I’ve focused hard in this blog on blowing false notions to smithereens. One of those is the idea that compulsive binge eaters aren’t true addicts; that they’re just gluttons who lack discipline.
Addictive behavior comes in many forms: Food, drugs, booze, the Internet, porn, and usually a mix of one or more. The root cause is always a hole in our souls that sends us in search of comfort in the most self-destructive ways.
People always struggle to include food in there because it’s something we all need to survive. You don’t technically need drugs, booze or porn to survive. Addicts only think that they do.
Well, a column in The Washington Post tackles the issue head on. In “Is food addiction real?” author Jennifer LaRue Huget notes that “for all the fanfare surrounding food addiction, the condition isn’t fully embraced as legitimate in medical and psychological circles. Some argue that our complex relationship with food can’t be easily boiled down to an addiction, as so many factors are in play. Others maintain that allowing for “food addiction” ends up absolving people of the personal responsibility to manage their food consumption. And some experts say the science to support the notion of food addiction remains incomplete.”
But she goes on to write that “for some overweight people — including Michael Prager, author of the book “Fat Boy, Thin Man” — viewing one’s troubled relationship with food as an addiction is the first and necessary step toward improving that relationship. Prager, who once weighed 365 pounds and for the past 20 years has weighed 210, was reluctant to accept the idea that he was addicted to food, but once he did so, he found that treating his addiction as an addiction led to his finally shedding those extra pounds and keeping them off for the long term.”
She admits that she was among the skeptics who felt food addiction was a copout. After meeting Prager and reading his book, however, her opinion shifted.
“Being addicted to food doesn’t mean enjoying big quantities of delicious treats,” she writes. “It’s more like being a slave to food, adjusting your schedule and compromising relationships with other people to accommodate your cravings, needing more and more of certain foods to achieve the satisfaction you seek, and not even particularly enjoying the food you cram into your mouth. Those all sound like addictive behaviors to me.”
Amen, sister.
Thanks for articulating what I’ve been feeling for a long time.
I’ve noticed something interesting in the halls of recovery: Some folks cling to their program so tightly that their addictive behavior latches on to the program itself. In my opinion, this can get unhealthy.
To find recovery in Overeater’s Anonymous (mine is a binge-eating addiction), the only requirement is to want to stop eating compulsively. It’s very simple. There is no “OA diet.” But there are a few different food plans people choose from. One is based on a “Dignity of Choice” pamphlet that outlines a few different plans. Then there’s the so-called “Grey Sheet” plan (included among the options in “Dignity of Choice”) a lot of recovering food addicts cling to like a passage from The Bible.
For them (not everyone, but quite a few people), there IS NO OTHER WAY. If you’re not following the food plan outlined there, you are not abstinent.
There’s also the mindset that you HAVE TO ABSTAIN FROM FLOUR AND SUGAR and have nothing in between meals to be abstinent. Eat an apple in between lunch and dinner and you break your abstinence and have to start over.
To me, this is an extreme that causes a lot of people to fail. In fairness, some people need the most rigid plan available to be well because their mental state demands the most brutal discipline to stay clean.
I get and respect that.
What I don’t get or respect is when someone following that plan tells someone they’re not being abstinent if they’re doing their own plan differently.
But not everyone can do it that way. There are many reasons for someone to do it differently. If you have diabetes, for example, following my exact food plan could be bad, maybe even lethal.
I also feel that if an apple between meals keeps you from binge eating, that’s what you do. If the more extreme among us tell you you’re not abstinent if you do that, they’re wrong.
In my view, folks who get that way become addicts of a different sort. The compulsive behavior centers around the program itself.
Don’t get me wrong. If doing it that way is what you have to do to stay away from the binges that made your life unmanageable, more power to you. It’s certainly better than the type of addictive behavior you displayed before finding the program.
What makes me uncomfortable is when that person tries to force their way onto everyone in the room.
There are also sponsors who insist you do your program exactly as they do, with no differences whatsoever. Even if another medical condition forbids you from eliminating all flour and sugar, these particular sponsors won’t work with you. That’s their choice, and they’re entitled to it. Some believe they’re not qualified to guide someone with a plan that’s different from their own. In some cases, that kind of sponsor comes off like someone on a power trip.
