Temperance

I'm not that nice, are you?
I'm the angry smoking girl. I'm the
smoking girl
with the orange hair
I burn it all down
and leave it all smoking
an ashy pile of cinders
I'll ash on your rug. I'll ash on your floor. I'll
smoke in your bed I'll need
ashtrays to ash in. I bellow
smoke, like a dragon, an angry one. I'm the
smoking girl of Racine Street
I will be in your bed
when you come home
angry and smoking
late at night
a glowing tip, in the darkness
smoldering
waiting
to immolate
working
to go from Code Orange
to Code Red
doused
in accelerant
reeking
and stinking

going up in flames
going up in smoke
and
fire fire

FIRE.

Closing Bell

One thing I do like about being an alcoholic is the new finish line for the day, this day, or any other day. If I didn't have a drink today, then job well done. No other accounting really matters. You can relieve yourself posthaste of any worry, doubt, anxiety, or fear related to what you did, or didn't, produce. You can relieve yourself! You don't even need anyone else to say it.

I did not do so much today. I went to a meeting this morning and I listened attentively and I gave a message of nonverbal love, affection, pride and gratitude to K., who both spoke at the meeting and received his one-year medallion. I gave him a hug after just to say congratulations, and suddenly we were holding on to each other for dear life.  What was that unexpectedly intense and long embrace, congratulatory hug turned into wordless communique of hold on, thank you, I love you, I love you?

When you're in anyone's arms for long enough, shit is going to surface, I suppose. It turns out K. is my AA buddy but he is also a soldier, a simple stupid grunt, like me, and we are fighting to save our lives and our souls in this war. Maybe that was it. He told a little of his war story today, and I had to grab onto him as veterans grab onto each other.  I was there too. I saw that shit too. I almost died too. I can never thank you enough for what you did for me. I love you. I love you. And at the end of today, I can look back on it, and I understand that those words are about me and about K. and about both of us together. And they're true. So perhaps I should have known that I was going to bury my face in his chest, and he was not going to let go of my back and neck and shoulders for awhile, and we were both going to have eyes swimming with tears at the end of it.

Christ. Usually we're talking about if the cookies are any good that day and where the missing people are: treatment, relapse, or jail.

It was a positive thing, but for whatever reason it also sapped me of everything and at 9:07 am this morning I was pretty much done for the day. A lot of West Wing reruns and website visiting followed. In my former life, I might have thought this was unproductive.

But if you drink the AA Koolaid, which I suppose I have (really, you're either in or you're out, and I am all done testing the out part) you can arrive quickly at this: If I didn't have a drink today, then good job, and that's job enough. End of story. You've had your hearty meal of churned butter and rough bread and farm stew after rinsing your dusty neck and face at the pump, and now you can sink into clean sheets and downy pillows in well-earned exhaustion, and sleep the beautiful sleep of the totally spent.

AA says: One day at a time. Just for today. Keep it in the day. All any of us has is today. A truism and map for living that is both scientifically correct and spiritually nontheistic but, nevertheless, uplifting in a Buddhist simple-essential-truth kind of way.

Enough then. I stayed away from a drink today. I did not put a drink or a substance in my body today. I have one day sober. I have a great number of days before this that I was sober, but those are all the past now. They are gone. I have a great number of days to come that I will be sober, but they do not yet exist. They are a fiction. There is only today.

So, K. and his red T-shirt. Not too much else to tell. A low-ball day. But an honest and true one. An awake one. A sober one, for a recovering alcoholic.

One magnificent, fine fucking day indeed! Beautiful. I love it. I love AA. I love K. I love that its enough, and that I get to have relief, and peace, and go to bed happy, full, alive, and absolutely spent.

I hope I have a deep and peaceful sleep, with dreams. I wish that for all of us.

Flash 5.24.13

Its a cheap shot, calling her a rube. So what if she is 35 pounds overweight, and that weight clusters around her thighs, upper arms, and belly? So what if her clothes are too tight and too short for someone her age, or anyone. So what if they're not flattering. 

She has more to worry about, more important things to think about, than if she is being flattering or not. She is standing up there in tiny shorts and squeezey tee and she is reading to us about how it works and reminding all of us that we don't have to drink no matter what. We can keep it simple, let go and let god, easy does it, as the little blue and yellow fringed banners around her remind us. 

