However, the past few months have been so hideous that I've not been able to put it into words.
I have been thinking of trying to get back into regular posts (daily, even ... but we'll see how that goes), just to have something to look back on. Of course, there's that "you shouldn't post anything but happy smiling material" saw out there, and my existence has been anything but.
I don't want to get into the gory, ugly, details in this post, but there will be a couple that will be very hard to write.
Today's "feature" is that it's the 33rd anniversary of my stopping drinking. Most people see this as a good thing ... me, I'm not so sure. Back in the day, I'd drink until I couldn't feel anything ... and that emotionally dead state is something that I wish I still had.
Now, there was a day a couple of years back, when I was sitting in the McDonald's and North & Wells, and was pretty much a coin-flip between throwing myself in front of the train or getting to a meeting somewhere. Had I been at that decision point an hour or two earlier, I might have ended up going up to the Hari Krsna temple and getting some free Indian food out of the deal, but I figured that the Mustard Seed AA club was just down the road, and I ended up there.
When I quit drinking back in the summer of 1985, I did so in the context of the "chemical dependence" out-patient program down at Northwestern Hospital, and there was an AA meeting at the end of each week's program. Given that the rest of the program was very "scientific" (with "philosophical" over-tones), all I heard from the AA part was "GOD, GOD, GOD, GOD, GOD", and I wasn't going to have any of that crap. In the following decades I suspect that I attended less than a total of 10 meetings (including the six in the program), then, in the middle of July 2016, I found myself doing a "90 in 90" (90 meetings in 90 days), in which I am now up to (with a few missed days) about 715.
You would think that my anniversary would "mean more" to me now that I'm doing the program, but not so much. That's a third of a century in which, while not drinking, I pretty much only had two emotional settings: suicidal depression and genocidal rage. Not a fun way to live.
And, hey ... it doesn't get any more pleasant from here on.
Wish I'd killed myself this past new year's, like I was considering.
