Shakespeare was Right!

Somewhere in Richard II or III or one of them Bolinbroke's or Lancastrians or someplace, the scheming, conniving SOB of a usurper to the throne utters the line, "the first thing we do, we kill all the lawyers."

Now that's always sounded like a fine idea to me. Oh, I don't have anything, per se, against them, aside from the fact that most of my adult life has been consummed, one way or another, by them.

Let me explain. I met the future ex in 1979. He was a lawyer. For MegaBank here in NYC. He was 19 years older than me and I instantly wanted him for my daddy (caretaker, protector and ATM). 15 years later I was enormously successful on Wall Street and a falling down wreck of a drunk. That's how happy I was with the lawyer (he had control issues). When I left him I said to myself, "well, THAT'S THAT. No more friggin' lawyers."

Bzzzzt. Wrong. Thank you for playing.

My next flingette was with some flack in Hollyweird who, whenever he wanted to avoid talking about something that made him uncomfortable (like how much money he owed me) would resort to saying, "Oh, I can't talk about that now. I'm up to my ASS in lawyers out here." And that would be the end of that discussion.

When the money, and he, were finally gone and I hit bottom and skidded into 12-Step recovery and slowly crawled back out of the hole I'd dug, towards the light...

God said, "He needs to be taught a lesson. I will give him a job... working for lawyers."

And so I do. And so I HAVE, since 1999. Over the years I've made my peace with working with them. Hell, I've even made my peace at sharing space in 12-Step meetings with them.

But today God went right over the top. At the end of the meeting this morning, Mr. "X", an attorney who actually has a year or two more of sobriety than I do, pulled me aside and, sotto voce, asked me if I would be willing to serve as his "interim sponsor." He said that he liked what I have. That's recovery lingo for "I see things in you and your behavior that I would like to emulate."

I've had to sleep with them, get taken to the cleaners by them and work for them.

Now they expect me to help them get sober.

What next?

The Work Week from Hell - Who's Lurking Out There?

I didn't get a chance to post much this week. It was the work week from hell. Every day I'd arrive at the office fresh from my morning 12-Step Meeting, conveniently located across the street from my office (unless some DODO had crashed his 18-wheeler on the Turnpike in the middle of the night AND, due to budget restraints and cutbacks, it took 9 hours for the 8 year old with a wagon to clear the wreckage) only to log in and face a barrage of overnight e-mails from the 3 lawyers I work for.

And they never said, "Hello! I hope you had a good nights rest." They usually began with "print the 32 attachments and get them to me ASAP." Now the 3 people I work for NEVER talk to each other so they have zero idea of what my workload is really like. All they see is THEIR shit and neglect to multiply it by 3.

By 5 o'clock yesterday my eyeballs were bleeding from all the revisions to various corporate documents I'd been making all day. It was not a good day.

I hate to bitch about the office because, frankly, it's usually a walk in the park compared to my old firm (and by far a better deal than being a corporate vice president of a major Wall Street brokerage house, which was another former gig), but this week really got to me.

The commutes from hell, both ways, several days this week, didn't help.

But it's over and TGIS. A little down time is going to be lovely.

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I've mentioned before that I have a little widget on this blog ("Sitemeter") that sort of keeps track of who visits the blog. No names, of course. This isn't "caller id." But it does give the city & state and, sometimes, the name of the sponsoring organization. Most of them seem pretty innocuous and I'm pretty much able to figure out who is checking in from places like Davis, California and Washington State (Hi Bev! Hi Alan!).

I even have some lurkers (people who routinely observe but never comment). There's a law firm in Los Angeles that provides me with a regular reader. Somebody in Bangor, Maine checks me out daily. This week I even had a drop by from the New Jersey Department of Transportation (right after I posted my glowing compliments of the New Jersey Turnpike Authority, surprise, surprise).

But it never occured to me until this week that under the current Fascist regime in D.C. a number of those unidentified, yet oddly consistent readers might very well be "fronts" for intelligence gathering groups in D.C., such as the NSA, doing a little "data mining", looking for subversives here at home (I AM, I AM! It's my intention to do everything within my legal power to see that the Republican Party gets it's ass kicked in the next elections and I'd like to see you try to stop me! NEENER, NEENER, NEENER!!!)

