After getting some good writing done and taking care of some business yesterday, I decide to head over to favorite street in town. Rohr begins with a verse from Romans where Paul laments that while he has a will to do what is good in him he does things that he hates. Rohr goes on to write that we’re all addicts one way or another. So why not go and be an addict today!

The experience is mind-blowing. There’s a handsome little Arabic fellow in the arcade who gives me the eye as he walks into a buddy booth. I follow him into the adjoining booth for what becomes an out-of-body experience whereby I completely lose track of time and space. At one point I’m so exhausted I have to stop, but he looks through the hole and clearly he wants more. So we go into a booth together and he lays back and lets me perform oral sex on him while he watches straight porn on his Android. At one point I have to stand up and stretch my legs. I take a deep hit of poppers that makes my eyes fog up from the bottom the way my glasses do sometimes when I eat spicy food. 

That was disturbing.

I have no idea how long I’ve been at this when the cleaning guy knocks on the door of the booth signaling it’s time to clear out so he can clean. I finally just masturbate to ejaculation, (it’s clear this guy is on the verge, it’s just unclear when). My body is sweaty and I smell like cum as I clumsily pull on my clothes. I notice that once I’ve gotten off, I could now care less about the guy with whom I’ve just spent the past hour or so. In the cramped booth he’s more of an obstacle getting in my way while I try to get dressed. Haphazardly pulled together and with one shoelace untied, I stumble out of the bookstore looking like the wrath of God. It’s cool outside and the layer of frenetic acting out energy that clings to my body seems to dissipate in the autumn air.

And where is God in all this? Because at this point, isn’t that really the only question? One could easily, reliably and rightfully look at this incident with disgust. Still, where is God here? What is God saying? What is God showing me? Well, that I’m powerless, for starters…

“When you don’t know what to do, do what I do. You know what that is at this point, right? Just like my yoke is light, my ways, where they concern you, are fairly straightforward and easily understood. It’s not yours to know ‘If you do this, such and such will happen.’ That’s not the point. The point is that I make my ways known to you so that you can know me.

So simple.

Love me, love others as you would love yourself. Let my reality bring out the best in you! That’s why I do what I do. For your sake. For your growth. Your need for security, approval and control are child’s play. Give them up. Die to them. Arise to me, my reality… My eternal and infinite love for you!”

This affirms what my Spiritual Director says more or less. And now it’s written on the wind.

…But when everything we thought we knew has turned to “nada” in the language of John of the Cross, we actually become more loving and compassionate human beings, for we no longer rely on our own light but upon the Light of the world living within us.

-Richard Rohr

Would I be doing this writing if I was otherwise occupied? With Children? A spouse? A job with a lot of responsibility? Pets? Or is my life so simple, so truncated that what the hell else would I do if I didn’t get up in the morning to study and write? I’d been asking for a simpler life…

Yesterday things start out so simply. Then I call my boss to ask him where he needs me and he’s like, “I honestly don’t know.” So the day just kind of opens up and I don’t need much encouragement to high tail it over to my favorite street in town. Suddenly things get very complicated because from about 1pm to 9pm that’s where I’m at, back and forth between my two favorite adult arcades.

The darkness emerges like a vengeance against all that is living, highlighted by contempt and derision directed at the men with whom I roam these arcades. In fact, I feel intense hatred toward them (kettle black). I’m like one of those lost boys in “Clockwork Orange,” so bored and out of it all I can do is roam around breaking things and committing all manner of evils. 

I think I should be disgusted with myself but I’m not.

Just yesterday I tried to shock a fellow who was sitting next to me at a coffee shop with my little iconoclastic diatribe about not giving a flying fuck about whether or not “Christ died for my sins.” Today I wonder if that isn’t a condition of my stone-cold heart. If it wasn’t so desensitized by my addiction those words might land on me with more weight, maybe (maybe not).

Regardless of the real complexities and obligations of life, people act out anyway. Because I live a simpler life with a lot of free time doesn’t make me more or less prone to addiction. People manage to hide their addictions in all sorts of lifestyles – busy, not busy, important and mundane alike. As Ernestine the telephone operator liked to say with a snort, “From presidents and kings to the scum of the earth!”

What if I really had nothing to do and nothing to defend? That’d be some serious evidence (in this culture) that I am nothing or not much. If I literally had nothing – nothing to defend, no image to project, no living to make.

