Spirituality

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Children at Last - Neverland Art Preschool“Forty-six now and dying by inches, I finally see how our lives align at the core, if not in the sorry details. I still shiver with a kind of astonished delight when a brother or sister tells of that narrow escape from the coffin world of the closet. ‘Yes yes yes,’ goes a voice in my head, ‘it was just like that for me.’ When we laugh together and dance in the giddy circle of freedom, we are children for real at last, because we have finally grown up.
-Paul Monette, Becoming a Man; half a life story

This book, this paragraph in particular, always takes my breath away because it describes so perfectly so much of the important experiences in my life. Monette’s story is about his coming to terms with his identity as a gay man, so of course I feel a strong identification with that, but because so much of my life is devoted to helping other addicts and alcoholics I frequently feel “astonished delight” when we share our stories of how we came to be in recovery. I can’t think of another place on earth where I can share stories like mine, in a general way or in detail, and know that I am completely understood. There is no place where I am so free to be my most authentic self as in Alcoholics Anonymous. I was finally home.

Being a Mormon and a Boy Scout and gay, I clean up pretty good. I spent much of my life as an incredible fraud. I knew how to play to whatever crowd I was in front of. 6’3″, auburn hair and a toothsome smile went a long way toward making people comfortable around me and the pressed khakis and crisp oxford shirt that was my uniform for years helped to deflect any suspicion that anything could be wrong. I showed people what they wanted to see so that I could get what I wanted. Inside I felt small and ugly. I was a fraud and I knew it. I never managed to take the mask down until I couldn’t keep it on anymore, and when if finally came down the only place I felt safe was in Alcoholics Anonymous.

Despite the various paths that bring us to recovery and the different ways we have of embracing it, there is a deep understanding among us that something important in the very core of our being marks us as one another’s companions. We’re great, we alcoholic/addict types, at sharing what it was like.

We’re not always so good at sharing the solution. We talk about ‘Higher Power’ and ‘God’ of ‘our own understanding’. At the beginning of every meeting we describe that power as ‘a loving God’. But very few new to the rooms get specific direction about how to come into conscious contact with that power. From the very start we need to share our experience.

My experience is that my original understanding of God was completely insufficient to keep me sober. I had to let go of all my ideas about a Higher Power and seek a completely new experience. I had to look for a God that was too big for me to understand; a God big enough to encompass all the ideas of God in the room. I was fortunate that Joe K. shared the following prayer with me.

God, please set aside everything I think I know about myself, my disease, the Big Book, the 12 Steps, the Program, the Fellowship, the people in the fellowship, and all spiritual terms, and especially about you God, so I may have an open mind and a new experience with all these things. Please help me see the Truth. Amen.

Every sentiment in this prayer is expressed in the book.

  • “But the program of action, though entirely sensible, was pretty drastic. It meant I would have to throw several lifelong conceptions out of the window.”
  • “We found that as soon as we were able to lay aside prejudice and express even a willingness to believe in a Power greater than ourselves, we commenced to get results…”
  • “When, therefore, we speak to you of God, we mean your own conception of God. This applies, too, to other spiritual expressions which you find in this book. Do not let any prejudice you may have against spiritual terms deter you from honestly asking yourself what they mean to you.”
  • “Besides a seeming inability to accept much on faith, we often found ourselves handicapped by obstinacy, sensitiveness, and unreasoning prejudice. Many of us have been so touchy that even casual reference to spiritual things make us bristle with antagonism. This sort of thinking had to be abandoned. Though some of us resisted, we found no great difficulty in casting aside such feelings. Faced with alcoholic destruction, we soon became as open minded on spiritual matters as we had tried to be on other questions. In this respect alcohol was a great persuader. It finally beat us into a state of reasonableness. Sometimes this was a tedious process; we hope no one else will as prejudiced for as long as some of us were.”
  • “We, who have traveled this dubious path, beg you to lay aside prejudice, even against organized religion.”
  • “Some of us have tried to hold on to our old ideas and the result was nil until we let go absolutely.”

