esplendor gemetrico

Crikey! I haven't updated this thing in awhile. It's like a resume with the last position listed as being a y2k compliance officer. Well no not that extreme, but since whenever it was that I last updated, I'm too lazy to look, I've had a world of change. I have four months sober as of Wednesday. My world has gotten bigger and I can deal with bullshit white people problems.

Actually I can't deal with white people problems. What I can do is "turn it over," meaning, understanding that I can't control how things turn out. I can only try to do good decent unselfish things and deal with the results. I pray, ok? I don't pretend there's any logical or objective reason why praying seems to work. It just does. I have romance and employment issues now that would have been pacified with beer and pie were it not for AA. I would have drowned my sorrows in self-pity and credit card debt. Now? From all the amazing things I've learned as a result of AA, problems that used to make me whine now show themselves as building-blocks to becoming a grown-up.

Odd thing a few weeks ago. I walk down the street with my coffee and run into my friend from the meetings. "How are you doing?" he asks. It's an appropriate question, one that AA's ask each other on occasion. "Oh, I'm okay. This fucking loneliness is a bit of a sour apple, eh?" He agrees and calmly says that he sometimes wants to set himself on fire. AA's can say shit like that to each other because we've all been there.

"Yes," I say, "I've been wanting to immolate myself too."
"And, I've been thinking? Like I want to smash the infrastructure of my life with a hammer?" says he.
"Yes, yes. That was part of my stinkin' drinkin' thinkin' too. And I just came from my parents' house and it was a bit of a struggle. My man boobs hurt from clasping my palms together."

Suddenly I'm overcome with the sensation of knowing how much I hurt. Now, we're all human beings, we hurt, many times for no identifiable reason. I've spent ten years glossing over my hurt with booze. Now that booze is far away from my body and pretty far from my thoughts, my nerves are all raw and dry humping each other. Well, this hurt was suddenly an uncorked bottle of poison, flowing from the base of my spine into my head. I had the actual physical sensation of my head filling up with poison. This made my blind eye wiggle around, I nearly collapsed from dizziness, and I had to stop talking.

For the rest of the night I was in something of a daze. I'd been waiting for that all summer: the ability to feel pain again, to know what it means to live. I'm not saying it's comfortable, awesome, worth replicating. But it was something that I've been avoiding for years, with the help of booze.

I feel like an actual person.