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U.S. Loses, AAA Credit Rating. Mental Health Tested Next

For a lot of people with mental illness, world events can have a crushing effect on sanity. Especially when those events can have a direct effect on the personal finances.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/t2zqYC8xKwM

For me and my OCD, it used to be that way all the time. The recent financial crises, including the latest news about the U.S. losing its AAA credit rating, would have sent me into a sharp tailspin a few years ago. I would have been too numb to see straight or function. It sounds ridiculous, but that’s what the disease does to you.

When you have an out-of-control case of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), you latch onto all the things you can’t control and worry about them nonstop. Nothing feeds that devil like the cable news networks, especially when a story as grave as the debt is on the screen nonstop.

I’ve written before about the anxiety and fear I used to have over current events. I would think about all the things going on in the world over and over again, until it left me physically ill. I personally wanted to set everything right and control the shape of events, which of course is delusional, dangerous thinking.

So here I am, the morning after this:

(From The Washington Post) Standard & Poor’s announced Friday night that it has downgraded the U.S. credit rating for the first time, dealing a symbolic blow to the world’s economic superpower in what was a sharply worded critique of the American political system. Lowering the nation’s rating to one notch below AAA, the credit rating company said “political brinkmanship” in the debate over the debt had made the U.S. government’s ability to manage its finances “less stable, less effective and less predictable.” It said the bipartisan agreement reached this week to find at least $2.1 trillion in budget savings “fell short” of what was necessary to tame the nation’s debt over time and predicted that leaders would not be likely to achieve more savings in the future.

I’m shaking my head and I think I’ve lost all faith in the political establishment.

But I’m not depressed. Not even close.

I have my family, my ability to write and, most importantly, my faith. Jesus has my back, and that makes this economic stuff look a lot smaller.

But that’s where I am at. A lot of people still in the grip of mental illness will be hit hard by this latest piece of bad news. They will watch the news in fear and walk around in a stupor, just like I used to do.

I feel for them. But I also know they can get better, because I did.

Who knows, maybe something good will come of all this.

I reached a point where the fear and anxiety got so bad that I knew I had to confront it or go into a mental institution. There were catalysts: In 2005-06, fears of a bird flu pandemic and other potential calamities brought me so low that I finally started to contemplate the need for medication.

I went for it, and it helped dramatically.

If the loss of a AAA credit rating brings a few people to that point and they start getting the help they need, then in a very strange way, this latest blow to the U.S. economy will be a blessing in disguise.

That may sound ridiculous. But I guess you can only understand after being down the road I’ve traveled.

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Lesson Of The Debt Debate: We’re All Selfish Bastards

Those of us with addictive personalities are selfish. You could say we’re the most self-centered people on the planet. It’s ALL about us. But I’m starting to realize we’re not the only ones who fail to consider the greater good.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/jyb8pMsyPFw

I got to thinking about this stuff after reading the latest post in the “For Attribution” blog written by my friends Meredith Warren and Fred Van Magness. The post was about the vote to raise the debt ceiling, but what caught my attention most was this observation:

Wanting to watch the debt ceiling vote live last night without too much commentary from the talking heads, we tuned in to C-SPAN’s streaming online video about 10 minutes before votes were cast.

If you are familiar with C-SPAN’s coverage, you know that they fill time before major votes and press conferences taking calls from average voters from around the country.

These days, there are three different lines available – Democrat, Republican and Independent.

Sadly, based on what we heard, C-SPAN really only needed one line – Entitled.

A majority of callers – from all three lines – stated that their main concern about the debt ceiling debacle was that they wanted to make sure they received their “check,” whether it was Social Security or disability or something else. Very few called to say they were concerned about our country as a whole, or the future generations who would be paying the bill for those checks and all of the other debt that is continuing to grow by the second. 

What bothers us – and what the debt ceiling debate has laid bare to – is the way so many in America feel they are “entitled” to be taken care of by someone else. For some, it’s their government check. For others, it’s a re-election unmarred by a second debt ceiling debate (we’re looking at you, President Obama) and a way to go on summer vacation without having a thorny issue hanging over their heads.