I needed a different God than I had before and all that I needed in order to start getting results was the willingness to believe in something. Something. And though the experience each of us has of that Higher Power is personal and unique, whenever I hear someone tell their story of finally making conscious contact with that power, something inside me says, “Yes, yes, yes. It was just like that for me.”

ora_et_labora.JPGI genuinely like and admire who I am because of my work.
-GrrlScientist

I alluded recently to the Benedictine motto, “Ora et labora.” That is actually only a derivative. The actual motto is, “Orare est laborare, laborare est orare.” To pray is to work, to work is to pray.

It is not exactly accurate for me to say that I have ever prayed without ceasing unless the diligent willingness to try to cast aside my ego in favor of coming to know God can be called prayer. If showing up in meetings, examining my character, sharing my experience with others is prayer, then I pray a good deal of the time. It is tricky. An amazing amount of selfishness can be found in the most (superficially) unselfish acts. Worse yet, when you realize THAT little nugget of crap the stakes change entirely.

That’s what has been happening with me lately. My understanding has shifted and the stakes have changed. My conception of “infinite” as it pertains to my H.P. has, this sounds weird, grown. Infinite is bigger. The edges are falling off.

The IFX (to those of you new here, he’s the boy who broke my heart – the catalyst of my ‘moment of clarity’ that got me to recovery) came to the clubhouse of the meeting I was at tonight. I had heard from a co-worker/former customer/mutual friend that he is out using again; using and hanging out with gay men. I had hoped it wasn’t true, of course, but he’s obviously taken this path before, with me for example. Sober he always maintained that he is absolutely straight and went out of his way to be rude to me.

He showed up at the clubhouse but he didn’t come into the meeting, choosing instead to go upstairs where he could buy a coffee and be near the fellowship without being scrutinized by a crowd under florescent lights. I worried that he may not be coming into the meeting because he doesn’t want to face me. Heaven knows I’ve been in those shoes. More than once it has been all I could do not to run out of a meeting because he was there. My sponsor (his old sponsor) went upstairs to talk to him and I stayed in the meeting, tears streaming down my face for him, and for me, and for what was and what will never be; all the kinds of things one might anticipate of the grieving.

And I suddenly realized that there was nothing truly compassionate in it. I was sad for me. The fact that he hasn’t yet committed himself to sobriety yet makes me think that we are different from each other, and by extension, that I am superior. I seem to sit in judgement of him by making him a “will not” rather than a “cannot”. Grieving for him is really a way internalizing my judgment of him; of making it about me. Obviously I need to keep trying to take a look at the points where I block myself from experiencing love, serenity and peace; to keep rooting out the causes and conditions that make me want to judge him and judge others in the room who haven’t yet been relieved of the compulsion and obsession.

It’s easy for me to remember today what life was like before, to recall the hopelessness and the pain. It is harder for me to differentiate that I was a would-not and not a could-not. But I was a would-not. The same as my friend. And the program really has nothing to offer a would-not except to maybe show them that there is another way of life available. I genuinely like and admire who I am today because of the work I’ve done. I like the life I have because of the results of that work. I have never met anyone who became miserable or who’s life fell apart because they committed themselves to a spiritual path of some kind, but I’ve seen a number of people suffer because they believed the lie in their minds that they couldn’t.

Image credit: Jorieke Putman

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.

Grand Illusion

swc-index2.jpgThere is a light at the end of the tunnel.
The light is not an illusion.
The tunnel is.
-unknown

I noticed this sign above the door of a meeting I occasionally go to and it just struck me. It seemed profound enough, but it wasn’t till I woke up this morning and read Sweet Pea’s post where she said, “secrets. they thrive in the darkest recesses of my mind and heart,” that I began to see the truth in the idea that the tunnel is an illusion.

