I am beyond furious and my sponsor is out of town. It happened again. I finally got last week’s paycheck cashed on Wednesday and today this week’s check bounced. Obviously, in spite of what my employer says, I need to find a new job. Read the rest of this entry »
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Right after the Manhunt experiment, I tried another experiment that I didn’t talk about. The OGL experiment. On facebook I’m bombarded by advertising for dating sites and one of them intrigued me, largely because the name of the site was so toned down. That, and the fact that they had a one month, non-recurring trial membership. $25.00 – If I waste $25.00 and nothing happens that’s totally fine, know what I mean. Fine. Not that I’m in the habit of throwing money away, but.
We always think of love being fantastic, right. In movies we talk about “the ONE” and we use words and phrases like “soul mate”, and “my other half,” and “my better half.” We fight for equal access to civil marriage. For “the man who never was” the “hole in my heart goes all the way to China (Monette).” Read the rest of this entry »
First of all, what the fuck happened to my wigits? They’re just gone. Erased. Blank. Vanished. I have to reconstruct every last custom setting that was in them which is a giant pain in the butt.
Tatum O’Neil is on crack? Are you kidding me? Tatum O’Neil allegedly smokes crack cocaine. And did I hear this correctly? She’s being charged with misdemeanor possession? Misdemeanor possession of crack cocaine? Who ever heard of such a thing? And this chick has kids. Lovely, lovely children.
When I was caught with methamphetamine it was a felony and when I dove headlong into my methamphetamine addiction I had no relationship with my family, no significant (or insignificant) other, and no children. I’ve always wondered if I would have traveled as far down the scale as I did if I had the ties of important relationships, particularly the ties of children. I think children would have taken up too much time to have ever been in a position to even be introduced to the stuff.
That’s almost an academic exercise though. I had an addictive mind and I would almost certainly have been a big pot head. I don’t think that would have had the same kind of destructive effects. I’m sure I could have gone on a long, long time being stoned without any serious consequences, but I would have been baked almost all the time. Read the rest of this entry »
First of all, thank God for the steps! I wouldn’t be able to tell this story without them. I wouldn’t because I would be trapped in the story; sucked in to the familiar familial drama of the tree from which this nut fell.
Last Friday night I had dinner with my sister and her two boys, my brother and his growing family and my aunt and uncle. I don’t remember the last time all of us were together to break bread. I was especially happy to see my sister as she is moving to Iowa City this month where her husband is doing his fellowship. Other times this opportunity has presented itself I have been way too strung out to show up. Seeing me would have been more painful than not seeing me. So to be able to show up for my family, sober, happy and present, was really wonderful for me.
As the sister and children of an alcoholic and her husband, though, the conversation took a dark turn almost from the very beginning and mostly stayed there. My family has been very protective of me and very supportive. Knowing the seriousness of my effort and knowing the gravity of my mother’s condition, they have been vigilant about not disclosing any specifics of my life to my mother. They have never passed along my phone number which she has asked for several times. They only answer her questions about how I am in the most general way. And perhaps more importantly, they spare me the details of the insanity going on in mom’s luxurious little rabbit hole.
I had no difficulty sloughing off the story of her arrest in her own driveway a couple of months ago. The scene that had been described to me was really nothing out of the ordinary – except that there happened to be police at her home at the time. I actually took a little (guilty) pleasure from it, particularly since part of her ranting had been about them harassing her when there were people like me out on the street. At dinner, though, the scene was illuminated more fully and details of the continuing downward spiral were revealed. It was not the police at her home, not in the usual sense, but rather the S.W.A.T. team. More recently there have been public urination accidents, car accidents, accidental falls down escalators resulting in knee replacement surgery, accidental falls at home leaving her husband with his femur broken in two places and passed out on the floor until the maids came in and found him (when he was admitted in the ER his BAC was .38).
By all outside appearances the gates of insanity have swung wide open and my mom and her husband have passed through, sprinted up the walk, gone through the front door, fixed themselves some drinks and gotten comfortable. For three days afterward I hoped that death wouldn’t be far behind. I imagined ways it might happen. I tried to figure out if you could get a wheel chair over the Lido deck and if a life preserver would be visible at night.
This time it only sucked me in for a couple of days. I was spared any direct contact with the dark side. All I had to endure was a 30 hour headache, an evening of plotting a final scene to the tragedy, and a few hours of step work and in return I was given a miracle, a change in perspective and the 4th step promise of being able to view my mother and her husband as spiritually sick and to think of them with compassion. Genuine compassion. I actually discussed with my sponsor ways that I might be able to be helpful to them without placing myself in the eye of the hurricane. On principle he agreed but we both though it would be better to talk to his sponsor and his sponsor’s sponsor who happens to know my parents and had parents like them.
