Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two
Sunday, April 23rd 2017 (The Links Market)
It's the London Marathon this morning. The top guys will be running this in just over two hours, which is pretty fucked up, as we have fourteen hours to cover twice this distance in six weeks or so. Yesterday I managed my sixteen miles no problems. I actually improved my speed quite a bit which was really what I've been aiming for. Normally I'm walking an average of just under four miles an hour but it's important to me that I increase this average and yesterday's walk saw me travelling at four point one four miles per hour over the course of the seventeen point one miles I walked.
I can see why humans decided to move from Africa into Europe and America all those years ago. There's no doubt that part of their reasoning for this was greed but it's also pretty clear that much of their reasoning was nothing but boredom. Even on my little walks I have become bored with the limitations I've placed on myself through route choice. This weekend I move off a little further in another direction in a bid to find different scenery. I've managed to find the entrance to a coastal walk I wasn't aware existed. I didn't have time or distance to try it out yesterday but I'll be heading straight to it when I get moving again later on this afternoon. The only problem I have with coastal walks is that the are not covered on the apps or online resources I use and so I won't know the distance I've travelled. I can't even go by the time because the coastal routes are always a little slower than the four miles per hour I've been putting in recently. Where there's a will there's a way.
I'll be turning thirty nine on Wednesday this coming week. The Twenty Sixth. I used to like birthdays (a wee bit anyway) but recently they have been something to fear. Too much time wasted has made me feel as though I wish I could go back to tell myself before taking that first alcoholic drink to not bother. Not gonna happen though. There is something that could come out of this latest birthday of mine though. I might get to see my mum. It's been a while. I saw her on Boxing Day when we had dinner at hers and then I saw her ever-so briefly at Oldest Niece's birthday back in early February. Not a cheep since though. I won't hold my breath but it'd be nice.
I was talking about that at the ACA meeting yesterday actually. I was thinking on my walk at how chronic loss and abandonment has affected my life and how things might have been had I not sobered up and tried to work through these issues of mine. It's not all bad though I was also thinking about what I've been left with in my life now that I am approaching forty. My working history is one of the things that stand out. It's appalling. I don't have much of a working history outside of cleaning windows. All of these career people, those who called themselves ''functional drunks'' – it's difficult to communicate to these guys just how different it is and was for some of us. We often drank until we passed out at really unpredictable times of day and night. Often we'd wake up and go again, not stopping until that little spell was over. Then we returned to what we might call functional alcoholism briefly and we could almost have a normal life for a bit, maybe even clean up the house, and then we'd go back to passing out at unpredictable times. All of this with a reduced capacity for living life and with a mind that is more child-like than it is healthy adult. It would take a super human to have managed to create and continue with a career while having an addiction.
Sandra (woman who runs the ACA meeting) approaches me at the end of the meeting and discusses my debts with me. She asks what the point is in me trying to pay them off over the next twenty or thirty years like I seem to want to. She explains about how this pertains to the Twelve Step fellowship's Step Nine amends and says that going bankrupt, but she called it something else, her having a background in law and all that, could be considered making an amend with myself. I wonder about this as we're not supposed to be too concerned with ourselves during this Step. We did enough of that while we were sick and this Step was all about repairing relationships with other people. She asks me if I want to have this reminder of my sickness for the next twenty to thirty years it would take to clear some of my larger debts. Of course I don't, but I have to be careful not to take the easy way out if it will come back and bite me further down the line. She asks me to think about it and give her a shout if I decide to go ahead with it. She'll help me fill out the forms. We'll see. I'll have to have a little think about what Step Nine actually means to me at the moment.
But to go back to that point about my mum. I think the situation with her shows how child-like my thinking still is regarding abandonment and such like. She spends time with my brother as I can see on Lindsay's Facebook and the nieces were on some Easter egg hunt at their gran's the other weekend. I wonder if this is anything to do with it. Does she spend more time with my brother because he has children? I have children too but they have been out of the picture now for over eleven years. Then I realise that I am doing what little children do. I'm being very egocentric. What have I done to mum to make her so disinterested in being near her eldest son? That's a very child-like way of viewing it. She doesn't have an interest – deal with it!! Who really cares what her reasons for this might be!? It's not my concern. I've done my best in trying to build bridges and communicate with her since we had our Step Nine talks at the start of the summer last year. Perhaps it would be best if I spoke with Dr. Bacon about possible ways of accepting that I don't have any parents. My mother is effectively out of my life. She always has been really....
