June 22, 2004

• Bummed…
  
  
  and busted!

  Yesterday I made an “extra” trip to town.  I’ve been keeping it
  down to just one trip a week, on Thursdays.  Yesterday I needed to
  take in a shotgun that Sarah and Jono had left here, for Greyfox to sell so we can help with Sarah’s (JadedFey‘s) from California.  Since I was going, I decided to stay for the NA meeting at the rehab ranch.

  On the
  way to town I put the solitude to good use and sorted out a matter that
  had been depressing me since my latest trip to our old home place
  across the highway.  I’d been all bummed out over what I found
  there.  My greenhouses are falling to ruin, with trees growing up
  in them (left), and the gardens have all gone to weeds, except for one
  bed of chives that have managed to band together and choke out
  everything else, and they have gone to flower and will soon go to seed
  (right). 
  Going to seed doesn’t seem to hurt the health of the chive colony, but
  when I was there to keep the flowers picked off and the plants thinned,
  they grew much taller, grander.

  The entire garden has had nothing in five years but whatever rainfall
  there was for irrigation, no fertilizer, and very little weeding, so
  it’s semi-miraculous that anything but weeds is still alive.  I
  suppose it would be fair to consider everything now growing over there
  a weed of a sort.  I noticed that the golden raspberries have
  survived, but the plants are small, with no sign of blossoms, needing
  more fertile soil with less competition from the encroaching trees to
  produce berries.

  Doug
  and I pulled a few weeds that were crowding favorite plants, and he
  broke off the flower stalks growing up from the rhubarb.  They
  really do sap the plants’ vitality, suck a lot of the sugar out of the
  roots that they need for their come-back after the winter.  The
  high point of that trip over there, for me, was finding the one little
  surviving asparagus plant at left, amid the weeds.  I thought they
  were all dead.  I’d once had a few dozen of them, and now that
  spindly lone survivor is all that’s left.

  The low point of the visit to my former home was discovering that
  scroungers had been at it again.  Someone had forcibly
  disconnected the nearly-full propane tank and regulator and moved them
  closer to the driveway.  Maybe it proved too heavy for them, or
  maybe they intend to come back for it.  There was also a
  collection of items (including an ancient chainsaw) from our
  junkpile–and a few things from inside the house–left in the driveway,
  apparently a staging area.  Either something scared them off
  before they got everything loaded, or they filled their vehicle and
  intend to come back for another load.  It even looks as if someone
  tried to move the old fireplug I used to mark my driveway, but found it
  too heavy and left it lay.

  The trip to the old home place was for the purpose of taking food for
  the feral cats, on our way to the spring for water.  Usually our
  runs to the waterhole, even in frigid or wet nasty weather, are an
  upper for me.  Water is life, and just getting the jugs and
  buckets full can give me a feeling of security.  Also, there’s
  always life around the spring.  Even when I don’t see any
  wildlife, I see their tracks:  fox, moose, ermine, lemmings,
  voles… or I see the resident golden eagle or some other raptor
  overhead looking for prey.

  The
  life around the spring wasn’t working its old magic on me.  It
  wasn’t that I didn’t see it.  I noticed that the wild roses down
  there were almost all bloomed out, and some fireweed had opened
  up.  Around here where the woods are denser, and sunshine comes
  later, the roses are still in full bloom and the fireweed has barely
  started showing buds.

  I
  even walked across the highway and shot a picture of the big muskeg
  over there, to show you how the green has gone to a deeper shade,
  losing that yellowish spring tone.  Traffic was heavy, loud, lots
  of RVs… not something that ever tends to lighten my mood even in
  better times.

  When we were at the old home place, looking at the wreckage of my
  greenhouses, I’d vented a bit to Doug, said, “Every time I come over
  here and see how the place is falling to ruin, I get depressed.” 
  He had answered, “Me, too, but I’m not motivated to come over and do
  anything about it.”  Then I said, “Same here–I’d rather spend my
  time on the Internet.”  That added a twinge of guilt to the
  building depression.

  That was a few days ago, and it kept eating away at me.  I tried
  venting to Greyfox.  I shoulda known better.  Crying on the
  shoulder of someone with NPD is like snuggling up to a prickly
  pear:  all the cuddlesomeness of a porcupine, with none of the
  mammalian warmth.  They “lack empathy” as it says in the
  diagnostic description.  His idea of a pep talk was, “Tough shit,
  don’t drink.”  That’s a saying he picked up in AA, and he could at
  least have customized it for me, to “don’t use,” knowing that alcohol
  has no attraction for me.  I’m a speed freak pothead.  But
  Doug’s lack of motivation to help and Greyfox’s lack of empathy turned
  out, as usual, to be just what I needed.  Who else could I turn to
  but my old friend, H.P., my “higher power”, higher consciousness, the
  guiding and consoling Voice in my Head?

  On the drive to town yesterday, I reasoned with myself.  Thank God
  that even in my most foolish moments I can listen to reason.  I
  reminded myself that all but one of the greenhouses had been falling to
  ruin before we moved over here, that my physical condition has
  deteriorated so in the intervening years that the garden might well be
  taken over by weeds or dried out from neglect even if I still lived
  there.

