Suebob's Red Stapler

Someone I knew drank herself to death recently. She did it with a determined sprint toward the finish line. It wasn’t pretty. When you kill your internal organs with alcohol, it turns out that all kinds of terrible things can happen to you, and for her, one of the symptoms was her skin dissolving and not growing back. Horrible.

When she was sober, or even moderately not drunk, she was the life of the party, a raconteur, a bon vivant, a real pistol. She had a husband and kids, but none of it was enough to keep her alive.

Meanwhile, another of my beautiful friends has quit drinking and is struggling. She, too, is determined, but in a better way. Still, alcohol provided a structure for a big chunk of her life, and now she’s left looking at the space where that was like a building collapse happened. Big chunks of cement, dangling wires, and a loss of familiar territory. I’m rooting for her and praying for her because she deserves a big, grand, sober life. I know when the detritus is cleared away, she’ll have space for beauty and strength and love to grow.

And me? It has been almost a year since I quit drinking. I’m not sure of the exact date, but Mom 2.0 was May 2-4 last year and for some weird reason, I wanted to be able to tell Schmutzie that I had been sober for a month when I saw her, so I assume it was the beginning of April.

What I do know is that on April 21 last year, I wrote a post about quitting drinking, mostly as a ploy to keep myself from starting again. I figured spilling the beans would help me stay quit because then I’d have people to answer to if I started again.

I’m trying to figure out what to say about it. I wish I had had more big Life Revelations, but I’m not a really big revelation kind of person.

I do feel better, and proud of myself. I know I’m healthier. I never have to take tums before I go to bed to prevent a red wine stomach acid attack. I sleep better and feel better when I wake up.

Mostly, I’m happy to be on the consciousness team, people who have chosen to face up to everything clear-eyed and sober. I know I’m on touchy territory, because I don’t want to insult other people’s life choices which were also my life choices for more than 3 decades, though I took it much further than most people. Not everyone who has a glass of wine with dinner is slicing off big chunks of their consciousness the way I was.

I’m just happy for my fellow travelers, people I care about and admire so much. Hanging out in sobriety with my people – Jim, Elan, Laurie, Karen, Alexis, Heather, Marius, Ellie, Lisa…and everyone else – lets me know I’m on the right track, because I want to be more like them and less of who I was before I quit.

Do I still want a nice glass of pinot noir? Hell yes, I do. Just not today. Not today.

“How is it?”
“Dude, so gnarly. It’s going OFF!”
“Yeah?”
“Yah, way!”
“Way?”
“Totally. Like 15 to 20 feet, perfect shape.”
“You going out?”
“Me, nah, I’m crazy but not that crazy.”

Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai

Broken heart leaf.

Look, Jack, I don’t know who you are (and I’m sure your name isn’t even Jack, but it feels good to spit those hard consonants out of my mouth), but I want you to give me a call in 20 years. Or 30.

Just give me a call when the regret really sets in. When you know there’s no one like my friend.

When you have found another woman, one who feels right at the moment but who won’t go the extra mile for you. One who doesn’t think of you as her best friend in the world.

Run around, look, try to find another love like this out there in the world. It’s a big world, but I don’t think you’ll find it. You had your One. She was there, her heart in your hands, constant, for all those years.

She was willing to wait as you pursued your dreams. She was proud of you. She was ready for you to come back, victorious, and was ready to walk beside you every day of your life.

But you threw true love away. I would pity you, but I’m far too angry. So call me in 20 or 30 years. I’ll probably have worked up some pity for you by then, and by then, I’m sure you’ll need it.

I heard a story on the radio the other day about the uselessness of performance reviews. It quoted someone who said the only people who want to hear negatives about themselves are people who are already dedicated to excellence.

In Toastmasters, we give generally positive evaluations of speeches. Every speech has an assigned evaluator, who spends several minutes going over what they liked about the speech and adding a few suggestions for improvement. We try very hard to be positive because we know how hard it is to get up and speak in public.

One night I did not do that. My dear friend Bruce, who is a longtime Toastmaster, got up to speak. He was unprepared and admitted as much, veering off in several different directions, even saying he was trying to decide what to talk about as he spoke.

I was his evaluator. Had he been a newer Toastmaster, I would have been kinder. But I felt like he had the experience to know better and do better, and my criticism was the harshest I had ever given or hope to give.

The audience was visibly shocked. They sat back in their chairs, rustling uncomfortably. When I got done, the applause was sparse indeed.

Later, CC took me to task. We ended up yelling at each other in the car, with her saying I shouldn’t have done what I did, and with me defending my actions. We never came to a resolution.

That was several years ago, and it wasn’t until recently that Bruce brought that evaluation up again. He told me that he felt I had given him one of the best evaluations he had ever had. I was relieved because I had felt all along that Bruce understood what I was trying to do, which was to shake him up and get him back on track.

I trusted that he was dedicated to excellence, and I’m glad he confirmed my beliefs.

When I was younger, I was horrible at receiving criticism. I automatically rejected it, angrily thinking that people were trying to hurt me. It wasn’t until I started writing for the newspaper and was under the supervision of a tough but very fair editor that I realized that he was trying to give me a valuable education.

“If I want to get better at this, I have to put my ego aside,” I thought. I had to lock my screaming teenage ego in a closet and take a clear-eyed look at my work every day, helped along by the team of editors and copy editors. They were never shy about offering criticism, and for that, I am glad.

