Daily Reprieve

My amends are now at 62%.  I have been asked to speak at a treatment facility in the area.  I speaking at 10am tomorrow.  I am feeling rather sickish.  I wish it wasn’t on a Sunday morning.  I refuse to be a preacher.  I am just me.  That’s all.  I’m doing this as a sobriety vampire.  period.

I am now at 60% complete on the amends after meeting with my sponsor tonight.  And I sent him 56 emails containing posts from this website so that he can choose to be aware of the ramblings here or just hit the delete button.  But I have done my part.  Now I think I am going to go to bed.

Ok, I’m through with that.  I feel better when I am in lust than when I’m coddling romantic notions of transcendant bonds of destiny.  How can I be accountable for a life I cannot fully remember and may not even be real.  I do not need additional forces to help me second guess myself. 

I did go out and get some Neil Diamond including his newest album, Home After Dark.  There was one song on there ~ One More Bite of the Apple that really helped me.  I went to it first because of the unusual mention in my third step prayer “Thank-you for one more apple to eat a bite at a time.”

Anyway, in this life, I have not left anyone in a burning building to save myself.  So screw all that shit.  I guess I have an adverse reaction to media that is too gentle.  I have got to get some violence and darkness into me before I disintergrate.

I also have to get out of my head.  Too much mental masturbation going on.  A meeting.  Going to start calling the network.

During the course of my life, I have gone through many appeasement purges, where I have destroyed things that I loved in order to focus in on and show my devotion to God.  One such purge was the destruction of my record album collection.  I sacrificed some of the most spiritual music in my life trying to be … spiritual.  Neil Diamond opens my heart like no other musician ever has.  I think it is time I retrieve him.  I want to see what he sounds like to free ears.

What if the movie is right, and you get to chose if you come back again?  What if soul mates do chose to come back so they can rediscover each other?  Would I not chose to do it better this time?  Has the intelligent force of the web, this Higher Power, bent the universe to help me do it better this time?  I can accept endings as transitions, come out of my cave, and sacrifice for love’s sake.  I don’t have to condemn myself to a coward’s hell.  Surely, I can do it better this time.  Progress prior to perfection.

Maybe this explains why Barry Manilow’s song Mandy meant so much to me as a teen.  Why I was drawn to it, but hurt every time I heard it.  And Neil Diamond’s, “I am I said” had a simular affect.  And I was drawn to the spiritual concepts in Jonathan Livingston Seagull and listened to Neil’s soundtrack.  I read the book by Richard Bach on soul mates. 

Maybe all this set me up to develop a memory.  Leaving me skeptical still.

I don’t know whether I believe in past lives or not.  But I have a piece of a memory that is painful, but is not apart of this lifetime.  Is there a way to do a Fourth / Fifth Step on a past life? 

This is what the movie opened up for me last night.  This is the “memory.”  I am leaving a large structure, castle or mansion like.  There is fire around me and panic within.  I am in trouble for something, I don’t know what.  I feel a sickish guilt as I look to a side room and see her.  She is behind a bed, her eyes squinting in the pain of my departure.  I stop and look at those eyes.  Flames flickering the glow of hell around her.  If I don’t move, I will stay here and die.  I leave her.  I am afraid. 

When I get outside, there is snow and barren deciduous trees.  I run.  I am breathing hard.  If I can just get to the mountain in front of me, I can escape.  I remember the cold air painfully filling my lungs and my heart will not quit pounding out alarm.  I am grabbing brush to pull me upward and onward.  I can remember the black or dark robe like material I was wearing getting caught and slowing me down.  There ahead, I find the small opening of a cave.  I feel its safety, and I look back.  I hear voices, animals, maybe dogs?  I retreat into the darkness.  The memory ends.  But not the intense pain.  I hate myself for leaving her, for wanting to live.  I could not sacrifice myself for love.  And I lost her.

The main character in this movie went to hell to be with his love.  That is what I should have done.  The guilt is tremedous.  How can this not be real?  Their home in hell looks like a burned out mansion. 

When I look into my slave’s eyes, do I see her again?  When we were first together, I kept her blindfolded.  There is power in the eyes.  They say so much, no matter how submissive.  Now, I look at her and get this overwhelming desire to paint her portrait.  To capture her beauty as I see it.  Especially when I look too long into her eyes.  But I cannot paint at that skill level.  I do abstracts, surreal type work.  I see in her a beauty that transcends this lifetime, and I am almost certain that we have known each other before.  Maybe I was an artist back then.  Maybe that is why I was reborn to my artistic Mother. 

And this may be another reason why I hate goodbye.  And retreat to caves.  And fear loving again.

Was I a coward?

Amends are now at 53% complete.  This evening’s amends with someone from the church I was apart of.  He said that I had never wronged him, that I owed him nothing.  He said that he had only been concerned.  He left the church eight months ago, and we actually had several areas that we related to one another.  He suggested I read a book written by his friend called, “Stop the church, I want to get off.” 

I finally watched the movie “What Dreams may Come.”  was a good image of the afterlife and a powerful romance.  But it has aroused my love.  Anyone I love, I feel it so much stronger tonight.  But I do not trust love to stay, so I would rather not feel this.  I hurt.  I cannot stop myself from weeping.  Why? 