In some cases that’s true. In other cases, those folks are just afraid of breaking their own abstinence by letting a sponsee do something different. I understand that fear completely. Nobody wants to have a relapse. That’s the recovering addict’s biggest nightmare.
The problem is that when you give a sponsee no room to do it differently, you’re doing them more harm than good. Someone hungry for recovery gets turned off and walks away to resume their self-destructive behavior.
I sponsored four people at one point, and I eventually decided I had to take a break from it because I was worried that I wasn’t in the best position to tell these people what to do.
Call it the fear of making someone worse while trying to help them.
It just goes to show that addictive minds never heal completely. When you put down the addiction that made you into a monster, you tend to redirect your compulsive nature onto other things — including the recovery plan itself.
This isn’t a criticism of people who are like that.
It’s just an acknowledgement of how hard and complicated recovery can be.
Seeing The Neighborhoods perform at the Joe “Zippo” Kelley benefit last night reminded me of my old friend Danny Waters. He shared in many of the adventures — good and bad — of my youth.
Mood music:
It was Sean Marley who introduced me to Dan. It was 1986 and I dropped in on the Marley residence (2 doors down from me) on a Sunday morning. Sean and Dan had been up late the night before, drinking. Dan had a mop of blond hair and I couldn’t see his eyes.
The two were delighting in the sounds of a Randy Rhoads solo on a live bootleg one of them had acquired. That would be the first of many times the three of us would hang out like brothers. I was the little brother, and sometimes they treated me like it, laughing over and mocking something stupid I said. I gave them plenty of fodder.
At one point, Dan was living in a house at the very end of Pines Road, a street directly across from my house that ended in a boat ramp leading down to the water. I’d go there and check out his guitars. The man could play.
He was brutally shy, though, and he would be there one minute and gone the next. He also had an almost super-human ability to consume massive amounts of beer without dropping dead, though one time, after downing 20 beers, he practically spent the next 24 hours chanting, “I’m not well.”
The very first time I drank myself into a puking spree was in his apartment next the the Northgate shopping plaza on Squire Road. I sat on his bathroom floor for a long time counting the tiles. That somehow made me feel better.
I would get loaded in his company many times after that. I learned to hold my liquor, and the drinking parties would often alternate between his apartment (he later moved to an apartment off Revere Beach Parkway) and my basement in the Point of Pines.
Dan was good friends with Zane, a kid I wrote about in a previous post. Zane jumped off the top of a building in 1988. It would not be the last time Dan lost a close friend to suicide.
I always felt like Dan was more Sean’s friend than mine, and to an extent that’s true. Those two were joined at the hip between the mid 1980s and 1990s. I never would have met Dan or found common ground with him if not for the friend we had in common.
Dan and Sean also played a lot of guitar together. They eventually let me join in as singer. We wrote a few songs, but I can’t really remember them.
As the years progressed, Dan and I would hang out without Sean quite often. The three of us still hung out all the time, but at one point Sean was in an intense (some would say Sid-and-Nancy-like) relationship with a girl who looked like that singer from The Cure. The two fought as often as they took breaths, and their fights would usually start at one of the parties at my place or Dan’s.
Times where it was just me and Dan included a 1988 show at The Channel headlined by The Neighborhoods, the 1991 Lollapalooza festival with Rollins Band, Body Count, Nine Inch Nails and Jane’s Addiction, and low-key nights in his apartment, drinking and watching late-night TV.
One night I freaked out because I consumed two beers and an entire stick of marijuana by myself in the concrete storage room beneath the front patio of my basement hangout.
The fellow who gave it to me was about 500 pounds and wore a black trenchcoat, even during the summer. He died Valentine’s Day 2009 of a heart attack. I lost touch with him as I became focused on career and learned after his death that he had led an admirable life of aiding the mentally disabled. Anyway, I was freaking out because, in the midst of lying on my bed enjoying the high, I suddenly got the idea that I just might have a heart attack. That’s one of my earlier memories of an anxiety attack.
I called Dan.
He drove over and found me pacing up and down the driveway in a blue-green polka-dotted bathrobe I used to own. It was well after midnight.
