I am happy to be at the end of another week; the second week of being a full time employee and a full time student.  And I am happy to be at the end of a week when I have accomplished more that I believed I was capable of just a few short months ago.

In 12 step meetings we sometimes read what are called the nineth step promises; and it’s big stuff; things like being amazed with the results, knowing freedom and happiness, not regretting the past, knowing serenity and peace, feelings of uselessness and self pity will disappearing, and…

Still missing the mark.  But that’s fine.  I set it pretty high.  I didn’t actually expect I’d reach it. My theory that I tend to come in under the mark, but always by some ratio, seems to hold weight.  Going to bed last night in clean sheets and waking up this morning to a clean kitchen was really, really nice. Having less time to get these things done did actually motivate me to get them done.

My homework is done, too.  I’m prepared for class tonight.

My willingness to work at my recovery has followed much the same pattern.  I am much…

So why shouldn’t I juggle too?  I’ve been juggling already.  Figuring out how to live sober has been really, really tricky. I don’t even think that, on balance, I’m very good at it.  I’ve complained about the big chunks of my life that really aren’t working, that I struggle with, that I’m apparently unwilling to fix, but I’ve also come to believe that I have a natural failure level.  No matter how high the bar is set, I come in X percent below it.  So if I want to achieve more, perhaps I should just raise the bar high enough to…

There are lots and lots of ways to learn to live a sober life, and addicts and alcoholics aren’t the only people who are looking for meaning in life.  And wether we find meaning in a church or a meeting or in the mindful experience of everyday living, it is always accompanied by some kind of faith. Finding meaning means believing in something that is possible to doubt, like the trustworthiness of an idea or a transcendent reality or a Supreme Being.

AA’s founder, Bill Wilson wrote that the foundation of his sobriety was faith, “faith that, despite all worldly appearances…

More and more I’m beginning to think that if one gets sober and stays sober it is entirely by happenstance; that no amount of effort, no profound experience, no treatment program, no great desire, no necessity, has the power to get and keep any of us sober. And I certainly don’t have the power to produce sobriety on my own. So if I can’t get sober because I want it bad enough, need it bad enough, have worked hard enough for it, have paid enough for it, etc., then every day that I happen to stay sober must be an anomaly. A…

it started to snow.

Snow!

I’m not freaking kidding. And not just a little snow, either. The forecast was for a little rain.  A 40% chance of rain. And we got snow.

It was the earliest snowfall ever recorded here, beating the previous record by two days and 1/2 an inch, and while it has melted off the streets now, my lawn is still holding on to a tattered blanket of the stuff.  Now, of course, it didn’t actually start to snow until three full minutes after I got on my scooter to go home from work. I was smart enough to wear…

I love my cat, Gracie, something fierce. We always had Siamese cats when I was a kid, and I love them. Gracie is only half Siamese, so while she has a strong similarity to her purebred cousins, her face is rounder and there is a faint, pale grey striping in her coat. She like to be outside during the day, and when I get home from work she likes to race me up the stairs to our apartment. From where I came from, broke, homeless, crazy, unemployable, and wandering the frozen streets of Boise wondering why my life turned out…

I’m totally double dipping today. Sorry. I spaced it that today is Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. I’m not Jewish, but I am fascinated by their faith, their culture, and their traditions. And this day is particularly important in the Jewish faith and it speaks to me in terms that I relate to my recovery.

According to Jewish tradition, God inscribes each person’s fate for the coming year into a “book” on Rosh Hashanah and waits until Yom Kippur to “seal” the verdict. During the Ten Days of Repentance, a Jew tries to amend his behavior and seek forgiveness…

My mom, God bless her, my mom saves wine corks. She saves them in white plastic grocery bags and she takes them with her whenever she goes up to her cabin. Should the weather be poor up at the cabin, she’ll crack open another bottle, bust out the hot glue gun, and set about to completely uhpolster the walls of the downstairs bathroom with wine corks. The last time I was up there, two years ago, she was nearly done. I suspect that next she’ll try her hand at siding the pump house with them.

I know where mom is going.…

How many times have I told myself that?  I rarely admit it out loud, especially in the old days. Pride is a subtle foe. Today though, possibly through force of will, and only because I couldn’t wait for someone else to do it and because I have a pretty good brain, I put new brake pads on my scooter. I’d never seen a brake pad in my life.

