If You Ask Me...

Looking at my Facebook feed tells me it’s been a big news week for the worlds that overlap the ven diagram of things that appeal to LGBT people. Some LGBTs focus on politics, some on celebrities, some on LGBT issues, some on sex, most follow the big world news and some love zombies. In the last six or seven days, we were one attack of the undead on a major metropolis from hitting the LGBT news superlotto.

METHodology

I stumbled across a journal tonight with a story in it that I wrote five or six years ago. I will probably tell that story here in the next day or so, but tonight I want to write about the journals I kept back then. First off, that story I came across ends in the middle of a sentence. I'm not kidding. There are five and a half pages and then it just stops mid-thought. I have no idea why I stopped writing the story. I don't even know exactly when I wrote it because it's not dated. It's handwritten in a book that I was using in the last months of my addiction and first several months of sobriety.

Sloth

Tonight's post looks to be mostly just a placeholder so I don't fall off the writing-every-day wagon two days in. To be fair, I am writing today. It's just that I'm writing a report on the time capsule survey I fielded a few weeks ago. You may remember an earlier post where I asked you all to complete it. Much to my surprise and delight, 243 people responded.

Psquared Can't Be Still

Over the last couple years (if you've read my blog that long) you've probably learned a lot about me. I guess the first thing is that I'm willing to reveal a lot (not all) about myself pretty easily. But a couple other things you might know about me by now are that I have ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) that is more than just a little bit difficult for me to manage and that I just forgot what the second thing was. Hold on. I'll read the first two sentences and it will come to me. Oh, right. I have a Facebook obsession. Come to think of it, you might only know that if you're my friend on Facebook. Now I'm not completely sure I've ever made that clear on my blog. Whatever. Let's move on.

Moments of Clarity

People in recovery often talk about their moment of clarity – that moment when they knew it was over and they couldn't keep going on the way they were going. I had one final moment of clarity the morning of August 27, 2007 and it was pretty simple, almost mundane. It was something along the lines of “OK. If this wasn't fun on Sunday night, how the hell is it ever going to be fun on Monday morning.” And with that, I took my stuff and headed off to my outpatient program to really start trying to be sober.

But that was just the final moment. I had several other moments along the way – both small and large – that culminated in that moment. And they were things that may or may not seem like they would have been significant, but I held on to them. And I continued to think about them as I spiraled downward. These moments I believe were the universe laying the groundwork for what was to come. The way I always describe it in meetings is, “God speaks to us where we are, in the language we understand.”

Remedial Therapy

I had physical therapy today for a problem I’m having with my shoulder. Interestingly, I’ve had three sports injuries in the past four years and three different therapists have diagnosed each discrete problem the exact same way. Apparently I have a habit of building up the large muscle groups in my body while managing to completely ignore the little supporting muscles. I had a problem with my neck that was resolved by doing exercises with 5-pound dumbbells for about two months. Same thing with my back issue. Those situations occurred in NYC. Now I’m in San Diego and it’s a different problem – shoulder pain – with the same solution. I believe the expression that’s needed here is, “I never learn.”

Rush Hour

Short post today because all I can think about right now is how tired I am after the air travel experience from Camden (Hell doesn’t even begin to describe how annoying it was). Rather than bore you with the details of that, I’m just going to jot down a few observations about driving to and getting around LA (in car and on foot).