He took me to Kelly’s Roast Beef and bought me a box of chicken wings. The binge-eating addiction was well under way, and I downed the whole thing in seconds. That calmed me down. I settled into a state of high where I’d let out a “heh heh” every few seconds.
Kelly’s was always a favorite place for me to binge eat away my troubles. It was as good as any drug or liquor store.
Sean got a kick out of the retelling later.
Later, Dan and Sean got into a scrape and I failed to return the favor and come to their aid. It was the fall of 1991, around the time that photo of the three of us above was taken. We were at Kelly’s and as we started walking back we noticed 10 punks were following us.
I freaked and walked ahead, ducking into what was then a bar-restaurant called The Driftwood. I looked back to see the punks circling Sean and Dan, kicking the shit out of both. I had a bartender call the cops and went back outside. By then it was all over. Dan had a black eye. The two limped their way back to the Pines. I stayed a few paces in front of them.
If I could relive that moment, I would have stayed with them and taken my beating, too. It would have made me a better friend. I’d also enjoy retelling the story today, because I wouldn’t look so pathetic in the rear-view mirror.
In 1996, I was living back in The Point of Pines and me, Dan and Sean would walk to Kelly’s every Sunday morning for coffee.
They would usually walk a few paces ahead and talk about a Skinny Puppy song or whatever else I wasn’t paying attention to because I was starting a deep descent into a dark place marked by fear, anxiety and vicious binge eating. Those days, Sunday was for getting myself into a state of anxiety and depression about the upcoming work week. The job was fine. I wasn’t.
Sean was in much worse shape than I was. I don’t know how aware Dan was of just how bad he was getting, but I was all but oblivious. I was too locked inside my head to see what was happening.
Thank God Sean had Joy. She did everything she could to bring him out of his deepening depression. He took his life anyway, but I love her all the more just for being his wife and shouldering a burden I was too self-absorbed to share at the time.
The day Sean died, I spent much of the afternoon frantically trying to reach Dan. When I finally got him on the phone, he collapsed into a pile of rubble on the other end. It’s not a stretch to say that was one of the worst moments of my life. I knew how tight they were, and Dan was more of a loner than I was, which meant he wouldn’t have as much of a support system as I had. I alienated my support system, of course. But that’s a story for another post.
Dan and I continued the Sunday walks into the spring of 1997. We always bought three cups of coffee. We always left the third cup on the beach wall for Sean.
That spring, Dan dropped out of my world. I wouldn’t reconnect with him until 2009 on Facebook. I spent all the time in between thinking he hated me for not doing enough on my end to help Sean. I eventually learned I was just being stupid.
Today Dan is doing just fine. He got married, had two beautiful daughters and lives in Texas.
He plays in a band called Three Kinds of People.
I miss him, and know we’ll never hang out like we used to. But when I think of how we both managed to survive a lot of ugly shit, it makes me happy.
I’ve held off for almost a week. I didn’t want to write about the events in Tucson because I felt a lot of folks were already exploiting the tragedy for page views. Plus, I’ve written already about mentally sick people who turn to murder.
I also found the Tucson case too upsetting to write about. I usually need time to process upsetting events. I don’t know any of the victims, but my heart goes out to them and their friends and family. I also pray that Rep. Giffords makes a full recovery. If she does, she’ll become a powerful source of inspiration. The fact that she had already demonstrated a fearless streak inspires me. (Her office was vandalized after her vote on health care reform last year, but she didn’t cower and pull back from public contact.)
As someone who knows what it’s like to be mentally ill, I’d like to say something about what I see as stupid talk.
To those who blame this affair on the often rancorous debate between the left and right, you’re off the mark.
True, the political debate in this country does get out of control, but most of the time nobody gets hurt. I consider myself a moderate, my father-in-law is conservative and Erin is somewhere to the left of both of us. We don’t get into knife fights out in the streets because we don’t agree on some things.
It’s the same, for the most part, nationally. Democrats and Republicans fight it out, and for the most part it’s a peaceful discourse. The system works the way the founding fathers intended. When someone says otherwise, it’s usually because their side isn’t getting its way.
A lot of name-calling happens, but the violence is rare. It happens, like it did last week. And when it does, people rush to blame it on the nastiness of the politics of the day. In this case, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement are the evil instigators.
