I had a wonderful weekend in Las Vegas, and about halfway through it, I realized I was living a short story.
So I'm going to write it while it's fresh in my brain, and post it here in parts. Until then you'll just have to wait.
One thing that did happen while I was gone is that my dogsitter installed the deluxe version of Photoshop. I had to make use of it immediately, and one of the images on Sheria's latest blog reminded me that I have completely neglected Toulouse-Lautrec. Here is one of his more famous posters, merged with two of Braque's works.
I was writing an email to someone in the early days of sobriety, but thought better about sending it. I am becoming more and more aware of my tendency to lecture, and am trying to remember, "when in doubt, don't." The great thing about a blog is that you can expound all you want and if people don't want to hear it, they just don't read. My friend knows about the blog, if he happens to click on it today, he was meant to read the following. If not, it could help someone else.
You grasped the very heart of the program, the orientation toward helping others.That is always available to us, no matter how many days we have, but the reason it's placed in Step 12 instead of Step 1 is the same reason flight attendants tell us to put the oxygen mask on ourselves before the person next to us. Conversely, if the person next to us is deserving of all the love and kindness we have to give, then we are equally deserving of it from them, and from ourselves to ourselves.
When I started to think of myself as a perfect child of God, exactly the way I am, the result of millions of years of evolution that produced this unbelievably elegant and powerful brain, it also helped me reframe the very concept of "enhancement" that I held to so tightly for so long. I might certainly be able to momentarily intensify my chemical experience of life by soaking my dopamine receptors, (a sensation always dearly paid for, as we know) but ultimately I came to see that as an attempt to improve on perfection
I found this very helpful when wrestling with the issue of drinking, which was so supplanted by the meth that I had no trouble, quantity-wise, keeping it manageable those weeks I drank after prison. After I got sober, I re-examined the seemingly innocuous high I got as reducing my capacity to be 100% present to my experience, which is where the real "high" was, as it's the place of being of maximum service to others. Getting even a little tipsy merely enhanced my desire to be of service to my lips, (please show me affection) or my dick (make me feel good) or ego (see how funny I am?) These are all things I do just as well sober, I just have to do a little more work allowing myself to be vulnerable, to shut up some of the time (still working on it), to find the charm instead of create it, to relax, to not aim for a particular result etc. (For example, I had a great conversation with this guy Friday night, which I will remember far longer than any sex we might have had. Plus, I needed to know I could approach someone in a bar without artificial fortification, and he needed to have an intelligent conversation with a gay man in a bar in Las Vegas, the dearth of which he lamented. A makeout scene would have been nice, but it's not like I don't know what that feels like, don't I? )
MCO 2008
P.S. If you're that guy, checking the blog out of curiosity, why don't you drop me an email?
I read this entry three times before I was ready to respond to it. Not because it was disjointed or confusing but because it was so complexly layered. There is a work by Plato, "The Allegory of the Cave," that I am immensely fond of that I read again and again to savor the richness of thought. Your paragraphs, beginning with "When I started to think of myself as a perfect child of God,..." have such complexity that I had to study them to squeeze out the nuances of meaning. No matter what our addiction, I think that we use it to reduce our capacity to be 100% present to our experience. Because we don't see ourselves as having value without the artificial enhancement, we cling to our addiction, not because it makes us feel valued but because it numbs us to the emotional pain of feeling that we are without worth. Without the numbing provided by our addiction, we find the agony unbearable and convince ourselves that somehow the addiction is a salvation of sorts. How wonderful to let life unfold without the crutch of addiction, to fully experience living, the ups and downs with all of your senses engaged, to embrace the beautiful and understand that even the ugly provides context and meaning to our existence.
Btw, I like the use of Lautrec and look forward to the short story.