In Three Days, Three Years

January 23 will mark the third birthday of this blog.

Happy Birthday, Flip!

I haven't read any of your old posts for a very long time. But if I remember correctly, when you first started this blog you had one overriding desire...to "right-size" the (in your eyes) major problematic circumstance of your life - that of being a not-entirely-straight man married to a woman. How's that going?

Hey, glad you asked. Today, as so often happens, I heard just what I needed to hear in an AA meeting. I heard that because of the gift I have been given through AA, my pain is now optional.

Truth. Like a dash of cold water to the face. Today I have a choice. I can surrender my will and my life to a Higher Power (a higher power I don't have to be able to understand or explain, by the way) and I can find serenity. Or I can hang on to my will (it's MY life, dammit!!!) and be on my own - subject to both fleeting pleasures and a pain that, in 50+ years, I have found no way to relieve other than by surrendering my life and my will to a Higher Power.

It's going very well, thank you.

Love and hugs to anyone who might read this.

F

I'm Leaving On Vacation. I'm Back. Sort of.

Greetings.  

I've long been in the posting doldrums.  So what better time to ask Brad to reprise his role as Joan Rivers to my Johnny.  I asked and he agreed.  Yippee!  I get some new posts out of the deal...and I hope this will also jump-start me out of my inactivity. 

Cheers!

F

Into The Ditch

First, thank you to my two readers, Brad and Cymber. You are both at the top of my blogland list. I appreciate the honesty and thoughtfulness of your comments. And I am grateful to count you both as friends.

Second, I talked about the narrow country lane. Earlier this week I drove straight into the ditch next to that country lane. It wasn't a slow drift. It was a sharp, quick turn of the wheel.

But I'm back on pavement now.

I'm a dangerous combination: a slow learner who thinks he can figure out anything. Like how a twelve step program works. Unfortunately for people like me, this approach makes it much harder to achieve the goal of a twelve step program - to have a spiritual experience which is (one of) the only solution(s) to the problem behavior.

I follow the simple directions in the book for a while, start feeling better, start feeling less than humble, and then decide I can figure it out. I want to figure it out because I think I can find "an easier, softer way." And because I am lazy and don't want to do the work I need to do to maintain my spiritual condition.

I'm a slow learner, so each time I forget what happened the last time. That I neither can nor need to figure it out, and that the result of this effort is always, ALWAYS, an excursion into the ditch (nil?).

I hope you both have a great weekend, and thanks again for the love you show me.

Hugz.

F