Read Krauthammer‘s article, because in my opinion he’s right. Especially when he says this:
As killers go, Jared Loughner is not reticent. Yet among all his writings, postings, videos and other ravings – and in all the testimony from all the people who knew him – there is not a single reference to any of these supposed accessories to murder.
Not only is there no evidence that Loughner was impelled to violence by any of those upon whom Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, the New York Times, the Tucson sheriff and other rabid partisans are fixated. There is no evidence that he was responding toanything, political or otherwise, outside of his own head.
A climate of hate? This man lived within his very own private climate. “His thoughts were unrelated to anything in our world,” said the teacher of Loughner’s philosophy class at Pima Community College. “He was very disconnected from reality,” said classmate Lydian Ali. “You know how it is when you talk to someone who’s mentally ill and they’re just not there?” said neighbor Jason Johnson. “It was like he was in his own world.”
His ravings, said one high school classmate, were interspersed with “unnerving, long stupors of silence” during which he would “stare fixedly at his buddies,”reported the Wall Street Journal. His own writings are confused, incoherent, punctuated with private numerology and inscrutable taxonomy. He warns of government brainwashing and thought control through “grammar.” He was obsessed with “conscious dreaming,” a fairly good synonym for hallucinations.
This is not political behavior. These are the signs of a clinical thought disorder – ideas disconnected from each other, incoherent, delusional, detached from reality.
Krauthammer gets right to the heart of the matter in that last paragraph. This tragedy happened because a mentally sick kid got his hands on a gun and found a place where there’d be a lot of people to use it on. He may have targeted Giffords, but politics had nothing to do with it. He just wanted to kill someone high-profile and get attention.
A couple other moments in history come to mind.
John Hinckley Jr. tried to assassinate President Reagan in 1981 to impress actress Jodie Foster. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and has been institutionalized ever since. He didn’t care about Reagan’s politics. His brain didn’t work right. And in his mentally-impaired world, he got fixated on Jodie Foster and wanted her attention. Shooting the president, in his mind, made perfect sense because of the publicity it would bring.
Should we have blamed it on the movie “Taxi Driver” and fought to ban it and movies like it?
The kids Charles Manson brainwashed into killing for him were led to believe The Beatles were telling them to do it in “The White Album.” Manson turned their young, tormented and impressionable minds to mush with drugs and made them believe a war was coming and that they had to kill.
Should we have blamed it on The Beatles and banned ‘The White Album”?
Hell no.
The point is that when someone is mentally sick, it’s easy for them to fixate on a person or movement. Those who turn violent will always be motivated by something based on religion, politics or something to come from the film or music industries.
But I never would have carried something out because — thank God — I’ve always had a strong enough moral compass that would only allow me to go so far. My mental state was damaged and would stay that way until I sought help. But it was never so far gone that I ever would have carried out some of what I was thinking about. I’ve always had just enough sanity to know better.
Some people don’t have that, and they’re usually the ones who pick up the weapon. They have a choice, and they choose to do evil.
That’s what happened in Tucson.
Don’t blame it on the political divide. That’s just stupid.
Instead, try to see it for what it is: An evil act perpetrated by someone whose mind was so far gone that anything would have inspired him to commit murder.
I had my monthly appointment with the therapist this morning. Sadly, I ran out of time to hit the Starbucks drive-thru on the way. He’s one of those stress-reduction specialists who thinks I should quit coffee, avoid cigars and do yoga every morning.
I do keep the cigars to a minimum, but coffee is about all I have left. And I will never do yoga. It’s just not my style.
I always make it a point to walk into his office with a large cup of the boldest coffee brew I can find. He looks at the cup and says, “Oh, I see you’ve brought drugs with you.”
I like my therapist.
I guess that’s why I do these things.
When I like someone, I needle them.
While I’m on here, I’d like to remind you that a benefit show for Joe “Zippo” Kelley is tomorrow night in Salem, Mass. Details HERE.
Two old friends have a son who’s been through the meat grinder too many times in his 12 short years. Some think he should settle in for a lesser life than he’s capable of. I say bullshit.
