the ritual of loading, packing, tamping, lighting - everything has to be just right in order for it to work proper, but when it is, and when it does, oh, sweet ambrosia!  I even love the anachronism of it.  My grandfather smoked a pipe.  It just has this old, retro, even ancient feel to it, and I enjoy feeling like a part of that tradition.  And since I don't inhale pipe smoke, I don't have to worry as much about bronchial damage, emphysema, lung cancer, or even nicotine addiction, the way I did with cigarettes.  And since I indulge in it so rarely (even at the height of my smoking during that half of the year, I will smoke, at most, two pipes a day), I don't really have to worry about it much, at all.  It is a rather safe, and pleasurable, indulgence I can allow myself.  Especially compared to all of my other indulgences, which are so many times more harmful and dangerous.

So, it occurred to me, perhaps an after-dinner smoke would fill the void left behind by the absence of my customary after-dinner drink.  And, perhaps also help curb my appetite for my after-dinner snack - and my after-after-dinner snack, and my after-after-after-dinner snack - that is currently replacing my after-dinner drink.  I know, it's still not the healthiest solution in the world, but tasting (not inhaling) a little tobacco smoke is a lot less unhealthy than drinking, or over-eating.  So, I'll take what I can get.  (And everyone needs some sort of vice, don't they?  What's life without at least a little indulgence?)  But the problem is, as soon as the weather starts to warm up, I immediately lose all interest in smoking a pipe.  I don't know what it is, but it has been that way every single year since the very first.  It's not something I'm trying to do, intentionally.  That's just the way it works for me, for some reason.  I always want to smoke a pipe during the cold half of the year, and I only want to smoke a pipe during the cold half of the year.

But on Sunday, I found a solution to this problem.  There's a brand of small "cigars" (or "cigarillos," which is a rather annoying word) that are filled with pipe tobacco.  It's not the greatest pipe tobacco I've ever had, but it still tastes sweet, and smells nice, and it's infinitely better than cigar tobacco.  (I would rather eat old sushi than smoke a cigar.  Ugh!)  So every night so far this week I've smoked at least part of one of these "cigars" after dinner.  And I've enjoyed them alright, but not as much as my pipes.  And they've seemed to help with the cravings a little, but not as much as I'd hoped.  I'd hoped that they would come close to putting an end to the cravings, but I've found that just a little while after putting out the "cigar," I'm hungry again.  Still, the whole time I'm smoking, I don't want to eat.  And the cravings are a lot easier to resist for a while after the smoke.  So, all-in-all, one "cigar" seems to equal about an hour or so of not snacking.  So, it's not as much as I wanted, but it's not nothing, either.  We'll see how it goes.  I'm glad to have something enjoyable to do for now that seems to help at least a little, but I could also see myself getting bored with this very soon.

Alright, that's enough for now.  I'm starting to get hungry.

Time for my Chai Latte.

Letting Go With The Flow...

Still really tired.  Still no energy or motivation.

At least I made it to work today.  Never made it to the gym, though.

Tomorrow's going to be a long day.  I have a lot of work to do, and I have to leave early to make my addiction therapy session.  And then I have a condo board meeting when I get home.

I'm trying not to worry about things I can't control.  I'm trying not to think about it.  I'm trying to just keep my head down and barrel forward and get it over and done with.

And I'm trying to follow Rule #32.  I'll be home with Her in just an hour or so.  I know I'll be able to find something in that to feel good about.


ADDENDUM:  what's the Brightside here?  I need to find the Brightside.

Pleasuring Myself, continued...

A reader left this comment on my post from yesterday, and I wanted to respond to it here, because I think it raises some interesting points that got me thinking about it a bit more:

Well I think the goal is to be happy moment by moment as much as you can. So what's the problem with pleasuring yourself? Just strive for getting outside your own ego as much as you can, and then you're still moving forward, I say. 

I'm not sure I can agree with that.  I'm not sure I should agree with that, for my own safety.

See, my problem is that, more often than not, that instinct or drive or need to pleasure myself, to make myself happy, has led me to do stupid, self-destructive things.  On more than one occasion now, it has come close to killing me.  And it's a virtual certainty that, if left unchecked, someday it will succeed.  So pleasuring myself is my problem.  And so I feel that, for my own good, I can't allow myself to just try to be as happy as possible moment-to-moment.  Because what happens when the thing that will make me happy is also something that hurts me in some way?

