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Dirty and Fried

It’s been an eventful week and I am close to fried. But before I collapse, I have many hours of travel ahead. As daunting as that may seem, I’m feeling a strange sort of satisfaction this morning.

Rough as this has been, I accomplished a lot. I got four articles out of the conferences I attended — one extra than planned, thanks to the Secret Service.

I got to spend time with our cousins, who are always a blast, and Erin and I even got a date night on Solomon’s Island at the tip of Southern Maryland. Tuesday night, I drove into Virginia and had dinner at the home of Ann and Bob Ball. Ann is a dear friend of mine from the days of North Shore Community College in the early 1990s, and I’ve found a new political debate buddy in Bob. Too bad he’s not on Facebook. Their kids call me “Mr. Bill.”

But I’m ready to be home and back to the normal routine. I’ve pushed myself to the limit this week, and I’m finding it difficult to keep a lid on my addictive instincts. I’ve pulled it off so far, with plenty of help from others. Ann, for example, made me a perfectly abstinent salad the night I visited.

But there has also been a lot of meals in restaurants. I’ve made the best choices possible for my program, but restaurant food is still restaurant food, and I’m feeling the slight bloat of what I call dirty recovery. The motor is feeling gummed up, and it has clouded my head a bit.

It really hit me last night. While on our date, Erin and I visited a liquor store to buy a couple bottles of wine as gifts for people. As I walked around I found myself staring obsessively at the bottles of gin and whiskey. I started to want some.

I haven’t mentioned this much before, but this time last year I was really leaning on alcohol as a crutch to help me keep the food plan intact. It sounds stupid, because drinking inevitably leads to binge eating for me, but for some reason it helped calm me down enough to avoid the food at the heart of my most self-destructive addiction.

In fact, as late as December, I was swilling wine even as I wrote “The Most Uncool Addiction” post at the beginning of this blog.

I was starting to drink hard stuff, too. There were bottles of gin and brandy in the kitchen cabinet Erin used for cooking. One day, I decided to start drinking both. I was also drinking a lot of wine on a daily basis.

A couple weeks into that, I saw what was happening and decided that sobriety had to be part of my abstinence from binge eating. I was feeling dishonest about calling myself abstinent while drinking alcohol.

I’ve had my challenges since giving it up in late December. Free booze flows like a tsunami at the security conferences I go to, and I actually found myself feeling awkward without a glass of wine in my hand. But I pulled it off by keeping that hand busy with glasses of club soda and cans of Red Bull. Red Bull feeds another addiction, but as I’ve said before, people like me play addiction like a piano. When you put a lid on the addiction that’s most self-destructive in your life, a few smaller addictions bubble to the surface.

That’s the daily challenge for someone like me. But despite feeling like my food plan wasn’t as clean as it could have been, I have not binged. I haven’t touched alcohol, either.

That’s a victory.

But I still have some cleaning up to do.

Which is why it’ll be good to get home.

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Anatomy of a Near-Binge

A few weeks ago I described a day in the life of a compulsive binge eater. Here’s the sequel. Even in recovery, the demon is constantly breathing down your neck. But you don’t have to let him win.

Mood music: “Starve” by the Henry Rollins Band:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLvsnkQtZLI&hl=en_US&fs=1]

4 a.m.: Wake up in a hotel room, grab some coffee and start typing away on the computer. Congratulate yourself for nearly two years of abstinence from binge eating and eight months of sobriety.

6:15 a.m.: Stop working — which is hard to do because you have OCD and don’t like to stop working — and call the sponsor. Tell her your plan of eating for the day and make sure to ask how she’s doing. That can be tricky, because when you’re an addict it’s all about you.

6:30 a.m.: Eat your abstinent breakfast

7:30 a.m.: Talk with the guy you sponsor. Control your temper as the call goes five minutes beyond its alloted time, thus knocking the day’s schedule off course.

7:45-8:15 a.m.: Take a quick shower, shave the head and get dressed. Get your ass down to the conference you traveled 14 hours to get to.

