Getting What You Want

I’m grateful for a visit from my son. I’m grateful for staying up late talking and getting to make him breakfast. I’m grateful for the life he’s building and grateful that it includes me. I’m grateful for coffee on the pirate balcony and a new view of the world. I’m grateful to be sober today.

song of the week;

I feel like every week I put a song in the spot above and then say things like it’s my favorite song and such. So, this is really one of my favorite songs—like of all time. I began listening to this in high school and like I listened a lot. It is super long, like songs sometimes were back then, but I love the way it builds, the series of images it paints. I like how the level keeps building, the guitars, drums and organs come in around 2 minutes, and then around 4:20 the choir comes in, just tones in C and F—it creates so much texture. I literally get goosebumps when I hear that—it’s almost an involuntary response. I had to take a break from this song when it appeared in a really horrible 90’s movie, played improbably and impromptu by an attendee at a yuppie funeral.¹

Music releases really strong emotions in me—those chords alone can also literally bring me to the verge of tears. There is no associated visualization, I think we all vibrate in different keys and it looks like that C-F combination could be mine.² I’ve always kind of been blown away by the idea that we aren’t really all that solid, that we consist of zillions of particles insanely vibrating away. One of my favorite spots in the world is the gallery at the Musee D’ Orsay that features the works of the pontilists—they followed impressionism and had a lot of the same gauzy colors, but the shapes are populated with tons of little dots. “A Sunday at La Grande,” at the Chicago Art Institute is a more well-known example.

All of this makes me realize how much of life depends on all of those things vibrating just the right way at precisely the right time. It also reminds me of the incredible number of variations and possible combinations and permutations that could be and are created with all of those zillions of particles moving somewhat randomly and bumping into each other. Then you start introducing other people into the mix, and their zillions of particles, and life can’t really be more than just a crazy set of random events without meaning. That is also the underlying premise for the Infinite Monkey Theorem.³

But then all of the crazy shit happens, and I realize that the coincidences and synchronicities created by the massive number of potential combinations, by all of those particles bouncing around, that crazy mix of things, is what creates our “reality.” For me, thinking about the world this way really drives home the point that control over all of this random chaos is simply not possible, an illusion at best. I can see how my decades of trying to re-arrange the atoms, just so, was always doomed to failure, how the frustration and resentment of living that way drove my drinking. Just like the Big Book says, sobriety does require a death, a live sacrifice, and what must die on the altar is the alcoholic ego. The idea that we should, and can, control the world around us. That is more appropriately left to the Higher Power that we came to believe in.

We’re on the late side today because I received an impromptu visit from my very amazing and kind-hearted son—the one who is back from one combat deployment to the Red Sea and headed back again on an aircraft carrier soon. He’s driving to meet his girlfriend and asked if he could stop on the way and spend the night. The girlfriend may not know it yet, but he’s going to try to turn her into a fiancee this weekend.

We stayed up late eating Chinese food (very much our thing) coming up with crazy schemes for presenting the ring. We discussed putting the fortune from the cookie in the ring case, which would then be presented to her as a gag before the actual ring showed up. M kept suggesting that he could hide the ring in his cheek and in a somewhat rare display of good fatherly advice I advised strongly against that owing to the risk of swallowing the ring. No one wants waiting for the ring to show up to be their engagement story—even I know that.

I got to make him breakfast, we talked some more over coffee on the balcony and formally abandoned any idea of misdirection or semi-magic tricks in connection with the impending engagement. Was it it lovely? Yes. Was it super meaningful? Yes. Is it maybe connected to the nearness of tears when I hear those chords this morning? Probably. It is also for sure a gift of the Program of Alcoholics Anonymous.

My drinking career was all about not getting what I wanted. My sobriety has been about finding that willingness, and maybe the suspension of disbelief, can lead to getting exactly what I need. My late night post-doctoral studies on quantum physics, Stoic philosophy and Jungian psychology (I’m attending YouTube University) have led me to this conclusion:

My thoughts and beliefs are part of what creates my reality.