I don’t know very many people, even the most spiritual or religious people, who come into the rooms of recovery, that have something resembling a useful and healthy relationship with a power greater than themselves that they understand to be infinite love. That was definitely true for me. I came in with a pretty traditional Judeo-Christian understanding of the Celestial Father, the one I hear some people call the ‘bearded, bean counting, lightning bolt throwing bastard in the sky’. Sure, He was loving and merciful to those who groveled for his forgiveness, but there were things he wouldn’t forgive and I was pretty sure it was me – radical faggot political activist drug addicted rebel that I am. In the difference I perceived between me and everything else I perceived darkness and isolation.

Though it was never said in so many words, I was under the impression that God didn’t like little boys who wanted to grow up to be Mahalia Jackson and to bury their face in Parker Stevenson’s arm pit, which is a shame, really. People like me especially need God. In a world where getting love and acceptance from the closest members of your family is problematic, God can mean the difference between life and death. As a youngster I didn’t understand that my church turning it’s back on me was not the same as God turning His back on me and I responded in kind. I turned my back on God and began to move farther into the illusion of separateness from All that Is.

I realize now that experiencing this separation is part of the human condition; that “our stories align at the core, if not in the sorry details.” The book talks about alcoholics and addicts being extreme examples of living according to this illusion. It talks about self-will run riot, of problems being of our own making and arising in our selves, of a spiritual malady that centers in our minds. It also suggests that people like me reaching out for help need to choose between God being everything or nothing; at a certain point we have to accept spiritual help if we are to recover.

Many forms of spiritual instruction and many forms of religion inform my journey, one of them recently being A Course in Miracles. I am attracted to the course largely because at it’s core it talks about what we talk about in AA and in similar, almost identical, terms. It talks about God being everything. It says that what blocks us from God is a barrier created out of our own mind. It says “a cloud does not put out the sun.”

The tunnel is an illusion.

The light is not.

The tunnel is made out of me. “Above everything, we alcoholics must be rid of this selfishness. We must, or it kill us!”

I found God in AA. I found God when I was finally “beaten into a state of reasonableness”; when I finally got still enough to listen. And that is where I continue to find Him; in the quiet space in between the demands of living a “productive” life in the material world. Demands on my time have increased and finding, or setting aside, enough time to get still has been challenging recently. I experience it as anxiety, frustration, sadness. I experience it as separation; as the tunnel. I wonder what people want from me and I wonder how my needs will be met. I forget that the real question is “what does God expect from me?”

As you already know, I am not particularly Christian. The God I have come to know through AA is described to me most perfectly in Hindu tradition as “the unchanging, infinite, immanent, and transcendent reality which is the Divine Ground of all matter, energy, time, space, being, and everything beyond in this Universe.” But the symbolism of Easter is not lost on me. It really is the sacrifice of self that leads to eternal life, freedom from bondage, salvation and enlightenment.

Happy Easter, friends.

Leisure Suit “[K]nowledge of truth alone does not suffice; on the contrary this knowledge must continually be renewed by ceaseless effort, if it is not to be lost.”
-Albert Einstein

They say the road gets narrower, and do you know what? The flippin’ road gets narrower. Aside from the legal issue, there have been things going on in my world that have occupied my attention in the last weeks; things that we learn how to handle by using certain tools in recovery. Using those tools and applying the principles of the program really is relatively simple. Not easy. But simple. When the issues are big, like learning to not pick up and not drink or facing an overwhelming obstacle, it has been relatively easy for me to immediately pick up the tools and use them. But throw me into a meadow of ordinary living and remove the imperative to make ceaseless effort and it doesn’t take long for me to start feeling like a “decroded piece of crap.”

Forgive the tangent, but I’m pretty sure that most of you don’t realize that those of us who grew up in the Intermountain West actually say things like ‘decroded’. We do. It’s true. And Preston, Idaho? The place where Napoleon Dynamite is from? That’s where my family is from, too. In fact my grandfather and great grandfather both graduated from that same high school. My relatives occupy more real estate in the Preston cemetery than any other family. That movie could have been  a documentary as easily as a comedy. It was an LDS version of Gray Gardens. And you know what that means – Napoleon Dynamite should become a Broadway musical!