  I thought that it’s a good thing that someone is dragging away that
  horrible junkpile bit by bit.  I never wanted all that junk in my
  yard anyway, it was just a trade-off:  Marty helped us move in
  exchange for our letting him store his junk there “temporarily”,
  twenty-one years ago.  I reminded myself that the trailer had been
  “ruined”, old, moldy, falling apart, and being used as a dog house when
  Charley and I bought it in 1975 during the pipeline boom housing
  shortage, and that everything else on the property had been salvaged,
  scrounged, or built from salvaged materials.  Ashes to ashes, junk
  to junk.  I had a moment of sympathy for those scroungers,
  frightened of getting caught stealing shit that’s mostly not worth the
  effort.  If, for example, that old chainsaw had been worth
  repairing, it wouldn’t have been in the junkpile.

  Then I asked myself what I might be doing on a typical day if we had
  not moved from there to here.  I’d have had generator maintenance
  to do, probably:  hauling and pouring gasoline, doing oil changes,
  a spark plug to clean and gap–nasty chore in my opinion. 
  Possessing mechanical skills does not necessarily translate to enjoying
  exercising them.  As hot as the weather has been this week, I
  would be going to the general store every day for ice to keep my milk
  and stuff from spoiling, and I wouldn’t be eating nearly as much fresh
  food every day as I have become accustomed to since we’ve lived
  here.  It didn’t take much more than that to begin to turn my head
  around.  I realized that, given the state of my health, I might
  have been missing working in the garden, and regretting the state of
  the greenhouses even if I were there.

  What had gotten into me, I wondered.  My first summer over there,
  I referred to that place as, “the most inhospitable dry camp I ever
  made.”   I frequently referred to the moldy old trailer as a
  squalid hovel, and that it was, for the whole time I lived in it. 
  The mold always aggravated my allergies.  But it wasn’t until I
  started enumerating to myself what I’d gained by this move, that I
  became ready to let the maudlin sentimentality of regret go.  I’ve
  got the web, for one big thing, with search engines to instantly bring
  me any little bit of data I want or need.  Greyfox calls me up on
  his cell phone to track down elusive answers for his crossword puzzles,
  even.  The thing that clinched it for me and ended the internal
  discussion was my memoirs.  I probably wouldn’t even have started
  that project, if not for Xanga.  ‘Nuff said.

  So that disposed of the bummer.  The “busted” bit in my title came
  last night at the NA meeting.  It was an honesty issue. 
  There are routine readings at the start of every meeting, the 12 steps
  and 12 traditions, What is the NA program?, Who is an addict?, Why are
  we here?  In the regular meetings, I always grab the steps, “How
  it works.”  It’s not only because I got a world of benefit from
  finding and working those steps when I was in prison, but because in
  each of the other readings there is some bit of program dogma that I
  don’t believe and can’t read without feeling like a hypocrite. 
  This sets up conflict for me and I have resolved that by just not
  reading anything but the steps. 

  But last night I was handed, “Why are we here?”  It begins and
  ends with statements that are simply not true for me.  My life and
  Greyfox’s had become manageable before we came to NA, and addictions
  can be cured through orthomolecular medicine,  psychotherapy and a
  lifetime commitment to abstinence as opposed to “one day at a
  time.”  I almost handed it off to Greyfox, the retired
  professional liar, but felt bad about that because I’d spoken up and
  asked for something to read, before I’d remembered that in that
  institutional meeting the co-chair always reads “How it works.”  I
  decided to cross my fingers, let political correctness take precedence
  over honesty, and read it.

  Then, guess what the topic from the daily meditation was: 
  honesty.  It started with something about the importance of
  telling the truth and went on to say that even harder and even more
  important than that was self-honesty.   I sat there as
  several of the rehab residents shared some moving things about their
  recovery process.  I knew that if there was a lull when everyone
  with a burning desire was done sharing, I had to share.  It came,
  and I said, “I’m almost as honest as I can be, almost but not quite
  as honest as I know how to be.  Sometimes I run into conflicts
  between honesty and political correctness.  When that happens,
  sometimes I just blurt out the truth and other times political
  correctness wins out and I go along with the crowd.”

  That was the PC way to handle my conflict, there in that meeting. 
  In those H&I meetings (hospitals and institutions)  we’re
  supposed to be representatives for the program.  The theory is
  that the patients and clients are shaky enough in early recovery that
  voicing our dissent could be confusing and harmful.  I save my
  heretical dissent for Tuesday meetings when it’s usually just the
  little core group of oldtimers, and for monthly group conscience
  business meetings when it’s often not even the whole core group. 
  And of course I vent my dissent here in my blog and to Greyfox, who is
  an even bigger dissenter than I am.  He can’t see the point in
  some of the harder steps, for example, while I value and work even the
  excruciating steps five, six and ten.  Greyfox says (right out
  loud in meetings, which I love to hear) that I live and work a perfect
  step ten, and when he is wrong I promptly admit it.  He’s right.  It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

  Last night after I’d obliquely admitted my dishonesty in reading that
  bullshit, I went on to talk about the self-honesty I’d been engaging in
  on my drive to town.  One of the other members had talked about
  how hard it is to be honest with oneself, and I said I could
  relate.  Denial, I said, is tricky.  You don’t know you’re in
  it until you get out.  I talked about how I’d been denying how
  much better my life is now and torturing myself with regret over the
  ruins of what I’d left behind.  Then I took Greyfox to the grocery
  store and on to his summer place, and drove home, tired but happy.

  • 2:23 pm
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