For the most part, I agree with this. But it’s important to look at how this happened. The answers have more to do with human nature than political ideology.

I have a habit of comparing my grandparents’ generation to ours in this case. Living through the Great Depression and WW II had an impact. During the war, EVERYONE was called on to make sacrifices.

Fast-forward to the present. In the last decade we’ve fought two major wars, but our leaders have not asked for sacrifices at home. We’ve been encouraged to be selfish — spending money and enjoying our creature comforts. In this atmosphere, it’s hard to think past our own selfish interests.

Am I oversimplifying things? Probably. People like me would be selfish regardless of the sacrifices society may or may not make as a whole.

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.

When we’re at our worst, politics have nothing to to with it.

In my recovery from mental illness and addiction, I’ve grown somewhat more apathetic about government and politics. Maybe apathy is the wrong word, because I still pay close attention to the debates and the platforms, and I always vote. To prove how conflicted my mind can be, I vote for Democrats and Republicans every time. I guess that makes me an Independent.

But I’ve learned that the best change we can have is the change within ourselves. A friend I used to work with had a screensaver that said “Be the change.” I always loved that saying. We have little control over what happens in Washington. We vote for change all the time, then, when the new guys come in, we see all the same bullshit we got sick of when the old guys were in charge.

Look at the last two elections. We voted for change in 2008. Then our selfish sides kicked in and we voted for the other guys in 2010 because that change wasn’t coming fast enough. What we got was this messy debate about the debt and a deal to raise the debt ceiling that will prove fruitless. Why? Because it’s like the rest of the legislation you get in a selfish society: No one is asked to make sacrifices to bring in the revenue needed to pay down the debt. That’s our fault, because we tell our leaders to fix the problems, but to keep the filthy sausage making off our front lawn.

Because we’re selfish bastards. All of us.

And yet I still have hope. I see people changing themselves all the time. Addicts clean up. People with mental illness get help. Not everyone, of course. But the changes I’ve witnessed in people are golden.

When you decide to change yourself, something wonderful happens: You meet other people who have gone from shattered lives to rebirth.

And when you go through that kind of change, you become a lot more helpful to society.

Still selfish? Perhaps. But we try to break the cycle through more acts of selflessness, like community service.

Inch by inch, we become a little less selfish. And when you’re in a room full of people like us, you’ll find Democrats, Republicans, Liberals, Conservatives, Socialists and those who would be perfectly fine with no government at all.

But we don’t really talk about that stuff. Because we’ve found that it doesn’t really matter when we’re spending so much time trying to make ourselves a little better than we were.

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Debt Ceiling Debate Would’ve Killed Me A Few Years Ago

I’m watching the political brinkmanship over the debt with much interest. But this time I’m more detached. A few years ago, I would have been sick over it.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/t43VgJ4U9_Q

That’s not to say I’m not more than a little concerned. If the U.S. goes into default the depth of economic chaos for us all will be severe. The world won’t end, but a lot of jobs could, which is a bad combination when you consider how the cost of living would skyrocket.

I just don’t see the value in putting life on hold as this thing plays out. The world is going to keep turning, with or without me. I prefer to keep up with the rotation.

It’s a similar situation to what I mentioned recently in a post about learning to shut off the TV news.

When you have an out-of-control case of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), you latch onto all the things you can’t control and worry about them nonstop. Nothing feeds that devil like the cable news networks, especially when a story as grave as the debt is on the screen nonstop.

I’ve written before about the anxiety and fear I used to have over current events. I would think about all the things going on in the world over and over again, until it left me physically ill. I personally wanted to set everything right and control the shape of events, which of course is delusional, dangerous thinking.

Right after 9-11 I realized the obsession had taken a much darker, deeper tone. This time, I had the Internet as well as the TV networks to fill me with horror. Everyone was filled with horror on 9-11, obviously, but while others were able to go about their business in a depressed haze, I froze. Two weeks after the event, I refused to get on a plane to go to a wedding in Arizona. Everyone was afraid to fly at that point, but I let my fear own me. It’s one of my big regrets.

