Tag: 12 steps

moral metrics

I’m not super into celebrity gossip, and I have curtailed my algorithm to omit bullshit that only serves to distract and upset – particularly that of foreign government action that I have no control over, even that of a vote that doesn’t count – but I am not impervious to world news.

Fairly big news in my world; and likely that of the recovery world, is that of disgraced-comedian-turned-podcaster-turned-hyper-religious-zealot, Russell Brand.

If you know me personally, or follow this blog, you know it’s out of character for me to discuss celebrities at all. I bring this one up because of the commentary I’ve seen from many of my more left-leaning friends because; and this comes with some speculation, it’s apparent to me that many people are delighting in his misery because of where he’s placed himself on the political spectrum as of late, even going so far as to insinuate that their taste in entertainment is somehow superior on some moral level.

As a fan of the music of Ryan Adams, allow me to assure you that there is no moral compass built into your artistic tastes. As a matter of fact, as both a connoisseur of the arts AND as a creator of the arts, that art is inherently fucked up, and largely created by somewhat fucked up people.

Make no mistake: I’m certainly not issuing an excuse for Russell Brand, who very likely did what he’s been accused of, and likely ducked & covered himself in sanctimonious Christian practices when he saw these accusations coming for him. What I’m saying is – you don’t know until you know… then you have to decide how to feel about it.

How do I feel about it, personally? Bummed.
Sad for the victims, and bummed about the situation.
Again… he very likely did it what he’s been accused of.
And no… I don’t resonate with a lot of what he’s been into lately… but before this, a few years back when his world view was less one-sided, and more worldly, I did.

He’s a great writer, super intelligent, and not so long ago he was ideological, and thoughtful, and his greatest contribution; a book called ‘Recovery: Freedom From Our Addictions’ may be one of the finest guides through the 12 steps to recovery ever committed to paper, and for that I will always be grateful. It’s unfortunate that his actions will prevent people from discovering this incredibly helpful piece of literature.

But what I know, and Russell Brand knows, is that it’s time for him to make amends. He needs to not only apologize, but atone for his deeds however the victim(s) and the powers that be see fit, and he needs to be grateful about the opportunity to do so.

My opinion bares nothing on that equation.

always searching

With each passing day, it becomes more clear to me that the 40-year game of addiction whack-a-mole I’ve been playing isn’t about substance at all so much as it’s about pacification. Pacification. I almost wrote ‘nurturing’ in place of that word, but it would have been in error.

I’ve not known what I needed or how to go about getting it so I’ve put a metaphorical soother in my mouth to hold back any crying I might have done (but let’s face it, crying still happened) in some half-hearted attempt to appear strong or attractive or badass, all of which worked. For a while, anyway. If these things didn’t work, then we wouldn’t use them as coping mechanisms.

That’s why drugs, sex, money, alcohol, gambling, food, jumping out of airplanes, and social media are such a problem – they work and they are powerful… that is, they work until they don’t, in which case not only do you have to go back to solving the problem and dealing with your newfound (powerful) addiction, which is hard – much easier to spin the ‘wheel of misfortune’ and find something else to; yes, pacify.

That’s what I’ve been doing since I was a kid.

That’s also why junkies & fuck-ups get really into Christianity, or body building, or 12-step programs, or workaholism, or become gym rats and health freaks who find themselves running low on bare skin with which to tattoo something meaningful – this is feeling self referential now, I’d better watch it – and these things will work, too, especially if you don’t want to do the work. Nobody is going to go up to a well dressed man in a $700 suit driving an Acura and tell him he’s clearly got a problem, nor does an Olympic gold medal bring about an intervention, because these things are great achievements… as though great achievements and successes couldn’t be the result of an addiction, or at very least a fixation.

Don’t misread me, though – I’m not saying that the desire to be successful or the desire to be the best at something is unhealthy. Goals are healthy. Achieving them is fantastic. However, these accolades can serve to mask a deeper problem… such as Elon Musk’s fixation on putting people on Mars as an effort to escape his relationship with his own father, or Donald Trump’s fraudulent aspirations for success, for the same reason.

I couldn’t blatantly say something like that anymore than I could say that everyone who does intermittent fasting has an eating disorder. It’s simply not true, though intermittent fasting is an excellent way to mask an eating disorder.

I’ve been told somewhere along the path that I should not become too good at the wrong thing, because the success will keep me unhappy for the rest of my life. As much as I have done that in my professional life, it means something different now.

Now, I’m gonna keep running, and keep playing music, and keep working on cars, and keep getting tattoos, because… fuck you I won’t do what you tell me – possibly forever – but these things have to; for me, anyway, operate in conjunction with doing the brain work, and the soul work, as well as the body work.