I used to walk through a world that I thought had been created separately, ran separately. I thought I was just here to observe and report, silently processing the world around me. I was always frustrated with that world, it never seemed to work the way I wanted it to. My timing was always off, things never seemed to happen when they were supposed to. The things that I wanted the most in the world always seemed just out of reach, tantalizingly close, but never to be mine.⁴

This generated anger and maybe even rage. Why did the universe insist on f***ing with me? I felt like Charlie Brown never getting to kick that football. I’m guessing Charlie Brown probably drank, too and raged against the Universe for the abundant disrespect it continued to show him. Why couldn’t that b***** Lucy do the right thing for once?⁵

I’m not going to say something like, my sobriety is a product of accepting that I was just not meant to ever kick the football. I’m going to say my sobriety was a function of learning to focus on the right things— the things I could change. Most of the fruitless decade I spent actively trying to get sober was also a decade of me desperately trying to find a relationship, or save a relationship (this was more often the case). My first trip to sleep-away rehab was the direct consequence of an ultimatum. Well, she actually broke up with me and said she would consider talking to me again if I went to rehab.

So, I went to rehab and spent every day talking about her and how unfair all of this was. How she just wasn’t seeing things the right way. Of course, my 28-days of venting /rehab bought me about 90 minutes of sobriety when I was released on that Saturday morning. Perhaps I was focused on the wrong thing.

One of my YouTube professors said something in the middle of the night that really hit me,

Fear is not love.

I realized in that instant, all of those years spent clinging to relationships, trying to continue to breathe life into something that kept dying, kept me from focusing on the right things, from seeing things the right way. All of those years were really about fear. The fear of being alone, the fear of missing my spot in life, the fear of not having external validation, the fear of missing out, the fear of losing the lifestyle, the fear of who they’ll date next.

None of that is love.

I lead a pretty quiet, solitary life these days. I wonder if I shouldn’t feel lonelier sometimes, but just like those first nights in the sober house nearly five years ago, I find myself unable to produce anxious, catastrophic thoughts anymore. I feel content and happy. I sit on the Pirate Balcony and feel peace coursing through my veins—the same ones that used to pulse with anxious, doomsday is coming thoughts.

When I sit on the Pirate Balcony and let my mind wander, it doesn’t fix on things I don’t have or lost. My mind doesn’t dwell on regret as the soft spring breeze blows over me, I realize I have what I need. I sit in my quiet corner of the world and watch it spin so beautifully. The garden is getting planted and things are already coming up. The mini-Italian strawberry plants have already flowered. How is it that these things can produce peace and tranquility? My life used to be roiled by conflict and constant efforts to retrieve what I’d lost, trying to make sure I got what I was entitled to, what everyone else had. That earned me a semi-permanent spot on a barstool and a raft of misery for all involved.

The force runs strong here these days. If you want another illustration, when the young Lieutenant arrived last evening we were going to park his vehicle in a parking garage on 88th Street, but it wouldn’t fit. Of course, we then found a spot on the street directly across from my building. Yes, that kind of karma.

I walk with purpose, Universe-inspired swagger these days. I don’t know what’s up, but I can feel things changing, aligning, coming together in a very mysterious way. I don’t know where this path leads. I just know that every time I listen to these words, my entire body vibrates along:

you can’t always get what you want, 
but if you try sometimes, 
you just might find, 
you just might find, 
you get what you need.

Happy Friday.

1. I’m not going to say the name, because then I’ll remember it.

2. For some reason, I always thought it was maybe G-major. Mozart wrote Symphony 40 in G, but my favorite is no. 41 in C.

3. I’ve written of this before and unless you look it up yourself, I don’t think you’ll remember.

4. You’ll also need to look up the Myth of Tantalus for yourself.

5. I’m doing an alcoholic voice now—hope that didn’t offend you.