Part of the problem was my inability to take my eyes off the news. To do so for a five-hour plane ride was unthinkable. To not know what was going on for five hours? Holy shit. If I don’t know about it, I can’t control it!

I really used to think like that.

Fear and anxiety were byproducts of my particular brand of OCD, just like my addictions were a byproduct.

The fear meant a lot of things. Working myself into a stupor over the safety of my wife and children. An obsession with cleanliness, which was interesting since depression always meant my personal hygiene took a dive.

It also meant a fear of world events. When that Nostradamus movie “The Man Who Saw Tomorrow” came out on HBO in the early 1980s, I was terrified by the “future” scenes.

I look at the debt crisis and think back to all the economic tales of doom I’ve heard over the years.

Why am I reacting differently now? I guess it’s because of all the therapy I’ve had over the years. I’ve gotten a lot better at detachment over current events. Through raw experience, I’ve found that the only meaningful change is the kind that starts in your own mind and inner circle.

I hope the debt crisis ends without a default. I suspect it will. If you feel strongly about the proper solution, you should absolutely contact your elected officials.

Just don’t forget that your life can’t stop in the meantime.

I wasted a lot of precious life before I learned that lesson.

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You Can Change Your Name, But You Can’t Hide Who You Are

An epilogue to yesterday’s post about Lynn, Mass.: A reader reminded me yesterday of the time some Lynners tried to get the city’s name changed so the “Lynn, Lynn city of sin” insult could no longer apply.

Mood music:

From my friend Katherine Doot: “Thought they wanted to change the name to Ocean Park some years ago? So it was Ocean Park Ocean Park never go out after dark?!”

I had forgotten about that, but it’s true. That was one of the movements afoot the year I covered the city as a reporter in 1997. I thought it was a stupid idea from the start, and I’m glad most people didn’t take it seriously.

My first concert was a festival headlined by Motley Crue in 1985 at Manning Bowl in Lynn. That was at the start of the band’s “Theater of Pain” tour. I have fond memories of singer Vince Neil badly mispronouncing the city’s name as “Leeeee-innnnn!”

If the city had been named Ocean Park, he might have pronounced it correctly and I wouldn’t have that fun memory of mangled language today. That would suck.

My main point is this, though: You can change your name, but it isn’t going to change who you are or who you should be.

If you don’t like yourself or your city, a name change is a stupid and ineffective way of trying to hide in plain sight.

You want real change for a city, you have to change the politics and clean up the streets. I think Lynn has made good progress on both fronts.

If you want real change for yourself, you have to identify what you don’t like and rebuild yourself.

Lynn Shore Drive

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I Am The Facebook Superstar. Hear Me Whine

This statement, which made the rounds awhile back, is deadly accurate when it comes to how we all behave on Facebook:

“Welcome to Facebook. Where love stories are perfect, shit talkers tell the truth, everyone brags they have the perfect life and claim to be in love with their partners. Where your enemies are the ones who visit your profile the most, your ex-friends and family block you, your ex-lover unfriends you. Where you post something and people interpret whatever the hell they want.”

When we de-friend someone on Facebook, our motives are always pure:

–Someone may post too much stuff (I’m fairly sure this is the reason when someone nixes me, though I don’t care. I do what I do. You either get something from it or you don’t).

–Someone may complain about their job constantly.

–Someone may go on constantly about how sad they are.

–Someone may go on about how cool they are.

–Someone may trade love notes with their significant others in sickly sweet fashion.

Easy come, easy go.

It’s funny, the things that offend us in the world of social media. The funniest part is that we usually do the very same things that others did to offend us in the first place.

On Facebook and Twitter, we all have the chance to get our 15 minutes of fame in ways we could only dream about a decade ago. We all have a podium and we can say whatever the hell we want.

Some would say this is the beginning of something bad; some severe downgrading of the human race.

I don’t see it that way.

Do people annoy me on here? Sure. Just like I’m sure I annoy people.

I have an honor code I try to live by, but I’m a writer and I have a machine in place to proliferate what I write. I figure why write a public blog if no one’s going to read it? That would be a stupid waste of time. So I get the stuff out there.

