Absolutely Fabulous!

I nearly started to feel jinxed today. Bev tried to hang me with being responsible for the death of her friend, Michele (Yes. She was kidding). But that didn't matter. In some sick, twisted and perverted little corner of my mind, I WAS responsible. Because I AM THE MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE!!!!! ... when I'm not busy being lower than whale crap at the bottom of the sea.

I have a friend in recovery who will celebrate his 1st year of sobriety tomorrow. Yesterday morning he stormed out after a 12-Step meeting, convinced that he was going to "resign" from the Program.

He showed up this morning and shared about it. He's lucky that he has people around him, myself included, who remind him that it's perfectly natural for him to be particularly crazy around this, his anniversary time, and that we've all gone through it AND continue to go through it every year around the time of our sobriety birthdays. God, around my anniversary every year I start to feel like Mr. Spock being drawn home to spawn in whatever episode of the original ST series that happened in.

I have another friend (again, in recovery) who is under the gun at work and at school right now. I had to point out to him that he's feeling anxious and under attack because it goes to the heart of his disease ... his perfectionism. Alkies like us are fine as long as nothing ever goes awry. But we are capable of taking even the most insignificant personal criticism and turning into the worst year of our life because, of course, we're perfect... or should be... and we know this because we do everything else perfectly... mostly.

He'd forgotten that he's afflicted with terminal perfectionism. It brings down many a drunk who cannot tolerate the slightest hint of failure.

My blog title yesterday was "What's Wrong?" and, of course, nothing was. I was just alone in my head with my thoughts ... not a good place for a recovering drunk to be without adult supervision.

Thank goodness for 12-Step programs and the friends people in recovery make in them. A few minutes spent every day speaking with another person in recovery, sharing our experience, strength and hope with each other, is the key to right and stable thinking. As is working the Steps and going to meetings.

And so, today (and JUST for today), I am absolutely fabulous!

And so are you!

Oh, Ya Gotta have Friends...

Yeah, I know. How gay is that for a title? Bette Midler's old rendition immediately comes to mind.

But I'm not going to talk about Gay Icons today. Someday I might tell you about seeing Bette doing "Clams on the Half-Shell" on B'way back in the early 80's. Maybe. If you're lucky.

No, today I'm going to talk about my friend, Bob. Bob works in IT someplace. It would be a disservice to Bob to say anything more about that, or about Bob at all, really, except to say that Bob is a true-blue friend. Bob's the kind of friend you'd come out of a blackout and find sitting beside you, both handcuffed to the bench in the police station. The kind of friend who'd look at you and say, "DAMN! THAT WAS FUN!!!!"

The kind of friend who'd happily drag himself out of bed at 3 in the morning to help you bury a body. No questions asked.

As I've whined about before, I've been living in a computerless wilderness at home for the past few weeks. My PC, such as it is, sits under the computer stand, lifeless and drab amongst the various piles of cables, many of them unused but God only knows they might come in handy some day so why bother picking them up now and finding God only knows what underneath of them!

But the noose is closing and action must be taken. The Feds (and New York and New Jersey) are fully expecting me to file my tax returns soon. And I can't do that as long as I have a dead PC in my living room. Something MUST be done. I found a solution (I think) on the internet. It involves ordering another drive (a 500Gigabyte beauty), buying something called "Partition Magic" and trying to find something with which I could boot the machine so I can "see" both an NTFS drive AND a FAT 32 drive. That's so I can copy my old files off my old, dying drive onto my zippy new one.

I scoured the internet for days (at work whenever I had a moment) and the common solution seemed to be in products I never heard of, such as DR-DOS 7.3 and other things like that.

And then it struck me! My friend Bob works in IT. I'll bet HE knows where I can get a boot disk. So I sent him an e-mail and quietly prayed.

And hour or so later I got his reply. He has exactly what I need and will happily lend me a copy of it to get me through my current woes.

I am SAVED, once again, by friendship. In this case, by my friendship with Bob.

There was a time in my life when I, if I'd been diagnosed with brain cancer, would've felt compelled to learn how to perform do-it-yourself surgery by next Thursday in order to have fixed the problem myself.

I thought, as one does when growing up in an alcoholic family, that everything had to be figured out for myself because I did not dare ask for help or, in any other way, "disturb" the undisturbable, suffering souls at home. I did not know that it was "okay" to ask for help. That that's what Earth-Children did. And Earth-Adults, too.

I found this out in recovery.

Every day I find myself becoming more and more like my life's dream. Every day I keep getting closer and closer to being...

human.