Is this the recipe for a life of peace and happiness? I don’t know any homeless people who are lovin’ it. But I do know some very loving homeless people.

There is a light in us that only darkness itself can illuminate. It is the growing calm that comes over us when we finally surrender to the ultimate truth of creation: that there is a God and we are not it… Then the clarity of it all is startling. Life is not about us; we are about the project of finding Life…

-Sister Joan Chittister

Ein Sof (the nothingness all life came from)… Tikkun Olam (the healing of the world by uncovering the light)… Primary concepts of Hebrew Kabbala wisdom. The light of the world. Discovering this Life within me (though it’s not me, it transcends me), like pulling open a wound and light comes blazing out of it. There is a God and it’s not me. There is a universe but I’m not at the center of it.

Yet there is a God and there is a universe and while I’m nothing and even less than nothing in the face of all that, I’m integral and essential to it.

This week’s Daily Meditation from Richard Rohr has the visage of Helen Keller in the header, an embodiment of this theme of darkness and light. From Darkness. From silence… Helen Keller! From nothing… an enormously fruitful life! The implications of this, equally enormous.

One might even argue that from the power of the mind and the spirit, Helen Keller was able to break through her senses. Which raises the question, how much of each? More mind? More spirit? Or something completely different? Her teacher Annie Sullivan, half blind herself? A perfect storm… a miracle! Both of the Red Sea parting and the everyday sort.

One day we’ll know. And I bet we’ll all chuckle at the simplicity and the obviousness of it.

What else from the dark – the Ein Sof and silence – besides HK? Light and sound. Truth. This colorized photograph that looks like a painting at first. Look at her hand – so long and slender, her fingers so delicate and dexterous. See how the second rose looks a little blurred the way certain areas could be a little blurry in these old B&W photographs?

This morning I’m dwelling on certain resentments. A perfectly happy Instagram image of my godchildren with their half-sisters brings on an animated imaginary conversation with their mother that isn’t very nice.

In other news, wait until you hear what I’ve got planned for Christmas! After my visit last weekend with my niece and her husband and getting clear that climate change, racism and income inequality don’t really register on their list of priorities, I think it’s time to bust another move with the evangelicals in the family. Since my niece’s husband has performance issues and their relationship seems nonsexual, they’ve decided the best way to adapt to their situation is to adopt (while somehow digging in their heels on the love-the-sinner-hate-the-sin stance on sexual orientation). There isn’t anyone in my immediate family that I’m aware of (or anywhere else for that matter) that doesn’t have sever-ish sexual hangups.

I think the best setting would be when we’re all together at the dinner table after everyone is served and grace is said. “Who here loves to have sex? …besides me?” I’ll snort. That’ll get everyone’s attention and likely generate some discomfort.

“Being people with some pretty serious issues regarding their sexuality sure doesn’t stop some of you from being vocal and self-proclaimed experts on the subject.” I let that right punch to the face distract them while I follow up with the left hook to the jaw, “God and Jesus could give a FLYING FUCK… who I fuck!” That’ll have mom gasping in protest and the evangelicals guffawing piously while I conclude, “That language, by the way, isn’t half as perverse as your beliefs about sexual orientation.” Then I’ll underline it, “Why don’t we all just lay this phobic bullshit on the slag heap of bad beliefs and try to get on without it. We’ll all be a lot happier. I know I’ll be.”

This is a snapshot of today and where I’m at with life. Smoking a lot of weed, acting out a lot (that black spot R of center is my poppers) and feeling driven to it.

It amazes me that I got out of the house today, got some errands done, and made it to my local coffee spot for an iced coffee. I walk inside, out of the heat into the calm coolness of the space. It occurs to me that this might be my favorite coffee shop. I appeals to me at every level, especially its swirling sensuality. I like how people look – educated, engaged, well-dressed.

I also feel accomplished having completed a major leaf-abatement phase out in the yard. It’s been hard work over about three weeks and about 20 leaf-bag’s worth of trimmings and rake-out. The place still looks a little rustic but now it feels more like a blank slate for more thoughtful landscaping.