After becoming willing to send people to my mom’s house to see if she needed anyone to go to the store or make dinner or bring in the mail I was given specific direction about cleaning up my part of this insanity in my head and in my mom’s life:
“‘Fuck off’ is an amend.”
I can live with that. I’m grateful that I was given the change in perspective from resentment to compassion. And I’m grateful to know that the most compassionate thing I can do is allow them to be on their own path.
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
I’m moving. At the end of the month I’m moving. And I am moving in to my own apartment. I realize that all you ‘grown ups’ out there have already done this, probably by the age of 18 or 20. But I have never successfully navigated this particular rite of passage. And it is time.
Among the considerations in choosing to live alone over moving in with a roommate was my desire to make it easier to begin dating again. Aside from the fellationship with the Imaginary Future Ex-Husband at the end of my using, there hasn’t been a man in my life, a man of any consequence, in about ten years. Sure, there have been tricks. I’m not a saint. I don’t know who would want to be a saint, really. If it was a trick I was interested in having I’m sure I could find a way to navigate that, anyway. I want to open the door a bit to the idea that if someone worth sharing time and space with should wander into my field of opportunity, that field is not cluttered with 3rd party agendas. If some Sunday morning desires to be spent with us in bed, drinking French roast and doing the NY Times crossword puzzle, I’d like it to be privately.
Somewhere along the line in this progression from ‘stuck’ to ‘recovering’ something has happened that I suppose I could have anticipated but didn’t. The age of the men who capture my attention has changed radically. In my late teens and twenties, all the way up to 40, really, the men who caught my attention were without exception older and richer than me. I had a fierce need for security. One of the 12 & 12 talks about those who place too much dependence on others, describing me perfectly.
I ran away from home when I was 17 and somehow landed in West Hollywood. Young and cute and smart and Mormon and a Boy Scout. I was a commodity, which was a good thing. It helped me survive. It helped that I was intensely attracted to men who could, and who wanted to, take care of me. I certainly couldn’t have done that on my own then. That insane need to be taken care of, the scar on my heart where my father belonged and miscellaneous other quirks landed me solidly in the arms of men over the age of 35 right up till I was 40. Even the IFX, though he was much younger than me, was a father figure of sorts.
In treatment I got a relationship with my father back. I’ve been moving toward ‘growing up’, and this bizarre phenomena has occurred. I am suddenly deeply attracted to men that are approximately the age I was when my addiction kicked into high gear – the men I would have been loving if I hadn’t been an addict. I’m really hoping that by doing the work the 4th step calls for that I’ll find myself accelerating quickly past this quirk. I’d like to get to the point where I’m most attracted to men my own age and am mature enough to relate to them, but that seems pretty far fetched when the object of my affection is another 20 year old straight boy.
At least I haven’t acted on that. At least at the point I figured out that he was straight, something that isn’t readily obvious in this boy, that I backed away and made sure that I hadn’t inadvertently upset him; that we were, indeed, friends.
Perhaps more surprising to me, in light of the off the chart, insane lust I have for, had for this boy, when I discovered he was straight it didn’t make my heart bleed. I was OK. The preoccupation, the intense desire, simply vanished.
I no longer feel, as I once did, that I am dying from a lack of intimate companionship. Though I haven’t been intimate with a man in 15 months I am not too tortured by it. I notice it. I know that I am alone. I am largely accepting of that. But I am still going to get an apartment of my own. I’m still going to create a path for him, whoever he is, should he choose to take it.
Funny how a lonely day,
can make a person say,
“What good is my life?”
Funny how a breaking heart
can make me start to say,
“What good is my life?”
Funny how I often seem
to think I’ll never find
another dream in my life,
till I look around and see
this great big world is part
of me and my life.
Sometime when I feel afraid
I think of what a mess
I’ve made of my life.
Crying over my mistakes,
forgetting all the breaks
I’ve had in my life.
I was put on earth to be.
A part of this great world
is me and my life.
Guess I’ll just add up
the score and count
the things I’m grateful
for in my life.
This Is my life.
Today, tomorrow,
love will come
and find me,
but that’s the way that
I was born to be.
This is me.
This is me.
This is my life,
and I don’t give a damn
for lost emotions.
I’ve such a lot of love
I’ve got to give.
Let me live.
Let me live.
This is my life.