Those who feel overwhelmed or offended are free to de-friend me or block my posts from showing up in their main news feed. I’m not offended. You have all the choice you want on here: Friend someone and be interested in what they post, or be uninterested and walk away.

It’s very simple, really.

If someone complains about their job, more power to them. I personally think it’s a stupid idea, because current or potential employers will inevitably see your whining and that’s pretty career limiting. I recently warned one friend — a good friend — against doing it. But he’s free to keep doing it.

If people get sickly sweet on Facebook, we all have the right to tell them to find a hotel room.

If someone feels relief from posting updates on how sad or empty they are, I’m fine with it if it helps them feel better. And if I disconnect from them, they still get to do what they need to be sane and I get to leave their room if I don’t like it.

At one point, I had to admit that my obsessive-compulsive demons were latching onto the Facebook friend count, and that each loss of a connection felt like a personal blow. My mind would spin endlessly about why someone felt the need to disconnect from me. Was it something offensive I did? Did I hurt someone or come off as a fake?

But I’ve come to see that sometimes it’s the right thing for a person to do.  This blog covers a lot of heavy stuff. A lot of people have become daily readers and tell me my openness has inspired them to deal with their own issues. But for others, especially those with a lot of pain in their lives, every post is going to feel like a baseball bat to the head.

Then there’s the heavy volume of content that flows down my news feed, which can dominate the news feeds of people with a smaller number of connections.

I admit it: I can be very hard to live with in the House of Facebook. I’m the loud obnoxious guy who hogs the dinner table conversation.

But some of you are hard to live with, too.

I love most of you anyway. Because as dysfunctional as you are, you’re still family. Sort of.

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Readings From The Book Of Crap, Volume 2

I’ve been observing amazing acts of stupidity in recent weeks.

Mood music:

When I do, my first instinct is to keep it to myself. Nobody likes a whiner, and I’m no exception. But when the poop pile gets too high and starts to stink up the room for everyone else, I need to kick open the door and vent the fumes.

So please indulge me as I tell a few unnamed people how they’re making the world a harder place for the rest of us.

This isn’t meant to hurt feelings, though I’m sure it will anyway. It IS meant to knock some sense into people who are capable of doing good but waste time on petty bullshit.

–To the parent among those in my children’s school and scout community who thinks it’s perfectly fine to use his friends as weapons against his ex in divorce proceedings, stop it. You’re making the other grown-ups uneasy and making some of them feel betrayed that you would use them like bullets. This makes the rest of us leery about being your friend. When all you’re friends are gone, you’re all done.

–To the folks who quibble over whether the street walker they pick on is a deranged Vietnam Vet or just a well-to-do guy who lives on the sidewalk for fun, stop it. You’re stupid to think it even matters if he got his mental illness in a war zone or not. The guy has a mental illness and deserves compassion. Instead, you “liked” a Facebook page dedicated to making fun of him.

–To the health insurers who label mental health care as a luxury instead of a necessity, cutting sufferers off from the things that can make them well again: The only way to describe what you do is evil. This is partly why people with mental illnesses can’t get better.

–To those who suffer from mental illness and do nothing about it: You are also contributing to the stigma. When you don’t do your job and you hide from people who love you, you are hurting everyone around you more than yourself. I know because I used to be just like you. It’s time to take a leap of faith and do something that scares you.

–To the fellow church-goers who think themselves more morally pure than everyone else and are quick to judge others, you are missing the whole point of your faith. Go back to Sunday school and get it right.

–To the folks who go on Facebook and Twitter to bitch about how mean the boss is or how unfair a family member is, stop. For one thing, your boss is probably on Facebook too, and they will fire you over your public airing of grievances.

–To those who dismiss all addicts as idiots who either need sense knocked into them or need to be locked away. Sometimes they do. But addiction is a disease, not an attitude problem. The only attitude problem I’m noticing is yours.

–To those who write off suicides as damned souls: True, suicide is a mortal sin. But those who do it are often so mentally ill that they’re not doing it in a moment of sanity or clarity. They have fallen to a disease. When you oversimplify their actions as the stuff of quitters or sinners, you do more harm than good to those who need help for mental illness, not ridicule. You’re also forgetting that you sin with the best and worst of ’em.