It all has to be in alignment or the machine doesn’t run right.

new growth

I have a monstera plant in my home, and allow me to assure you beyond any doubt that it has lived up to it’s name in the 8 months it has dominated our living room. The growth of it’s dominion over our front room was slow, anarchistic and seemingly uncalculated until one day I found myself with a bit of a stiff neck that I can only attribute to my passive attempt at seeing the TV; first around, then through, it’s overt foliage. It’s menace seemed even more obvious when we moved it to an empty and freshly painted room only to discover that it required a quarter of the space in the room.

When it eventually suited me, I found some information online regarding how to prune and take proper care of this plant and was reminded of several things I already knew about plants – the first of which is that there is a specific way to do it. This; I knew. This is why I didn’t just dive in unlearned. The second: that strength and new growth is possible through pruning, sculpting, and when required – bracing.

The aptly named; and to my surprise, toxic, semblance of vine, tree, and massive leaf, needed all three aspects of pruning, so adhering to the guidance of the hostess of the YouTube channel ‘fun with plants and cats’ I cut back the most obviously superfluous 25-30% and propped it’s main stalk up with the strongest bamboo stake in the garden shed before commenting to myself that as though the framework for growth is in place, it’s not where I’d like it to be just yet.

For starters, it’s amazing that the cumulative 12 minutes of time I’ve invested (7 of which were spent watching a video) has led to an expectation of performance based on my investment. It’s also interesting that I began to relate to it, and even as I write this the parallels between the structure and framework I’ve given it and the structure and framework I am giving myself make for easy comparison.

This is the strongest and most ridiculous plant in the house, and thus it takes up a lot of attention. It is loud and boisterous, and at times obnoxious – but it is also the most obviously in-need of assistance, guidance, and nurturing of all of it’s leafy brothers and sisters here. It is beautifully vulnerable but it is not weak.

Perhaps I could stand to be a bit more vulnerable as well.

when it gets dark

First, a brief synopsis.
Then, analysis.

The book of Job is a book of the bible, that for all intents & purposes is sorta just wedged in there. We’re given no real parameters for the setting. All we know is that Where Job lives, in Uz, is far away from Israel, but we’re given no context of time, which seems intentional. The story itself starts with the introduction of the character: Job. He’s ultimately a good dude and is a righteous follower of God… and God says so. In God’s court; however, The Satan or The Accuser contests this and tells God that Job is only a devout follower because he’s prosperous, and that if Job’s prosperity were removed that he would curse God… and inexplicably, God plays this game and allows The Satan to torment Job.

This is where the record scratches off the turntable for most people. Why would God go along with this? Well, spoiler-alert – that question never gets answered. The book gets into more about whether or not God is just and fair. The assumption made by the humans (again, Job, a non-Israelite, and his non-Israelite friends) is that God works the same as most of our modern assumptions about Karma might work: Do good things, get good things / do bad things, bad things happen.

This means that Job, who is a good dude as the book states, is being unjustly punished – meaning that either God is not fair, and unjust – or that his punishment is not from God at all. Job’s friends disagree, and assume that Job has sinned against God, and even start to speculate how.

Another friend comes along and provides a third alternative explanation: God uses suffering to teach and build character. But – Job is choked and starts questioning God… and God shows up.

God makes clear the many unfathomable moving parts of the universe he’s created, not stopping short of the Leviathan and the Behemoth, (both of which are already namesakes for metal bands) in order to show Job the real dark stuff that still has purpose and beauty. Eventually Job apologizes, they reconcile, and Job is made more-than whole for his trials.

It’s not a feel-good story.

I came across this story through unconventional means, I suppose… through recovery channels, but being raised a church kid means I’d heard of the book of Job the same way I’d heard of all sorts of books of the bible that I hadn’t read. Through these channels I’d also learned of a series of drawings by William Blake that outline the brooding darkness of the Leviathan and Behemoth as he understood them to be. They are dark and brooding, of course, but not shocking in the way they would have been when they were new, like so many installments of Friday The 13th movies that gave kids nightmares in the 80’s and have become appropriate Saturday morning viewing for kids by today’s standards.

Upon analysis; however, Job and God look the same in these drawings. I naturally concluded that Job was created in God’s image, and that God is inside him as we’re told when we’re young.

However, if God is within us and God has created all these dark entities that we don’t understand then me must also conclude that the dark parts of ourselves that we stumble across from time to time are NOT ONLY there by design, but that they have purpose and function beyond our own understanding.

This might not help you to understand yourself at all, but it helps me to understand the many sides that form me. We all have a capacity for darkness but that capacity for darkness must then also be God’s… and that I am not waiting for God to save me so much as I am conjuring the power to save myself, because God’s power is also mine. I have had a moral compass within me all along, and what I needed to know is that when I struggle with loss or anger, that God holds on to the pain until I can carry it myself. It’s part of an internal process for anyone who’s ever said “it just hasn’t hit me yet” when coping with the shock of tragedy, for example.