I think I will go to bed before I embarrass myself once more.

If you live in the Birmingham area and need a counselor knowledgeable of addiction, I highly recommend Paul Brown.  He has an empathetic gift, and an ability to help you restate your thoughts more clearly.  That is really helpful in muddling through with a physical craving and mental obsession snapping at your heels.  His website is [www.pbrownacsw.com].  I will add it as a link to this site as well.  He helped me know that I wanted to be able to believe again, but that I just didn’t want to be deceived and robbed of valuable life investment once more.  He helped me to understand that I don’t just desire to know truth, but I desire clarity.  And he gave me the following prayer when I was struggling so with the whole Higher Power thing:

“MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am going.  I do not see the road ahead of me.  I cannot know for certain where it will end.  Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.  But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.  And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.  I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.  And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.  Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.  I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”

Thomas Merton – Thoughts in Solitude

I have come to realize that I am socially immature in so many ways.  I am like some lumbering beast at a tea party.  I have often had problems with saying good-bye.  I used to say that it was a military superstition.  I am beginning to believe that is probably self-justification.  I am inconsiderate of others.  Why?  Maybe it is because I am so overly considerate of my own pain, that I minimize my own impact on others around me. 

I remember a time back in my childhood that might render some understanding her, some reason, other than simply being an asshole.  I learned to become invisible in my teenage years to avoid any possibility of ridicule or humiliation.  But such a strategy had a price.  People were willing to accommodate me.  I became insignificant.  And this was enhanced when it was time to sign yearbooks.  I so longed for others to write little messages about me in my book and how they would miss me.  The few times I got up the nerve to acknowledge the desire and ask someone to sign, the message they would put in it was so generic, so stilted, that it hurt more than being ignored.  It was social pity.  And others would pass their books to me, and I was terrified that they would discover that I did not know them either.  I learned to absolutely dread yearbooks. 

The reality was that I wanted to connect with others without the risk of being hurt by others.  Becoming a nobody was the best plan I could come up with.

In the process of doing my fourth and fifth step, several short-comings were identified.  When these short-comings become more and more active, my disease is gaining strength, and I have a very limited amount of time to confront the short-coming.  Or the disease will begin confronting me.  And I almost always lose when I wait for that to happen. 

The short-coming that I started off with was being judgmental, harsh to myself and others.  The Higher Power has worked with me on this.

Now, it appears that with the renewed opportunity with the military, I am dealing with another short-coming:  Inconsideration.  So the opposite characteristic that I want built into me is Consideration. 

Example – on my last day of work at Walmart, there were co-workers I had enjoyed and developed a good working relationship with.   They were unaware that it was my last day.  One of them discovered and was angry with me.  I thought she was joking.  But apparently, she was truly hurt with me.  I am not used to being significant enough to miss, at least in my own mind.  I am taking more risks in relationships and others are taking risks in being in a relationship with me.  I have to honor and respect them the way that I would want to.  It means a lot for someone to drop their guard and welcome you into their hearts, if only during duty hours.  It is still very significant.

I do not want to turn others into nobodies. 

There is woman who has allowed me to visit her world, and I have been inconsiderate to her as well.  I will guard her anonymity here on this site, but her anger with me for not telling her personally that I was leaving is very real.

I have worked on this short-coming with others in my life; My father, slave, children.  But I still have a way to go.  I just didn’t realize the profound impact I was having. 

I hope that I can make amends and build a social interaction that is enhanced with respect and consideration for others who, even for a moment, open the door of their hearts to me.

I just woke up from a dream in which I was watching myself promise to steal a restaurant from a local friendly owner and love her and make her beautiful.  Then next to my bed I had a toy confederate soldier that had the traditional uniform except it was all flashy silver and glittery.  His horse was shiny gold.  The images were disturbing.  Flashy and frivolously bold.  Then I began to think about this previous entry, and the program’s principal of anonymity.  Rather than change my previous post to appear more humble, I just decided to put some entries from the “As Bill Sees It” book to emphasize what I am talking about.  I lack a certain element of accountability on this blog, but my sponsor does not what to read it for some reason or another.  It is supposed to be a real account anyway.  I am not dressing me up to show you that “I have arrived.”  I am going to embarrass myself from time to time in an attempt to be real, honest, and hopefully, some of you can relate to me on some level.  Here are the excerpts

From the Grapevine newsletter of June, 1961, Bill Wilson:

“I see ‘humility for today’ as a safe and secure stance midway between violent emotional extremes.  It is a quiet place where I can keep enough perspective and enough balance to take my next small step up the clearly marked road that points toward eternal values.”

12 and 12, page 75

“We saw we needn’t always be bludgeoned and beaten into humility.  It could come quite as much from our voluntary reaching for it as it could from unremitting suffering”

Letter from Bill Wilson, 1966:

“We first reach for a little humility, knowing that we shall perish of alcoholism if we do not.  After a time, though we may still rebel somewhat, we commence to practice humility because this is the right thing to do.  Then comes the day when, finally freed in large degree from rebellion, we practice humility because we deeply want it as a way of life.”