Shirley Bassey
(Amurri, Norman, Canfora)
I keep this list of stuff I’d like to do on a web site called 43Things.com – kind of a social networking site for the purpose driven life, even if the purpose is pointless or silly. One of the things that’s on the list is ‘pick a theme song for myself’. Well, I think I’ve found it. And what a fabulous goddamn song for anyone who has danced on the lower end of the scale that measures experience that can benefit others. And what better role model of perseverance than Dame Shirley? At 71 she is still recording with artists like Pink and Kanye Weest. I just really love that song and I just really wanted to share it with you and I’m not afraid to tell you that if I had one iota of drag queen in me I’d be shooting for the kind of over-the-top drama and worldly edge of Shirley Bassey. I love her so much that I’m trying to talk my friend Millisen, who buys trashed Barbies at thrift stores and breathes new life into them with custom clothing and all, into making a couple of Shirley Bassey Barbies for me. For a man who loves Home Depot, there is a part of me that is sooooooo gaaaaayyyyy!!!!!!
I’m going to talk about prayer here soon, when I actually have a couple of hours to sit down and write, but I started a new job today. One with regular hours so I won’t blow it like I did McDonald’s. Between that and meetings and sponsoring 5 guys (all of whom showed up at an 8 o’clock meeting tonight so we got to all sit down together!), doing my own step work and starting to work on my 200 hours of community service, that may not be till next weekend.
In the meantime, click on Dame Shirley’s picture and enjoy an early performance of this fantastic song.
P.S. I’ve started a new outlet for the random insanity inside my head. You can amuse yourself with it at Cold Vinyl.
embrace
c.1300, from O.Fr. embracer “clasp in the arms, enclose,” from en- “in” + brace “the arms,” from L. bracchium (neut. pl. brachia). Replaced O.E. clyppan, also fæðm.
Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper
Last night, late, I stepped out on my front porch to smoke a cigarette. I still smoke cigarettes. For some reason cigarettes have been harder to give up than booze and crystal meth, but I digress. I was standing on my front porch in a cold fog, looking across the street, watching two neighbor couples embrace.
The first couple live in the yellow clapboard house with the white picket fence on the corner across the street. I’m guessing they entertained last night because at this unusual hour the wife, a petite blond in her early 30s, was in the kitchen washing dishes. I saw her husband walk up behind her and place his arms around her and nuzzle her neck while they swayed. It was a picture of the kind of domestic happiness that I have often longed for but never really had, at least not for any meaningful time. I’ve never really touched life that deep. It feels like no one has ever really loved me like that -all the way through. Perhaps it is that I have never loved them back. One would think I could get the direction right since in some ways it is my most obvious and most painful disappointment.
At the same time, two doors down, the shirtless figure of the muscle boy who my friend Lindsey is engaged to, was on the front porch of their house being held, the way you hold someone who has suffered a sudden and terrific loss, by a woman I didn’t recognize. Behind him was a tall, older man with his hand on the boy’s shoulder, telling him he was fine. It’s OK. You’ll be alright. The older man opened the front door and asked if muscle boy had a shirt. It was, after all, only about 40 degrees outside. A hand reached out a shirt from inside the house. “Dad? What are you doing here?” the boy slurred as his father dressed him. Father and mother held their drunken son up as they walked down the steps and to the car and drove away from the young couple’s house. I see this boy in meetings. My friend Lindsey just celebrated 2 years clean and sober. Obviously she’s no Lois Wilson. She told me this morning that she’s broken off the engagement.
One couple clasped in the arms of love, the other in the grip of this disease.
I guess it has had me thinking about which is worse and how; to long for the embrace of an undiscovered beloved or to be in the embrace of hopelessness and futility. They are both awful. They are both lonely. At times I’ve felt like both were killing me. Lately I’ve watched people I love struggle with each of these and I’m finding it harder and harder to watch the struggle in a detached way -probably because the struggle still exists within me. The examples are all around me but two of them in particular seem to have ‘embraced’ me. One of these young women is pretty and smart and sweet and she is sensible in many ways. However, she is obsessed with what she cannot have. I think my suffering over the IFX demonstrates that I know something about obsessing over what I can’t have. Unlike my own experience though, the object of her obsession suddenly became available to her. She responded by running away, forcing this amazing man who loves her to retreat. She has responded by chasing him again.
The other young woman has been in and out of the rooms for over two years but can’t seem to stay sober for more than 30 days at a time. Yet she insists on calling on herself at every meeting and actually giving people advice. She yammers on endlessly about having a wonderful relationship with her higher power (lower case mine and intentional) and how she is working steps and has a wonderful sponsor and how much she has endured and remained sober and “what this program has given” her. Her first or second sentence always begins with the words, “I can honestly say.”
I must care about the first woman more because I haven’t pulled her aside to say, “You stupid, selfish bitch. Can’t you see what you’re keeping yourself from?” I wasn’t so well behaved with the second woman who I did pull aside last night. I believe my words were, “You don’t know shit about shit. You can’t “honestly say” anything. And shut the fuck up. You need this as bad as anyone here and you’re not going to hear it if you’re talking.” The rule I observe about not sharing in a meeting unless I’m called on or unless I’m dying has saved me more than once from either being her, with something to say on every subject and on every occasion- or unloading on her at meeting level. G-d seems always to make sure that I am not called on or (on a couple of occasions) called out of the room for some reason right before my head pops.
