Stripped

My life has been stripped of a few things in recent days. See all the red berries on the cotoneaster in my header photo up there? The migrating flocks of cedar waxwings, who made their first appearance here on December 16, have stripped them for sustenance on their winter voyage to Mexico. I rejoice in the fact that my little piece of paradise helped fuel their epic flight from the northern climes to their hiatus in the south.

Then I received a splendid tool last week from my physical therapist, who has made it his mission to strip my neck of the agony that plagues me. He gave me a TENS unit, designed to combat pain with electrical stimulation of the nerve pathways that conduct messages of misery to my brain. I attach electrodes to my neck and direct the palm-sized unit to zap the neural fibers in the musculature with a level of intensity that I control. It works! I crank that baby up to the echelon of warfare and rejoice as it slams shut the gateways to pain.

It is empowering to live in the solution rather than mucking about in the problem. I’m so jazzed that I’ve dived into the brown lifeless stuff in the garden. Hacking away at the evidence of death is a joy too, because visions of crispy brown crap drags at my sense of hope. Tearing it away fuels little jolts of delight as I uncover tiny shoots of the hardy harbingers of spring. Hyacinths and tulips push through the hard, droughty soil in their enduring drive to bloom.

Next comes the Zen of pruning frost-ravaged roses. I have 13 of those, looking like shit in the front yard, yelling “Life has ceased!” every single day since the hard frost hit. I hollered back at five of them yesterday with a litany of “Prepare for spring!” I was a rose-pruning ninja, not a Zen master, because I only had an hour and was impatient to dive into solutions again. Having made the crucial beginning, I will go more slowly today and savor the art.

It’s lovely to be stripped of things that then fuel flight.

Hope, personified in the eye of growth on a winter rosebush.

Oh, Boy! Deep Freeze

The killing frosts have hit us here on the central coast of California. Our nights are down in the 25-degree zone that kills all the tender growing things in the garden. Tomatoes that remained on the vine are popsicles in the mornings, turning to paste after sun-up. My beautiful dahlias are now brown stalks of mush. Normally, this would depress me: Winter is coming, alack! alas! But something’s different this year. I don’t feel like Eeyore.

In fact, I feel pretty interested in life. I’m checking out this garden scenery….

…and I’m thinking, I betcha that puppy has viable seeds in it! I’m looking at this dahlia….

…and I’m thinking, there’s a gift for me in there! I suspect a praying mantis laid an egg case on one of those branches, and I’m going to find it and save it when I cut that dahlia back.

Several things are different in my life this year. I’ve been working with a new AA sponsor, and she’s had a big impact on my outlook. We’ve been studying faith and gratitude, and I’m reading Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You. She also was diagnosed last month with stage-four lung cancer. Now we have our weekly talks while she’s getting her chemo treatment. I’m not scared about her future; I’m blessed by her life.

Maybe it’s the added vitamin D in my diet. I’ve taken substantial D-3 since a deficiency was diagnosed back in March. My immune system is vastly stronger than it was last year, with its serial pneumonia and relentless infections. There’s a correlation, too, between major depression and D deficiency. Maybe the converse is true as well, and I’m nutritionally better equipped. Who knows? Is it God or vitamin D? Who cares? Life is good.

The deep freeze around here has sent the sap earthward, but my spirit lifts upward. Tolstoy has affected me greatly, a gift from out of the blue. I caught the tail end of The Last Station a while back, and it sent me on a research run to learn more about his "spiritual anarchy." His study The Gospel in Brief held me spellbound. When the word “deep” was offered this week as a prompt on the Poetry Jam blog, I thought of this poem, written a month ago at a café while waiting for a lunch date who never showed.

The Water Walker


Faith made Peter climb out of the boat
and walk on water for a while until
he remembered people can’t do that
and then he sank. I understand
his sinking; I too have sunk
into the impossible and had to stroke
for shore, arising on reality
drenched and choking.

It’s the faith I want to summon in the boat
that mesmerizes me: to see the liquid
which I know cannot support me, yet
to trust in God’s incredible command
that I be more than bone and flesh
tethered to physics and the imagined
certainty of all my limitations.