My young friend’s name is Mark. He lives in a city on the North Shore of Massachusetts. That’s all I’ll reveal about his identity. But his parents will know this is for him and will hopefully share this with him:
Dear Mark,
Because of the mental and physical challenges you face, some grownups think you should set your sites low. They think you’re not cut out for college or a career as, say, a scientist.
They mean well. They know what you’ve been through and they don’t want you to get hurt. But if I’ve learned anything in my own journey through hell, it’s that you can’t always hide from hurt and disappointment. Life is hard. But it’s supposed to be.
It’s how we find out what we’re truly made of.
Item:Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a pampered child whose world view changed when he was crippled by polio in 1921. A lot of people would have given up right there, but he rebuilt his life, became a mentor to other polio victims and was the longest-serving president in history, dealing with war and economic calamity that could have broken the spirit of healthier leaders. Through it all, he carried on an outward cheeriness that put people at ease.
When I was a kid there were plenty of roadblocks. I missed a lot of school because of Crohn’s Disease and lost a brother when I was only a year older than you are now. My studies suffered, and I was put in a lot of the classes where they put the problem children.
Things worked out, though. I got married and had two kids that are much smarter than I was at that age. I have a job that’s allowed me to do a lot of excellent things (excellent to me, anyway).
You shouldn’t settle for anything less than the life you want.
Item:Abraham Lincoln suffered crippling depression his whole life and lost two of his four children, all in a time before anti-depressants were around. He led the Union through the Civil War and ended slavery.
There will be setbacks and those can be discouraging, but you CAN survive them with the right perspective.
Item: The drummer from Def Leppard had an arm ripped off in a car wreck. A lot of people thought his career was over. Twenty-six years later, he’s still drumming.
So just keep trying, and never give up on yourself. Nobody can hold you back. Only YOU can hold yourself back.
One more thing: Having a good life doesn’t mean you get to live without the bad stuff from time to time.
It’s easy for people who fight mental illness and addictive behavior to go on an endless, futile search for the happily ever after, where you somehow find the magic bullet to murder your demons, thus beginning years of bliss and carefree existence.
A few days ago, rumors wafted around the Internet about Facebook shutting down in mid-March. Panic ensued, illustrating just how addictive this thing has become.
Call me nuts (well, I am a little nuts). But as a guy who’s recovering from a runaway addiction, I know it when I see it.
And since an addict is forever playing a frustrating game of whack-a-mole, I admit the thought of Facebook going away panicked me a little, too.
There are times when I’m embarrassed by my own Facebook behavior. Sometimes I’ll stare at it for hours even if there’s really nothing new happening. It’s easy to use it to be a busybody and nose around in other people’s worlds, though some folks are only too happy to supply the fodder.
Last summer my friend Linda noted that I changed the settings on my Facebook page to allow wall comments. It amused her because it was my birthday. She knows me well. Truth is, I wanted to see the birthday messages. I have an ego to stroke.
I suffer from an inflated ego. It’s a side-effect of where I’ve been. I have this odd fear of being forgotten. And I didn’t want to be forgotten on my birthday. It sounds ridiculous. But there it is.
OCD types have big egos. Achieving big things is one of the ways we try to fill in that hole in our souls. In my profession, getting access to the major power players of information security is a rush. I feel like I am somebody as a result. When I don’t make it to a big security conference, the wheels in my head start spinning. I start to worry that by not being there, I become irrelevant.
With this blog, when I write something that really connects with people, the ego grows a few sizes larger.
I’m somewhat ashamed about this. But I also think it’s a common thing among us. When people say they want their birthday to pass quietly without hearing from people, I don’t buy it.
Everyone wants some attention. That is exactly why Facebook took off.
People suddenly found they had a way to project themselves in ways never before possible. Wannabe writers suddenly got to become “published” writers because they had a platform to do it with. For the most part, this has been a good thing, because a lot of those writers are very good.
But it’s also become an outlet for a never-ending supply of mind junk. And I’m only too happy to consume it.
There’s small comfort in the fact that I’m not alone.
For me it’s complicated further by my profession. In the media world I exist in, proliferating your content is vital to survival. If nobody sees the content, why would anyone want to advertise with us?
So I can’t completely put Facebook down and walk away.
