I'm Looking For Home.

It's not a hard thing to fathom.  I want to feel like I'm at home.  Relaxed, and engaged, and comfortable, and surrounded by the things that I love and that make me want to submerge myself deeper.

Lately I've felt exactly the opposite--that everything is alien.  The strangeness that has pervaded almost everything is hard to pinpoint, both in a way that is totally accurate and a way that tries to unveil its origin.

Why should I, after all, feel so tremendously off?  Everywhere?  Even at home?  Is there a reason that would allow me some sort of excoriation to jab at and turn over?  I'm serious!  I really could deal with reasons here, instead of the opaque ambiguity of feeling lost.

I admit that my current job does not help the situation.  I'm basically staring at lots of computer code all day long.  It makes me feel unhinged, even though it is, at a basic level, incredibly logical, incredibly mathematical.

Oddly enough I've finally sort of gotten a hold on the tremendous back pain that has plagued me for many many years.

Too many tangents here.

I have  sense of pervading hopelessness, but it is not so acute that I will be silly and act out like a teenager.  It is instead the way it is spread so thin, how it just sort of layers over everything, that makes it so damn cloying.

I'm also sick of NYC.  I'll say that btw.  I should have a different post on that.  I will endeavor to post about that now, actually.  Two posts in one day.  It is a testament to my strange sadness that I must write.

What To Do When Sober?

I admit that it isn't easy to figure out what the best regarding activities when you get sober.

What are you supposed to do, after all, especially when so many of your nights/days/weekends have been dominated by seeking out drinks--whether, or especially, drinking is not the main subject, it always sits in the backdrop.

I remember drinking on the way to going out drinking, so I would be good and stoned drunk before I arrived.  This was all about anxiety alleviation, this need to be charged prior to the main event, which was in itself, drinking.

So much energy and waste went into being "okay" to be drunk.

And so, what do you/  When not drunk?  When sober?  When not going to get drunk?

It is hard. I'll admit it.  Even after the clarity of the first few months or the first few YEARS.  It is still hard to know what to do.  Very few things offer the same kind of immediate reward of seeming deep relaxation and relative immediate release.

Not Being Scared of Failure.

That might sound like a fancy way to talk about some mostly soft and emotional concept, but it's not.  Here's the book.  McArdle is especially cogent and tight in her writing.  Forgetting about all of the technical background to her eloquent chapters, there is this: we live in a culture where we're quite afraid to fail, which makes us less likely to try new things, and those of us who have succeeded, obsessed with keeping our status--that is, trying to do things perfectly the first time.

McArdle says it is important to engage, that progress and success happens in increments, small increments, and that nobody has pure success without lots an lots of iterations first.  It is a really important less for anyone who has thought of themselves as imperfect, and thought of this imperfection as pure failure.  It is okay not to be perfect.  It is okay to try.  It is okay to play a little and experiment with things to figure them out.

Packaging Your Message 2

But the larger reason that it matters that we take care to communicate with empathy and thoroughness (see yesterday's post), is that we could be wrong.  Our assumptions that a) what we're saying is coherent, b) that it is logically represented, and c) that we have stated it lucidly, are self-serving and hard to check, especially when we are emotionally engaged with the material.

This is probably worth a larger post on its own, but I'd argue that our capacity to understand that we could be wrong in any given situation should be used much more widely than it is.    Why assume that you make sense?  Isn't that the lazy way out?  If you're the rare person that doesn't have to make sense when talking with someone else (and who could this be?  even billionaires, or especially billionaires, have communications that demand precision), then don't worry about it.

But I guess my "test" or way around this problem is this: assume you are wrong, and then communicate from that starting point.  Seek less comfort.

Packaging Your Message

At some level, it is disagreeable to think about the way that one's words might be received, and to alter those words according to perceived reception.  After all, we then must frame ourselves contingent on our perception of other people's perception of us--that is, we must guess at how they might interpret our message and have a quick mini-conversation with that phantom conversation partner prior to actually communicating.

