What the hell is going on in here?

I’m not sure exactly when, but my WordPress installation has been seriously compromised.  The footer.php file was infected with something that added links for every creepy thing you can imagine, but made those links invisible so only Google could see it.  Having removed that this morning, I am now being barraged by spam in a way that I cannot even begin to describe.  It’s almost like an AA meeting being sponsored by Absolut Vodka – it’s just not right.  Absolut has no reason to be there.  Neither do the mail 0rder drug companies have any business pedaling their opiates, benzos, and erectile dysfunction products here.

I ran into a young couple at Starbucks last evening; a couple I had seen at a 10PM meeting at the “Little Red House” – one of the meetings I got sober in but rarely attend now.  Ten is way past my bedtime and one tends to get picky about meetings.  I still visit those places I got sober in, the Grapevine Club and the Little Red House; places populated with the sickest of the sick, partly because I want to be helpful, partly because I want to remember where I came from, sometimes even to reassure myself that “I’m not THAT sick!”   — but I met this young, very attractive couple when they were celebrating their 30th day.  Yesterday, like the day I met them, I had to suppress the thought that followed.  “You’re smart.   You’re pretty.  You’re young.  You’re getting sober for each other.  —- Good luck with that.”  I can be so bitchy.

I realized something else though; something besides the fact that all of my shortcomings have not been removed.  I noticed that recently I have been attending a lot more meetings.  When Life was going along normally I was only going to 2 or 3 a week, and I was doing that for an extended period of time.  But as busy as I’ve been recently and with as many demands that are placed on me now, it seems my attendance has bounced back up to near the level I was attending during year 2.

Any time you hear about a soldier or a police officer or a firefighter tell a story of how they escaped from an impossible situation or rescued someone in great peril to their personal well being, you also hear them say something akin to, “I relied on my training.”  I guess that’s kind of what it feels like; like my old training kicked in.  I was trained to stay close to the group.  I was trained to not think I can do these things alone.  I was trained that when the going gets tough, the tough go to meetings, visit their sponsor, and do the work.

And somehow, in spite of the firestorm of shit that has rained down on my life in the last couple of months, I’m pretty happy most of the time, I feel joy much of the time, and I am free of the desire to ruin that.