8:15-9 a.m.: Walk past the breakfast food they put out at these conferences, because to you it’s all poison. Have more coffee.

9 a.m.-noon: Take notes during various talks, then start your writing. Write as many stories as you can even though you only have to write one. get it posted and remember to send it out on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

The day has been pretty good so far. You’re doing what you love, and you are keeping the abstinence and sobriety together.

2 p.m.: You realize you didn’t eat lunch. This is fucking bad if you’re a recovering food-binging addict. The danger that you’ll say “screw it” and sacrifice lunch altogether in favor of a giant dinner is high. Doing it that way will almost certainly break your abstinence.

2:05 p.m.: Find a salad, thus keeping the abstinence intact.

2:30 p.m.: Write another story from the conference and get over the fact that you’re not networking as much as you’d like because your OCD is making you produce.

3:45ish: Fatigue sets in. So does the urge to drink some wine. After all, you’re not at home and nobody’s going to know. And hell, your main addiction is binge eating and drinking wine isn’t binge eating.

4:30 p.m.: After wrestling with this one in your head for 45 minutes, you remember that you gave up alcohol because getting drunk leads to binge eating. But if you binge just this once, you could always keep it to yourself. Addicts are excellent liars.

You head to the place where snacks are sold. You stare in and suddenly turn and walk the other way. Sure, you can lie, but the guilt will eat you alive. And besides, you worked too hard to get clean.

5 p.m.: You remember that while OCD drives a lot of your writing, you also do it because you love it. So you go do some blogging and you feel better.

6:30 p.m.: After an abstinent dinner — another salad — you call the wife and kids and get caught up on their day.

6:50 p.m.: Go outside and have a cigar. That too is an addiction and you indulge more on the road than when you’re on the normal routine. But avoiding the food and alcohol must be the priorities for now, so you allow yourself the tobacco. In your heart, though, you know the cigars will have to go — sooner or later.

7-10 p.m.: You meet up with associates from your industry over drinks and food. You’ve eaten already and you don’t drink, so you order coffee and, later, club soda.

11 p.m.: You collapse into your hotel bed, thanking God for another clean day.

The demon is always seconds away from ripping your day out from under you.

But not today.

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High Drama: The New Normal

I’ve had a couple of high-drama days, as readers have figured out by now. The 14-hour drive across six states. The grilling by Secret Service cops in Washington D.C. I’m hoping for a lot less drama. But that may not be easy. Drama clings to my type of personality like a sweaty shirt.

Mood music: “You’re Crazy” by Guns N Roses:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM2KI0Fs-fI&hl=en_US&fs=1]

Here’s the thing: When you have a mental condition — OCD, in my case — and addictions as a byproduct of the former, it’s almost impossible not to turn the most mundane of situations into drama.

The TV station TNT thinks it knows drama and the commercials for its programming says so. But that’s just Hollywood drama. I know real drama.

The incidents of the last two days probably qualify as real drama in the dictionary. It’s not every day you have two Secret Service cops in your face, after all. But the fact that I was almost happy for the encounter because it gave me fresh material to write about? That, my friends, is drama. Maybe not in the perfect sense of the definition, but hear me out…

When a person has been through mental illness and addiction, situations small as well as large seem big and dramatic.

When your head isn’t screwed on straight, losing your keys can become a big, dramatic situation. Gearing up for a performance review at work can become a big, hairy situation. If you have OCD, the need to constantly check your laptop bag to make sure the computer is really in there is an intense situation.

Most commonly, the difficult relations in just about any family or circle of friends becomes a big, scary, daily drama.

I’m in recovery and I still see situations in my life as a drama. The financial pickle we were in last month, for example, felt like a major crisis.

I try to look at other people who have it a lot tougher than I do. One of my sponsees has Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and spent the better half of the 1980s getting the tar beaten out of her by abusive boyfriends. Naturally, drugs and alcohol — and later food — became her source of comfort. She’s in recovery now, but because of where she’s been, little things still become huge dramas. If she finds a bag of chips and wants to eat them, it’s a big deal for her.