I feel the need to underline this – I spent 10 hours at adult bookstores yesterday (6 hours of it needed to have been dedicated to work… my job… hours for which I’m being paid) driving back and forth between my two favs cause they’re really close to each other. At one point in the evening the kindly brother behind the counter stops me after maybe the forth or fifth time I’m about to slide my ticket through the card reader at the turnstyle. He looks me straight in the eye and holds out both hands. “Take my hands,” he says firmly. Without hesitation, I put both hands in his. They are big, warm, dry and safe.

“Slow. The fuck. Down,” he commands, eyes burrowing right in. “You wearin’ yo self out! Drivin’ back and forth like a crazy man. You bein’ hard on your body, your brain, your car…”

“I saw you come back in here and I had to tell you this ‘cause I saw a little bit of me in you… This’ll make you crazy… if you let it.”

I think of the night I spoke to one of my oldest friends, soaring on Oxycodone, and telling him to “close the bank” on a crazy restaurant scheme he’d gotten himself in bed with. But I knew even as I said the words that he’d glide right past that warning. And that oversight cost him close to a million bucks! He was on that same crazy bent I was in last night because while I did stop and appreciate for a moment what the guy was telling me (the Truth!) it would have taken a tree falling on my car to stop me. I kept going till after midnight feeling desperate and crazed pacing back and forth behind the one-way glass door. And when I finally got up the nerve to walk out, a feeling of relief blew through me like a cool breeze.

That was unmanageable. Then my HP speaking through the guy at the bookstore. No joke. Not to mention the day I nearly gouged out my eye on the corner of my CR-V’s door panel in the parking lot of my other favorite bookstore and needed 4 stitches…

“This must stop,” I think to myself. Still, as an addict, I know better than to use language like that. This can stop though, but now, for the next hour, maybe till the end of the day…

A couple slips since my last entry including one Sunday night after an intimate dinner with friends. I drive home feeling connected and loved. These are good feelings which signal smooth driving ahead so why not put the car in cruise control for awhile. The addict, consummate backseat driver that it is, grabs the steering wheel and screams, “Move over and buckle your seat belt, good feelings! We’re going off-road!”

One thing an addict understands pretty quickly. My addiction wants me dead.

And so back to adult bookstore to wander the labyrinth of booths in the back and worship at the glory hole. Here’s a pic I took of one with my iPhone yesterday.

Yesterday, by the time I worked out some of the kinks in WordPress, I’d been too long in front of my computer and type a particular search engine into my browser that is the springboard into the vunderbar world of porn. I grab my bottle of poppers and I’m off to the races in no time flat.

Fortunately, it doesn’t lead me to the acting out side of town, a particular strip of road with 2 adult bookstores and where I’ve spent a great deal of time and money during my 5 and a half years here. No, this time it ends just about as fast as it starts.

I’m having a friend over for dinner and while I’m preparing the main course, a chicken and vegetable stew with multiple steps and specific timing requirements, I notice the after-effects of acting out. I’m aware that I’m impatient and irritable, 2 states incompatible with good cooking.

One of the recipe’s final steps is sautéing onions then adding flour to make a roux. Well, I impatiently and absent-mindedly add the flour at the same time I add the onions which instantly absorbs all the oil so the whole thing just dries up and starts burning in the pan. I’m upset and start cursing my stupidity because I should know better. At first I think, “fuck it, just add the pureed tomatoes and keep going.” Then I take a deep breath, relax my shoulders, and dump out the burnt flour and onions, clean the pot and start over.

I don’t know about you, but stress can quickly drive me into a masochistic state and instead of reading the caution signs and slowing down, I step on the gas. But this time, by grace, I slow down. And the result is an excellent chicken and vegetable stew!

The day beings at 6:15 am. To give me time for a 25 minute meditation before my men’s group at 7:30. Mostly meditation is a return to breath from mind chatter, over and over. But this morning, I notice a definite shift in my body to a deeper state of relaxation. At the meeting last night we read from the SAA “Green Book.” I think it’s called the “Green Book.” In any case, it’s the SAA equivalent of the AAA Big Book. It’s the story of a guy who finally in middle-age finds sobriety from his addiction to sex and fantasy. Good news for me. It’s not enough for the importance of getting sober to be described. Me, I need to see actual results in the way of real, sober people. I can relate to much of the sharing until suddenly, I’m overwhelmed by hunger pangs and I start obsessing about food… It’s too late to eat! Will I get home before it’s too late to eat? What about making little tacos with scrambled eggs? etc.