Or maybe not. Maybe there are just some people (gasp) who actually derive some yuks from my stuff, or who identify with my wacky world weary witings (sic). When I'm alone with my thoughts it's like being in a bad neighborhood. After dark. All alone.

Weekends used to be made for Michelob (well, they REALLY were made for Chivas because I never liked beer), but nowadays they're made for restoring some semblance of sanity to my life.

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend.

More good news to post, but that'll have to wait for now.

Love to you all....

My Big Fat Sober Life!

I got way too busy to blog yesterday. They closed the office early and lawyers, being lawyers, they like to cram as much crap into Fridays as possible (because they don't do a friggin' thing all week), so that meant cramming even more crap into even less time than usual.

I had dinner with a friend of mine last night. A(nother) nice straight guy, divorced, with a 12 year old, pubescent daughter who has definitely taken a turn to the dark side (paging Darth Vader). But I never turn down a home cooked meal, if I can help it. And it's fun to watch hormonal teenagers in action and to wonder how I managed to survive my puberty. I think I postponed it until I was 20, which helped in the houseful of drunks I grew up in.

I crashed early but I was up at the crack of dawn today to shop. Tomorrow is my friend John's annual Labor Day Picnic, Ice Cream Social and Tractor Pull, which I wouldn't miss for the world. It has gotten to be a dubious habit of mine to bring my world-famous "Kitchen Sink Salad" which starts with loose spinach (a pound), Hearts of Romaine (chopped), crushed walnuts, shredded carrots, sliced red bell peppers (cleaned), red onions, mushrooms, mini-cubes of cheese, grape tomatoes, mandarin orange slices, croutons and tossed with a combination of Caesar and Ranch salad dressings (Maries).

I have to put it into a couple of those disposable aluminum oven roasting pans in order to transport it over to Pennsylvania for the party. It takes about an hour to get there and I like to keep it in the fridge right up until the moment of departure.

Anyway, it takes a fair amount of time to assemble the ingredients and to pre-prepare some of them, such as chopping the lettuce then washing and rinsing it and then stowing it in plastic bags in the vegetable crisper overnight.

The party will start at 2:00 p.m. (EDT) tomorrow, but I'm the coffeemaker for a Sunday morning 12-Step meeting, too, and I'll have to run over to the town hall tomorrow morning to get the coffee going, then come home and finish assembling the salad.

Oh, yeah, and I have to stop and pick up a sponsee I'm taking to the picnic with me, too.

I'm happy about all that. I'm really happy because some new shoes I ordered showed up yesterday. A pair of Sperry Topsider deck shoes and (be still my boyish heart) a pair of Jack Purcell low-top gym shoes which take me right back to my miserable youth! But Lord, I do love those sneaks!!!

Oh, and I've been sharing at my meetings about this being the 10th anniversary weekend of my emotional bottom, when all I wanted to do was die.

And my phone has not stopped ringing since yesterday with calls from people in recovery telling me how glad they are that I didn't get my wish that weekend 10 years ago.

I'm glad, too.

Have a lovely holiday, everyone!

TB Boy

TB Boy is "pretty sure" that he wasn't infectuous so he decided to go ahead and have unprotected sex, er, breathing, with bunches of people trapped inside an airliner with him (several of them, actually) for hours and hours and hours on end.

Now if some queer who'd been diagnosed with HIV but who had yet to exhibit any symptoms went around having unprotected sex with people because "he wasn't sick (yet)", you'd better believe that there would be a public outcry (and probably some lynching mobs) about it.

I work for lawyers, I know how they think. If some CDC doctor didn't sit down with TB Boy and put an iron-clad "no-fly" contract in front of him to sign, he would've done exactly what he did... find some way to weasel out of it. And to not feel an ounce of shame or remorse about it, either because, you see, that's the way "the game" is played!!!!

And yes, they DO think they're special and unique and different.

Do I hope he dies? Of course not. Do I sincerely hope that somebody will take him outside into a dark alley and pound the living shit out of him? YOU BET I DO!

He may not be legally culpable.

But is morally culpable. Not to mention reprehensible, egotistical and utterly self-serving.

Does his new bride actually trust him to be the father of her babies? I don't care how cute he is.

I wouldn't trust him as far I could spit.