So I feel like I need to do something to correct that behavior, that need to pleasure myself.  And right now, I'm not sure that I actually am.  Yes, it's true that I'm no longer indulging in those self-destructive pastimes at the moment, and that I've replaced them with more self-constructive activities, but I don't feel that I can take any credit for that.  Because I didn't do anything to foster that change.  The circumstances around me have changed, but I'm still responding to them in the same way I always have before.  I still feel just as strong of a need to pleasure myself, it's just that the methods in which I want to achieve that pleasure are now different.  As I said yesterday:  before I wanted to get high and get off, so that's what I did, and now I want to meditate and study mathematics, so that's what I'm doing.

The root cause of my self-destructive behavior lies in that need to make myself feel as good as possible for as much of the time as possible.  Yes, I'm now indulging that need in a constructive manner, but since I had no hand it actually making that happen and am only following where the flow takes me, then how can I trust in that and believe that I am now somehow "better?"  I have put no Will into this.  I am not behaving any differently, not really.  I'm just responding to different stimulus in the same manner as before.  So, what happens when the novelty wears off?  What happens when I suddenly find that I'm not deriving the same amount of joy and satisfaction out of these healthy activities as I once did?

What happens when I finally do want to get high again?

Because that day will come, no question.  And if I haven't done anything to correct the root cause of that desire, then how will I be able to resist it?  And I guess that's the problem in a nutshell:  I'm not resisting.  Because for me, there's nothing to resist.

Most people in my situation (newly-sober addicts) are in a constant battle against their own desires.  They are struggling against themselves to try and resist the urge to do the one thing they want to do more than anything else.  And their entire recovery is built around that internal conflict.  I know that I am an addict because I have experienced that conflict for more of my life than I care to admit, and because most of the times that I have fought those urges, I have lost.  But that is not my experience now; that is not what I'm going through today.  I'm not getting high right now because I do not want to get high right now.  I am sober because, right now, I want to be sober.  I have no urges to resist or fight against.  They just disappeared, and I ran with it.  And so that makes me feel like I'm not really doing the work.  Like I'm not really getting any better.  That I just got lucky.  That I had a brief window of opportunity, and I seized on it.

But this is not going to last forever.  Eventually, the winds of my desire are bound to blow back in the other direction again.  And I'm going to need to know ahead of time how to respond when that happens, or else it's going to catch me off guard and I'm going to fall right back into the same self-destructive patterns that I feel so blessedly and falsely liberated from right now.  But how can I possibly prepare for that?  Should I be resisting every pleasurable desire I have, irrespective of de-structive vs. con-structive?  Do I need to be living a monastic life?  (Frankly, I'd rather OD.)

Maybe I just need to cross that bridge when I come to it.  Maybe there's no point in worrying about it.  Maybe I should just accept this period of productive activity for what it is, and be grateful that it came so easily to me.  Maybe I should just focus on how lucky I am that I don't have to go through that struggle the way so many other addicts do.

And it would be so easy to do all of that, if only I felt in any way responsible for this change of fortune.  If I just felt that I had some hand in bringing this release about, then I would know that I actually am resisting, that I am doing the work - just in my own unique way, outside the range of the typical experience.  The same way I seem to do just about everything else.

Maybe that is true.

Could that be true?

No, I don't think so.  I've fought hard before, and I've won.  And I've fought hard, and lost.  But this time, I wasn't even fighting at all.  I had given in to my desires 100%.  And even though I knew I was hurting myself badly I still didn't try to resist.  I just didn't have it in me.  But then I hit a bottom I hadn't even seen coming.  And it scared the shit out of me.  And I responded to that fear by running as fast as I could in the opposite direction.  Basically, I scared myself straight.

How can I take credit for that?

I can't.  I didn't really do anything.  I got lucky.

But what I can do?  I can be grateful.  And oh, how I am.

And I can look on the bright side.  I can make the most of it.  I can do everything in my power to get as much out of this experience as I possibly can, for as long as it lasts.  And if I'm lucky, and smart, then the things I learn during this temporary reprieve will prepare me to know what to do and how to respond when that inevitable day finally arrives, and my desires shift their poles again.

And that's gotta be enough.

Pleasuring Myself...

How's that for a provocative title, huh?