It maybe wasn’t the smartest move, but getting greasy and succeeding at the task really made me feel more worthwhile than I’ve felt in several days. I learned all over again something I…

It’s funny, the ideas that people get about the relationship between loving others and loving themselves. The conventional wisdom is that learning to love oneself is essential to loving others. Yet 12 step programs insist that we must place others ahead of ourselves in order to recover.

I was at a meeting the other night where this was brought up as a topic. The person that brought it up insisted that before he can experience recovery that he needs to love himself more. “I just do whatever I want to do. If I see something I want I just buy it…

Someone I sponsor relapsed last nigh and I’m angry and depressed. Even though it’s not my fault, even though I couldn’t have done anything to stop it, I’ve been taking it out on myself. I’ve been lethargic all day. I haven’t accomplished any of what I set out to do this morning.

I watched Oprah and took a nap and at about 6 PM when I finally roused myself  I walked to the market to scrounge up something to eat. I live around the corner from the Boise Co-op, which isn’t really a co-op at all; it’s a membership market. It…

One of my most pet peeves about the ways that the internet and text messaging have changed English usage in written communication is the use of the letters “boi” to say “boy”. Gay chat rooms are rife with this aberration. If we’re going to accept “boi” as an acceptable spelling of the word “boy”, instead of the airport code for my hometown, we should also accept the spelling “Kwir” to mean “homosexual” rather than the call letters of a christian radio station in Colorado Springs. (I’m not kidding. Kwir Radio. What were they thinking?) But enough of that. This is…

But the answer I was hoping for was about something I’m not equipped to make decisions about all by myself. Any time I stand to directly benefit from something that I may be doing for any reason other than that it is the right thing to do, I need the help of others.

My friend Dennis and I have been talking about getting an apartment together. He’s a newcomer. He hasn’t managed to put together more than 2 months clean in over a year. He thinks, and frankly I think, he’d be better off not living alone anymore; that he’d do…

So often the best action is no action. So often things sort themselves out on their own. Without any interference on our part. “We pause when agitated or doubtful” and sometimes that is all that is required.

At least that seems to have been the case here.  I spoke with my sponsor regarding the handsome sponsee. He agreed to take him back on. And I haven’t seen him in two days now. I understand from someone else in the program that he’d called yesterday looking for help.  He hasn’t been seen or heard from since.

I guess I’m sad for him, but…

My favorite writer, Paul Monette, along with several collections of poetry, an acclaimed collection of essays, and two biographies, one of which won the National Book Award, wrote a bunch of pulp fiction.  It is pulp.  The stories aren’t challenging. They don’t really give one much to think about. But they are so beautifully written that I have read several of them many, many times.

“Halfway Home” is one of those books for me. “For I’ve never loved anyone all the way through-or maybe it’s no one has ever loved me back. You’d think I’d get the direction right, considering this…

I don’t remember the last time I got drunk. I remember almost the last time, but not the last time.  I can’t even be sure about my last drink.  I know that during my 3 year Carnival of Crystal Meth I had a few drinks. The weird thing is that I had a period of sobriety before that 3 year relapse and somewhere in there my taste for alcohol vanished.  I was once a daily drunk, but somewhere in the years I was dry the feeling that alcohol brought me became one of unease. I didn’t feel like I was…

I am going to have to be extra vigilant.  I’m going to have to work harder.  I’m going to have to stick closer to my sponsor and to other people in the program and I’m going to have to work harder at expressing myself honestly.

I’m going to have to  do all these things because I have a prescription for Ritalin in my pocket and later today I’m filling it.

My nurse practitioner works exclusively with addicts and alcoholics and has for over 15 years. Her experience closely mirrors the anecdotal evidence that methamphetamine addicts who are put on Ritalin or Aderal…

Millie* relapsed recently. She had done lots of things right. She had done lots of step work. She attended meetings regularly. She worked with others. But Millie only went to meetings at one place and she’s the kind of woman who really worships other people, so when she had a conflict with one of those people, she didn’t really have the support she needed and she spent that night drinking.

When I saw her last night she threw her arms around me and cried. “I don’t feel like I have a purpose anymore.” I left my arm around her through the…

First of all, I need to apologize for not being here last night in the chat room, which I have committed to doing on Tuesday nights. No matter how I try to arrange it, Tuesdays are busy.

I’ve been spending more time with one of my sponsees lately and I’ve been doing it because he’s been reaching out. I’m probably the only guy in town who understands about what it is to be a gay man in early recovery from crystal meth addiction that actively makes himself available to other men trying to get clean.

