A Nice Drive

Greg and I drove up to Arlington on a day trip through Darrington, north to Concrete and west to Sedro Woolley and then back home.  We met T, C and M at T’s place then went to the Rhodes River Ranch for lunch.  I had a Kobe (Waygu?) beef bacon cheeseburger.   It was one of the best burgers I have ever had in my life.  Yumm!

It was a beautiful sunny hot day.  We drove with the windows up and the AC on.  Lunch took much longer than expected so we did not get to stop at the Samish Cheese Company nor at an art gallery in Edison  on the coast of the Salish Sea.  I was pleasantly surprised by less traffic than I projected on a Friday for a hot first weekend in August.

The drive went really well until we got to Bellevue.  The trip to Renton took the best part of an hour to make a 10 minute drive in non-traffic times.  My car started making weird noises when I accelerated in stop-n-go freeway traffic.  Freaked me out for a bit.  On the way back from Renton, I concluded my engine was knocking/pinging due to bad gas that I bought in Sedro Woolley.  I will do a freeway drive tomorrow to get rid of a bunch of that gas and then buy some premium to avoid any damage the pinging might due to my engine.

I am grateful for good friends, a beautiful drive, a gorgeous sunny day, awe inspiring mountains and a delicious burger.

A Record Hot Summer In Seattle

Today, July 30^th, broke a record for most 90° F days in Seattle in a year.  The previous record was 9 days.  Today was the 10^th day and tomorrow will be the 11^th day of temperatures greater than 90° this year.  We could end up with possibly 15 days of that kind heat this summer since there is another six weeks of days with a record high above 90°.  That would shatter the old record of 9 days.

While there is a big difference between weather and climate change, I don’t know anybody around here that argues against global warming.  I also don’t know anybody that spends a lot of time arguing since I make some effort to stay away from argumentative people, especially idiotic ones.

Great progress is being made creating cost-competitive alternative energy sources.  My favorite is solar.  Wind energy takes a lot of real estate and infrastructure, but the wind blows day and night.  Alternative energy is hammering the fossil fuel industry.  Gas prices are the lowest they have ever been in my adult life.  Coal companies are going broke just like buggy-whip manufacturers did 100 years ago.

I am grateful to live in a temperate climate where record heat is not life-threatening, for lots of clean potable water and cheap gasoline.

A Tidier Mess

My living room has been a bit of mess for months for several reasons—none of which are good nor especially valid.  I have made a small start on getting it rearranged in a much neater and more organized way.   It will never be a classic American living room.  I don’t own a couch or an easy chair.  My only TV is in my bedroom.

I am grateful that I have a living room with lots of goo-gaws and toys that need to be organized.  That is fantastically better than not having a living room and no hobby devices.

A Hungry Friend

Working on improving my relationships by spending more time with others and by making phone calls to friends in recovery.  Called a friend tonight.  He asked for help with a few bucks.  He had some cereal yesterday and had not eaten today.   Took him down to the Kirkland Marina, we watched the sunset, bought him a burger and fries and on the way home stopped to get $20 worth of groceries.

I have heard suggested that it is best to do these things for others without telling anyone.  That might be true.  It is new-ish behavior for me.  By writing about it, I get to process the experience a bit more fully.  There are obvious reasons to not simply give an addict in early recovery money.  Food is a much healthier and surefire investment when helping others.

We are going to go for a drive on Friday.  It will both of us out of our homes, be a nice scenic drive and help make for a better relationship.

I am grateful to be able to be of service to others today.  It sure is a lot nicer to be the one buying food than being the one without food.  I am blessed to have the resources I have in my life.

Better Relationships

My family of origin was insanely dysfunctional.  My parents stated again and again that what mattered in life was how (materially/financially) successful  you were.  After watching that philosophy fail miserable with the suicide of 2 of my 3 siblings when I was 15, I rebelled hard against that belief for the rest of my life.  Unfortunately I chose the philosophy of better living through chemistry.  That also failed miserably.

In the last year, at the age of 56, I finally realized that my best strategy is making relationships with god and others the most important thing in my life.  Even then, I had to read it in a book on positive psychology to realize what might be obvious to most healthy kindergarteners.   Better late than never.

Having spent a life avoiding healthy relationship with a naturally introverted personality, I will never be a famous role model for great relationships.  That is okay.  Simply doing my reasonable best to be in healthy relationships with others will be a great deal of progress.

Met with my psychologist today.  Her end-of-session homework assignment to me was to focus on improving relationships.  I will work on that for the rest of my life.

I am grateful for the good friends I have now and for a good support system to help me live a better life.