In other words: I am the hero I am waiting for.

To go one further, I could also conclude that since these things are within me, that when I hear something that resonates with me and stays with me, allowing me to change or adapt, that this is either the voice of God speaking to me, or an echo of the voice of God, keeping me on my path.

God talk turns a lot of people off and I am sensitive to that. It turns me off sometimes, too, but if you read this far then I thank you. That said, I don’t really write this for anyone’s approval, and for all I know I’m dead-wrong about a lot of things.

I’m just working my way through.
Same as you.

be better, do better

If I want to learn a skill, whatever it may be – Yoga, Bass Guitar, Brazilian Jujitsu, whatever you like – the methodology of improvement is almost mathematic:
Desire to learn + Knowledgeable Instructor + Time = Improvement
There are other factors such as inspiration and discipline, of course, but the reality of the situation is that you can do whatever you want. It’s not until we start applying labels to things that we start building a resistance movement against our own progress, and start telling ourselves that we’re too tall, too short, too fat, too slow, and so forth, that we start talking ourselves out things.

My favorite; and by favorite I mean least favorite, is “it’s hard.”
Of course it’s hard.
Anything worth doing is hard, and is worth doing well. Once we truly embrace that truth, we can begin to understand that we’re probably not going to master a skill immediately after starting. But can your ego handle it?

Although there’s a need to ‘toughen up’ in regards to these things, it should be stated that we should be toughening up toward our own internal resistance and we often toughen up to everything except for that resistance. If anything we punish ourselves for trying in the first place, when it’s through trial and error that we really learn the ropes of what we’re doing, but love and kindness are the only things that can permeate the thick veneer that protects the inner child. As a child; or as a childish man, I tend to reject this notion in an effort to protect the ego.

Adversity breeds character.
Mood follows action.

So; too, are matters of the mind, heart & soul.
It’s not a stretch to say that we’re all doing our best. Our ego may take issue with the level at which others are handling things, but we may never rise to the same level as others because our standards are as different as our levels of pain. So yes, we are all doing our best – and as I reconcile that with whatever heated emotion I might be feeling at any given time, there comes a different level of respect and tolerance for those around us.

So while we’re taking it easy on ourselves, we should also take it easy on each other. When the labels we use to divide each other (and ourselves) get stripped away, and there is no ‘too fat’ or ‘too thin’ or ‘too tall’ or any number of other expletives we’ve come up with to label one another, we might actually start to see ourselves in each other.

What I’m talking about is spiritual connection.
Again, I believe we feel the need ‘toughen up’ because it is in us to do so, but we toughen up towards each other when we should be toughening up to our own ego… to our resistance to vulnerability. Because vulnerability is hard.

And again… Of course it’s hard.
Anything worth doing is hard, and is worth doing well.
Once we truly embrace that truth, we can begin to understand that we’re probably not going to master a skill immediately after starting. But can your ego handle it?

reasonable being

I’ve spent a lot of time in my life, as we all do, erring on the side of what is reasonable. Within reason. What can be reasoned with. And as much as I would consider myself to be a reasonable person, I’m not so sure that ‘being reasonable’ is something to strive for so much as it is a basic expectation. We’re all familiar with the turn of phrase “be reasonable” when attempting to quell an emotional situation because it is understood that a more moderate response to any situation implies a readiness to compromise, or in many cases, act professionally.

So allow me if I may, to substitute a less flattering synonym – the kind of thing that might be lost in a reasonable scenario, and gauge response: Lukewarm.

“I’m going to need you to be a little more lukewarm” and “You’re coming in hot, and I need you to tone it down to a lukewarm level” don’t inspire the same agreeable nature – as a matter of fact, in conversation, you might just as well try to halt an argument by piping up with “I’m going to need you to stop giving a shit” and see how the rest of the conversation goes.

Okay – now to leave figurative and broad-stroke notions behind… this is not a one-size-fits-all conversational response, of course. As I read the above statements I feel myself going from an advocate for ‘being reasonable’ to the other end of the spectrum, cheering on the (here, fictitious) impassioned underdog because in many, many cases, rational thought is the enemy.

Passion. That is what we want in our lives, and that is what makes life worth living. Pursuit of goals, both tangible and intangible, is the stuff of a life well-lived and if I’m being brutally honest with the man in the mirror (and in spite of my own chill demeanor with most things) being reasonable in times of high emotion is a disservice.

Should I have reasonable goals for my artistic expression, or should I push the limits of that expression to new heights and new realms? Should a theatre experience or a musical performance leave you feeling content and unmoved?
Is the sky the limit, or is the limit the sky?

