The Last Chance Texaco

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My body has been a challenge from the moment I got sober.  Things bother me that I would never have noticed before.  And I don’t know if it is that I’ve totally damaged myself from my years of crystal meth use or if I’m just some kind of unluckily predisposed to illness kind of being.

Early in recovery it was respiratory stuff; bronchitis, sinusitis, that sort of thing.  It didn’t help that I was still a smoker.  Getting through the first winter sober required several rounds of antibiotics.

The second winter sober required several rounds of antibiotics, too, but I guess they didn’t do much good if I ran around with pneumonia for 3 or 4 months, eventually needing a couple of major surgeries to get me better.  I don’t know how better I got.  I still have pain from the surgery.  I look at my back and side and I feel like Frankenstein.  And all that time, those 2 months of recovery, laying in bed, taking vicoden (as prescribed – but so what, that shit is hard to do when you’re “sober”) losing faith, losing hope, losing “conscious contact”.  All of that is normal, I’m told, for anyone in recovery going through what I went through.  But it’s been a year and some months later and I’m OK.  I don’t have the Burning Bush kind of Higher Power that baptized me into recovery.  It’s quieter now.  I have to look for it.  I miss the Burning Bush – but what I have now is OK.

I have convinced myself that my head is OK – but my body says otherwise.  A week ago last Saturday the skin on my leg became really sensitive, but there was no rash; nothing to indicate that something was wrong.  I thought maybe it was the length of my shorts rubbing that part of my leg or maybe my new detergent wan to blame.

Last Saturday I woke up with a full-on, huge case of shingles that was spreading before my eyes.  I went to the doctor immediately and I started taking medication to stop it within hours, which I guess is a good thing.  It continued to spread, in spite of the medication.  It seems to finally be calming down.

It makes me wonder, am I really the same as I was before I had half my lung hacked out?  Am I still so completely unaware of my mental and physical state that things like this happen.  I thought when I straightened out spiritually I was supposed to straighten out physically and mentally.

I thought I had been taking pretty good care of myself; three meals a day, going to bed at a decent hour, etc.  I thought that I was handling beautifully the pressure I’ve been under at work.  Then my body tells me what’s really going on.

I know that I must be recovering from my drug addiction because when I was using I might not have even seen a doctor.  This could have been much worse than it was.  Like that terrible relationship I almost got in to, I recognize when something is wrong now and I take action.  I put “first things first”.  The first thing to do when you can actually see the blisters forming is go to the damn doctor.  I guess that is what progress looks like.  One of the differences between me on drugs and me sober is that I see a doctor when I need to.

Maybe – just maybe – God is doing for me what I cannot or will not do for myself; slowing me down.

By the way, don’t get shingles if you don’t have to.  This hurts like a . . .

Goddamn – being your own boss is hard.  It helps that I have somewhere to go and work but I still find myself spending 10, 11, 12 hours a day there.  Fortunately there are 3 good noon meetings walking distance from where my new office is in Boise.  I’m so glad to be out of Meridian and out of commuting 40 miles a day and working somewhere where there are places to have lunch.  I totally envy people like Vicarious Rising that they live in real cities.  I don’t know that I’ll ever make it back to living in a city.  It’s easier to go downhill than up.  And Idaho is definitely downhill.  Whatever.

The phones are installed and the computer network is up and I’ve overwired the hell out of the office so that growing will be less painful.  Tomorrow the 600 page manual and I will try to figure out how to program the new phone system to do cool tricks, like transfer calls, set up voice mail boxes, make the number that is supposed to be the fax machine actually go to the fax machine.

I love my new office – It has a recessed skylight and no windows on exterior walls so it has perfectly diffuse, indirect daylight all day.  It’s beautiful.  Everyone else wanted views – in western windows.  Have fun with the glare kids, and knock before you enter.

I have been sober now for three years, six months, and thirteen days.  Not very long at all but long enough; long enough to forget.  It’s funny how easy it is to recall my moment of clarity and to recall the early days of my recovery.  I recall the events well enough.  I can recall what I thought.  I can recall the names of the emotions I felt, but honestly it has been so long ago I cannot recall, or rather re-experience those emotions.

Part of the reason I do the particular kinds of service work I do is that it gives me the opportunity to see others in a state similar to mine all those days ago.  It does not replace the gut wrenching pain I was in or the terror I felt when I could finally see that things were never going to be different.  I do not re-feel the hope I suddenly felt.  I get to see it in others though.  I get to see it in others and that helps me remember, at least mentally, what got me here and why I keep doing this.  I realize, intellectualy of course, that the process of taking the steps is an experiential learning process, and having had the experience I tend to re-experience that process intellectually.

There are rare occasions however when I am swept over with a great wave of emotion, by a profound wonder and gratitude that I have been graced with sobriety.  There are very rare times that when sharing in a meeting I have to pause before I regain the ability to speak, and when my eyes well up with tears.  Sometimes, some beautiful and breathtaking times, these feelings are so overwhelming that I weep.