I’ve learned something about all this. Everyone has drama in their lives, no matter how “normal” they are. If you’re buying a house, there is inevitably conflict along the way. If you have kids, there’s drama aplenty — yours and theirs.

Sean and Duncan have their drama every day. If a piece breaks off one of Sean’s elaborate Lego sets, it becomes an intense situation for him. When Duncan feels the person he’s talking to isn’t listening, same thing.

I guess the point of this post is that we all have drama, so maybe, instead of going on about how you can’t handle this person or that person’s drama, you should take a breath. After all, by telling us you can’t handle their drama, you in turn are shoving your drama on us.

Of course, everybody loves a good drama, even when they say they don’t. Me included. So maybe you should just have at it.

By the way, I used the word drama approximately 23 times in this post.

If that’s not high drama (make that 24 times), I don’t know what is.

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A New Jersey State of Rage

It’s been one of those days: Six states in 14 hours. The plan was to do it in nine. Then I took a wrong turn in New Jersey.  It was the second anger management test I had in a week. I guess I passed. But for a few hours I seriously considered diving off the wagon head first.

Mood music: 

http://youtu.be/2spuprrj4Pg

The drive was going well enough. We made it to New Jersey in record time, then hopped on the turnpike. The plan was to take the turnpike to I-95 South into Delaware and points further south. Somewhere we missed the turn. Before we knew it we were almost in Atlantic City, a good two-plus hours off course from where we were supposed to be.

It took us nearly four hours to find our way out of the mess we had gotten ourselves into. A couple of nice people in a CVS helped me plot the course back to Maryland. It worked, but we hit bumper-to-bumper traffic the whole way across. We finally rolled into Lusby, Maryland, some two hours south of Washington DC, around 7 p.m., having left Haverhill at 5 a.m. in an attempt to make good time.

So here I am typing this at 9:24 p.m. I have to leave here at 4 a.m. to get to DC and I should be crashed out. I don’t want to bitch about a long day of travel because I don’t really like it when other people bitch about such things. In that respect, I can be a jerk. But it’s better if I get these thoughts out of my head.

It’s worth noting a few things about today:

–I didn’t go into the full-on road rage as I would have a decade ago. I flipped off no one. I didn’t punch the steering wheel in anger.

–I do admit that I was in a pretty dark mood for the rest of the trip. I scowled. I didn’t say much. I felt angry.

–Most importantly, in the flash of angry emotion, I considered breaking my abstinence and my sobriety. I seriously considered it. I didn’t admit as much, but the thoughts were there. I was simply at the breaking point.

It would have been awful had I carried out the angry instinct, given all the work I’ve put into my 12-Step program. I thank God that I didn’t.

But it’s a scary reminder that I’m never far from a relapse. I have to work my program hard — definitely harder than I have of late. I’ve kept it together, but I’ve been getting sloppy. That can’t possibly be good.

And since I’m on the road all week, the danger level is high for me.

So I was tested big-time today, and I expect to be tested some more as I work two security conferences on a schedule that is more ragged than my normal schedule.

One thing occurred to me as we sat in traffic somewhere on the Atlantic City Expressway: With my Prozac dosage up by 20 milligrams since Aug. 1 in an attempt to head off the depressions I usually experience in December, I’ve been waiting for the wild mood swings that hit me as the chemicals balance themselves out. The emotional zigzag I experienced last time the dosage was upped was epic.

Today, lost in New Jersey, I think the mood swings I’ve been waiting for hit me hard. In fact, with my brain cells scrambled, I’m pretty sure I missed that turn because my head was in too many other strange places to comprehend the road before me.

If this is what happened, the rest of this trip will be much better, because I will have turned the corner.

We’ll see tomorrow.

I’m happy to say the day ended well. We arrived at the home of our cousins, the Deans, and they did everything they could to make the tired Brenner clan feel better. The Deans are quite a family, the kind of family everyone should try to be like.

When you have such beautiful friends and family around you, the effects of a bad day can never last.

Now I’m going to crash and hope for a better Monday.

Good night.

