Category Archives: recovery

Expectations. The Update

07 Tuesday Jan 2020

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I watched a video about a mobile home for sale on a lot somewhere in Alabama or Mississippi or some other el primo mobile home state. For almost an hour I tbought about buying a mobile home. An hour. Almost. It would mean I (we) would have to move out to the country, out there in an area where tornadoes go prowling for innocent trailers. Forget that. Maybe I could write lyrics for country music songs if I lived in one.

I did not swim.

I did take a nap.

I fixed my Waldorf chicken salad for J’s lunch tomorrow.

I did two loads of laundry.

So I feel better. I did stuff that needed to be done that wasn’t particularly grandiose. There is hope.

In an unrelated observation, England’s Ben Stokes is a great batsman.

And Now, This…

11 Wednesday Dec 2019

Posted by in Exercise/ Fitness, memoir, recovery, Uncategorized

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I was up at 2:30 AM, stayed awake til 5:30. I wanted to see J off to work around 4:20. Then I went back to bed. I slept til around 9:30. I went to AA, and shared a traumatic moment from my childhood, that I rarely talk about. I must have been 8. It was summer, August. Mother was in a particularly angry(?) or emotionally distraught mood. I was not good at psychological assessment at that age. She was upset, and was about ready to drink a bottle of Dickinson’s Witch Hazel until I knocked it out of her hand. It was a glass bottle and it shattered. Nothing was ever said about this ever again. I thought she was going to kill herself. I knew that was a bad idea.

Now I know that this was an event of childhood trauma for me. And since, sixty-one years later, it still haunts me, this might be PTSD.

Having shared that, I went about my day. I did some shopping, found a nice beef eye round. I felt like taking a nap, but changed my mind and went swimming at the Y, first time this month. I did 1750 meters. And shaved afterwards. I used all the grooming products that make me feel masculine. As we say, if you want to gain self-esteem do estimable things. I slew one dragon from my past, bought a nice roast, and went swimming.

Now we are waiting to go get $1 tacos. I am working my way up out of the pit I fell in.

Ongoing Collective Nightmare

12 Tuesday Feb 2019

Posted by in Addiction, recovery

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I was talking with my elder son tonight. Just chatting, getting caught up. He said he talked with his ex-wife a few weeks ago for the first time since their divorce nearly fifteen years ago. She had remarried, was the mother of two children 10 and 8, and taught high school math. All pretty routine. Then she told my son that her husband died of a heroin overdose about a year or so ago. Heroin overdose. It isn’t unusual anymore. How horrible and two orphaned children.

It isn’t just opioids, synthetics, but heroin, an opium derivative. Do you think heroin just might be smuggled across the Southern border? Are we doing enough to deal with the ongoing drug nightmare?From the perspective of those two fatherless children, I would say we are not.

A Minor Recovery

11 Thursday Oct 2018

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Hanging around the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous for over twenty four years, I’ve learned that we can and do have setbacks (not relapses, when we go back “out” and drink) but setbacks where we lose momentum in maintaining our spiritual connectedness. Or sometimes we get out of the habits that make sobriety a rich and welcome experience.

I had gotten out of the habit of regularly working out. I have some issues with my left shoulder; when I swim, my overhead freestyle stroke hurts. The muscles seemed tight. The stroke felt totally awkward. I stopped at 150 meters. I decided to tread water, using my arms as much as I could, moving, rotating, stretching, putting in an hour of treading. Right now, nearly six hours later, I feel the soreness and pain near where the scapula meets the spine. I will go again tomorrow.

Back to rebuilding, grateful for all I have sustained, I begin another intensive approach to emotional and spiritual recovery. Life is good. Sobriety is good, for with it comes a clear head and a forgiving heart.

If I have learned anything lately, it is to let go of feelings of animosity towards those with whom I disagree, the more strident the angry words and feelings, the more urgent the need to completely let go.

I am not the person I was when I started this blog. I have changed the title three times, from The Celibate Pervert, to Celibate Or Chaste?, to Dispatches From Dystopia. I think we do live in a dystopia, the source of which isn’t political; rather it is our quest for the ideal culture, of perfection that ignores the baseness of the human creature. We can’t ignore the greed, the anger, the lust. the pride.

Maybe we just don’t have all the answers. And never will.

There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your…philosophy.- Shakespeare, Hamlet. (1:5 167-8)