This is, in a very real sense, how severe anxiety manifests itself, partially because it might in most cases prove impossible to corner all possible interpretations in time to actually communicate.

But it is also disagreeable to contour our speech for consumption at a more guttural level, one that provides the bravado of a good "fuck you" and the satisfaction of outrage.  Why should we cater to others at all?  Why think about how our expression is or is not received?  At an abstract level, the answer is that language is contingent on multiple nodes, each person necessary but not sufficient alone to produce it.  There's no real language without the capacity to understand one another, to have a degree of "inter-subjectivity" -- to be inside each other's heads.

I think the reason we find it disagreeable to change our speech is that we feel as though we're compromising our message, that somehow it isn't as pure or authentic if we change it.  I'd argue, or at least I feel, that this is a highly selfish and almost narcissistic or conceded way to operate.  Making sure that other's understand what you're saying, or what you mean, assures that you get what you want, and it also helps the larger functions of the interaction you may be having proceed--whether at work, a traffic intersection, or in an unfamiliar setting.

It is also incredibly hard to concede what we don't know, at times--say a board meeting, or anytime we want to impress our superiors.  But I'd submit that the capacity to hone in on what we don't know, what remains ambiguous, or what is not being communicated clearly, and to distill it (both the gap, or space itself that isn't being successfully bridged, and also a way to synthesize that gap and move forward), is something that takes time to learn, and that builds a tremendous amount of character.  It certainly isn't always intuitive, especially in a toxic self-centered culture, and it certainly doesn't mean you have failed, if you chose to acknowledge it in real time.

It Is Possible To Be Unhappy Anywhere

Let's all play a game, whereby we run.

We could run from anything, parents, teachers, peer pressure, social outings, or inferiority in general, en masse.  We could figure out a way to see the negative shit in any situation, finagle, pull, and coax out the layers embedded in normal discourse that represent the darkest most angsty and inward interpretations, lexical touchstones that reify what we "always knew" anyway.

We could let outrage bloom.  We could allow it breathing room.  Outrage at everything, anywhere, all day, all night.

We could frolic with the narcissism that accompanies not taking anything seriously.  And we could certainly froth with the stubborn refusal to self-correct.

That would be easy.

And then we could keep on running.  All day, All Night.

Absurdest Comments: Drinking to Celebrate Not Drinking

Every once in a while a comment comes in that just irks me in a deep and fundamental way.  You see, it is illogical, this comment, the smiley face following the admission, for instance.  It drives me crazy, nuts, batty.  I won't delete it.  But I will highlight it thusly:

SOBERDUDE?  Listen up.  Listening?  You're not fucking sober if you're drinking.  I don't know how else to say it.  You can be one or the other, not both. If you chose to be one, and post on my blog, I appreciate your honesty, and your willingness to share your experiences, but I wholeheartedly disagree with your logic when you think you can be both.

Finding Meaning and Sobriety

So the hardest part of getting sober beyond the whole physical thing and readjusting to live part and finding basically a somewhat new set of friends and basically sort of relearning how to do a lot of stuff, is this: relearning how to enjoy yourself.  For, shall I say it explicitly?, the problem with people like me, who can have one hell of a time when drinking is that, well, drying up the source of booze also dries up a lot of the outward affected personality.  And the willingness to engage.

And basically queue a kind of new dry period of stoned realization that life isn't just going to get easier, i.e. social situations and anxiety will not just go away because there isn't any booze greasing the hinges.

And anyway this is apropos of nothing, as per the usual.  Now play it again, Johnny.

Haunting Past Is Misnomer

Easy for me to think that the past is back there, frozen, both in time, somehow, and geography.  I don't go near my indiscretions, physically, that is, for fear that somehow I'll find myself there, stuck in some endless loop, and the only true solution to such a mercurial discovery would be both murder and suicide.  I'd have to kill that version of me, thereby committing a kind of suicide.

