Well, it's that time.

I wanted to focus on staying clean and sane first, then I wanted to concentrate for a whole month on stopping smoking before I seriously addressed my weight problem. Tomorrow is a month exactly that I quit smoking so the weight issue is at hand.

The think I want to focus on with food is, enjoying eating but not be compulsed to shovel it in to feel safe and satisfied. The best program I know is Weight Watchers so I am counting points again as off today.

It's the next biggest gaping hole that needs dealt with in my life. I am ready, I am all in!

Good life takes effort

i just had the most amazing day. I liked who I was, I like what I was doing, I'm making new important friends and I haven't smoked in 3 weeks. If I felt better about my eating issue I really don't know if I could stand it. lol Today was that good.

I have know dramatic event or revelation to blog tonight, I simply enjoyed being here today.

Envisioning a new identity when I think of myself.

I realized today that odds are I am not going to go back to smoking and that I should get a new identity in my head that isn't a smoker. For twenty years a cigarette in my hand has been a part of the mental picture I have of myself. A smoke in one hand and a ridiculously large diet coke in the other.

I am a non'smoker now. God that is soooo weird. All most 3 weeks and almost 3 months since I have popped any muscle relaxers or scripted' sleep meds. I am very fucking clean. lol

My eating is out of control. It has bypassed over eating to compulsive over eating. I have to stop before it gets worse. The good news is, I now know if I can quit drugs, alcohol and cigs, I should be able to get a more manageable grip of the food I eat. I' will deal with it as it comes up and hope I make progress.

I felt pretty at ease within my own self today and that is very welcomed.

Sometimes I get a little bummed at myself

To frame this thought up, I saw a picture of a twenty something who wasn't a great hulking beauty of a man but pleasantly average. He had just been cast on a hour long drama in it's 6th year. When I saw his picture I imagined when he figured out what he wanted to do, act, he either didn't have people that discouraged him or he was in tune with himself to the point the just didn't believe them.

Finding out who you are at 40 something is a trip. I am doing work that the majority of my friends did before high school graduation. I absolutely have less amounts of debatable truths than I started out with. I can picture what I want to look like in the second act, and I know how I want to feel and finish up. The rest I am following the inner directive of spirit and I'm not up for debate this go around.

I can be anything I really want to be, life is creation in motion, not retraction and paralysis.

If I had a chance to live the past differently, I would play with more dolls, and not in closet. I would cry and feel no shame when they called me names and when I was told I needed to be tougher and stronger, I would tell them some boys aren't. And that is OK.

I am so warm and mushy tonight.

I'm full of the feeling that xanax used to give me. I have great moving music on, it's raining, I don't smoke anymore, I am sober and clean and I have new friends. I have projects and things I want to do and dice I want to roll for my numbers.

It is a good night, it is a good life and I am thankful in this moment

Some great and moving quotes I found tonight.

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.
— Mark Twain




I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.
– Michael Jordan

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
— Louis Hector Berlioz


Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
-– Carl Sagan


Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.
— Sandra Carey



Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I wished I still smoked today.

Part of being clean and sober and rightly medicated is showing up for the people in your life when they need help. One such person needed my help today and I got to practice patience and tolerance WHILE, not stuffing the aggravation. I seriously wished I hadn't quit smoking.

I've been looking at fear in my life , in the STates and in the world. It causes the best of people to be assholes and cause pain for others. It enables people to manipulate entire groups of people who share common fears that they aren't going to get enough or will lose something they cherrish.

When I look honestly at my life which as been completed submerged in fear, I realize what a waste of time its all been and how many people, were hurt. I am number one on that list.

Most of the stuff I was fearful of never happened and the few things that did come true weren't minimized or lessened by the length of time I spent in fear over it.

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. This is not real. lol

At the core of my issues is fear

I never felt safe as a child, as a kid or as a young adult or even an adult for that matter. Never. I never had a place or a person that I could go to and feel like I wasn't in jeopardy. The odd thing about that is had both parents and they were always there but I never could just tell them I was afraid. Everything in my little world was overwhelming. Picturing in my mind now, a tiny shouldered dark haired boy hypersensitive and alone makes me sad.

When I started school, I was picked on and I wasn't safe there. I was around all these people who were suppose to take care of me and none of them could tell that I was drowning. The pisser about drowning is from a distance you can't tell if someone is splashing about and having fun in the water or if they are struggling. The are struggling to stay a float, struggling for air and struggling for life.

Everyone I knew assumed I was "playing in the water" because at the same time I was struggling, i couldn't be a bother with my feelings.

The first time I got drunk on bootleg malt liquor in the 8th grade was the first time, that even for a moment I felt not so exposed, vulnerable or scared.

Actually I experience the euphoria and fineness of alcohol at a fancy dinner before that. The hideous wine made me feel warm from the inside out. Warm and cozy. It was the first time I had alcohol and I tried to get as much as I could at the dinner without anyone noticing. Walking outside in the Newport street , with the warm breeze blowing, I felt great. I felt in the flow, I felt drunk. It was good.

Honestly it quit doing that for me a long time ago. I used it for awkward social gigs, dates I didn't want to go on and to relax enough to have really nasty dirty sex.

I could give list after list of specifics of when I was scared, had no one and couldn't verbalize me fear. I'm not sure that each individual episode are important, because it was just more of the same.

I was like a turtle with no shell, crossing a multilane freeway. I was scare, alone and I was to exposed and certain the attack was imminent.