I feel better now. And since I didn’t name names, nobody got hurt. If you noticed yourself in here and you are hurt, don’t blame me. You got some work to do.

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For Veterans, A Holiday Here and There Isn’t Enough

Funny thing about holidays where we honor veterans: Everyone puts those who have fought for our freedom on a pedestal for the day, then the next day some of us go back to treating the same people like garbage.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/V-zqIS7vWbY

Flashback: September, 2010: I’m walking the streets of Brooklyn on a beautiful night, and a guy comes up to me. He has a hole in his head where his left eye used to be and burn scars up and down one arm.

I’m smoking a cigar, so he approaches me for a light. He tells me he was maimed in Afghanistan during military service and asks for some change so he can get a train to somewhere. He tells me he’s in New York looking for work and was stranded without money.

I give him the change from my pocket and then he’s gone.

Is he telling the truth? I have no idea, and I don’t really care. He just looked like a guy in pain who needed a few quarters to survive the next few hours, and that’s all that mattered at the time.

Flashback: Late April, 2011: I’m on Facebook one afternoon and I see a friend commenting that he’s disappointed that some of his friends have decided to “like” a page that makes fun of a fellow known in Haverhill, Mass., as Crazy Mike.

In any city there’s a guy like “Crazy Mike.” The stereotype is usually a long beard, ratty clothes and the fellow is usually living on the street. He talks aloud to no one in particular and falls asleep on playground equipment. People like to laugh at him.

A lot of these so-called crazy guys are homeless vets whose luck ran out somewhere between the battlefield and the hard re-entry into society.

After a few seconds of thinking this through (admittedly, a few seconds is never enough time to really think things through), my temper reaches full boil and I pound out a blog post called “Liking The Crazy Mike of Haverhill Page is Sad and Stupid.”

Discussion follows online, with a big question being if Crazy Mike was in Vietnam and, as a result, sick on the streets with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. One reader insists he is indeed a veteran, and that other homeless people keep stealing his medication. Someone else says she knew the family fairly well, and that Mike is not a veteran. He’s simply a guy who has a serious mental illness.

To me, it doesn’t matter if he was in Vietnam or not. Instead, two realities have my mind spinning like a top on fire.

One is that a lot of people assume he is a veteran, but treat him like shit anyway.

Another thing is that there are a lot of homeless who ARE military veterans, and most days we don’t give them more than a few seconds of thought before we walk on by.

It’s almost as if we honor them on holidays to make ourselves feel better about being the assholes we often are.

I say this as a guy who is admittedly one of those assholes. I’ve made my share of fun of people like this, and in the rear-view mirror, looking back at my own struggle with mental illness, it makes me feel ashamed.  Back when fear, anxiety and addiction had me by the balls, I used to walk or drive the other way when these guys approached. It makes me the last guy on Earth who would be fit to judge others for poking fun at someone less fortunate.

It would be high-minded of me to say we need to do better for our veterans. But it’s been said so often it’s pretty much lost it’s meaning. We like to praise our veterans on Veterans Day, Memorial Day or July 4. But once the holiday is past, we go back to our normal behavior. Because they’re homeless and, as a result, they’re dirty, scary and unpleasant to those who have lived far more comfortable lives. And, don’t you know, we LOVE to judge people even though we know nothing about them.

Let’s face it, folks. We need more than the occasional holiday to treat these people the way they deserve to be treated.

And with that, we can all go back to our holiday cook-outs.

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Why We Judge Each Other

This whole debate over security curmudgeons has me thinking about our tendency to judge people. We all do it. I sure as hell do. But where’s the line between fair and unfair?

Mood music:

[spotify:track:25RpoTWuW0SBd9XBrGzY5d]

I’ve said my thing on that matter, and promised that my post yesterday would be my final word on the subject. So I’ll ask you to read those posts, which I link to above, for the background.

The rest of this post is about the class warfare we seem to live with every day. In security circles, it’s the “rock star” hackers vs. the suit-and-tie security execs. Elsewhere, it’s about judging different people vs. normal people, rich people vs. poor people, ugly people vs. beautiful people, normal families vs. dramatic families. I could go on into infinity, but you get the point.