So yesterday afternoon he called.  He’s 5…

I’m a curious kind of guy and I am super interested in me, so even though I’m not an educated person, I know quite a bit about the neurobiology of addiction. Therefore I have an intellectual understanding of how behaviors such as gambling, debting/spending, eating, love, and sex, can be addictions. An intellectual understanding really isn’t much, though.

I learned that today when I was at the courthouse. I’m on felony probation, you see, and my judge really, really, really wants to make sure that I either succeed or be placed somewhere else. Every couple of months I get to go…

I’m talking about my neighbours alarm clock. It is 6:30 AM and it has been beeping for nearly an hour now. I had been asleep for less than 5 hours when it woke me up. Maybe I should just be grateful that for the last 600 days I’ve gotten to wake up sober.

Some people use sports analogies. I use hair. I’m sure it is motivated by jealousy as I wish I had more. Just FYI I PhotoShopped a significantly lower hairline in my picture. I also substantially evened out my skin tone and virtually eliminated the wrinkles from my face. I’m so vain I probably think this post is about me.

My ADD is showing.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

I’ve been kind of off the beam with regard to tracking my spending, the only tool I’m supposed to be using right now. What’s worse is that I just dropped tracking entirely the minute I had money…

In order to keep growing I have to stay teachable and one of the ways I stay teachable is that I still get resentments.

That is one of the smartest things I’ve ever heard in a meeting. I can’t say what meetings are like anywhere else, of course, but around here 12step meetings aren’t exactly hotbeds of recovery and mental health. Like most other ways of staying sober, the steps are a discipline, not an event. I work really hard at my recovery and I cannot claim to be a very disciplined person at all so anyone that says they always…

There is a Sunday morning meeting in my community that is very popular and that, being like I am, I haven’t attended in many months. But I didn’t have to work today, and I was up this morning, and I thought maybe I’d go.  So I got on my scooter at a quarter to 11 and headed over to the Sunday Spiritual Meeting, only to find that it started at 10.

That’s fine. Really, I should be doing laundry anyway.  But on my way home I stopped at my favorite coffee house for an iced mocha and ran into someone from…

Last night was really a fantastic DA meeting. It didn’t start off that way. Someone shared at the top of the meeting about one of the things that every consumer goes through but that are problematic for people who spend to change how they feel; the get rich in real estate seminar. Pretty powerful stuff. Other people shared the “opportunities” they had nearly fallen victim to during the week.

It came my time to share and I shared that I had been presented with a real estate opportunity myself; not the “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” workshop my friend bought (then returned),…

I have the day off.  When I have the day off I like to get up slowly, stretching, praying, before I ever get vertical.

When I allow my self to get up slowly the likliehood of having intuitive, meaningful, and useful inspiration to guide me through the day. Today I had that experience, drives me crazy when this happens, of realizing a deeper meaning of one of those things we say all the time:

Don’t make too hard a work out of a simple matter.

Which is exactly what I’ve been doing. Recovering addicts and alcoholics everywhere, from every walk of life, no…

I didn’t see this news item posted anywhere here and some of you might like to know, so I’m posting, in whole, a press release from the Whole Health Campaign (WHC).

For Immediate Release     Contact:          Michelle Dell

August 23, 2008 mdell@stargroup1.com

Joanna Ford

Office: 215-875-4387
Cell: 267-909-4003

jford@stargroup1.com

Office: 215-875-4362

Cell: 215-534-5373

Whole Health Campaign Names 2008 Democratic National Convention the Most “Recovery Friendly” Convention in History

First-Ever Wellness Room Will Be Available at Denver Convention

Denver, CO – For the first time in the history of America’s national party conventions, a Wellness Room will provide peer-support meetings and other recovery support to delegates, guests, and staff at the Democratic National Convention…

POV is a camera direction, not a writing technique. Do not use a POV notation unless the imagery seen from one character’s point of view is distinctly different from the rest of the scene and, more importantly, that difference is integral to the plot.

Don’t let these problems ruin your screenplay - Surviving the Muse

Have you ever looked through a telescope? Or try to drive with one eye closed? Did you notice how everything turns flat? It becomes two dimentional and distance becomes hard to judge? Therein lies a problem: staring monocularly at any situation affords a singular and often useless…

I don’t know what it’s like anywhere else, but around here there are two AAs; one is populated with the middle classes, the other with people who may never be middle class. It’s not a hard and fast rule, of course. There is always overlap in divisions like this, but there is an obvious difference that is apparant to even the most casual observer.

For the most part the people in the first group came from middle class families, graduated from college, own homes, and cars, and have money in the bank. They shop in department stores,. They floss. They eat…