The greatest thing to happen when we want something so bad...

My all time favorite moment on tv was in 1999 when on her 19th nomination Susan Lucci won her first Emmy. For 18 years the swell of support for her grew and grew and her losing streak was legendary and widely talked about even by non-soap people. But at her 19th try when Shemar Moore announced "The Streak is over Susan Lucci". It suddenly was about much more than a trophy, the audience turned into screaming, weeping energy producers. People like me at home suddenly felt the overwhelming rush of emotion like we had just heard our name called out. She even mentions in her 5 minute acceptance speech that she was glad she didn't win because she would have had all the consolation cards and cakes her kids made her to feel better.

I just watched the U.S. Nation Men's Figure Skating finals where a great young guy who I have rooted for for 11 years, get past injury and self doubt, the changing of the sport to put it all together in a meet that he almost retired after last year. It was just thrilling and I felt like I had just won when he became the 2011 US. Men's Figure Skating Champion Ryan Bradley.

When you make Nestle Toll House Cookies, the recipe calls for like a quarter teaspoon of salt. Well, that is insane because you wouldn't put salt a sweet cookie. Preposterous! But the salt, makes the sweet and the chocolate even more delicious.

Time is the salt in my cookie recipe. Some things gain their most importance when you didn't get it right away. I know that I have been in/around 12 step programs for over 18 years and my recovery is very much sweeter because it has taken this long. And I have many people who are invested in my recovery because they have seen me flounder but they know I have to get this on my time, but your terms.

Maybe the next time I don't get the thing or result I want, I can recall this entry to my blog. If I don't, someone please remind me. The same thing that makes antiques valuable can make moments in life more valuable too.

Worry is not love and it steals your inner peace, bit by bit

I've been anxious most of the day regarding my sister and her substance abuse issues. I am well away that we all have to get to the point of wanting help on our own, but I can't help but wonder if there is anything I can do.

If you don't know I love you, if you can't hear the words or see all the actions that I take to show you, then at some point I have to admit to myself, I have done all I can do. I have to be ok with the fact I can't convince you of my love and all I can do is all I can do. There is an endless stream of hoops you can line up for me to jump through but today I know all I can do is all I can do. I wish I had the heart language to get through to yours, but I fear I never will.

It isn't the concept, it is the word "God" that I react badly too.

Straight people do not seem to understand that from the moment I knew I was different meaning gay, I have felt or seen little of anyone that claimed to be a follower of "God" to lead me to believe that I was in for nothing but pain and abuse by them. I hear "God" and my very cellular structures react by retreating and getting ready for another glancing blow from the team of the righteous.

I've been abused by theology , I've been bullied by people who claim to be "GOD?S" followers to the point that as soon as I hear GOD, I am ready to curl up into the fetal position to protect myself from the karate kicks.

We are talking 30 years of being pointed out, singled out, mocked, derided , castigated , casted out, bullied, and read for filth. Told repeatedly that I was not worth saving unless I did one thing. Deny who I am. Even when I tried doing that I never felt the relief that was promised. I did exactly as I was instructed to do and I still could not connection to "God" which made me think the things you said was true. There was no place for me in spirituality.

Saturday when I was so upset about the way the word "God" was invoked and was given credit for writing the literature in Narcotics Anonymous, all the old abuse issues came right back and suddenly I questioned how in the fuck did I let myself be vulnerable again.

I have a love concept of a Higher Power. If a Muslim, or a Jew or a Buddhist would have been speaking I would not have felt my body shut down and go into protect from abuse mode.

I do not know if I will EVER no associated the word GOD with anything that is approachable or connectable to any way of life I have. Nothing good has ever happened to me that is associated with that word-God.

I usually just sub in "Higher Power" when I hear the word God in a meeting but there was just to much mention Saturday and the whole gathering seem to take on the feel of an old camp revival.

Fun with Murray and Forrest pictures

http://sendables.jibjab.com/view/yHj7wS3s7CPr9kUf

Things that make me go all teenage girl and say how cute is this.

This is a follow up to the earlier post about my grandmother.

I certainly would not read anything into this other than it was a chance to me to see the scope of life. Yesterday I touched my grandma as her organs began to shut down, today at the noon meeting my friend Lee's sister told me to hold her baby so she could grab a smoke. I looked down out that tiny 3 week old baby in my arms and I was so aware that everyone has an entrance and an exit. How anyone could teach this little thing enough to make his way in the world is beyond me. How do you try and show a baby how to be a good human. He is only three weeks into his life and my grandma is 3 inches from leaving hers. Both have been awesome and moving experiences and I have nothing but hope for us all.

What a Priveledge I had yesterday.

My grandmother's body had begun the process of shutting down and preparing her to leave on Friday. When I woke up I heard the voice of intuition tell me to get dressed, drive to Daingerfield and sit with her a while. Just as I was putting on my shoes my aunt called and I told her I was on my way to the nursing home. My grandmother was in her bed and the back was raised so it looked like she was semi sitting up. She held her neck up and I was supprised she wasn't laying flat out but my aunt told me because of the copious amounts of fluid build up she couldn't lay down flat. She was very quiet and only made noises as pain waves would hit her. Even the noise and the long physical drawing up of pain were hushed and muted.