Which is intrinsically sad, no?  Thinking not of suicide, but that the past is somehow frozen back there, and that the place and people inhabiting that place are also locked in--that is: locked into your egocentric perambulations of shame!  Because so long as "you" left the past, then, well, that past can't possibly move about, grow, change, frolic, or even whither up and die on its own, even without your overwhelming urge to go and kill it!  It might already be dead without your constant semi-nostalgic-semi-religious treatment of it all these years.

So I do have a few words that are not designed for the faint of heart.

And they hurt.  But once the hurt dissipates, there is an ultimate freedom in smallness and regularity, and a spirit in the everyday that can actually overcome wildly dramatic fits and starts to one's life.  So let's try to live small for a bit.

Letting Go -

The need to control is at times (for some of us) quite strong: social situations, other people's thoughts, patterns of activity throughout the day, and what have you.  Flexibility, in other words, can be quite low, even and especially for people who profess verbally to be quite open to new experiences, people, things, places, or ideas.  In fact, I'd wager that most of us are a lot more rigid than we allow.  Just think of the list of things that pisses you off, for instance, about other people, particularly in regards to politics or social policy or any other idea based conception.  Why would it be that normal living standards, habits, norms, and routines, run counter to this base intuition--that "I" am fundamentally correct in what I do, and others are basically, to the extent that they differ, incorrect.

Anyway, there's ways to break this a bit.  One is to try really hard not to come to conclusions based purely on intuition, or even if you have, to try to understand that others have come to conclusions based on their own sense of intuition, what is right, and what they think should be.  It is difficult, it is said, to reason with someone who hasn't reasoned to get to the place they are, wherever they have been.  It is doubly difficult to see your own blindspots.  And not always necessary, either, but crucially important at times.

The Club

Wherever you wish.  Film it, if you can, and we'll pawn it later, to fund our first house, raise kids on the royalties, and denounce the puritans who rarefy all that is bad with everything we don't like.  How sweet it could be--can't you see?  At least they'll know where they came from, right?  No more wondering about it.

Slither into my energy, my peacekeeper, and find a hollowed out grave for safe keeping for your valuables, where we might appreciate them through the process of fermentation, make them sweet like kombucha and honey.

Filter out the rinky dinky little thoughts of panagyric fantasy, blessing yourself with a smite bit of delusion and, shall we indulge? - ecstasy.

I loved you, once upon a time, in a world that we inhabited.  I loved you, and you were more than just a drug.  I promise you that much.  There are no conclusions when worlds slowly shift, disintegrate in such a fuzz of synth.

So much for the tears.  So much for these long and wasted years.

Dramatic Change

Personal self-induced dramatic change (say, from the cessation of using alcohol), is probably a self-fulfilling prophecy.  I wish it wasn't, naturally.  This doesn't preclude change, it just means that we don't become entirely new people just because we put down the bottle.

In fact, we alcoholics are probably so self-centered that we think the change that occurs from not drinking is equivalent to something more than it is, simply because it happened to us.

I'm not trying to take away the somewhat amazing accomplishment of sobriety from anyone who has achieved it.  That's not my aim at all.  I'm just saying, in short, that being sober is a necessary condition for certain people to live relatively normal and non-horrible catastrophic lives, but it is not a sufficient condition, alone, for those same people to excel.

It is nice, but it is not everything, see?  A foundation of sorts.  If we don't wear clothes (and often times specific clothes), we can't go to work.  See, but if we don't wear any clothes, we can't really go to work (and be allowed to keep going).  Simple as that.  Wearing clothes by itself isn't special, but it is for us, people who have a problem conforming, perhaps, to the "uniform" of whatever it is that normal consists of, or to carry the analogy off the deep end, people who just love to be naked no matter the costs.

We, the naked ones, who pretend so hard to be vulnerable, exposed, groomed, and otherwise mature, and yet, can't manage to just keep our clothes on!

I'll tell you this much, and I won't tell you no more.  Not today.