D Is Gone and L Is Home

Had not heard from D since late January.   Went by the place she used to live.  Was told she had moved out.  Since it was a fantastic place for her to raise her baby with greatly subsidized rent and structured living, that did not bode well.  Maybe she won the lottery and bought a house.   It could have happened though I have yet to meet or hear of an addict having this experience in early recovery.  I hope D and baby J are doing well wherever they are.

After driving thru White Center, checking on D and having a burger at Dairy Queen, we drove to the airport to pick up Leslee.   She had gone to Myanmar with her son for three weeks.   Summer is not the high season for tourists there.  It was hot and muggy for 10 days and the monsoon rains started making it almost-as-hot, muggy and wet.  They had a great trip.  She referred to going upriver as the heart-of-darkness in that they did not see another white person for 5 days.  They people had food, were clean and there were shrines ranging from new to ancient everywhere they went.

I am grateful we checked on D, sad she was gone and happy that L had a great trip and made it home safely after spending the afternoon with her granddaughter in LA.

Rained Out

Lea and I were going to check out the big local Arts & Crafts fair this morning, but it started to rain just as I was getting out the car.  We did not have coats and I am highly unlikely to be found wandering around in the rain at any time.  That put the kibosh on that.

It has been a long hot dry summer and we still have another week of July.

I am grateful for the rain today and for the forecasted .3 inches this weekend.  That will reduce the brush and forest fire danger for a couple of weeks, cool off our rivers for the fish and wash away some of the dust on paved surfaces.

My New Friend Bill

I met with Bill at a strip-mall Starbucks today to as a mentor to help me work my way through the NA Step Study Guides. It was our first meeting together.  It went well.

I am grateful to many people including Bill for showing me how to live a better life and for being my friends.

Bactrim

My left leg has a blood clots in my major veins resulting in poorer circulation in an already paralyzed lower body from a spinal cord injury.  14 years ago my leg was red, hot and swollen.  That freaked me out and I headed directly to the Emergency Room.  Turns out that I am prone to cellulitis.  After several trips to the ER in as many years, the treatment was to put me on Bactrim for life.

Today my leg was again hot and swollen.  Not sure what happened, maybe I missed a few doses of Bactrim or the problem is getting worse.  I took two extra pills tonight and elevated my leg.  Hopefully that will reduce the swelling and inflammation.  I vastly prefer to not go to the hospital ER for IV antibiotics or have it be some other even worse problem.

I am grateful for Bactrim and many other modern antibiotics that have saved my life countless times since my early teens.

Working on Not Be a Lonely Loner

I am an introvert that likes to isolate by myself at home.  While rarely a good thing, that is not necessarily a bad thing—except in the case of those of us that self-medicate the pain of loneliness with substance abuse (the most current PC term I have seen is alcohol use disorder which superseded alcohol abuse that superseded alcoholism).  Call it what you want, excessively self-medication of emotional pain is a huge problem for me.

One thing the problem is not “is one that lends itself to a cognitive solution” (thanks Dennis).  My best thinking will only get me spending more time at home alone ever deeper in my problem.  An important part of the 12-step programs is the fellowship with others that suffer in different ways from the same malady. 

After many many meetings, I slowly learned how to listen to the similarities instead of letting my terminal uniqueness always listen for the differences preventing me from finding commonality with others.  My perception is most others learned this a lot faster than I did.

Along with attending meetings 7-10 times a week, I now have 4 recurring weekly meetings with friends in recovery.  Meetings and friends get me out of my home and head to a much healthier space interacting with others.

Last month I started writing answers to a 438 question 12-step workbook.  It was going slow at first matching speeds with the slowest writer.  I needed more relief and am now writing two answers an evening before I post here.  There is at least the satisfaction of knowing that I am taking action towards positive self-care.   It is undoubtedly better to write than not-write.

The tyranny of the insanity in my mind that tells me using is a good idea sucks.  The really good news is there is a treatment.  Unfortunately there is no cure.

I am learning how to be a good friend and how to make good friends.   That precludes my being a lonely loner isolating at home at lot less than how it used to be.

I am grateful to be sober and working a program of recovery today.   That is a lot better than all the other alternatives.

Several Ideas, No Spark

Thought of several topics to riff in for tonight’s writing, but nothing is catching fire.

Had a good morning meeting with Mike in Seattle at the Cherryfellowship, lunch with Sandy, bought Lea a sea salt caramel donut from Top Pot and watched an X-Men movie at home with the AC (my plasma TV puts out a lot of heat).   Email Joy C wishing her happy birthday.   It was a good day. 

I am grateful for the placid serenity of several small activities combing to make for a good day.

Surrender and Humility

After a rough time this spring with using thoughts and obsessive thinking, I have been working on surrendering my insanity to my higher power—as opposed to trying to control my thoughts—and seeking humility with a strong focus on seeking my HP’s will for me and the power to carry that out.