Today's Monumental Events

Waiting for something to happen

 I am restless, uncertain, uncomfortable in my skin. What is wrong, I wonder.

I could sit and stew all day in this miasma. Or I could answer that question: If I'm honest, what troubles me are three unmade phone calls about unpleasant possibilities, and I don't want to tackle them. That's all. So I go outside with the camera to visit the praying mantis in the dahlias. I eat a little because I ought to, not because I'm hungry. Then I make one of the calls.

Hello, little fly!

No one's there, and I leave a message. This is called "baby steps" in my 12-step program, and it counts on the plus side of my personal little inventory. How I feel is my responsibility, so what action can I take to be more comfortable? Take care of business, sweet pea! That would be a start.

Then I make the second call. Check! That one's satisfied. I feel better already. I ponder the third and final call, the ickiest one of all. I'm in a position of strength now, and I can see that I should get answers to "x" and "y" before I place the call. Now I get to make more choices, with a level head and honesty. This problem has no urgency, and it could spend a while in the hands of someone wiser than I am. I have a place for things like that, called a "God box" ~ a gimmick I've been using lately, a little red box and shreds of paper scribbled on and dated. So I put that last call in the box.

I love my lunch.

"Look away from unpleasant surroundings, from lack of beauty, from the imperfections in yourself and in those around you. In your unrest, behold God's calmness; in your impatience, God's patience; in your limitations, God's perfection. Looking upward toward God, your spirit will begin to grow."

Twenty-Four Hours a Day, Oct. 17

Beware of Expungement

Every now and then I get bummed out. I love that phrase: "Bummmed Ouut." Or the more prosaic: "Bummed." I get bummed every now and then. I'm proud of my generation for dreaming up that one. Otherwise I'd have to go with "sad," "mad" or "bad" or visit Roget's Thesaurus, where I can get lost for days.

It has been a long nine months, beginning back here with the FBI raiding my demented mom's care facility and giving her the boot. Then she had a horrible couple of months and died. Then pneumonia, then a family feud, then yada yada yada, culminating with me on the pity-pot this week. Not a comfy place to sit.

In everything give thanks, sayeth the Bible. My 12-Step program makes gratitude a numero-uno priority. So I'm working on my y attitude. Meanwhile, I thought I'd let you have a peek at the unedited me. Part of my love affair with poetry is that I get to expunge (!) (is it real, or is it Roget's?) expunge the bad stuff that would otherwise stew inside and grow toxic.

Caution: expurgation going on here:

End of December

I lie down on my bed with my fat dog
beside me growing old before his time
slowly dying of his master’s love
for feeding him relentlessly

If only I could fall asleep and awaken
next spring, like the trees in my yard
or the magnolia in the garden, then
I might remember happiness or even

contentment. At 5:30 p.m., Dec. 28,
sleep is a dream that keeps me awake
as do the past year’s march of miseries
and I name them in case I should forget

starting with my mother’s demented
implosion on the Ides of March
then her slide into madness and death
and all that followed, discord, illness

the tapestry that was my family
unraveling thread by thread faster
than I could piece it back together
My fat dog snores, snuggled close

and I try to believe this is love
this is enough to keep going on
this is a blessing big enough
to balance the accounting sheet

But in the end I lie awake counting
my woes, angry with myself
for being wretched when I have a dog
beside me growing fat and old with love

Lame Things the Brain Thinks

This is a cross-section view of my brain first thing in the morning and after several hours of Electronic Hell. Just kidding. It's a thing I made to honor my youngest daughter one day when we were not getting along.

A funny thing happened on the way to the store....

Someday I will start a list of the odd things I think of first thing in the morning. Waking up sleep-ridden, mindlessly making coffee, and opening the shades of my office, my brain isn't engaged until somewhere down the line, maybe about the thirtieth cup of coffee.

The morning before last, all I could think of for the first, oh, two hours of being awake was the line "A funny thing happened on the way to the store...." And nothing funny whatsoever had happened on the way to the store the last time I checked. I was so obsessed with that line, I Googled it. And nothing funny ever happened on the way to the store. On the way to the Forum, yes, and on the way to the theater too. But there is nothing funny about American stores at this time of year. They're crowded and parking is a pain.

