A disciplined return

I found this in my inbox recently...a clear image of how connected I am, and how ripples in my life are detected by others...

~~~

Can't sleep. Up browsing.
It seems you haven't posted on the ragamuffin blog for a l.o.n.g. time.
Are you okay?
Are you blogging elsewhere?
Are you done blogging?

Perhaps none of it is any of my business.
I miss your words. your thoughts. you.
Still pondering deeply and praying for understanding.
Saying a prayer for you also tonight.

Love from Kansas.
Deb
~~~

Thank you for the wake-up call, Deb...and Michael...and others.

Yes, I am okay, overall - though it has been a bit of a roller-coaster. No, I am not blogging elsewhere. I did allow myself to get sucked into the catch-up-with-the-world-of-the-past of Facebook, for a bit, and I allowed myself to get wrapped up in the stuff of life for a bit. I have also been somewhat annoyed by technological issues - my 2002 PC has been dying a slow death, and I'd been trying to nurse it along. But all these things are just contributing factors.

Am I done blogging? That has been the big question that I think I've been avoiding over the last two or three months. I confess that there have been a number of "what's it all about, Alfie?" moments scattered over the last four or even six months. I wondered if I really had anything to share, anything new or worthwhile.

I found, in some introspection, that I had once again succumbed to an old, old character defect - being concerned about what other people thought, rather than just voicing my belief or conviction. That concern for the opinion of others, combined with my natural conflict-averse personality, made it more comfortable for me to simply withdraw.

I found, however, that my failure to write, even about the most mundane thing, hasn't necessarily freed me from anything, but seemed to have left me in some kind of spiritual sloth - not wanting to do much of anything. It hasn't helped, to be honest.

So I am going to work toward posting more regularly - catching up on some of the events of life over the last three months or so. And I'm making an effort to be more "present" in the community of friends.

There are more than a few topics to consider...

- Six months in a strange new land
- It's not perfect, but it's home - joining a church
- Hitting the "hide" button on Facebook
- If the phone ain't ringin', I know who it is
- Going back to roots of faith
- Is it worth arguing?
- Running from "the faithful"

And for those who sent the "where have you been" messages (and especially to Debby, whose message I quoted at the beginning), thank you.

Restart/renew/reboot...

Starting over, nearly five years in...

It's been 65 days since I went into St Luke's Hospital in Toledo, complaining of chest pains. In that 50 days, a lot has happened, and blogging has simply been pushed near the back of the pack, so to speak. So now, as the holiday weekend ends and a new week begins, it's time to catch up, and reboot my blog.

A scant 38 days ago, Chris got the phone call he'd come to believe wouldn't come - a call from his dream employer with an offer for his dream job: doing product support for the second-biggest remote-control hobby distributor in the country, in Champaign, IL . The call came April 3rd, as we were leaving the Weak Signals RC trade show in Toledo - it turns out one of the biggest RC product gatherings in the country happens in Toledo the first week in April every year (and I never, ever knew that - even after living in Toledo for 30 years - until I met Chris).

His phone rang, he looked at the caller ID, and just registered this "NOW what?" look. As I watched his face, I could tell - like he'd been throwing himself against a door for a year, and when he turned his back on it, it swung open all by itself. The challenge, of course, was the timing: it was after the first of the month, our landlord required 30 days notice - and the New Job wanted him there by the 27th.

Twenty one days later, on April 24th, the 26-foot Penske truck, the Camry and the F-150 were loaded to the gills and we were on our way. A couple of retired AA friends were driving the Penske truck, so we could make the trip once. We had a late start - it is a moving truism that "90% of the stuff takes 90% of the time - and the last 10% of the stuff ALSO takes 90% of the time. " And we tossed some stuff that was marginal, that we ended up replacing when we got here - just because there was simply no more room anywhere to put it.

Six hour later, we landed in Champaign-Urbana, and checked into the motel for the night (the water wouldn't be on in the duplex until the following morning!...). We had a great meal together, and then my AA buddies and I went to my first meeting in "the new world." The next morning, we sent them home in a one-way rental car, and we started the task of unpacking and settling-in to our new world.

We've had 4 weeks here. The boxes are either put away or neatly organized in garage storage. Pictures are on the wall, Chris' workshop is in perfect order, and I am trying to keep my office chaos to a minimum in my new world. It looks, and feels, like home. One of Chris' employment benefits is cheap membership for himself and one other at The Fitness Center in Champaign - so he's become "a regular" and I'm working on getting to be a "periodic." And the insanity has come way, way down.