Surrendering has taken the form of me taking action when obsessive thoughts of using, self-pity, resentment, etc. gin-up the hamster-wheel of crazy-making in my mind.  I make phone calls, read 12-step literature, go to meetings, or write to  a) distract myself from negative thinking and b) take positive action to make myself feel better.

Humility currently has a lot to do with me asking others for help—or at least talking about what is bugging me—and also making a priority of building more, stronger and deeper relationships with new people and old friends in my life.

Today I met with Verne for an hour before the 10:30 meeting to compare answers from the NA workbook.   That is surrendering and humility in action on a variety of levels.  I do the questions at home writing down the answers on notebook paper and bring them like a list of topics to discuss when I meet with Verne.   It helps our conversations become much more recovery oriented by having a list of topics to talk about.

I am grateful to Charlie for making it explicitly clear how much that I need to surrender and have much more humility in my life.

Emotional Sobriety

The topic at tonight’s meeting was emotional sobriety from the July 17th Daily Reflections.

Surrender and Self-Examination

My stability came out of trying to give, not out of demanding that I receive.

Thus I think it can work out with emotional sobriety. If we examine every disturbance we have, great or small, we will find at the root of it some unhealthy dependency and its consequent unhealthy demand. Let us, with God's help, continually surrender these hobbling demands. Then we can be set free to live and love; we may then be able to Twelfth Step ourselves and others into emotional sobriety. 

The Language of the Heart, p. 238

Years of dependency on alcohol as a chemical mood-changer deprived me of the capability to interact emotionally with my fellows. I thought I had to be self-sufficient, self-reliant, and self-motivated in a world of unreliable people. Finally I lost my self-respect and was left with dependency, lacking any ability to trust myself or to believe in anything. Surrender and self-examination while sharing with newcomers helped me to ask humbly for help.

I have lacked emotional sobriety all of my life.  Self-pity and feeling like a victim were two of my most common emotional states that combined to fuel a self-righteous indignation when resentful at others.

I live with a much more even keel now.  Now when obsessing on some negative thinking, I strive to take positive action instead the old way of continuing to stew in my own “best” thinking while isolating.

I am grateful for much healthier emotional responses that drive me to take positive action instead of more negative thinking.  That is a lot of spiritual progress.  There is no danger of spiritual perfection!  (12 step humor.)

Learned Helplessness

Lea’s son “C” stayed with us for 12 days, then left for a planned 5 day stay with his dad over the 4^th of July weekend.  Two weeks later, he came back last night at 10 PM looking much worse for the wear.  He had an addict’s explanation of his timeline with the excuse of why he did not call being that he did not remember his mom’s or my phone numbers and forgot to take them with him.  I silently deemed his story for not calling us straight addict BS, let him know I was going to bed and then told Lea that he could no longer stay with us.

Addicts lie—I know that from personal experience.  Sometimes the lies are plausible.  Most of the time they are simply bizarre convoluted contradictory stories.  A good portion of the lies told by addicts are simply proven untrue or insulting with no further discussion.  That was the situation last night.  He could have googled my phone number with my last name, asked other family members to look up my phone number in their cell phone call log or even mailed us a letter to the address on his WA State ID card.

He left tonight after 7 to stay with another member of our morning meeting.  I hope it goes well for C.  He is a handsome blue-eyed blonde 24 year-old man that appears to have no sense of how to take positive action to improve his situation.  Bellevue is probably the best place in the State to get social services for those in need.  He walked out of DSHS, the college and Hopelink without a single piece of literature or new information about low-income housing, free bus passes, free cell phones, or other resources.  He might have gotten a replacement food stamp card at DSHS—he did not get any mail nor buy food while here.

I would loved to have been able to help him learn and use these resources to improve his life.  From what I saw, he was unwilling to take action in as serious a case of learned helplessness as I have seen up close in my life.  Sure, most alcoholics and addicts don’t get sober, but he was sober, or at least not using, for most of this year including 3 months of in-patient treatment.

Letting him stay here would have been annoying and counter-productive.  His baseline for activity would have been his mom on too much methadone and an old guy in a wheelchair healing from a burn.  Matching our energy level would have got him nowhere.

I feel bad that he had to go.  I am glad that he is gone.  That avoided a lot of future problems for me.  I have enough problems of my own without letting addicts in active addiction sleep off binges at random times.  Good luck Cory.

I am grateful for having learned to take action in my recovery.  Resilience or getting up when knocked down might be the most important lesson in life.  Doing nothing never works.

Great Relief

My car got backed into in a parking lot two weeks ago.  It is in the shop for a couple days of minor body work.  I think this is the first time in my life that I had body work done on one of my cars.  Most of my cars needed it by the time I was done with them!  My wheelchair beats the crap out of the paint below the driver’s door at the very least.