So why do we judge each other? I guess the easy answer is that we have an irresistible urge to compare ourselves to other people. If we feel like shit because of what our lives have become, we want assurances that what we have is still better than the next guy.

If we come from a family of drama queens, we want assurance that some other family is ten times as bad.

In high school I was a fat misfit (the girth carried over to adulthood to varying degrees). To make myself feel better, I bullied kids I thought were uglier and more socially inept. I’ve been working to make amends for that in recent years, and have covered it more deeply in the posts “The Bridge Rats,” “Stiffy” and “Welcome to the Outcast Club.”

To this day, if I see someone who seems to fit some misfit stereotype, I gawk. I’m ashamed of that, but it’s the truth. It’s also hypocritical since I described myself as a misfit in that last paragraph.

It’s something I continue to work on. When I’m in a situation where I end up getting to know someone I’ve judged prematurely and my view changes, I try to keep that in mind next time I go to judge someone. I stop myself and think, “I know nothing about this person. I’m in no position to decide if they’re good/bad/weird etc. I was wrong about the last person I judged.” Of course, I still fail at times. I need to force myself to keep taking that step back.

I’ve really been digging the new Sixx A.M. album lately. Much of the subject matter is on how we judge each other and have stupid ideas of beauty vs. ugliness. I haven’t read the Nikki Sixx book it’s based on yet, called “This is Gonna Hurt,” but from what I’ve seen an important theme is in smashing stereotypes and valuing people on what they contribute to society.

At the end of the day, I think we’re all imperfect beasts who try too quickly to figure each other out. In that rush to judgement, people get hurt. Whole groups get hurt as well as individuals.

The question is, can we — collectively and individually –take that hurt and do something constructive with it?

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You’ll Bitterly Disagree With Me Sometimes

A couple days ago, in the security blog I write as part of my day job, I did a post about folks in the security community who consider themselves curmudgeons. As expected, some folks passionately disagree.

Mood music:

I knew when I wrote it some people were going to be pissed off. That’s how it is when you write an opinion piece: You’re inevitably pissing in someone’s bowl of Wheaties.

I don’t do it to tear people down. But when I think we could all be doing something better, I’m going to say it. People will rage at me in return and that’s OK. I respect that.

I also readily admit that what I write isn’t THE RIGHT ANSWER. It’s simply how I feel about something after being immersed in the culture and details for an extended period of time. My take is my take, and I’ve gotten it wrong on occasion.

That’s why I welcome feedback, however negative it might be. That’s how we learn: Different sides present a viewpoint and the truth usually lies somewhere in the middle. The subject of security curmudgeons is no different.

And I feel the same way with the stuff I write about personal struggles in this blog.

After 17 years in journalism, I like to tell people I’ve developed a thick skin. And I have in one sense, because back in the day, I would never take issue with someone’s specific viewpoint or lifestyle for fear that my targets would come back and tear me to pieces, either physically or in public writing.

But in another sense, my skin is as thin as it was the first day I ever walked into a newsroom.

I’ll take on an issue, but sometimes I’ll be terrified of the response. The big fear is that someone will come back with an overwhelming, ironclad stack of evidence that I’m merely a misguided idiot who has no idea what he’s talking about.

But somewhere along the way, I realized that to truly bring something to the table and contribute to my industry and society as a whole, I have to occasionally risk pissing people off and getting it back in heavy doses. So I do.

When doing so, my biggest fear is that I’m going to hit too hard and leave someone deeply hurt. I don’t ever want to make anyone feel worthless.

If I’ve learned anything in battling my own demons, it’s that we’re all a little or a lot broken. We all shoot our mouths off and say stupid things sometimes. We all hurt each other along the way, and we can all be better.

When writing the curmudgeon post, a point I tried to make but probably failed at is that we all have our justifications for approaching our professions cynically from time to time, and there’s a time and a place to get our more negative views across. But at some point we have to evolve and take it to the next level. If we’re going to talk about why something sucks, we should move on to talking about how we’re going to make it suck less.

