!!!

Remember when I was saying how Kyan Douglas (god) appeared to me in the form of a squirrel eating a lollypop? (The squirrel was cute, what with his little santa claus beard and white robe and all.) Since then, the dude hasn't appeared to me once. What-the-F-gives?

I totes lack words how to describe what's been happening inside my noggin in the past few days. This thing has creeped up on me and...hmmm...let me give a few anecdotes about stuff that's happened:

1. I got a "sober haircut." There is no such thing in AA as a sober haircut, but for the past week or so I've been itching to totally change my hairstyle for the sake of sobriety. Before yesterday, my hair was something like a cross between Harvier Bardem's in "No Country for Old People," and an expensive mop. I imagined it perfectly showed the world what my taste in music was (garage, punk, grage punk, and glam). Yeah, read that last sentence again. Like it was real important to me for the world to know I wasn't a square? Jeez! Who-the-F-cares?! I'm not totes thrilled with my hair now (AA peeps have told me it looks "young professional," a lot less geico caveman and a lot more like "Tom Cruise." (Really? A guy told me that and I groaned, "Agh! That guy is the WORST!" before I quickly realized it was a compliment and mumbled, "Thank you, that's a very nice thing to say to someone.").

2. Mood swings. I've had mood swings here and there, but not like this. They go from (don't know why this quote sticks in my head lately, but) that line in MacBeth, "Yet do I fear thy Nature, It is too full of the milk of human kindness." At these times I may as well be a cartoon archtype of a happy guy, what with birds chirping on my shoulder and cats playing fiddle at my feet and all. One perceived slight later, and "Ye done pissed in my milk of human kindness, and I do throw up on my wig and throw it at your face and say 'bitche, make me a sandwiche.' " (From the adult movie "MacBeth II: Deez Nutz."). These rapid declinations feel wreched. I'm sleepy but can't sleep, hungry but can't eat, hyperaware of everything but unable to remember it. At times like these I get spiritual all up in there, so

3. Feeling my Higher Power, how you say, taking over. The biggest thing on my mind is this newfangled and newfound religious feeling that's taken root. This is a big deal, yo, but I hesitate to talk about it. Why? For one thing, whenever someone talks about spirituality, more often than not it's complete mush. Total nosense. An absolute fucking waste of words. Why? Because (I invite debate here) real religious feeling defies logic. Since it defies logic, it defies grammar and syntax. Therefore it cannot be communicated. Hence this blog post is full of pointless asides and parentheses. Since you can't communicate religious feeling, you cannot talk about it without either lying or being coercive. I could be way off base here, and look forward to my views on this evolving, but for now, I feel like talking about religious experience is basically an act of violence.

Hence, you can only talk about religious experience by talking about what it is not. In theology this tradition is called "negative theology," and in western philosphy it's known as the ineffable. AA is a perfect example of this theory in praxis: before we entered the rooms, we lacked a spiritual what-have you. After we got into the program, we have one. Since we can only talk about what spirituality is not, most of what AA's talk about is all the horrors in their previous modes of living.

Make sense? No? Oh well.

"The Power" is an electronic pop hit song for the group Snap! from its album World Power. It is particularly known for its hook "I've got the power!"

If you're like me you think/thought the idea of god was baloney, ballyhoo, and boring. God is the creepy-crawly word that kept me out of the AA rooms for so long. As someone who grew up in the papist church, I was turned off to the whole idea of gob and jebus and highber powber by the time I was old enough to pour my own drinks. Flash forwards (or backwards, depending on where in time you are) to psalm psunday, 2009. At my local watering dump, I see a woman who I knew drank little and went to church but yet hung out in that place. I says to her I says "Psst! Hey! I wanna go to church with you."

At that time in my drinking career, I was close enough to wrecked that I was just about ready to give up my athiesm that I got from these guys and here more specifically, and most convincingly, him. I had this crazy idea that if I could just get a little religion, I'd be able to moderate my drinking and not have to stop. Pssh! Girl, please! That psunday was no different than the last time I was forced to go to church (the feeling of terminal boredom, "this-is-total-nonsense" banner ads running through my mind, and the familiar need to pee a lot). Yeah, I wanted to get some religion, ME, who knew religion was just a result of how our not-yet-developed reptilian brains try to make sense of the unknowable, and to connect to people we're isolated from in several dimensions: time, geography, language, tradition, nationality, race...don't get me started, don't EVEN get me started.

Ok, fine. The mass I went to with this woman commemorating when the easter bunny was nailed to a palm tree or whatever (I wasn't paying attention, ok?; I skipped out asap!) did nothing to chink my armor of athiesm, and I think I scampered to the barfy-stinking bar and filled up on easter beers.

The next few weeks, not much happened. I think somewhere in there I got a TV. But other than that, life went on as sourly usual. I went into my first AA meeting, with the broken desperation of wanting to give up drinking no-matter-what. Flash forwards again past things I'll address here at a later time, and my sponsor says to me he says "Ok, I want you to do something for me."

"What," I says, "pretend there's a god?"

"Shut the fuck up," he said. "I want you to imagine there is a loving, benevolant god who wants you to be happy. And I want you to pray to him every night."

FUCK. Last thing I wanted to do, I said. Whatever, my sponsor knew his stuff, and I admitted the first step ("We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable."). I assented. I had a sneaking suspicion up until then that, while AA claims you don't need to be a believer and you can make up your own god, it was simply a cover for their backdoor monotheism. I was wrong. Sponsor told me to imagine god however I wanted to. The first thing that popped into my mind was:

KYAN DOUGLAS (see Figure 2)

Figure 2 : God

That's right. My idea of god is totally made-up. Please forgive his stupid pants and lame silk-screened shirt (this pic is like 2002, bro!) but, whatever, you've seen Queer Eye. He's the guy who never looses his cool. I could be all, "Kyan! If I cut my hair short I'll look like a water-head baby!" and he'd be all "Don't worry about it, Maxie, I've got you. Hold my hand." Kyan has it under control! Yeah, Kyan really is a dumb name. Like his parents were fighting over the two equally-boring baby names Kyle and Ryan and had compromise sex. Anyway, I don't know why I chose anyone from that show. It's basically unwatchable now, the music is too early-twothousands and the clothes are hideous. But look who else was on that show: the black guy in the pilot episode had no personality, the interior designer was pouty and too puffy about the face, the guy with glasses had no personality and his mouth looked funny, the blonde guy looked like a muppet thrown in the dumpster, and the porter rican guy was just too twinky. Thus leaves Kyan Douglas, the down-to-earth one who shares my enthusiasm for Kiehl's prodct.

So, when you get into AA, you'll call your sponsor complaining that your sobriety is making you antsy or frowny or what have you, and he'll tell you, "Send it up to your HP." He doesn't mean send it to that Hewlitt-Packard printer that never worked that your parents got you for christmas in the 1990's. He means Higher Power. Personally, I can't imagine saying, to anyone other than Kyan, "Hey, man, even though your arms are full of groceries, can you please take care of this first world problem I'm having?" He'll say, with his barely-audible lisp, "Abssolutely."

I've variously described my god to people as my celebrity bromance crush, my imaginary friend, and god. I've somehow accomodated the idea of having god exist as this: our primitive reptilian brains are probably biologically adapted to believe in god, so why not play a trick on this and pretend, on a certain, strictly-personal level, that there is a divine being? We athiests can still be militantly against teaching garbage science in school, the church saying that gay people are no good, and that abortion is the worst thing ever.

Somehow I'm an athiest, AND, a believer. I don't pretend to have reconciled these two things yet. At least I'm fighting my papistly-ingrained homophobia...