I was thinking just the other day how seldom that happens anymore, twelve-hundred-odd days away from the turning point.  Then without any warning I’m hit with a great tsunami of emotion and I remember with every cell in my body, with every synapse of my nervous system, with every corner of my sometimes dimming spirit, how wondrous and how miraculous it is that I’m sober today.

For whatever reason, Day 1290 is one of those great days.

How is it that the first (and possibly only) man that ever loved me - that I ever loved – designed the costumes for Pump Up the Volume and I never saw that movie before tonight?

I was just looking at a friend’s Facebook page, admiring a picture of her and someone’s baby, when I noticed a quote on the sidebar; something about love from Dostoevsky’s, “The Brothers Karamazov”.  Having just come from a meeting where the topic was Love and knowing how way leads to way I followed the trail of that quote as it has been used in several sermons.

The Dostoevsky story is the story of Father Zossima, the wise, self-effacing, good-humored orthodox monk that many people come to for spiritual direction. One day, a woman comes to talk with him. She has a big problem, she says.  She has lost her faith and therefore her reason to live. If Zossima cannot give her a reason to believe again, she says, she will kill herself.

The monk tells her to go home, and every day, do something concrete to love the people around her. If she does this, he assures her, she will find, slowly but surely, that she won’t be able to help but believe.  Love in action, he says, will change the way she sees the world.

The old woman isn’t especially impressed.  Basically she says, “That’s it?  That’s all you have?  I’m supposed to love the people around me?  I already do that.”

And to this Zossima responds with a line which has become famous: “Ah”, he says, “love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams. It may very well kill you”

Doing what is good for another can be really hard. Sometimes, it’s hard to know what would be good for someone as distinct from what would make us feel good.  And actually doing it is often very hard.  In recovery we know that to love other people until they can love themselves requires “work and self sacrifice” – and it is a requirement.  It is the foundation stone of recovery. Read the rest of this entry »

My credit score must be improving.  I’m getting more and better junk mail.  Here’s to clearing away some wreckage.

I hear people in meetings all the time say how they do a written 10th step every night.  Honestly, I cannot imagine doing that.  It’s hard enough to find time to do everything else that needs to be done.  But, written or not, I do regularly look back on my day, or my recent past, and look at my motives, and when I am able to, I try to make it right.

The thing is, now that I’ve been sober awhile, it is no longer the really obvious selfish choices that harm others that trip me up; it is the small, ambiguous details.

If I’m dating someone, or thinking of dating someone, when do I tell them about this blog?  Or do I tell them at all?  I can hardly keep some of the details of my past from them, but is it better to hold back on it or to up front with it.  And what if I suspect that I might actually like someone, and become afraid that my history will scare him away.  If I direct him to my story here then, am I not actually depriving him of the opportunity to get to know me, and then decide on his own what he wants to know?  Isn’t that a decision based on fear?

I did that recently.  I tried to scare someone off before he had the chance to decide for himself whether he wanted to be scared off or not.  I did it because I was afraid.  If I was going to be hurt I wanted it to be now instead of later, when it would hurt more.

If a person is curious it isn’t too hard to do a Google search, or go to a library and look in the card catalog for that matter.  There is more than one person with my name in the world, but even so, 8 of the first 10 Google results are me.  If a person wants to know they can.  The only reason for me to direct someone here is either for attention (which I wouldn’t rule out – some of my old stuff is pretty good) or I want to manipulate them into seeing me a particular way.

It’s a very fine line though, isn’t it?  Discerning our motives can be so subtle, and so easy to justify or deny.

If any feel that as psychiatrists directing a hospital for alcoholics we appear somewhat sentimental, let them stand with us a while on the firing line, see the tragedies, the despairing wives, the little children; let the solving of these problems become a part of their daily work, and even of their sleeping moments, and the most cynical will not wonder that we have accepted and encouraged this movement. We feel, after many years of experience, that we have found nothing which has contributed more to the rehabilitation of these men than the altruistic movement now growing up among them. -William D. Silkworth, MD

At 7 o’clock on the second Friday of every month I visit the Allumbaugh House, presumably to bring in an AA meeting.  The thing is most of the people in a county detox center have made multiple attempts at getting sober.  Most, if not all of them have been to meetings before; sometimes hundreds of them.  I went to hundreds of meetings before I ever got sober.  I had vast sections of the book memorized.  I knew what to say in meetings and I knew how to act and I knew what I was supposed to look like so that I would fit in.  I was good at doing that.  Standing on the firing line of recovery has very little to do with attending meetings.  It has to do with carrying the message.

Because these folks have been to meetings before and because they haven’t managed to stay sober in spite of it, I like to do things a little differently.  I like to go back to the very origins of the fellowship.  I like to go back to the first meeting between Bill W. and Dr. Bob.  The real power of what the program is lies in the space created between two addicts or alcoholics honestly sharing their stories with each other.  That isn’t something you can do at a meeting.  And let’s face it, who among us understood what the steps meant when we were two or three or even ten days sober?  What is the point of even reading it? Read the rest of this entry »