We have didactic teaching and visual aids here. We are being given everything we need. It is unimportant that she is not dressed for this cooler weather, and with some effort, you can stop looking at and thinking about how her legs show little circuits of red vascular loops over her white white skin, how her circulation is unhappy with the cold. You can stop seeing that simply by closing your eyes, and listening instead. You can make a choice to listen only to her voice and try to understand what she is saying. 

You'll run into her later in the grocery store with her friend that she is always with who isn't anywhere near as sober. Are they friends because they are or does she just need that friend in a symbiotic way because she needs the rides and she still has a year to go before she can get her license back? 

That's exactly what I'm talking about. Stop looking, stop thinking those thoughts with your monkey brain. So what if she's going to make a lasagna tonight? All you need to know is what she told you. You can practice these principles in all your affairs. You really can. 

She is the proof.

30:5

For his anger endureth but a moment, in his favor is life: weeping may endure for a night, but 

joy cometh in the morning.

My True Identity

Love Tat

Where to Begin

Where to begin? Begin at the beginning. That's been said before, not by me. I'm not going to do that. Nothing is particularly linear anyway and that's the truth. Neural networks will teach you that.

This is me at work. This is L., my patient, who with his 5 brothers went to World War II. I listened to L. tell me about the war for about, maybe, 50 hours total over the course of 18 months or so. He has a purple heart. His wife was my patient too and I sat in between them for a week holding both of their hands. They were side by side in twin beds, her dying, him sick and crying and scared. And she died, and he lived. He remained my patient.

That's my table that was my great-grandmother's. That's my mug that makes me think its funny everytime I use it and gives me an amused feeling that I like. That's the pen I used when I signed my resignation letter and faxed it in and therefore could no longer go visit L. and, you know, listen and be with, as I formerly did.

That's me giving him a certificate of recognition for his military service as well as one for his late wife, who was also a veteran.

I could write a book about me, for the top photo and what's on my table, and I could make it all true and it would be a little bit shocking and also a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, which Dave Eggers got to before me. Some people hog all the good names.

I could write a book about L., and me, or just L., and I could even write a book about just the few political and personal and beautiful and terrible things flying around the room in just that photo about that moment, me, L., a company, death, medicine, politics, war, ethics, love, terror, a certificate on a piece of paper. It would be a little bit shocking and also staggering, heartbreaking, and genius in an obvious kind of way. I would like to write that book but I'm not sure if I can do it and make it true. If I couldn't tell it true, I don't want to tell it at all. The closest I can come for now is just to allude to it. But that is a beginning.

I notice now how he's holding on to my wrist. That was really the point, the truth, of the whole thing, although I don't know if anyone other than L. and I and the photographer, his daughter, ever got that part straight.

I thought about these photos of photos about 10 minutes ago while I was taking a pee in my house, and what it felt like in both of those photos. What lead to it and where it is now. Both of those photos go together. While I was peeing they just came to me and I thought, The whole team could not bear the idea of death and in fact were traumatized and terrified and though end-of-life professionals with training, experience, expertise, regulation and oversight, brought it to subtly and constantly bear upon me to stop it. Just stop it, somehow.

And that was hard. But I withstood it.

But it did wear on me too.

I can understand it better now. I forgive it.

I'm glad I never bought into that. Trying to stop it. That would make a person go nuts.

I'm so glad for that photo of me and L. and that he is holding my wrist and that I know I am feeling happy to be with him in that moment. I remember that moment perfectly even though this past Sunday and most of Monday are an absolute and total mystery that I can only reconstruct by scrolling through texts and messages on my phone.

I was happy then. I was happy. I loved L. and I still love him and that's all that was going on, in truth, in that photo. There are all kinds of clues and inferences and I'm wearing a lanyard and a badge and that's not the point.

We were happy. We were touching each other. It was good to both of us to do that. It was mutual. It was understood. It was safe and loving and kind and not terrifying and death was in the room. We were happy.

I was happy today and while I was peeing and I'm really happy right now.

That's the truth. If I had that photo with me right now, in bed, I would press it to my chest, my heart, and turn off the light, and keep pressing it against me, and fall asleep smiling in the dark, feeling happy, and full of love, love, love.

I hope I can sleep now.