I stroked her hair several times and touched her face and arm as I spoke to her. Her eyes would open periodically but she wouldn't appear to focus on anything in particular. The wonderful nurse she has tried to get her to eat horrible looking ground up and wet down food but it really wasn't happening.
I sat there with my aunt who has been there every step of the way as age, then Parkinson and Alzheimers took over. She received more verbal tirades than anyone should hear from their mother due to her illnesses. She just needed someone to sit and let her talk as we sat beside with my grandmother, who's organs were shutting down. There were moments when it was quiet, and my grandma with tense up and moan. Then relax again. At one point I felt so much peace fill the room that the hair on my arms stood up. The world didn't exist outside that little room, with my grandma , my aunt and me, surrounding by the pictures and things that represented Grandma's time on the planet.

My grandma is 93 years old and she has been stuck in a nursing home for a long time. Her leaving isn't so much an ending but more like being set free from a miserable place and from a body that has been out to get her for the last 50 years. lol

I would not have had this sacred experience, just as sacred as being in a room that is filled with a life being brought into the world, if I wasn't clean. I may have been in the room but I would have missed the experience all together. I'm grateful beyond words not to have had to take some xanax, valium, Klopine, shot of liquor, in order to get my body where it was suppose to be and yet miss the miracle of being present and in it.
It is something that if you had told me I would have made the short drive and stayed there without looking at the clock every five minutes to insure my impersonation of a caring person looked real then stayed there the appropriate amount of time I would not have believed you.

When I get to clear my head of all the trash of "What a good boy does" and I take my spiritual centeredness that the program and my own spiritual practices grant me, I suddenly can enjoy/be apart of/feel the life that unfurls in front of me. Real life.

I am so thankful to be a human, a recovering addict and a being of spirit that has the capacity to feel , love and understand on a super-human level that life is indeed quiet and sacred. Sacred not just in the end but in the moment.

I'm not sure how much long it will be before she finally gets a clear exit out of that old woman's body but I know she has earned the right to rejoin whatever source origin she came from. I think the source is love, and I send her with love to love.

Sitting with grandma for a couple of hours may have enlightened me in my own life to just how beautiful every part of the experience is, the experience of one more hour on the spinning rock, 3rd from the sun.

This was a note to a friend with Job issues and addiction issues. I wanted to save a copy to read later.

M, I had to make a "for real" decision. Is the world a place of lack or is the world filled with more than enough. My choice shades the things I see and experience. When I remember that I am enough and the world has plenty, I don't stress so much. There is either enough or there isn't. My experience with stopping drinking was that it popped up in the form of pills, which turns to my original drug of choice food. When my illness perceives I am going to be shorted , slighted or left to die I reach for something that makes me feel good. Food, sex, alcohol, pills, food has been my progression of quick fixers. And they all have individually kicked my as repeatedly.

Don't let the fantasy of work or "Mike at Work" make you forget the difference between attaching identities to you for the simple ease of not having to become the real you. In the 50's men were "business men" who joined "Chamber of Commerce" and "Elks Lodge" and they were "Republicans" and "Methodist" and "husband" and "father". All of those things let the ego tell those men that is so they were but those were just identifiers that allowed them to be and function without having to look to deep. I know who I am, look at all the clubs I am in. Remember how a club was formed for Saturn Drivers. People used it to join a larger group that supplied some form of identification for them. One reason I got tired of the AA group I used to go to is they filtered everything in their life the the premise of "I'm alcoholic'. It's like that was the only thing about themselves they could claim. For me, I know I have to balance out in my life and reconcile my choices with the Narcotics Anonymous Program I work, but Addiction doesn't define me. In fact I think being an addict and gay are two of the least interesting things about me. Don't even get me started on the men who's soul mission is to perfect being "a gay man". I don't have the money or the costumes to be a professional gay guy( or the desire).

Life is really something

We go along assuming that we have seen it , done it and felt it all then suddenly, boom. Your exposed to something foreign and completely different from anything you have know. I dreamed last night that I had fallen in love. I fell in love with someone who loved me back. The chemicals that get produced in our brains when we fall in love must have kicked in in my dreams because the love was intense , powerful, consuming yet gentle. It was so fantastic that when I woke up this morning my body seemed to be mourning for the loss of the dream love. I've been 5 inches from sad all day. It isn't the sad without hope that is drepression, it is just the sad for a loss of something that was beautiful.

I've never been in love as an adult. I have learned to get the most out of flirty school girl crushes, but I haven't been in love with anyone since I was 18 years old. For most of the time in between, I certainly wouldn't have been able to love much in return if there had been someone. The dream only reminded me what was possible. I'm much closer to being able to hold my end of a relationship up because I have many moments strung together now, where I feel like I am worthy of being on the planet AND that I have something important to give away.

In many ways the dream of being head over heels in love with something has only high lighted the fact that I have a place for it in my heart and I deserve unconditional love.