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God and Metal

Those who read this blog know two things by now: I’m a devout Catholic, and I have a passion for Metal music. Both have played a central role in my recovery from OCD and addiction. But the spiritual part has been getting the shaft lately.

I’ve been leaning hard on the metal lately. Earlier I spent two hours burning the most searing music in my iTunes library onto discs for tomorrow’s 12-hour trip south. I’m especially into The Runaways and The Stooges of late. They are not metal in the conventional sense, but those bands had a huge impact on many of my favorite bands today.

I’m especially hooked on this Runaways song:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI3RneGO_ks&hl=en_US&fs=1]

And this Stooges song:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDNzQ3CXspU&hl=en_US&fs=1]

Back to God. I’ve been giving him the shaft of late. I haven’t given up on him and he NEVER gives up on me. But my sinning streak continues, and my mind wanders during Mass more than it should these days.

There are reasons for my preoccupations. I’ve been ramping up several writing projects for the work I do in the security industry. Money has been tight and we’ve spent a lot of time putting the finances back in order. Thankfully, we’re getting there. And there’s the ongoing pressures of holding onto my abstinence from binge eating and sobriety from alcohol.

But those aren’t good excuses.

Sometimes I forget that my life would be nowhere without God. Only when I let Him in my life did the pieces start falling into place. It’s time I refocused on paying The Man more respect.

Some folks have noted that I’m serving God by sponsoring people in my 12-Step Program. True. But it’s not nearly enough.

This fall I’m going to pursue a 12-Step “Big Book” study because I’m ready for the next step of my recovery. That will force me to put more trust in my “Higher Power.”

I’m also going to help out with this fall’s R.C.I.A (Right of Christian Initiation for Adults) class at the church. That’s where I’ll be spending my Tuesday nights for nine months.

Good thing, too.

I need the refresher course.

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Saturday Morning Sanity Check

Didn’t get up until 6 a.m., which for me is sleeping in. Kids came in the room, dragged me out of bed and down the stairs to the living room.

Poured myself into the chair and used the kids as a blanket. It got cold overnight. They make good blankets.

Got out of the chair after an hour and grabbed a Red Bull. Now I’m listening to this while blogging:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irskrVvKR1E&hl=en_US&fs=1]

Gotta pack for the drive to DC tomorrow. Gotta go feed the in-laws’ cats.

All in all, life is just as it should be.

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How the Recluse Became a Road Rat

Since my OCD and anxiety used to make me deathly afraid of travel, it’s kind of weird that I do so much of it now without giving it much thought.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A47HVhzF6No&hl=en_US&fs=1]

This time, me, the wife and kids are driving down to the D.C. area. Not a White House tour like we had a couple months ago, but good times all the same. The family will stay with relatives in southern Maryland for a couple days while I drive on to DC to work two security conferences: Metricon 5 and one of my faves, the USENIX Security Symposium. After I’m done writing all there is to write down there for CSO Magazine, I’ll retrieve the family in Maryland and head home.

I still take my precautions, of course. I’ve enlisted people to look after the house while we’re away so someone will be here. I write about security. I can’t help but think of these things.

But the fact that I’m making this drive twice in one year really flies in the face of how it used to be, when I felt complete terror if I took a wrong turn and got lost in a city other than my own. Even getting lost in Boston would freak me out.

This week I’ve been driving all over Boston, taking side roads in the city to avoid traffic hell on I-93 as I traveled to and from Haverhill for SANS Boston 2010. It hasn’t bothered me one bit.

I used to have a fear of flying, too. Not any more. I get on planes all the time now. In fact, I start to get a little crazy if I go too long without leaving Massachusetts for a few days. It’s always for work, but I ALWAYS make sure I build in some time to experience the city I’m in.

Frankly, it would be easier to fly to and from DC on my own. But I treasure these long drives with the family as well, so it’s all good. I’ll be fried by the end of next week, but it’ll be worth it. And as a bonus, I’ll have several security articles to show for it.

This makes me happy. And it makes me feel weird.

These are just more examples of how I now crave most of the things I used to fear most.

I don’t have to over-analyze it. I just thank God and make the most of the gifts he gave me.