It is easy to let up on the spiritual program of action and rest on our laurels. We are headed for trouble if we do. Alcoholics Anonymous, page 85

There has just been a cumulative effect of many little things piling up on me recently, coupled with uneven or absent application of effort to ‘expand and enlarge’ my relationship with my Higher Power. I haven’t let up entirely, of course. Dropping everything instantly would require a force of will that I just don’t have. You have to work to fail utterly, but it doesn’t take any effort at all to let one thing slip. And then another. And then another. The slippery slope is gentle. You travel quite a distance before you fall off the cliff. I’m still attending meetings daily, for example. I stay in touch with my sponsor on a daily basis, too. I work with 5 sponsees, two of whom are actively doing the work, two are actively pretending to and one, the one who is probably the most like me, is actively wishing he was willing. (Thinking about him breaks my heart. )

In spite of these things I have increasingly felt restless, irritated and depressed. Finances, for example, have been hugely problematic since last August. There is a definite move in my future, either at the end of this month or next, which is adding to my anxiety. I have become increasingly irritated in meetings by an entire class of AA member whom I have judged (either rightly or wrongly) to have not done ‘the work’. In spite of the reinstatement of my probation, a blessing of some magnitude, I have only been able to focus on the additional terms of my probation. One of my court orders reinstating my probation actually says that as one of the terms of my reinstatement that I am to “complete AA/NA” – that little gem just about made my head pop off. I have never really recovered from my bout of bronchitis and right now my throat is so sore I can barely swallow. I haven’t slept more than two consecutive hours in months. I am acutely aware of being single.

For someone putting consistent effort into the program these things are easily navigable. For someone who has “let up” they are the beginning of a slow decline back into the insanity of addiction; a decline so gentle that it is hardly perceptible. I couldn’t see it, but something was gnawing at me. I knew something was not right. And somehow, before yesterday I had not noticed how long it has been since I was willing to pick up a pen and write any inventory. My writing here had trailed of significantly and anything that showed up here was by sheer force of will rather than the organic process that I typically experience. My regimen of prayer and meditation has weakened. Naturally a simple knowledge of God’s presence in my life has not netted the same results that earnestly seeking God did.

One of the most uncomfortable truths for me is that nearly every time I take someone else’s inventory, like I did to that poor girl the other day, I am really taking my own inventory. Those that irritate me are more often than not just like me. It often takes me days to see it, though, and I don’t know that I’ve ever been able to see it before I pick up a pen and write inventory. The up-side of this discomfort it that it reminds me that I am growing. In fact, I’m probably growing a lot.

Hell’s Fairies How could we make amends?
So it’s one more round for experience
And I’m on the road again
And it’s going to take some time this time.
-Carole King

I am so relieved to finally have this chapter over with. Well, this part anyway. My relationship with the Department of Corrections is far from over, but the big hurdle is – the hurdle where I have no power. From here on out the results are directly related to what I do. Ultimately, all they are really asking for is that I do what I’m doing -stay sober, be accountable. In a way that seems like the true test of addiction and of recovery. In active addiction staying sober was unthinkable and being accountable was impossible. In recovery staying sober and being accountable are both absolutely possible. I have seen (and been seen by) the last of the three judges who had all placed me on probation back in 2001. I have accounted for the fact that I simply vanished for 13 months while I was supposed to be supervised. The State has had three opportunities to show that for the good of the People I need to be placed in a correctional institution and on each of those occasions the Court has disagreed. A year ago the story would have ended differently.

“(H)e had the extraordinary experience, which as we have already told you, made him a free man.” (p. 28)

Going several rounds with these judges gave me the opportunity to become more effective at speaking to that particular type of audience, authority figures, and I’m grateful for the experience. It didn’t take away the tears. I kept them from pouring. I kept my voice in check, mostly, but there was emotion there in me, the kind that I normally associate with deep prayer; the kind I let myself fall in to when I’m in the shower, say, or whenever I can have some uninterrupted time with God. But by the third time I was able to get right to the bottom of the matter and let Her Honor know that I knew the gravity of my error, that I didn’t believe it was the sort of thing that would happen again because of the work I’ve done, that certainly I hoped to not go to prison but that either way I knew that I would be useful. God gave me a message to share and I would be able to share it wherever I was.