So Lindsay and I were at the Links Market last night. We had waited until the evening to try to catch a little more of the festival atmosphere that the night offers. My brother and nieces had been earlier in the day and had said that it was really busy but I was actually surprised by how few people were there. Hundreds of people for sure, but we didn't have to wait in long queues to get onto the rides we fancied. I notice that Lindsay mentions the past quite a lot. Every now and then she'll tell me a little about how she used to do this and that with her mum and son. She did it over Christmas, she did it in Edinburgh, she's been doing it while we've been looking through online holiday brochures. This market was yet another place that they used to visit every year. With her losing her mum (and best friend by the sounds of it) to death (alcoholism and smoking while in her fifties) a couple of years ago and her subsequent drinking binges causing her to lose the right to have her son live with her there's little doubt that she's going to think about this stuff. I think she might have even been looking out for her boy with one eye while we were cruising around the streets. It was good fun though.
Of course there is going to be a downfall to having something like this coming to town and the police are as busy as you might expect. The amount of underage drinking on show is alarming. Little girls looking around as young as perhaps fourteen (although it's hard to tell for sure these days since they're all waxing their faces with tons of that shit that makes them look orange and fake) puking all over the place and guys scrapping with other boys from different schools. Ten years from now and some of these young people will turn their lives around; others will do okay but act like this over the weekends way into their lives as adult children; but a large number of them will end up on the dole queue and spend their lives being looked after by the nanny state that is ''Great'' Britain, just like me. They don't bother us though so everything is fine.
I have to say though – I'm perhaps getting a little too old for all of that upside down carry on that goes with sitting on most of those fairground rides!!
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Stevie
Hanging upside down.
1559
Sunday, April 23rd 2017 (The Links Market)
It's the London Marathon this morning. The top guys will be running this in just over two hours, which is pretty fucked up, as we have fourteen hours to cover twice this distance in six weeks or so. Yesterday I managed my sixteen miles no problems. I actually improved my speed quite a bit which was really what I've been aiming for. Normally I'm walking an average of just under four miles an hour but it's important to me that I increase this average and yesterday's walk saw me travelling at four point one four miles per hour over the course of the seventeen point one miles I walked.
I can see why humans decided to move from Africa into Europe and America all those years ago. There's no doubt that part of their reasoning for this was greed but it's also pretty clear that much of their reasoning was nothing but boredom. Even on my little walks I have become bored with the limitations I've placed on myself through route choice. This weekend I move off a little further in another direction in a bid to find different scenery. I've managed to find the entrance to a coastal walk I wasn't aware existed. I didn't have time or distance to try it out yesterday but I'll be heading straight to it when I get moving again later on this afternoon. The only problem I have with coastal walks is that the are not covered on the apps or online resources I use and so I won't know the distance I've travelled. I can't even go by the time because the coastal routes are always a little slower than the four miles per hour I've been putting in recently. Where there's a will there's a way.
I'll be turning thirty nine on Wednesday this coming week. The Twenty Sixth. I used to like birthdays (a wee bit anyway) but recently they have been something to fear. Too much time wasted has made me feel as though I wish I could go back to tell myself before taking that first alcoholic drink to not bother. Not gonna happen though. There is something that could come out of this latest birthday of mine though. I might get to see my mum. It's been a while. I saw her on Boxing Day when we had dinner at hers and then I saw her ever-so briefly at Oldest Niece's birthday back in early February. Not a cheep since though. I won't hold my breath but it'd be nice.
