August 8, 2004

• How many times can you reuse tea leaves?

  I just poured water back through the tea leaves in my drip coffeemaker
  for the ninth or tenth time since I started counting.  I don’t
  know (of course) how many times I did it before I decided to count, but
  it had to be at least half a dozen over the course of more than a
  week.  It started one day about three weeks ago, when for once I
  decided to ask my body about drinking coffee.  I use kinesiology
  (MRT:  muscle response testing) to determine which foods are safe
  for me to eat, but I’d not asked about coffee.  The answer was
  coffee no, tea okay, and to further questioning I got the response that
  the goal was to withdraw from caffeine gradually.  For some drugs,
  cold turkey works best and for others some tapering off helps minimize
  withdrawal symptoms.

  Both caffeinated drinks taste equally vile to me now that cream,
  “non-dairy” creamer (which contains casein, the addictive peptide in
  milk), sugar, honey and artificial sweetener are taboo, and both smell
  equally pleasant.  I might have been drinking more tea and less
  coffee if tea had been easier to make, or coffee less so.  Greyfox
  got an electric drip coffeemaker with an insulated carafe that keeps
  the stuff hot all day.   Making tea, on the other hand,
  involved messing with leaves or tea balls or my neato little infusing
  spoon dealie (teabags are less appealing), and either brewing it one
  cup at a time or having a potful grow cold and drinking it room temp or
  nuking it.  Coffee being easier, and Greyfox always being willing
  to make coffee but leaving the tea brewing to me, meant I usually drank
  coffee. 

  When I had to switch to tea (gotta listen to this body — I sorta
  depend on it to carry me around), I decided it was worth a try brewing
  it in the nifty insulated carafe.  I loaded the filter basket with
  a plentiful heap of tea leaves, figuring it was a large carafe and
  perhaps the drip brewing would not extract the essences as fully as
  does traditional steeping.  Boy, was I wrong!  The first pot
  was so strong I had to water each cup down about half-strength to make
  it drinkable.  When that pot was half gone, I ran a half measure
  of water through the same leaves to get a weaker brew.  It was
  still stronger than I liked, so I kept repeating that process. 
  After several days, I started checking the leaves each time to make
  sure they hadn’t gone moldy, and it occurred to me that daily dousings
  with boiling water dripping through would keep them from growing
  mildew. 

  That’s what I’ve been doing for these three weeks, and will go on doing
  as long as the resultant brew has color and flavor.  How’s that
  for gradual withdrawal?  I don’t suppose I’ve had more than a
  homeopathic dose of caffeine in the last few days.  My caffeine
  withdrawal headaches stopped over a week ago.  I’m drinking less
  of my weak tea each day, and more water.  Much of that is
  sparkling water, because I like the fizzy stuff.  There’s a brand
  of naturally flavored calorie free sparkling water, Crystal Clear,
  sweetened with sucralose, which my body (through MRT) says is safe for
  me.  It is too sweet for my taste, so about an ounce or two of it
  in the bottom of a tall glass flavors the whole glass of sparkly water
  – my version of soda pop — and makes me feel both virtuous and
  luxurious when I drink it, not to mention frugal.  Two liters of
  plain sparkling water cost the same as a liter of the sweet stuff.

  Douglass, my father’s family name, is a Scots name, y’know?  My
  mother’s family name was Scott, and you can’t get much more Scottish
  than that.  Thrift and frugality are in my blood and part of my
  early training.  Both my parents went through the Great Depression
  in their youth, and even when they had plenty they never wasted
  it.  Weekend trips to the Alviso dump were fun alternatives to
  fishing trips during my early childhood.  I smile every time I
  pour another pitcher of water through those old tea leaves, and frankly
  the brew tastes better with each pot.  Maybe those leaves are
  fermenting….

  I guess I tried too hard to tie everything together in that last blog
  about my two-meeting day in town.  Next day when I read it, I saw
  that I’d left out a lot of what I had intended to include.  One
  thing, implied but not stated, was that I brought all that stuff for
  the thrift shop back home again.  There are five thrift stores in
  Wasilla.  The one at the rehab ranch is my first choice and they
  were not taking donations.  My old friend and associate from the
  SCA, who runs the Women’s Center store, whimpered the last time I took
  a donation in, and complained that she had more things than she could
  get priced and displayed.  Likewise Greyfox’s favorite shop, the
  Treasure Loft, is overstocked.  They have an entire back room
  piled high with 55-gallon garbage bags full of clothing and toys, and
  their shelves for housewares runneth over, literally.   It’s
  dangerous walking by one of them.  The vibrations of one’s
  footfalls could set off a crockery slide.  Besides that, the
  manager has a capricious pricing policy and knows little about relative
  values of things, plus they often spoil objects by using masking tape
  for price tags.