And we've found a church home - which will be a post in itself. Suffice it to say that McKinley Presbyterian seems, at first blush, to be everything we could hope: a friendly, welcoming and accepting "More Light" congregation.

We spent the Memorial Day weekend in Chicago - Chris flew his float-plane off the water for the first time, and I showed him around some of Chicago (you can't do much in one day, obviously). That trip will be yet another post.

Whatever happens - with my health, with my job, with the two of us - it seems we are in the best place for it. My prayer is that this will be a time of restoration and renewal for both of us. So far, it seems to be just that.

Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly

Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.

Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us - sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them.

(just a few of the promises from the text Alcoholics Anonymous, page 84)

If you were outside Wednesday evening about 5 PM Eastern time (4 PM Central) and you heard a great sucking sound followed by a loud pop!, I can tell you all about it. I know what that sound was.

It was the sound of loving hands helping me to pull my head out of my ass about my employment situation.

For more than three months, I and my co-workers have been led through a seemingly unending series of crises at The Evil Empire. The carrot at the end of the stick that led me to put in more than 300 hours of unpaid overtime in the last quarter of the year (leading up to my hospitalization January 5th) was the promise that the Empire would "make it up to us," with some kind of financial compensation. What each of us heard was variations on this line: "I know that it's been difficult, and I know you've been putting in impossible hours - but we'll work to make it up to you in the new year."

And then, the second week of January, the person who had provided this assurance was abruptly slid out of managing our team, and those promises were deferred. Then they were rejected by our former manager's boss. The expectation that we would continue to breathe life into the ongoing processes through working late into the night every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday didn't go away. Just the promise of any kind of compensation or flex-time-off for it. Our position was getting a wee bit ambiguous, to say the least.

So I sent the obligatory "here's what we've done for you lately" memo, and suggested that if we were going to be expected to keep doing this, we needed a different compensation model.

Silence from the camp of the princes and knights. Growing annoyance in the camp of the squires.

So I sent a second copy of the email - with a read-receipt attached, this time. A swift response to this one - basically saying, "Hey, I've been busy. But you should know that these positions are salaried, exempt positions. That's what you signed up for. And exempt positions are not eligible for overtime or bonuses. Oh, and by the way, you guys shouldn't have to be doing all this stuff anyway - don't know what you were thinking when you agreed to do it. I'll call you later and we'll talk about it."

I re-read his email, and I thought, "Well, that is many things - but it is certainly not ambiguous."

I got angry. How dare they do this to me, after all I've done for them! Then I got a fleeting dose of reality. I put on my CSI:Miami glasses, and looked very carefully at all the evidence - all the timecard entries, all the software and all the files. And guess what? An objective examination showed that everything that had hurt me had my fingerprints on them. No weapons had been pointed, no poison threatened. No GSR anywhere. If I had any wounds out of this deal, they were entirely self-inflicted.

Selfishness - self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles. Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity, we step on the toes of our fellows and they retaliate. Sometimes they hurt us, seemingly without provocation, but we invariably find that at some time in the past we have made decisions based on self which later placed us in a position to be hurt.
So our troubles, we think, are basically of our own making. (ibid, p. 62)

It seems that my twisted logic went like this: if I were just selfless enough, willing enough, committed enough, and just fixed enough, saved them from the fire enough, then surely they would have no choice but to reward extraordinary effort with extraordinary rewards, eh?

/sigh/

(The sad part is, I am the one who keeps taking the institutional church to task for being stuck in the 1950's. But evidently my work ethic and motivation comes out of that same twisted history...I just think it should "work," in my case. Bleah.)

Well, after passing through anger, denial, and self-examination, the humiliation led me to just a wee dose of humility, and a massive dose of depression. I got vastly demotivated to do much of anything.

And the combination of all those things led to that great sucking sound, and that pop, I referred to earlier.

And I surrendered.



So today, at work, I didn't kill myself responding to anyone today. And by the time dinner-time came in northwest Ohio, I was logging off from whatever passes as "virtual reality" at my employer. No "hey, I'm leaving," no explanation. Just "Take me off the grill; I'm done." Watched a little CSI:Miami with my brother in law. Went to the Thursday night men's meeting, and told them of my uncomfortable revelations. Came home, had dinner with the family, and here I am.