I also use it to push out the contents of this blog. I won’t lie: Some of it is driven by my OCD impulses, some of it is because I badly want to break some stigmas.
Facebook, Twitter and the like are like a rushing river. Throw a toy boat on the water and it’ll be gone from view in milliseconds.
So we throw duplicate copies of the toy boat into the current every few hours.
I’m no better than the other people who worried about Facebook going down.
I also know people who can stay off Facebook for days and weeks at a time. I envy them.
The best I can do, since I can’t extract myself from Facebook, is be a positive voice and give people something they might be able to use while I’m here.
I’ve written about how Joe Kelley and I were friends in college and how I dropped out of site as he was tearing up the Boston punk scene. But I don’t think I’ve given you enough of a picture of who he was.
To help me do that, I reached out to some friends. I’m especially happy that I got two members of Pop Gun to share some memories, because their music was part of that wider array of hard rock I depended on to maintain my sanity back in the day.
First, some mood music in the form of vintage Neighborhoods, one of Boston’s great bands, who will play Saturday’s benefit show for Joe:
Greg Walsh, drummer for Pop Gun and Zippo Raid, who once worked with the author in a dingy little weekly newspaper office in Marblehead:
“When Zippo Raid first started out I was studying a lot of the drummers we played with because I really needed to get up to speed – so to speak – with punk rock drumming. I was seeing what worked and didn’t work – and what I noticed was a lot of bands did breakdowns where they’d be playing fast and then suddenly cut the tempo in half – it was like pushing moshers off a cliff and they gladly went along for the ride.
“So I begged Joe to find some spots in our songs for breakdowns, but anything we tried sounded forced and honestly kind of trite, and we took pride in not doing punk rock “by the numbers.”
“Then one day Joe came to rehearsal and said he wrote a song with breakdowns in it – called “Work.” But we always referred to it as “The Breakdown Song.”
“I have a recording of that rehearsal where he says he wrote that song for me. Probably just to shut me up, but the sentiment was still there.”
“Joe Kelley, when I first met him, was a DJ at WMWM Salem State College Radio 91.7 FM when Pop Gun was in it’s hey day. Well, if we ever had one.
“Anyhow, we used to goof around and play a version of Ted Nugent’s “Cat Scratch Fever” for kicks (a song which we all secretly like but didn’t actually fit our musical motif). Se we decide to play it live in the studio at WMWM when we’re in there one day, and Joe, with his terrific sense of humor, decides to get revenge on us for playing it on his show. So we play about 10 Pop Gun songs and then, for a less than Grand Finale, we break into Cat Scratch. Joe is miffed, amused, but quickly acts. At the end of our show he tees up the actual Ted Nugent live recording of Cat Scratch complete with stadium crowd noise which he blares into the studio as we finish our tune.
“We were totally confused, but eventually got the joke. Joe was sitting in the booth very pleased with himself. The guy had a great sense of humor, like I said.
“I miss that most about him.”
Stu Ginsburg, owner, Platorum Entertainment, one of the planners for this Saturday’s benefit show:
“His first appearance on WMWM was when he came back to school and found the radio station during my show. He rang the buzzer and asked me if I was f—ing his girlfriend, then he thought it was cool anad came back wth me a few times and became a DJ and so on.
“Prior to WMWM, he and his girlfriend were going to many Grateful Dead shows and other hippy events. Joe never played gutair at that time, but WMWM changed him into Joe Zippo. He was a rightous dude. I miss him.”
If anyone else wants to share a story, I’ll keep adding to this post.
In the meantime, be sure to attend the show Saturday night. Details here:
Earlier in the day there will be a memorial service. Details here:
Friends and family are welcome to the religious interment of Joseph Kelley Jr. A time for quiet prayer and meditation. We hope you can attend.
Saturday, January 15 · 12:00pm – 3:00pm
Grave side service with Rev. Msgr. Stanislaw Parfienczyk
Saturday at noon
57 Orne Street
Salem, MA 01970
plot #1198
Thanks to all those who helped me put this post together.
I like to use this blog as a birthday card for the people I care about. I did one for Sean and Duncan and one for Erin. I did one for my sister. I even did one for my deceased brother. Now it’s Amanda Corthell’s turn.
The youngest of my three sisters-in-law is 31 today.
