Audio (MP3): 20170323 - Looking for a road to walk

One of my absolute favorite lines in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous is the last pertinent idea of How It Works (PDF):

God could and would if he were sought.

We only have to seek god, that is all.

Half the time I don’t feel in touch with anything but I’m looking for a road to walk, searching for spiritual footing. I’m questing, out to slay demogorgons and smell the flowers.

When I first got sober I had to climb out of that damn hole I’d dug and unfortunately when I got out there was a huge hill before me. And then it was all uphill from there. The good news though is that the incline isn’t as steep the higher we climb, the farther we go.

No matter what I’m going through, the pain, the anxiety, the fear, the emotional puke — they all gradually relax their grips the more I keep walking through whatever fire has been lit.^[1] Then one day I realize that my feets are no longer smoking and only mildly warm, just a smolder.

It feels chaotic at times because the pain seems to come in lightning bolts that I was never expecting.^[2] I’ve always felt blindsided by them. What the fuck was that? And then it can take months or even years to recover from those bolts. It’d be nice if pain went away as fast as it seems to come but it doesn’t.

So what I do is pray for miracles because God could and would if sought. God just does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. Lightning bolts can come out of the blue but so do miracles.

As an example: we’d moved to Oregon state in late 2000 right before the tech bubble publicly burst in 2001. It was impossible for me to find work and financial times were lean and then dire. In 2004 I hadn’t worked full time in I don’t know how long. I’d applied for jobs of all shapes and sizes, had my resume on all the online job boards, blah, blah.

I mean, you have applied to everything on wheels from Toyota to Schwinn. You’re gonna get a job any day now.
– Caroline Butler, Mr. Mom

And then one day I’m watching Mexican Wrestling in broad daylight and I get a phone call^[3] from a recruiter looking to fill a contract spot at Microsoft. Again, what the fuck was that? I couldn’t believe it. Why the hell would someone call me of all people to go hammer on a keyboard at Microsoft?

I worked there for a year as a contractor and then full-time until late 2006, met some of the best people I’ve ever known. My world was all of a sudden bigger inside and out. It was one of those eras in life that I still treasure when I look back.

My point is that one phone call from Vinny changed everything, changed everything from there on out. For the better. It’s like when you’re walking down a street in a shady neighborhood and then turn right and all of a sudden you’re in the safest, hippest part of town.

Even though I was drinking at the time I knew that telephone ring was all God’s grace. It wasn’t anything I’d done, wasn’t anything I’d surely deserved.

It’s easy to loose sight of hope when the times are dark but expect miracles, peeps. They’re coming soon to a theater near you — just be open to receiving them and then embrace them when they come.

And please don’t think I’ve transcended up to any spiritual, moral higher ground. Some days I get sucked into playing video games for hours because I don’t wanna climb no damn hills. Or I’ll watch Mexican wrestling because it makes me feel good and distracts me from responsibilities and real life.

 It’s risky but I do it because I don’t have any real consequences.


So with all that said, my actions seem to influence how I feel much more than the other way around.

If I act like an asshole then I feel like one. If I act like a good person then I feel like one, too.

I just try to be the best me that I can in any given moment. And then I seek god’s will. That’s all.

Last thing: just look for God and worry about the finding later.

#alcoholism #advancedsoul #lettherebehope #diariespodcast

1. Generally I lit the fire ↑

2. Generally because I’ve got my head stuck in the sand ↑

3. I never answer the phone so the mere fact that I did is a miracle in itself ↑

KONG !!! 🦍 I loved it. I would’ve closed the helicopter windows before flying into the storm, though.

#movies #kingkong

#photos #cats #napsarespiritual

👋🌶 #photos #peppers

Why do I have so many clocks? And why can’t they all be self-correcting??

#daylightsavings

I swear…when I’m trying to get somewhere, nobody in the world knows how to speed. Everybody wants to go the speed limit or below. 🙄

#trafficnews

Peeps, here’s your hot-blooded-like-a-harlequin Friday afternoon jam.

I absolutely loves these guys.

#musicvideos #galantis

Net neutrality hurts health care and helps porn, Republican senator claims

“Chairman Pai, I would encourage you and the commission to revisit that order and to rescind it in its entirety,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said during an FCC oversight hearing held by the Senate Commerce Committee yesterday. “I believe you would have the support of a majority of this committee and substantial support in Congress.”

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) agreed that net neutrality rules harm ISP investment and offered a lengthy analogy to explain why.

Johnson said he wants to cut through the “rhetoric, slogans, and buzzwords,” before saying that enforcing net neutrality rules is like letting too many people use a bridge and ruin people’s lawns. Net neutrality rules, he said, also give pornography the same level of network access as remote medical services.

If you’re not sure what Net Neutrality is or why it’s important, this will help.

Spoiler: it’s not hurting health care or helping porn.

#netneutrality

House GOP would let employers demand workers’ genetic test results

A little-noticed bill moving through Congress would allow companies to require employees to undergo genetic testing or risk paying a penalty of thousands of dollars, and would let employers see that genetic and other health information.

Giving employers such power is now prohibited by legislation including the 2008 genetic privacy and nondiscrimination law known as GINA. The new bill gets around that landmark law by stating explicitly that GINA and other protections do not apply when genetic tests are part of a “workplace wellness” program.

The bill, HR 1313, was approved by a House committee on Wednesday, with all 22 Republicans supporting it and all 17 Democrats opposed. It has been overshadowed by the debate over the House GOP proposal to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, but the genetic testing bill is expected to be folded into a second ACA-related measure containing a grab-bag of provisions that do not affect federal spending, as the main bill does.

LOVE IT. Genetics are all fun and games until your boss finds out your momma was a leper.

Elsewhere:

New bill would let companies force workers to get genetic tests, share results

Despite the heavy financial pressure, employee participation is still considered voluntary. Under HR 1313, GINA wouldn’t apply to anything voluntarily collected through wellness programs, and companies would have access to genetic data. That information would be stripped of identifiers, but in small companies, it could be fairly easy to match certain genetic profiles to specific employees.

Moreover, employers tend to hire third parties to collect and manage health data. These companies are not heavily regulated and can review genetic and other health data with identifiers. Some of the companies even sell health information to advertisers, STAT notes.

Read the HR 1313 bill on congress.gov →

#politics #healthnews #worknews

Peeps, here’s your I’m-winking-at-you Friday jam.

I heard this driving to work a few minutes ago and the “got new skank, it’s so reet” line always makes me wonder what Chrissie Hynde meant by that.

Regardless, Chrissie Hynde’s the best.

#musicvideos #thepretenders