I am still grateful for my job, to be sure. I am still employed, I still got paid this week, and I still have benefits. (There are 13,000 Chrysler workers who would gladly swap with me, today. ) The vast majority of my co-workers think that what I do has value, even if my managment does not. It didn't take another trip to St. Luke's Hospital to get here, this time. I'm still sunny-side-up, suckin' air and sober. This lesson didn't cost as much as others I have learned from....I am still a very, very, very blessed man, still very much in the bonus round.

So, later on today, it's back to the exercise routine. And I'll suit up, show up, and give 'em a full day - but no more, and let the chips fall where they may. There is a God, and They are not it.

When we sincerely took such a position, all sorts of remarkable things followed. We had a new Employer. Being all powerful, He provided what we needed, if we kept close to Him and performed His work well. Established on such a footing we became less and less interested in ourselves, our little plans and designs. More and more we became interested in seeing what we could contribute to life. As we felt new power flow in, as we enjoyed peace of mind, as we discovered we could face life successfully, as we became conscious of His presence, we began to lose our fear of today, tomorrow or the hereafter. We were reborn.

May it be, even unto me, God. Amen.

Starting over again, looking for more light

Here's an interesting coincidence. January 11, 2007 marks 21 days since December 21st - the winter solstice. Twenty-one days since the year's shortest day and longest night - the time of the least light and the most darkness of the winter.

In the olden days, on the solstice I understand there were huge bonfires to bring light into a darkened world. It's from these supposedly heathen celebrations that we have the traditions of lights on Christmas trees - illumination to a darkened world, reminiscent of a Star shining on another dark night, bringing the Light of the world.

It would be nice to celebrate the coming of more light, wouldn't it?

I'd really like to take that high road of philosophical imagery today, but I can't.

For me, Thursday is simply the fourth day that I have been out of the hospital.
.....

Anyone who has been reading these posts over the last year know that the single most significant focus of my life for the last fourteen months has been a sadly codependent, addictive relationship with my employer. It has been a battle to do the impossible - to take a series of systems that don't play well together and an undertrained but desperately committed staff and somehow make them work for a deeply-unhappy client. The intention was always that "when things get better, when things get stable, the work schedule will ease back." But we "went live" on New Years' Day 2006, and twelve months later the situation is not in the least improved. In fact, it is in many respects worse.

And I've been an idiot - somewhere between a John Candy imitation of the Man of Steel and a badly-drawn Dudley Do-Right, trying desperately to save the day, to make things right, to "get it all together" somehow so that life would be good. Through increasingly manual intervention, I (and others) have tried and tried and tried to defeat the shortcomings of systems we barely understood. And the more we tried, the more we (especially I) failed. Once again, I have learned the painful lesson that the blue tights and the red cape still don't fit, and almost certainly never will. In fact, they never did fit. It was all a lie.

Over the last four weeks, the hours have gotten (if one could believe it) even more insane - aided and abetted by the fact that since my move to Ohio and my work-at-home situation, I don't even have to walk to the train anymore. My "commute" is now about 8 feet - from the bed to the desk in my spacious bedroom/den/office. Over the last three months, physical human interaction (e.g., non-instant-messaging relationships), exercise, even eating dinner with my sister and brother-in-law, all fell off significantly. And when I finally did take time for myself - for sleep, for recovery meetings, for fixing and eating meals (or, eventually, eating the meals that my disabled sister fixed for me) - it always felt like there was too much left to do to get up and walk away from the desk, from the crisis at hand, from the heart of the battle.

All that changed Friday, January 5th. For about two weeks, I'd been having some uncomfortable spasms in my chest when I finally did get to go to sleep. Being overweight, hypertense, diabetic and nearly 50, I was getting a wee bit nervous about what those spasms might mean.

So I went to the doctor on Friday, in the midst of the latest end-of-year and start-of-new-year battles at The Evil Empire, to get it checked out. I figured it would be as it had been in the past - new medicine, new/fresh warnings about my lifestyle, and that would be that... that is, "until things got stable" and I could actually find some leisure time to take some action.

Then the doctor said the words no one wants to hear: "I don't like the looks of this - I can't be 100% sure, but I'd say you really need to be in the hospital to get this checked out."

I said, "But..."

...and the doc gave me a look that spoke volumes, and said, "Today. As in, right now. As in, 'Do you need someone to drive you? Or should we call you an ambulance?' "

So I called my brother-in-law, and I went.

When I got there, my blood pressure was at stroke level, my blood sugar was in the stratosphere, my heart was racing like I'd just run a 50-yard dash, and I was damning all the time that I spent working and NOT either praying or getting my will and durable power of attorney updated. All the things that were so critical two hours earlier - other people's lives and information - seemed to shrink to insignificance as I confronted the admissions form saying, "Indicate your next of kin."