But, seriously, I've been realizing lately that I'm still exhibiting the same pattern of behavior that I'm currently trying to break out of.  I'm still spending the vast majority of my time every day pleasuring myself.  The only difference is that now I'm pleasuring myself in ways that are generally more beneficial.

I'm eating good and good-for-me food instead of fried, microwaved, and/or bar food.  But not because I've made some self-sacrificing commitment to eat better.  I'm doing it because I'm craving fruits and vegetables and yogurts and other nutritious food, and because eating the heavy, calorie- and fat-laden foods I used to love now makes me ill.  So, I'm still doing exactly what I want; it's just that what I want has changed.  So, am I really doing anything differently?

I'm still pleasuring myself all the time.  But instead of doing it physically or chemically with sex and drugs, I'm doing it mentally, emotionally, and creatively by studying subjects that interest me, reading books that move and/or stimulate me, and by writing whatever I feel like at the time here on a regular basis.  (And I guess physically, as well, by eating healthy foods.)  But again, it's not because I've made some difficult life-decision to try to become a better person.  It's just that this is what I want to do now.  I'm still doing exactly what I want.  I wanted to get high and get off before, so that's what I did; and now I want to study mathematics and meditate, so that's what I'm doing.

I have not yet even made an attempt to resist my desires.

So, the question is, have I really changed at all?

And if I'm being healthy and productive, then does it even matter?

I guess we'll find out soon enough.

Confessions #2...

"What did you take?," the doctor asked, sounding bored, not bothering to look up from her computer screen.  I was in her office for the first time, for a check-up following my overdose the week before.

"I snorted 75 milligrams of Oxycontin, and drank three-quarters of a fifth of bourbon."

"Well, why did you do that?," she asked, with a note of condescension in her tone, still not looking up.

That seemed like a pretty stupid question to me.  "Because I'm a drug addict," I replied, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.  That seemed to get her attention; she finally looked up at me.

She stared at me, as if sizing me up.  As if she'd never heard anybody say that before.  I didn't understand what the big deal was.  Of course I was a drug addict.  Why else would I do that?  Why else would I be here?  What was I supposed to do, lie?  Tell her that it was an accident?  "Honestly, Doctor, I have no idea how all those powdered narcotics managed to get up my nose!"

She continued to stare at me for a long moment.  She was looking me straight in the eye.  It was very odd; I couldn't remember anyone ever looking at me in quite that way before.  I imagine she must've been measuring me up, testing me, trying to determine if I was being serious or just fucking with her.  I didn't flinch.  Eventually, she smiled softly.

"Well, how do you feel about that?," she asked.

"I'm not happy about it, if that's what you're asking."

"Do you want to continue to be a drug addict?"

"No, I don't.  I've been an addict for a long time, but this is the first time I nearly died because of it.  That was terrifying.  I don't want to go through anything like this ever again."

"I can help you, if you want."

"Please.  I need to stop."

Over the next few years, she helped me to stop abusing drugs and alcohol, got me to start exercising every day, and taught me how to not only eat healthy, but how to enjoy it, too.  I lost weight, and I felt strong and healthy and happy in a way that I couldn't remember feeling since I was a child.  Every time I'd go into her office for a check-up, she would stare at me in the same intense, probing way for a few moments, sizing me up, and then give me that soft smile.  She was the first doctor I've ever had that seemed to actually care about me, and want me to succeed at being well.

But nothing lasts forever.  After a few years, she left my HMO for private practice, and I was assigned to a new doctor.  Not wanting to start over with someone new, I found "better things" to do with my time than go for my check-ups.

Recently, after 5 years of sobriety, thinking I had everything under control, I relapsed.  Three days later, I was back in that same office, having overdosed again, for the second time in my life.

"What did you take?," the new doctor asked, sounding bored, not bothering to look up from her computer screen.

"About 600 milligrams of Tramadol, a six-pack of beer, and a dozen-or-so tequila shots, over the course of the day."

"Hmm... you should make an appointment with a counselor in Behavioral Health.  Your stats look fine.  I don't think you're in any danger.  Do you need the number for Behavioral Health?"

"Um, no, I have it."

"Ok, I'll see you in six months, then."

As I watched her walk out of the office, I couldn't help but think, She never even asked me why I did it.  I felt as if, were I to die tomorrow, she wouldn't care less.

This time, I thought, I'm on my own.