  The Salvation Army store just moved to a new larger building, but
  Greyfox and I both have reasons not to want to support them.  Mine
  are Virgo-picky:  they’ve stopped organizing clothing racks by
  size and now it’s a time-consuming task trying to find anything, plus
  they eliminated their fitting room.  Instead, they allow people to
  return things (for store credit, not cash refunds) within a week. 
  I don’t always get back to town every week, so last time I was in there
  (possibly my last time EVER), I stood in a back corner of the store and
  tried on pants.  Luckily I’d worn thin leggings that day and
  didn’t need to fully disrobe.  Greyfox’s reasons are more
  politico-economic.  Sally Ann’s prices are excessive, higher than
  any other “thrift” store in town, and the uses to which they put their
  funds range from questionable to regrettable.  Making street bums
  sit through a sermon to get a meal seems petty to me.  I have a
  bit of a semantic quibble with them, too.  Calling proselytizing
  and converting, “salvation”, well, that’s just mealy-mouthed weasel
  words to me.

  Political ideology is also the reason we’ve agreed not to take
  donations to the other thrift store in town, Earthly Treasures. 
  They use their profits to support Christian missionaries who interfere
  with the indigenous cultures of Central America.  Greyfox’s
  feelings on this are so strong that he won’t shop there unless it’s a
  bag sale and he can be sure of getting the greatest value for a few
  meager bucks.  My thinking is that they’re going to be down there
  in Guatemala doing their thing with or without my few dollars, but I’ll not, on principle, give them my treasures.  We will just wait until winter when the donation stream tends to dry up, and take our stuff to the ranch again. 

  Thank God there’s no Goodwill up here, or I’d have to compose a
  diatribe against their exploitation of crips.  (Speaking as a
  card-carrying crip — my handicap parking placard is one of my most
  valued possessions — I can use that politically incorrect term.) 
  Some of my old friends are among those exploited, and I have plenty to
  say about that.   Maybe some other time.

  Another thing I neglected to mention in that last blog was a
  conversation before the AA meeting, with a man I’ve seen in all three
  of my current 12-step groups:  AA, Narcotics Anonymous, and Double
  Trouble in Recovery for the dually diagnosed.  He has stopped
  going to DT for the same reasons that it is my favorite meeting. 
  It doesn’t adhere to the cultish AA program as strongly, there’s more
  “cross talk” at meetings making it more like a therapy group than the
  series of monologues you hear in AA and NA, and members are often heard
  trashing their doctors for overmedicating them.  He’s a firm
  believer in better living through chemistry and thinks that
  prescription meds are all okay.

   After he got through trashing Double Trouble for being too free
  of dogma for his taste, he said, “I might have done bad today.” 
  He had first offered to help a female member of all three groups who
  had car trouble.  Then he found that her problem was beyond his
  skill level and he managed to start her car for her and take her to a
  mechanic.   That wasn’t the “bad”.  She had a headache,
  and he gave her one of his hydrocodones.  Belatedly, he started
  worrying that it might trigger an alcohol binge for her.  This
  typical alkie thinking is one of the reasons that AA comes third on my
  list of three current 12-step groups.  If there was a Food Addicts
  Anonymous chapter locally, or one for sex and love addicts, my list
  would be longer.  The only other 12-step resources I know of
  locally are AlAnon and Overeaters Anonymous.  OA adheres to the
  dogma that it’s all in the mind, and doesn’t recognize the physical
  nature of addiction — FAA is just a step nearer reality on that
  one.  But I digress.  This man surely would have known, from
  seeing that woman and hearing her share at DT and NA meetings, that
  she’s a drug addict, but his only concern was that the hydrocodone
  might make her pick up a drink. 

