Earlier this month when I was giving my recovery talk at the church in Montgomery, I was sitting at a long table facing everyone. Like I was a teacher at the front of the class or something. It was the first week of August and hot so they had fans blowing. I had to talk louder than normal and that wasn’t easy. I may yammer away on social media and on my blog but in groups of real people I’m not a fan of speaking up or standing out.
One of the things I mentioned when giving my “sermon” was that drinking never really made me feel like I was better than anybody else. That was something I was never after, being better than you. Drinking just brought me up to a level of “normal” that I thought the people around me had. The warm alcohol burn gave me a feeling of “okay” that it seemed like everybody else had. And I didn’t on my own.
I only fought with the police once and there was only one of them. And it was 3 in the afternoon. And I was drunk and feisty. And then he tackled my 19 year old self in an alley and one side of my face ended up in some gravel. And then I went to jail with a swollen eye. And got to spend the rest of the evening sobering up.
About 9pm or so and no longer drunk, I decided I would never fight with the police again.
tism posted a link on his FB timeline earlier today, that Marilyn Manson had collapsed last night on stage while in Houston. He was performing their cover of Sweet Dreams by the Eurythmics. This reminded me of a conversation that Sara and I had not long ago.
What are sweet dreams made of ?? What are “these” ??
Every time I hear that song I imagine Steven Tyler sneaking onto the set of The Fellowship of the Ring set. And then Liv Tyler shouting, “Dad, get you and your scarf-laden mic stand the fuck outta here!”
I’m working at home and have NPR in the background. They’re going on with the typical things that make our world headlines… Trump, sanctions, the EU, Russian hackers, Iran, blah blah blah.
I have a look at Google News to make sure nobody’s blown anybody else up since I last plugged into the Internet. I see that the animal crackers have finally been set free. Finally some news I can get excited about.
After more than a century behind bars, the beasts on boxes of animal crackers are roaming free.
Mondelez International, the parent company of Nabisco, has redesigned the packaging of its Barnum’s Animals crackers after relenting to pressure from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
PETA, which has been protesting the use of animals in circuses for more than 30 years, wrote a letter to Mondelez in the spring of 2016 calling for a redesign.
“Given the egregious cruelty inherent in circuses that use animals and the public’s swelling opposition to the exploitation of animals used for entertainment, we urge Nabisco to update its packaging in order to show animals who are free to roam in their natural habitats,” PETA said in its letter.
Writing a valid, functional, and strict MySQL regular expression for latitudes and longitudes is much harder than I thought it would be. Note that I said “MySQL” because they have their own regex engine apparently.
You can search for more or less anything if you have the right permissions on your login. Like, the property assessment guys can search by the names of homeowners. I can’t imagine what the database must look like. I mostly use it for air photos and land tenure (e.g. to see if an area is owned by the territorial government or by the municipality). It has some nice features; I always feel appreciative of the programmers when I use it. 😊
But once I got comfortable with the idea, and then started fully expecting it, when change did come along it wasn’t that bad. And in the here and now, most days I look forward to it.
How did you learn to understand yourself so well?
I learned how by communing with the ancient frogs who live on the slopes of Mt. Giluwe in New Guinea.
Seriously though, that’s what the recovery stuff is all about. 😊
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sveagrabarek · Aug 22, 2018 at 10:15 pm
Here’s to family.
You got a fresh one!
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