Now I crave feedback. I gave a presentation on Thursday and dragged someone out into the hallway afterward, wanting to hear exactly what she thought.

I’m sure my screaming teenage ego is still out there somewhere, because I can hear her off in the distance. It’s just that I don’t care what she’s yelling about anymore. I have work to do.

My parents and I went to Zion National Park when I was about 15. Zion is all the things a national park should be – natural and spectacular in its own particular way. Giant red rock formations glow in the afternoon sun, interspersed with waterfalls and creeks big and small.

On our way home, we stopped in Las Vegas. It seemed almost laughable after Zion. All this human effort with unlimited amounts of money – and you create THIS? Is that the best you can do? Compared to Zion, even the electric excess of Vegas seemed puny.

I got the same feeling when I watched this video on these augmented reality glasses, which, I guess, are just a concept at this time.

Winning at billiards, impressing a young barmaid with your knowledge of her astrological sign (really? REALLY? Is this 1977?), riding a lonely fake bike race – that’s what you can do for me?

It makes me long for an afternoon at Downton Abbey. Tea in the garden. Sit in the shade of a parasol. Listen to the Duchess make catty remarks. Eat a cucumber sandwich. Then maybe a nap. Plenty of time. No flashing objects on my screen.

My imagination will have to augment my reality for me.

I cut back on caffeine today. I normally only drink 3 cups of coffee per day.

24 oz. cups.

So.

I just drank a cup and a half in the morning (drinking from a smaller cup, too). It was kind of a surprise how nice it was, not to feel like this:

Lisa Bonchek Adams is one of ours and she’s under attack from some of the biggest media outlets in the world because of it.

The 37-year-old mother of three is going through cancer, and she is blogging and tweeting about it. She’s tweeting a lot – up to 200 times a day. Not just about cancer, but about life, her life, as she shares ideas and news and information.

First, Emma Keller wrote an opinion piece in the Guardian wondering about Adams’ sharing so much.

Will our memories be the ones she wants? What is the appeal of watching someone trying to stay alive? Is this the new way of death? You can put a “no visitors sign” on the door of your hospital room, but you welcome the world into your orbit and describe every last Fentanyl patch. Would we, the readers, be more dignified if we turned away? Or is this part of the human experience?

Emma Keller’s piece asks questions rather than giving Keller’s opinion of Adams’ writing, but the implication seems clear to me – “Why so much truth?”

Then, remarkably, several days later, Emma Keller’s husband Bill took to the pages of the New York times to tell Lisa, in so many words, to shut up and die.

In October 2012 I wrote about my father-in-law’s death from cancer in a British hospital. There, more routinely than in the United States, patients are offered the option of being unplugged from everything except pain killers and allowed to slip peacefully from life. His death seemed to me a humane and honorable alternative to the frantic medical trench warfare that often makes an expensive misery of death in America.

Not content to merely discuss the merits of ending cancer treatment versus treating it aggressively (while ignoring that a 37-year-old mother may have different motivations than an elderly man), Bill Keller throws mud on Adams and her relationship with the treating hospital, even tossing in a little sneer about therapy dogs in the process:

The first thing I would say is that her decision to treat her terminal disease as a military campaign has worked for her. Her relationship with the hospital provides her with intensive, premium medical care, including not just constant maintenance and aggressive treatment but such Sloan-Kettering amenities as the Caring Canines program, in which patients get a playful cuddle with visiting dogs. (Neither Adams nor Sloan-Kettering would tell me what all this costs or whether it is covered by insurance.)

I don’t have a lot to say. I think you can read the two opinion pieces and see how disgusting they are for yourself. I just wanted to record a few words of support for Lisa, because she is one of us, and by “one of us,” I mean more than just being a blogger.

There are many types of bloggers, but only a small percentage are truth-tellers, people who are on the journey not to sell and not to self-promote, but to tell the truth, the honest and beautiful and painful truth, about life as it is, not as how they wish it would be.

There are always those who hate the truth. Any truth-teller who has been at it for long has heard the criticism, often posed in the form of a question: Why are you doing this? Who do you think you are? Why are you so special? Don’t you know that others have it worse than you do? Shouldn’t you be doing something better with your time? Why don’t you give it up?

Lisa is one of ours. She tells the kind of story that is hard to hear and easy to turn away from. That’s ok, though. She’s not telling it for those who can’t stand it. She’s telling it for those who need it, one of whom is her.

Rock on, Lisa. Rock on.

I once had a tiger cat named Antonio. He was a special cat in many ways.

One of those ways is that he did not speak. Antonio made his presence known, certainly, but as far as I knew, he could not meow.

He would often open his mouth as if he were going to speak, but no, only silence emerged.

I had had Antonio several years before I got a catnip plant. Antonio, as cats tend to do, enjoyed the catnip. He and my other cat enjoyed the plant to death – they knocked it from the shelf on the front porch and ate it down to nubs.

When I opened the front door the next morning, I spied a broken pot, a pile of dirt and roots, and two tired, marble-eyed cats.

I let several years go by before I got another catnip plant. After giving the cats a few sprigs, I put the plant in a spot where they absolutely could not reach it.

Antonio walked over beneath the plant, sat down, looked at me, and said, in a very clear and distinct voice, “Meow.”

Lesson: When you want something bad enough, you’ll find the voice to ask for it.