I was talking about that at the ACA meeting yesterday actually. I was thinking on my walk at how chronic loss and abandonment has affected my life and how things might have been had I not sobered up and tried to work through these issues of mine. It's not all bad though I was also thinking about what I've been left with in my life now that I am approaching forty. My working history is one of the things that stand out. It's appalling. I don't have much of a working history outside of cleaning windows. All of these career people, those who called themselves ''functional drunks'' – it's difficult to communicate to these guys just how different it is and was for some of us. We often drank until we passed out at really unpredictable times of day and night. Often we'd wake up and go again, not stopping until that little spell was over. Then we returned to what we might call functional alcoholism briefly and we could almost have a normal life for a bit, maybe even clean up the house, and then we'd go back to passing out at unpredictable times. All of this with a reduced capacity for living life and with a mind that is more child-like than it is healthy adult. It would take a super human to have managed to create and continue with a career while having an addiction.
Sandra (woman who runs the ACA meeting) approaches me at the end of the meeting and discusses my debts with me. She asks what the point is in me trying to pay them off over the next twenty or thirty years like I seem to want to. She explains about how this pertains to the Twelve Step fellowship's Step Nine amends and says that going bankrupt, but she called it something else, her having a background in law and all that, could be considered making an amend with myself. I wonder about this as we're not supposed to be too concerned with ourselves during this Step. We did enough of that while we were sick and this Step was all about repairing relationships with other people. She asks me if I want to have this reminder of my sickness for the next twenty to thirty years it would take to clear some of my larger debts. Of course I don't, but I have to be careful not to take the easy way out if it will come back and bite me further down the line. She asks me to think about it and give her a shout if I decide to go ahead with it. She'll help me fill out the forms. We'll see. I'll have to have a little think about what Step Nine actually means to me at the moment.
But to go back to that point about my mum. I think the situation with her shows how child-like my thinking still is regarding abandonment and such like. She spends time with my brother as I can see on Lindsay's Facebook and the nieces were on some Easter egg hunt at their gran's the other weekend. I wonder if this is anything to do with it. Does she spend more time with my brother because he has children? I have children too but they have been out of the picture now for over eleven years. Then I realise that I am doing what little children do. I'm being very egocentric. What have I done to mum to make her so disinterested in being near her eldest son? That's a very child-like way of viewing it. She doesn't have an interest – deal with it!! Who really cares what her reasons for this might be!? It's not my concern. I've done my best in trying to build bridges and communicate with her since we had our Step Nine talks at the start of the summer last year. Perhaps it would be best if I spoke with Dr. Bacon about possible ways of accepting that I don't have any parents. My mother is effectively out of my life. She always has been really....
So Lindsay and I were at the Links Market last night. We had waited until the evening to try to catch a little more of the festival atmosphere that the night offers. My brother and nieces had been earlier in the day and had said that it was really busy but I was actually surprised by how few people were there. Hundreds of people for sure, but we didn't have to wait in long queues to get onto the rides we fancied. I notice that Lindsay mentions the past quite a lot. Every now and then she'll tell me a little about how she used to do this and that with her mum and son. She did it over Christmas, she did it in Edinburgh, she's been doing it while we've been looking through online holiday brochures. This market was yet another place that they used to visit every year. With her losing her mum (and best friend by the sounds of it) to death (alcoholism and smoking while in her fifties) a couple of years ago and her subsequent drinking binges causing her to lose the right to have her son live with her there's little doubt that she's going to think about this stuff. I think she might have even been looking out for her boy with one eye while we were cruising around the streets. It was good fun though.
Of course there is going to be a downfall to having something like this coming to town and the police are as busy as you might expect. The amount of underage drinking on show is alarming. Little girls looking around as young as perhaps fourteen (although it's hard to tell for sure these days since they're all waxing their faces with tons of that shit that makes them look orange and fake) puking all over the place and guys scrapping with other boys from different schools. Ten years from now and some of these young people will turn their lives around; others will do okay but act like this over the weekends way into their lives as adult children; but a large number of them will end up on the dole queue and spend their lives being looked after by the nanny state that is ''Great'' Britain, just like me. They don't bother us though so everything is fine.
I have to say though – I'm perhaps getting a little too old for all of that upside down carry on that goes with sitting on most of those fairground rides!!
'
'
'
'
'
'
'
'
'
'
Stevie
Hanging upside down.
1559
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