Why, I wonder, can’t they simply embrace the truth? Then again . . .
why can’t I?
Photo Credit:Â unknown
“Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.”
-Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
Great pain and great love are called the disciplinarians of recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous. In my life it seems that point of origin from which willingness to grow spiritually springs is tremendous pain. “Pain is a root, not a flower.” When the pain gets bad enough I take action. Sometimes, rarely, but sometimes tremendous love is operating in the origin of my willingness to persevere.
This is a story about love.
I have written about my unwillingness to carry on with the last part of my 4th step; my sex inventory. I have discussed it in more detail with other spiritual men. I have shared about it in a very general way at meeting level. I seem to have been in the grips of the faulty idea that I am so defective and so broken that I don’t deserve God’s help in forming the right ideal and seeking it. “No one will ever really love me,” became manifest in my life as a result of nurturing that faulty thought. “No one ever really did love me. No one ever could.” I see now how gigantically arrogant that thought is even though it has not completely been purged from my consciousness. Just like the drugs and alcohol, just like any area of my life that requires divine help, application of the principles of the steps is the solution and the solution is not really available to me until I have the first 3 steps down. I am powerless over people and the way I have related to them. A power greater than I can heal that secret wound, and that power, that I variously call God or my Creator or the Underlying Fabric of the Universe, wishes for me better than I wish for myself. It is the eternal power of Love that wishes for me to manifest the glory of that power which lies within me.
Though we had spoken of it before, this was not on my mind Saturday when I sat down with Brian, whom I consider to be my most spiritual friend. Where Jim, my sponsor, has great spiritual force (which is inspiring and exciting), Brian has great spiritual reserve (which I find breathtaking and clarifying). Out of the blue, Brian said, “You’re going to make an incredible companion for someone one day.” He went on to tell me about a writer who had profoundly influenced his own spiritual path and the relationship that had with becoming the kind of man who could have a wonderful intimate relationship. I kind of filed the information away in the mental folder marked ‘New Agey’.
Sunday morning I had my 8th step list out; the list of all people I had harmed. I started googling the names of some of the key people in my life in the 80′s. Some, I thought, might still be around, but I knew I was really looking at the result of the great plague that decimated the gay community. One who had been important in my life was Rick Saslaw. I met Rick in 1983, the first time I was exposed to Alcoholics Anonymous. He met my requirements for Rescuer status at the time. He drove a green Jaguar. He owned a 4-plex behind Canter’s Deli on Fairfax Ave. He was intelligent. He was politically active. He was a huge man; warm and safe. And he was amazingly kind to me. My life spun off in a completely different direction but while I was seeing Rick he impressed upon me that there was a spiritual life and a way to seek God that had nothing to do with being a mormon. The last time I saw Rick was in a parking lot on the south east corner of La Brea Ave. and Sunset Blvd. It was slightly awkward. I was married — to a woman — he had begun the heroic ordeal that was treatment for HIV in those days.
The next time I heard about Rick I was at a gay AA round-up in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1998. The guest speaker, Ira S., told his story of what it was like, what happened and what it’s like now. I was especially caught by a couple of things that Ira said about his turning point and the man who was there in his office when that happened. That man became Ira’s first sponsor. I approached Ira after his speech and he confirmed what I had imagined. His first sponsor was Rick Saslaw. He got sober while Rick and I were dating.
So Sunday, while I was dodging doing my sex inventory and instead was googling old flames, I came across only 2 listings for Rick; his obituary in the New York Times, and this blog post from another man who was also sponsored by Rick. It seems that Rick’s memorial service was officiated by the woman who my friend Brian had said was so influential in his own spiritual growth.
“Marianne (Williamson) paused her [Return to Love book] tour and officiated at Rick’s memorial at this postage stamp of a park tucked below Sunset Strip. All of Rick’s eccentric friends and AAs — crowded onto this petit lawn. . . Marianne salvaged the hour’s empty disposition, basically giving us an ACIM lecture, a discourse on Rick Saslaw. It was the most fitting tribute Rick could ever have had.”
The result of a thorough sex/relationship inventory is the clarity needed for one to ‘return to love’. That part of love that is eternal clearly wants better for me than I can understand. Needless to say, I have picked up my pen and started diligently working on my inventory and I dare say that a copy of ‘Return to Love’ will be in my near future. (Thank you, Rick. Thank you, God.)
312, originally uploaded by impala.1970.
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