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The Pedophile, Part 2

A childhood-friend-turned-convicted-pedophile was kicked off Facebook a few days ago, much to my relief. But his case makes it uncomfortably clear just how dangerous social networking can be in the hands of an addict — including me.

Mood music: 

Before I go further, here’s the original blog post I wrote about this guy about a week ago. That’ll give you all the background you need for what follows.

After talking to him on the phone, I had a decision to make: Unfriend him on Facebook or stay connected to keep an eye on him? I chose the latter.

Sure enough, despite what he told me about cleaning up his act, he was “friending” scores of teenage girls from such far-flung places as Indonesia and Thailand. I was able to follow the conversation threads he was having with these girls:

“You’re pretty.”

“Can you IM (instant message) me?”

And so on.

My friend, Kevin Littlefield, started to quietly notify our Facebook friends. I alerted the authorities that they should keep an eye on him and reported the activity to Facebook. Since then, I’ve learned that several other friends were on to him and alerted Facebook as well. One of us got through, because by the start of this week, he was gone from Facebook.

It’s been sobering to watch this guy. I consider myself very lucky that my addiction was binge eating and, to a lesser extent, alcohol.

At least with those addictions, you have a fighting chance to redeem yourself and fit into society. For someone addicted to sex — especially pedophilia — you’re all done once you’ve been caught and convicted. You have to register as a sex offender and tell all your neighbors.

That’s as it should be.

It’s one thing to have an addiction in which you slowly destroy yourself. It’s quite another to prey on another human being and damage them for life because your addiction makes you do something to them instead of yourself.

He doesn’t belong in society. Pure and simple. We all have a chance to redeem ourselves to God, but justice means the punishment for some crimes has to be permanent for as long as you remain on this Earth.

That old friend of mine is getting exactly what he deserves.

That doesn’t mean I feel good about it all. As an addict, I know how powerful things like Facebook can be. I’m not on there trying to pick up women. But I do find myself on there for long periods of time, simply curious about how other people’s lives are going. You can find a page for everything — favorite bands, favorite topics like history and politics, in my case. It’s very easy for me to put the blinders on and just stare at it for an unhealthy amount of time. I’m working on that one.

I’m not a special case here.

But in the spirit of this blog it is noteworthy.

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A Lesson in Anger Management

As I’ve told readers before, I used to have a vicious anger streak. A big trigger used to be getting stuck in traffic. So I was surprised by my reaction yesterday when a sinkhole on I-93 North turned a 45-minute ride into a nearly 3-hour ordeal.

I left the SANS Boston conference at 1:30 p.m., planning to finish up some work projects from home for the rest of the afternoon. I hit the traffic jam and heard about the sinkhole on the radio. It was at Roosevelt Circle and the two right lanes were shut down.

Photo by Jim Davis, Boston Globe

Let’s rewind to about 21 years ago. It was registration day at North Shore Community College, where I was enrolled for the fall semester. I was just out of high school and angry at the world for a variety of reasons. I had been working long hours in my father’s warehouse in Saugus and was rubbed raw. I was frustrated because a girl I liked was getting cold feet about the idea of hooking up with a loose cannon like me. It didn’t take much to trigger a temper tantrum.

That day I was rattled hard by the long lines of college registration. I wasn’t expecting it and was full of fear that I wouldn’t get the classes I needed. Not that it really mattered, since my major was liberal arts.

Two hours in, I realized I had to give them a check for the courses I was taking. I had no money and panicked. They allowed me to drive to Saugus to get a check from my father. I was in full road rage mode on the drive there and back.

By day’s end, I was in supernova mode and breathing into a bag between the chain of cigarettes I was smoking.

There are many more colorful examples of my temper back then:

– Hurling a fork or steak knife at my brother in a restaurant on New Years Eve 1979 because he made a joke I didn’t like. The more dramatic among my family members say it was a steak knife, though I’m pretty sure it was a fork.

– Lighting things on fire out of anger, including a collection of Star Wars action figures that would probably be worth a fortune today. I would pretend they were kids in school who were bullying me. Never mind that I bullied as much as I got bullied.