  To far too many AAs, it’s like that.  Any drug is okay, except
  alcohol.  People wearing blinders, stuck in ignorance, wallowing
  in their own denial and reinforcing the denial of each other, have so
  badly distorted what Bill W and Dr. Bob intended for that organization,
  and are turning it into a dogmatic cult… it’s pathetic.  The
  foundations, the steps and traditions, are sound.  The original
  club based on them, like many other institutions that have been around
  for a while, is now corrupt and dangerously obsolete.  AA
  literature mentions the “X-factor” the “unknown” thing that makes a
  person an addict.  Those who would have this organization be a
  personality cult revolving around its founders ignore all the research
  on biochemistry that has occurred in the past eighty years. 
  Ironically, Bill W, before his death, had gotten into orthomolecular
  medicine (while it was still being called mega-vitamin therapy) and
  tried unsuccessfully to introduce it to AA.  Ah, well, enough of
  that dead horse.  I had one other thing I’d left out before….

  The topic at the NA meeting was “the shape of our thoughts,” and how
  they change during recovery.  That was right up my alley.  My
  way of thinking has changed so much in the thirty-some years since I
  was doing IV drugs that I have a hard time recalling how I thought and
  felt back then.  I can no more relate to that “me” than I can to
  some of the people still struggling to get out of the addictive mindset
  and into recovery.  The 12-step programs don’t magically do that
  for them.  One does not enter recovery when one starts going to
  meetings.  Some of the ways I’ve heard that stated is that there
  is more to recovery than just abstinence, and that the programs won’t
  keep you from using, they’ll just take all the fun out of it for
  you.  I think those things are true, and also the line, “it works
  if you work it.”

  That thing I wasn’t “getting” Thursday, the struggling and trying
  instead of just doing, could be something I may never understand. 
  I even suspect that those who “struggle” and “try” may be in denial
  about what they are actually doing.  I do remember when I quit
  shooting speed and downers, and more recently when I kicked the
  lifelong sugar addiction and stopped smoking weed.  Quitting
  wasn’t a struggle.   Life was a struggle with the
  drugs:  to maintain a supply of them and to maintain some
  acceptable level of function with them, and to rationalize their
  use.  Quitting was just… quitting.  As soon as I made the
  decision to quit, I stopped.  Weed was easy to quit; for me it
  hadn’t been addictive.  IV speed and downers were easy, because I
  was locked up where I had no access to more during the detox and
  withdrawal.  Once free of them and then free on the streets, I
  chose not to enslave myself to the needle again.

  Pills were never as compellingly addictive for me as the needle was,
  and they were relatively easy to quit.  Nothing was as hard to
  kick permanently as the sugar was.   Many times I tried to
  cut down on my use and that failed every time.  Every addict knows
  you make the kicking harder if you try to cut down.  You either
  quit or your use tends to escalate.  It was not until I applied
  that same logic of addiction to sugar that I managed to get off
  it.  As long as I thought of it as food I was in trouble. 
  Over and over again I lied to myself and convinced myself that since it
  was okay for “everyone” else to eat the crap, a little bit wouldn’t
  hurt me.  Of course it’s not okay for everyone.  Look at the
  obesity epidemic in this culture, and the incidence of diabetes
  especially among those not of European ancestry.  And a “little
  bit” of an addictive substance just makes me want more.

  There are a few old-timers in my AA home group who will speak up when
  one or another of the newcomers or the relapsing crowd talks about how
  hard it is, the “struggle” to stay sober and “trying” to do
  recovery.  They say “bullshit”, and “tough shit, don’t
  drink.”   If not for that knowing core of members there, I’d
  probably never go back.  They remind me of the junkies who helped
  me turn my life around.  And that’s what it was, a turnaround, a
  transformation.  I went from making excuses for my behavior to
  refusing to accept my excuses.  I went from wishful and magical
  thinking to acknowledging the truth I knew.  I went from ripping
  and running, lying and denying, to a determination for the rest of my
  life to do nothing to damage my self esteem.  That lifetime
  commitment is at the core of my recovery.  I think one stumbling
  block for 12-steppers is a misinterpretation of the “one day at a time”
  idea.  

  One must live in the moment and not in regret for the past or fear for
  the future.   Life can be lived only one day at a time, or
  just from moment to moment, but commitments — the promises we make to
  ourselves and others — are forever.   There are probably millions
  of ways to weasel around and keep an addiction going while saying
  you’re “trying to quit.”  There is only one way to quit, and that
  is to not do it any more.   When I took a day off from eating
  sweet treats, the next day I was back to stuffing my face with
  them.  When I made a lifetime commitment to stop I ensured that
  even an occasional chance or unthinking exposure wouldn’t lead to
  relapse.  Anything we do, we do one day at a time, but if we
  expect to continue doing it for the rest of our lives, we must commit
  ourselves to that.

  

  • 4:03 pm
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