January 24, 2004

• Damn! 
  Another addiction….

  
  

  If this doesn’t come out coherent, then it is accurately reflecting my mental state.  I guess I can quit kidding myself… if this doesn’t come out coherent, my regular readers will recognize it as coming from me.  In my photo blogs I have trouble getting the pics and the captions to hang together.   In my housekeeping, the closest I ever come to being organized is when I can remember in which part of the mess something I need is located.

  
  

  I guess some incoherence in my writing is understandable when you understand that I do a lot of this writing just to get my thoughts organized…  or to try to get them organized.  I was thinking about yesterday’s blog all through the preceding day as I rode to town, shopped, sat through (and shared in) two 12-step meetings (2 different 12-step programs) and worked at confronting Greyfox’s NPD with him.  Even after all that thought, a lot of keyboard time writing it down, several rereadings, proofing and editing, I still left out the central thought.  It just got lost somewhere along the way.

  
  

  Yesterday, I mentioned some of the paradoxical images that had been flitting through my mind:  bootstrapping, biting my teeth.  A couple of others are sitting in a corner listening to myself talk, and sneaking up behind myself with a 2 X 4 to get my attention.  These things, my friends, are some of my favorite things.  Bi-location, as my shaman-husband has said, R Us.  Only it’s not really bi-location.  It’s just living in an infinite holistic universe where everywhere and everywhen are here and now, and trying to talk or write about it in a language that is finite and linear.  Another high-tech shaman of my acquaintance grokked the truitude and (as perhaps only another shaman could) appreciated the humor when I said that being a theta person in a beta world is fun, but hard to talk about.

  
  

  …and I have once again wandered astray from the thread of my discourse here.  No prob–that’s why I put the title up there big, bold and colorful, to remind me and get myself back on course.  I know my tendency to stray.  I see an analogy of it every time I take a walk out the cul de sac in fresh snow, when I turn around to come back.  One of my legs is significantly shorter than the other.  Walking a straight line is tricky.  The best I can manage is a series of arcs with periodic arcs in the other direction as course corrections.  As I’m going, it feels like I’m following the road.  When I look at my back trail, I see that I wobbled all over it.  Such physical course corrections have grown unconscious through conditioning.  It takes more consciousness, vigilance, and thought to keep my mind on track.

  
  

  My straying mind gets me in trouble every time I try to “share” in a 12-step meeting.  I start out with something on-topic to share and often lose the thread somewhere before I get it said.  Thank God I’m not the only one who rambles and babbles.  It’s common enough that barely a meeting goes by that someone doesn’t stop himself and apologise for it…  and I’m still wandering here, but I do seem to be wandering back around by a roundabout route to my topic. 

  
  

  This may seem like a digression, but is actually right spang on topic:  CamelJoe commented yesterday that I used to get “like 23 comments” to my blogs.  Implied and unstated is the interesting fact that now I’m only getting about five to seven.  She also previously had asked me how I got so many people to comment on my blogs and I told her that I did it by commenting on theirs.  That was when I was indulging my Xanga addiction full-time.  Now, in this interminable infernal fibromyalgia flare-up, when sitting in a chair hurts my legs and keyboarding hurts my neck and shoulders, I spend more time on the couch indulging my video RPG addiction.  Through introspection (that sneaking up and whacking myself in the head so I’ll step aside and pay attention shit) I’ve come to see that almost all my behavior is addictive behavior.

  
  

  I used to be addicted to eating sweet gooey things.  Now I’m obsessed with NOT eating sweet gooey things and put even more of my attention and effort into that pursuit than I ever devoted to the sugar addiction.  (I decided not to include the latest, the Ultimate or maybe Penultimate gluten-free muffin recipe today.  That I’ll save for another day.  It’s heavenly:  almond meal and pumpkin seeds.)  One of the truisms in all the 12-step programs I’m familiar with (including but not limited to AA, NA, Food Addicts A., Gamblers A., Sex Addicts A….) is that addiction is a “progressive disease.”  It escalates.  If it wasn’t so damned unhealthy to even THINK such a thought, I might think about starting a Health Addicts Anonymous.  That ‘nother damned addiction referred to in my title, though, is not the one to my new healthy lifestyle.  I realized recently that I’m addicted to addiction.

  
  

  When I dropped out of school at age fourteen, in my sophomore year of high school, my real education had barely begun.  I’m not talking just about street smarts, either.  I still do and have always hit the books hard and regularly.  I go on study binges.  I’ve been addicted to archaeology for years, to biochemistry, nutrition, math and physics and that obscure and enigmatic branch of science where math, physics, and philosophy run together:  the study of TIME.  I am unabashedly addicted to my own brain chemistry, to that jolt of dopamine I get every time I learn something new.  It keeps me pursuing new paths of learning.  Lately, a lot of my study time has been spent in the fields of psychopathology and addiction.  Thus, my addiction addiction, as mentioned boldly and colorfully above.  Which brings me right back, by the roundabout path, to biting my teeth.

  • 3:17 pm
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