–Throwing rocks through windows, especially the condominium building that was built behind my house in the late 1980s.

–Yelling “mood swing!” before throwing things around the room at parties in my basement. It came off as comical, as I intended, and nobody got hurt. But there was definitely an underlying anger to it. I was acting out.

– Road rage. Tons of it. I was a very angry driver. I would tailgate. I would speed. In the winters I would intentionally spin out my putrid-green 1983 Ford LTD station wagon in parking lots during snowstorms. While in college, I nearly hit another car and flipped off the other driver while my future in-laws sat in the back. Traffic jams would infuriate me. Getting lost would fill me with fear and, in turn, more anger.

There were a lot of legitimate causes of rage for me. The drug I took for Chron’s Disease had a lot of nasty side effects, including violent mood swings. A brother and two close friends dying — one by suicide — gave me a lot of anger. Being stuck in the middle of turf wars and working late nights while at The Eagle-Tribune certainly made me a a walking ball of fire.

I’m also sure the fear and anxiety that came with my OCD contributed to more anger.

So it was an absolute blessing for me that after three hours in traffic, my sanity was in check. Not once did I punch the steering wheel in anger or flip off someone in the car next to me or in front of me.

I don’t even think I dropped an F-bomb. I don’t remember doing so, anyway.

I got home, went upstairs and was just happy to see the kids. I emptied the dishwasher, folded some laundry and set the table for dinner. I was in OCD mode for sure. But sometimes it’s best to just let the OCD run hot. It always passes.

Just another example of how I’m not the same person I used to be.

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AA vs. OA: 12-Step Dysfunction

The folks you find in Overeater’s Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous often mix well. But when they don’t, well…

Mood music: “Dead End Justice” by The Runaways:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8jhAzSZYfg&hl=en_US&fs=1]

I’ve noticed lately that there are more folks coming into OA that have also been in AA. Some of them have been sober for more than two decades. Now they need OA because in the process of putting down the booze, they developed a food addiction.

I know how it is. I’ve gone in reverse. I stopped the compulsive binge eating and at first started to use wine as a crutch. When I realized how much I was starting to need a drink every day, I stopped that, too. But I still like my cigars and can’t exist without caffeine. The cigars will have to go at some point. I know it in my heart. But not today. Caffeine I won’t be giving up anytime soon.

Anyway, I’m mixing with the AA crowd a lot more these days, perhaps because one of my sponsees has been in AA for decades. We have the big things in common. We developed addictions that made our lives unmanageable. Having found recovery, we latch onto each other pretty tight.

But something’s different.

In OA, there’s a tight fellowship in meetings and on the telephone. But the AA crowd really sticks together. It’s more like a gang. Recovering addicts often live together, several in a house. Not a halfway house. They just live together, watching out for each other.

It’s cool to see. But I’ve also found that there are some real animosities among the AA crowd. One of my sponsees, an OA drop-out for now, spent a lot of time telling me about how I shouldn’t trust this person or that person because one likes to tell lies and the other likes to steal money. The lying part didn’t shock me. All addicts lie. wine_bottle_face.jpg

There seems to be an extra level of paranoia that comes with being a recovering drug addict and alcoholic. I understand. Those addictions tend to go hand in hand with getting arrested and spending time in jail.

If anyone has ever gotten arrested for getting junked up on food, I’d love to meet them.

I don’t write this stuff down to complain, or to act high minded. There’s plenty of dysfunction to be found in OA as well. If we weren’t dysfunctional, we wouldn’t need a 12-Step program in the first place. There are control issues and grating personalities aplenty.

But the AA crowd? There’s more of an edge.

I’m not complaining. I learn a lot from them.

There’s a lot of love to be found among the AA crowd. Those who have recovered are among the strongest people I know.

So to hell with it. I’m going to accept it — just as other people have accepted my own brand of dysfunction.

I’m going to start doing a 12-Step Big Book study soon, so I’m going to be spending a lot more time with these people.

I’d better get used to it.