We, in our turn, sought the same escape with all the desperation of drowning men. What seemed at first a flimsy reed, has proved to be the loving and powerful hand of God. A new life has been given us or, if you prefer, “a design for living “that really works.” (p. 28)

God’s hand-prints are all over this experience of mine. And yet the unrealized, finite and fearful part of me still worries about things; is still ungrateful and selfish. Perhaps I can never be entirely free from worry or self-pity. I recognize that those defects are pretty significantly diminished today and it has occurred to me of late that mindfulness of what I am grateful for might alleviate some of that insane suffering. So, lest you think I’m the most ungrateful son of a bitch that ever lived, here is a quick and dirty of what I am grateful for today:

  • Being ‘on the road again’ on my little gay scooter! Motorized transportation rocks!
  • My friend Robert who agreed that we should start our own club since, because we don’t have bikes with at least 600 cc., the Sober Riders won’t have us. We’ll be Scootin’ Sober. We may even get groovy wind breakers or something.
  • The fact that food stamps are easy to apply for.
  • That I have clear cut directions for finishing probation.
  • That I have probation at all.
  • That I can’t be thrown in prison for thinking stupid, selfish thoughts about not getting my way.
  • That I can sometimes recognize that I’m thinking stupid, selfish thoughts about not getting my way.
  • That people who love me love me enough to point out when I’m thinking stupid, selfish thoughts.
  • That I have a purpose, that I can be useful to God wherever I am.
  • That God has allowed me to be useful out here instead of in there, and most of all, that
  • God loves me. Like, A LOT!!!

So, in this particular “round for experience” I have made my amends. The judges have permitted me to do the right thing and supported it. And three times now God has let me know that I am most useful out here doing what I’m doing. I’m “on the road again”; literally and figuratively, and that is fantastic!

HELLS FAIRIES: A GLBT scooter group in Chicago is ready to ride. Photo: Alex Rumsey

Texaco ManOne of my great, if not my greatest character traits is intelligence. I’m smart, damn it, and I know it. I was also raised in a family, a community and a culture that all place a high value on intelligence, so I feel valuable. Another trait is perseverance. “Quitters never win,” was an oft repeated admonition in the society of my youth. Taken together these are the kind of qualities that governments and industries are built of. There is little that cannot be achieved with intelligence and perseverance. They are qualities to be admired.

In an addict or an alcoholic they can be fatal. Alcoholics and addicts of my description often die rather than embrace the truth; that “we were powerless over alcohol; that our lives had become unmanageable.” To finally and completely admit the truth about me, that I was entirely without ability, influence or control with regard to drugs and alcohol and that as a result of my drinking and using the ordinary tasks of living became impossible to deal with was a pill too bitter to swallow. Me, the one who prided himself on his ability to solve even the most difficult problems, the one who never gave up till the obstacle was overcome or the difficulty mastered, admitting that I had been defeated by such a trivial thing.

I saw other people having wine with dinner, going out for drinks with friends or having a beer on a hot summer day.  I even saw people who occasionally smoked a joint or did a line of coke or crystal meth without anything terrible happening and I couldn’t understand why I was unable to do the same.  I didn’t understand why when I did the same things I saw other people doing I got different results. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to recognize that when you take culturally reinforced personality traits like intelligence and perseverance, a hereditary brain defect and a powerfully addictive substance that the result is someone who has to go pretty far down the scale before they cry “Uncle!”

Ultimately I did surrender.  After I had tried absolutely everything I could think of to try, I did admit complete defeat, and asked for help.  People who understood me and my problem took me to the solution and showed me how to apply a simple set of spiritual principles to my problems.  But I didn’t or couldn’t  ask for help before I had done some pretty outrageous things in an attempt to satisfy the craving and manage the outcome.  I am still paying (dearly) for the consequences of my addiction.  Today my head (my disease) is telling me that the price I am paying is too high, that the world is unfair, that the behavior that placed me in the position I am in is the result of a disease, a brain disorder really, and culturally reinforced ‘virtues’; that I am being punished for being biologically defective, smart and persevering.