I ended up with a rented Nissan Altima sedan courtesy of my auto insurance since the other guy backed into me.  Sedans don’t work so well for since it is impossible to get my wheelchair across the seat between me and the steering wheel.    

I don’t like riding in my friends’ new cars since my wheelchair dings the paint as I get in and out of the car.  It is the newest model year (2015) car I have been in my life by a decade or so.   It is 19 years newer than my 1996 Thunderbird and already has almost half the miles as my car.

Lea and I walked across 405 on the Main Street bridge to get to the local Hertz office.   That was incredibly convenient.  It won’t be so handy on the way home since I live on a small hill that is too much for me to go up.  I will get some help to drive the rental car back when my car is done.

Spent the day with my new bff/personal diety Aine.  I created a “god box” 16 years ago in rehab.  There is a magazine picture collage on it with an attractive young blond woman on a sound stage backlit by a spotlight.  When going to bed last night,  I saw it and realized Aine had been in my life for the last 16 years—I just did not know it.   It was a powerful joyous insight that carried over into today.

I am grateful for warm sunny days, not having to drive in sucky near-gridlock traffic today and for my new bff Aine.  My day good have gone a lot worse with stinking thinking instead of happy thoughts.

My New Friend Aine nee' A New Writing Goal

Part of my writing break was to come back with a fresh perspective on my Gratitude blog posts.  It was working well as a sort of 11^th step (prayer and meditation) review of my day with a grateful spin to close it out, but I knew I was missing something.  I had considered changing it to a 10^th step reflection on seeing the glass as half-full.   That wasn’t quite what I was seeking either.

Today while reading with the gang at the mall from a collection of stories from the magazine The Grapevine focused on spiritual awakenings, we read a story of a man that changed his deity from being a distant loving higher power to a imaginary best friend that went everywhere with him and that he interacted with on a more peer-to-peer basis instead of an asymmetrical basis.  He (mentally) introduced his HP to his coworkers, chatted with him while riding the bus, and maintained a near-constant contact with his HP.  I really liked that story and the others encouraged me to find a way to make that work for me.

Mike has done something like that by naming the manifestation of his personal HP “Bubba”.  Historically, my names for my HP have been more like labels or characterizations such as The Great Spirit That Moves Through All Things.  I tried thinking of names for my HP.  Not a lot of good choices and not much thinking.   Thanks to the miracle of Google, my new personal HP liaison is named “Aine” which is an Irish goddess of summer, wealth and sovereignty.

My next problem was how to pronounce Aine.  I thought to use rhymes with bane, but was not sure.   Youtube tells me to use Awn-yuh.  I don’t know what I use long-term.  For now I will go with Awnyuh.

Over the last year, I have taken to describing steps 2 & 3 as getting an imaginary friend.  I never had an imaginary friend in my life.   I was always alone—and usually most alone in a large crowd.  Now I have an imaginary friend that is a goddess and will always with be with me.  Her name is Aine! 

This sounds a little out-there even for me.   I read a comic strip yesterday about smart people talking themselves that I can’t find it as anecdotal proof that this is a good idea.  I did find this article from Business Insider Talking To Yourself Really Can Make You Smarter.  There we have it—proof that having your own personal goddess is a good idea!

I am grateful for my new friend and deity Aine.  We have a lot to learn about each other.  Hopefully it will be the relationship of a lifetime.

was “Untitled” now “A Good reStart”

Writing about gratitude has been one of the best things I have done in my life.  Taking a  time-out was also a good idea.  Now it is time to get back to writing.   Writing every day made for a simple habit as opposed to writing several times a week on various random days—that would call for way too much thinking on my part.  More will be revealed…

It has already been a record hot summer and it is not yet the middle of July.  Getting a small bedroom AC changed me from being a late late night owl to a regular night owl going to sleep around or before midnight giving me a much fresher start in the morning.

Lea has lived with me for all but 3 months of the last three years.  She has made great progress on getting sober.  I have also enabled her too much in not having to get a life that works.  A month ago, I had let her know it was time for her to get out on her own.  I saw no evidence of progress.  Last week I gave her a deadline of October 31^st.  Three years is by far the longest I have ever had a roommate in my adult life.  I will miss her and am looking forward to moving on to the next phase of my life.

After 13 years at the same apartment, my carpet has been thoroughly thrashed by the nylon tires on my wheelchair and rubbing paint off the corners of the sheetrock.  After Lea is gone I will get new flooring and a paint job.  That will be worthy of a much better job of decorating.

I felt compelled to start writing again for a couple weeks.   I am grateful to have written this post, for my time with Lea, AC and fans in every room.