Mood music:
Yeah, this is essentially the one I wrote for her last year when she hit 30. But my fondness for Blondo is still captured pretty well in here, so I’m reposting it as a reminder to people of how cool she is.
It’s the thought that counts, right?
Amanda was just 12 when I first started coming around. She wore glasses that were bigger than her head and she reminded me of Cousin Oliver from the Brady Bunch. Sometimes she’d act like him, which irritated me a little.
She also had a pretty advanced sense of humor for her age, and I was only too happy to teach her some of my dirty tricks. I showed her how, if you lightly placed a piece of scotch tape on the back of a cat, the animal would squat close to the ground because it thought it was under a piece of furniture. I also showed her the ball-of-tape-on the-cat’s-paw trick, where the cat shakes its paw trying to get it to fall off. Before you call PETA on me, I should note that the tape was placed gently on. It was no more dangerous than making the cat chase that little red dot around as you sit with the little flashlight behind it. The cat lived a long, happy and obese life.
I also taught her the joy of smearing the lens of someone’s eye glasses with a spit-saturated finger.
As she got older, she started to test her parents’ patience. She’d wise off to her father at the dinner table and he’d slam down his silverware in anger, which was always fun to watch. And you could never stay mad at the kid. She was just too amusing.
I started calling her Blondie because sometimes she said things that were worthy of a blond joke or three. The name stuck. I’ve modified the nickname to Blondo in more recent years. It’s funny that the name stuck, because most of the time her hair is some other color.
In recent years, she’s made a name for herself as a photographer. Here’s a sample of her work:
My favorite pic of the niece
She works her ass off, and just got offered a manager’s post at a local studio. We’re all very proud of her for that. I’m also proud that she’s such a good aunt to her niece and nephews.
Happy Birthday, and don’t worry: Stuff won’t start to sag until you reach 40. Actually, I’m in better shape now than I was at 35, so you should be OK.
I’ve always wondered if I was a narcissist. I’ve been wondering even more since last week, when someone asked me when I reached a point in my recovery where I stopped being self-absorbed. I had to be honest and tell her I still get self absorbed. All the time.
People with obsessive-compulsive tendencies are basket cases about being in control. Maybe it’s simply control of one’s sanity. Usually, it’s control of situations and people you have no business trying to control.
I went looking for a definition and found this on Wikipedia:
Narcissism is the personality trait of egotism, vanity, conceit, or simple selfishness. Applied to a social group, it is sometimes used to denote elitism or an indifference to the plight of others. The name “narcissism” was coined by Freud after Narcissus who in Greek myth was a pathologically self-absorbed young man who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool.
So, let’s see…
I’ve never fallen in love with my reflection. Usually, when I look in a mirror, it’s to make sure I don’t look too fat. I don’t get people who insist on having their bedroom or bathroom fitted with wall-to-wall mirror. I’ve also gone through long periods of hating myself.
But I am guilty of thinking I’m better than the guy sitting next to me. I probably think I’m a better writer than I really am. There are days when I think a little too highly of myself.
Here’s a fact about addicts: We are among the most selfish people on the planet. Or, as Nikki Sixx says in the final track on Sixx A.M.’s soundtrack for The Heroin Diaries: “You know addicts. It’s all about us, right?” That selfishness usually leads us to do stupid things that make us feel shame. In the midst of that shame, we lie.
That sort of behavior can overwhelm us, no matter how much we want to be better people. Putting ourselves before others is the hardest drug of all to resist.
In OA, those of us in recovery from our compulsive eating disorders rely on a set of tools that go hand in hand with the 12 Steps. There’s the plan of eating, writing, sponsorship, the telephone and literature. There’s anonymity. And there’s service to others.
The plan of eating is what’s most necessary for me, but I think my favorite tool is service.
When I do service, the people I may be trying to help are helping me as well. If it’s through OA, everyone is supporting each other. It’s the same at church, be it through school activities or actively participating in Mass. That’s why I do lectoring. Actively participating in Mass helps me to pay attention to what’s going on instead of sitting there locked inside my head.
Service forces me out of my usual role of being a selfish little bastard.
It may not be a cure for narcissism, if I even fit that description. But it makes it manageable.