That insane idea is as much a part of the problem as anything else, and luckily there is a set of simple instructions that I now try to follow to override it.  Following those instructions can take me from thinking how upset I am that it will be years and years before I get my passport back and go to Italy, to thinking how grateful I am that I get to be useful to the people around me outside of prison walls today.  The problem is still that I don’t always pick up those tools and follow those instructions right away.  I seem to have to reach a certain level of misery before I understand that the only effective solution I have today to the problems that trouble me most is the same solution that they showed me how to apply to my drug and alcohol problem.

What I’m saying is that someone showed me how to apply the solution and yet today I am miserable and unwilling to apply that solution to the thing that is troubling me.  Today I am miserable.  It isn’t something I’m going to drink over.  I may just do some extended pouting.  Hopefully I won’t wallow in this too long.

Any Texaco Man Will Show You, originally uploaded by nyctreeman.

 

HeiroglyphicsThe spiritual journey does not consist in arriving at a new destination where a person gains what he did not have, or becomes what he is not. It consists in the dissipation of one’s own ignorance concerning one’s self and life, and the gradual growth of that understanding which begins the spiritual awakening. The finding of God is a coming to one’s self.
-Aldous Huxley

Just got home from work, fired up the old (seriously, if you saw it you’d laugh) ‘puter, opened up iTunes to listen to some incredibly talented/incredibly fucked up Amy Winehouse. With a name like that she probably is legally barred from getting sober. I had the JayZ remix of Rehab I wanted to hear. So I’m listening to that, right? And I’m checking in at the station to see if there are any new comments. And the ‘mix’ part of the remix hadn’t come in yet and I forgot that I had enabled autoplay on finetunes and I’m listening and listening and listening for something to make sense because it isn’t making sense. But what I’m listening to is Amy Winehouse and Maureen McGovern singing They Tried to Make Me Go to Rehab/We May Never Love Like This Again. They Tried to Make Me Love Again? We May Never Go to Rehab? Something. It didn’t make so much sense it made sense. Or at least there was a beautiful kind of absurdity to it; a perfectly absurd song for a perfectly absurd afternoon in a perfectly absurd life. CBS Mona Lisa Atari.

It was the perfect bit of accompaniment to this afternoons discovery that there is another warrant for my arrest. This time it is just a requirement that I go check myself in at the jail and go home. I knew this was a possibility. It had been my understanding, of course, that the prosecutor was going to serve the warrant to my attorney so that I could go take care of it. Seems it was issued on the 16th. He didn’t know about it, and I was just sitting around paranoid so I checked. Puma saxophone saxophone. I have to exercise great open-mindedness to be able to see any point of view but my own about certain things, and even then I sometimes have difficulty not selling myself into my own idea. You know what I mean? In this case I have a hard time separating my desire to be left the fuck alone, so I can continue uninterrupted the more or less decent life I have been given since I got sober, from the idea that prosecuting a single violation on three separate cases will net anyone any benefit. I feel it is an egregious waste of money, mine, of course -or rather my father’s- and the public’s. It appears to me that the public can have my amends at a third the price. But what do I know? Absurd. Vaio Mickey Mouse trumpet trumpet trumpet, you know? It’s not my call. It’s not my place to judge.

Internet Explorer Nike Oscar and I hate my job. I need my job at the moment. I’m still catching up from a terrible December. The only paycheck I’ve had in a month paid my rent and left me with $2.00 Missing 2 weeks of work while I was in jail and while I was waiting for the next schedule after I got out combined with having my hours cut as a result of that adventure put me drastically farther behind where I had tried to plan to be when I addressed the legal issue. You do the best you can to live life on  life’s terms and Jaguar NBC Eiffel Tower. You know what I mean?

It’s just always some dude I don’t know and Apple Apple Apple Texaco television. Again.

Reading Culture, originally uploaded by eworm.

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