I know of at least one person who was personally insulted by my post. She vows to write a response and it will no doubt nail me to the wall. I’ll respect that.

Whatever comes of that, I just want her to know that I don’t think she should go away, which she has threatened to do in the past. I just think she should take her act to the next level. Rage is an emotion that has it’s place. But too much of it will burn a person down to nothing.

Nobody wins when that happens.

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What’s YOUR Insanity?

“Paint a garbage can platinum and underneath, it’s still a garbage can.” Nikki Sixx

In Chapter 3 of the AA Big Book, we’re introduced to an alcoholic named Jim. He has a successful business until he starts drinking at age 35 in an attempt to dull a nervous tick, and everything goes to hell.

From pages 35-36:

“In a few years he became so violent when intoxicated that he had to be committed. On leaving the asylum he came into contact with us.

“We told him what we knew of alcoholism and the answer we had found. He made a beginning. His family was re-assembled, and he began to work as a salesman for the business he had lost through drinking. All went well for a time, but he failed to enlarge his spiritual life. To his consternation, he found himself drunk half a dozen times in rapid succession. On each of these occasions we worked with him, reviewing carefully what had happened. He agreed he was a real alcoholic and in a serious condition. He knew he faced another trip to the asylum if he kept on. Moreover, he would lose his family for whom he had a deep affection.

“Yet he got drunk again. We asked him to tell us exactly how it happened. This is his story: “I came to work on Tuesday morning. I remember I felt irritated that I had to be a salesman for a concern I once owned. I had a few words with the boss, but nothing serious. Then I decided to drive into the country and see one of my prospects for a car. On the way I felt hungry so I stopped at a roadside place where they have a bar. I had no intention of drinking. I just thought I would get a sandwich. I also had the notion that I might find a customer for a car at this place, which was familiar for I had been going to it for years. I had eaten there many times during the months I was sober. I sat down at a table and ordered a sandwich and a glass of milk. Still no thought of drinking. I ordered another sandwich and decided to have another glass of milk.

“Suddenly the thought crossed my mind that if I were to put an ounce of whiskey in my milk it couldn’t hurt me on a full stomach. I ordered a whiskey and poured it into the milk. I vaguely sensed I was not being any too smart, but felt reassured as I was taking the whiskey on a full stomach. The experiment went so well that I ordered another whiskey and poured it into more milk. That didn’t seem to bother me so I tried another.”

—

This is what we addicts call insanity. We get into this stupid idea that we can drink, eat or do drugs in perfect moderation like so-called normal people. That might mean trying to moderate drinking by ditching the hard stuff for just beer, or ditching red meat.

In the former case, you’re still getting smashed on a daily basis on beer. In the latter case — my case — you binge on everything that isn’t red meat until you explode.

At one point in my time as an out-of-control food addict, I decided to starve myself during the week and allow myself crazy binges Thursdays through Sundays. I looked forward to Thursdays because I could go into the Ground Round and order one of those colossal plates of nachos with every kind of junk dumped on top. That’s an appetizer meant to be shared between three or more people, but I would eat that myself, then chase it down with something healthy like a salad.

I’d carry on that way until the end of the weekend, and work out an hour-plus each day to balance it out.

It was but one variation of the insanity I had always practiced. As a teen and early 20-something I would binge on fast food for weeks and then starve myself for one or two weeks.

I usually binged in the car, trying to drive as I stuffed one arm into the bag of grease, flour, sugar and salt. That’s insanity too, because it doesn’t exactly promote safe driving.

It’s all about as crazy as putting whiskey in your milk and carrying on like you’re just drinking milk.

In the big picture, the problem isn’t the food, or the booze, or the drugs. It’s not necessarily the insanity of engaging in the binge.

Instead, the real problem — ground zero — is a deeper insanity that takes up residence in our souls, causing us the nervous ticks that make us do the stupid things we do. In the TV show “The West Wing,” recovered alcoholic Leo McGarry describes the nervous condition nicely:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUwm6WJRPIQ&fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0]

We all have some form of insanity within us. Some learn to manage it without substances. Many more don’t.

Which leaves me with the question:

What’s your insanity, and what does it make you do?