Those five words will get your attention.

So will having a nurse start an intravenous line in your arm.

I have to admit it - I made a great drunk at times, but I would have been a dismal failure as an IV drug user. I simply hate needles. Yes, I get the occasional vaccination; yes, I submit to the periodic blood-test, and don't even whimper much (though I do sing Hosannas to whoever invented those marvelous vacu-tainer things that mean you can get stuck once, and get many vials of blood removed. Thank you God, for those things).

But getting even a short-term hospital IV line set? I'd rather have a gasoline enema. I'd rather be stretched on a rack, or to attempt suicide by hitting myself in the head with a baseball bat. I loathe them - period. My preference would be that if I have to have an IV, I would have them start it, then immediately fill it up with thorazine or pentothal or something to knock me smooth out. The long-term goal would then be to wake me up five minutes after the IV was successfully removed. I don't hate many things, but I hate IV's.

I even tried, pitifully, to hold off getting it started. After all, I just GOT here, for cryin' out loud. Do we have to do this now, of all things?

The nurse looked at me, pointed to my chart and said, "Honey, with readings like those, I may need to get medicine into you quickly. And if I do, you just don't want me fumbling, trying to find a vein. If you're sick enough to be in a hospital, you're sick enough to need an IV line in."

And she pointed again to the listing of my vital signs, and said, "And I'm sorry, honey, but you do qualify to be here. Really."

At least she was sensitive about it, and was successful the first time she tried. The semi-sadistic triage nurse who first encountered me slapped the heart-monitor (EKG) connecting pads on my somewhat-hairy chest without benefit of shaving the spots first. So everytime I moved, one or more of the connector pads would be pulling chest-hair - and trust me, that is a serenity-killer, every single time.

After all the tests and the imaging and this and that, it ended up a 50/50 deal. I was not as bad as my doctor feared - but I am worse off than I imagined. And all those "someday" lifestyle changes? Eating less, doing some exercise every day, watching the vital-signs more, working less?

They started yesterday.

For two days after I left the hospital, I had a 24-hour heart-monitor. Now, I have a heart-rate monitor (like runners use), a new glucometer and an auto-inflating blood-pressure meter. If the heart-rate gets too high, or the BP gets too elevated, it's no longer a "white flag" situation - it's an "international-orange" flag. And I have started the daily stroll to the condo clubhouse, to the exercise bike and the treadmill - starting slowly, but starting. And the work situation? Well, I had a doctor's release for three days off - and my boss extended the offer to just take the week off. And I took him up on it.

I haven't signed back on to see what's waiting for me on Monday. I have no doubt the demands of the addicts will start as soon as I turn the silly thing on.

But I have my hospital arm-band taped to the side of my work PC's monitor - as a reminder.

And my left arm is still well-bruised from where the IV was, and there are still a dozen round bare spots on my chest where the pads were. (They itch, too.)

I've had the three-and-a-half days in the hospital, and four more days at home, to reflect on just what has been happening over this last year. The spiritual, emotional, mental and financial excuses for the insanity of which I've been a part. And the lessons - in all of those categories - that I've ignored to get to this point.

In the communities of recovery, what we call 'hitting bottom' is the process of realizing that you can put down the shovel - you don't have to dig the hole you're in any deeper. As a friend "in the rooms" is wont to say, "If you'll just put the shovel down, and look up, you'll see where you need to go - at least you'll see daylight, for a change!"

It's sad, too - both from a spiritual and a recovery standpoint - how easy it has been to set up worship of false gods - to violate the spirit of the 1st Commandment: "You shall have no other gods before me." How many times have I heard the lesson - where your treasure (in my case, my time) is, there your heart will be. What a sad, sad waste.

But, if I am willing to trust that each day is indeed a new begininng, and that everything that does not kills us makes us stronger, then today is Christmas Day all over again. I have the gift of life, of love, of (relative) health, and hope. Yes, I'm stuck with a heart monitor, for a while - but I still have a working heart for it to monitor, as well. I have spent a long time walking a long way from God over the last year, it's true - but I also know that this God is one whose Son told the story of both the prodigal son and the prodigiously welcoming Father.

So today I am celebrating the light, rather than cursing darkness. I'm trying my best to make wiser choices, even as I acknowledge my seemingly innate ability to live and work stupidly.

Monday will bring a fresh set of challenges to this rediscovered faith - but, just for today, all is not "well" - but it's OK.

And that's enough.