This is not intended to be a criticism of the moderately successful or the passively motivated so much as it is a critique of self, and the lukewarm nature with which I’ve treated myself and my aspirations. The truth is that when I look deep inside, I have unreasonable and unsustainable desires and the sick & sad truth of it is that upon talking myself down – talking myself into being reasonable – I developed my very own coping mechanisms and distractions in order to keep myself in line, I developed unreasonable and unsustainable means of suppression of myself, by way of periodic and problematic alcohol and substance abuse, and and a highly transferable addiction to binge eating.

As much as I’ve been dealing with my problems head-on for the past few years, it’s at this point that I have no issue stating publicly that I have only begun to scratch the surface, and that the answer I am slowly brushing the debris away from is completely impassioned and unreasonable. I understand now that I am a creator, made in the image of the creator, and that I am NOT the most powerful being in my first-person-narrative of life experience…

… because to say that I am the main character in my story, just as you are in yours… and to say that there is no greater force than me, but to also know that I cannot control myself around a bottle of bourbon, or a box of donuts – then I must also acknowledge that the greatest force in the world is that bottle of bourbon, or that box of donuts, and that I am at best, 2nd place.

It’s clear then; that I must be humbled.
Humbled in the presence of donuts and whiskey, and anything of greater power than these things.
But I can be humbled and impassioned. I can be humbled and have unreasonable goals of self love, unreasonable goals of recovery, and unreasonable goals of reaching as many people as I can with my music, my art, and my writing.

So as much as I will be “be reasonable” when the occasion suits it… I hope to transcend the idea of a “reasonable being.”

the price of admission

“The first step; a frequently cited trope, is admitting you have a problem…”

On September 9th, 2023, I accomplished a personal first. I attended a gathering of people who I am simultaneously happy to see, and wish I didn’t have to see; however, we’re united by a common struggle.

The first step; a frequently cited trope, is admitting you have a problem, and although walking through the door of my first 12-Step meeting is an experience that echoes off the walls of my subconscious like some clanging gong – abrupt, and disarming, I have to say that the impetus for actually going has been a slow-moving yet still unstoppable growth, like mound of shit built by lazy insects. In essence, It’s taken a long time to get here, but I’ve known I would eventually arrive for some time now.

Yes, I admit I have a problem…

It’s probably the far reaching arm of my ego preventing me from actually putting a name to this problem – I thought I checked my ego at the door, but it still seems to be peering in at me – it’s hard to articulate your propensity for shoveling cookie dough into your mouth with a spoon, or your insatiable love of pop-tarts while attempting to put words together that don’t make you appear completely foolish.

I’m a poetic and a romantic – why can’t I come up with a better word for this problem? Ohhhh… right – it’s because it’s actually not fucking cool… and in this room you’re not fucking cool… and in the presence of these people – these honest and vulnerable and hopeful people, your “out there in the world” coolness factor means precisely nothing. In this room, you are the complete and total embodiment of embarrassment and humility, and you are sitting in a circle with other people who are the same… so no, there’s no fun word for this, so the narrative goes as follows:

Member of the groups: “My name is ___ and I am a(n) ___.”
The rest of the group: “Welcome.”

The “Mad Lib” answer-key version of this is: “Dave” and “I don’t really know, but I know I have a fucked up relationship with food, and I use it to cope with my problems” before I give a coles notes sample of how I inadvertently caused myself an extra 20 minutes of work while doing a home-renovation project and rather than doing the 20 minutes of work, I consumed a couple thousand calories while trapped in some strange, feckless trance – likely for longer than the aforementioned 20 minutes, but in the end I still had to do the extra work I caused myself, so it was a fruitless endeavor.

I’ve transferred my compulsion numerous times in my 41 years of walking around on this planet… but my first fascination was with food, and after I systematically pushed all the bad habits out of my life, I was left with my first love – and the only one I couldn’t truly abstain from: Food. I have other distractions… fitness, my car, music… and they do help me cope with life, but they’re not unmanageable compulsions that have driven me to negotiate terms with a higher power.

I tell my story with a hint of mist in my eyes because I don’t even like remembering it. I’d love to forget it and fill it’s place with music, or art, or some brilliant reflection of what life is supposed to be but instead I have this story – an insignificant blip, and a weak example of why I am really here, but these are strangers and I’m not ready to let them in yet… and when I’m done speaking, I look up from spot on the floor I was staring at – just beyond my left shoe as it cradles my right shoe on the end of my outstretched legs – and rather than seeing judging, laughing faces, I am met with nodding heads and appreciative smiles.

My story ends; as I tell it, in a rather strange place where any other group of people would keep waiting for the resolve, or some calamitous punchline, is instantly relatable in this room. I don’t just feel seen, I feel understood.

As an aside, Today marks 1 calendar year since my last alcoholic drink. I can’t say I was ever counting the days, but I will say this: You can do whatever you want to do, and if it helps you to align yourself with your purpose then you should probably start now if you haven’t already.

Much love.