Thursday morning, the weird thing that was stuck in my head upon awakening was a word: Imatropium. I'm a tropium. It's meaningless. I looked it up. My goofy, sleepy brain got a big kick out of saying it over and over again at 4:30 in the morning! The dumb word made me get up! I had to track it down, because I knew I'd seen it somewhere. And I found it: It's a misspelling of a chemical that I've been inhaling for the past month as part of my post-pneumonia treatment. And I'm not going to look up the chemical, either. I find myself in an obsessive state of mind, and Lord knows where that investigation would take me.

I got stuck in TECHNICAL HELL all day Thursday. Since I had so jolly much time in the morning, being as I woke up before the crack of doom, I decided it was a great time to address some digital technical difficulties. It turns out to have been an utterly insane idea, on all fronts.

First on the list was the satellite company, to whom we just paid a gazillion dollars to have a guy come to the house and "set up the system" for our new enormous flat-screen TV, which is my beloved's long-awaited Christmas gift. Oh, how happy he is! But we needed a new piece of furniture for the TV, because it no longer fits in the old-fashioned, beautiful oak entertainment center we've had for 20 years. And I discovered this proposed new piece of furniture was hideous, as my beloved perceived it in his dear head: a piece of laminated plastic crappola from one of those close-out super discount kind of places. That would mean the monolithic new focal point of MY living room would be the new enormous TV balanced upon a piece of shit. No!

Have you bought what one might call a "substantial" piece of furniture lately? I'll just say that it's more than half our mortgage payment. And then, come to find out, you don't just plug stuff in to an outlet. There now are multiple cables of various types and special surge protectors and "connectivity," and one must have surround sound and that means installing speakers all over our dinky living room, but wait, the surround sound dealy-bob happens to be a piece of crap, in the technician's eyes, and he advises us to retain the fine old HUGE speakers that go with the (now INCOMPATIBLE) stereo, which will have to have its own remote control device, as will the DVD player, because it's ... what? 15 minutes older than the new humongous TV? It will also need its own remote, so here are your three remotes, sir, see ya.

And the first thing that happens after paying this technician, who has been sent to our home by the national satellite company (accessed by an automated 800 number), yes, well, the first thing that happens is that we can't get the DVD player, which is playing the little DVD merrily, to communicate with the gargantuan TV, and so now we can't watch movies.

A simple thing to fix, no? When I called the automated 800 number and finally got to a human being, I learned that the satellite company doesn't "do" DVD players. What about the billon dollars we paid the guy to "set it up"? That was just to hook up the new satellite dish they said we had to have, and make it talk to the new satellite receiver boxes they said we had to have. I made her go talk things over with her "manager" but the answer was the same: Not our problem.

That was my first technical failure. My second took many, many hours longer. I decided, because of some crazy wild hair, to sort out why my computer doesn't recognize my digital camera. After spending all day and all evening sorting it out, I discovered that it's a simple matter of incompatibility between Canon and Microsoft Windows 7. I did find a "patch" on Canon's site and wasted, oh, maybe three hours doing every sort if iteration you could think of, to no avail. So sorry.

In my leisure moments, I idly poked around the computer, looking for reasons why my printer isn't recognized either, why I can't do scans, why I have to go in a back door to get things to print. Alas. No answers readily available there.

So I've spent the entire day attempting to solve difficulties associated with my purchase of equipment that won't even nod at each other let alone communicate. I fired off a couple of snide emails, but what will that accomplish, if their geeky little heads couldn't figure it out and avoid the incompatibilities in the first place? I don't mean to inply that all geeks have little heads. Just the geeks at Canon and Microsoft.

I knew I should have thrown all of this aside in order to decorate our brand-new Christmas tree. Had I done so I would have felt fulfilled as the evening came to a close. Instead, I felt frayed and dog-bitten by the hounds of hell. But a sweet little rain began falling, and I'm warm and dry and I have stuff to battle with even if no one's talking to each other.

If I wake Friday morning obsessing over another meaningless phrase, I'm getting up and decorating the tree.

****************************************************

THIS morning, I gave up trying to sleep at 5 a.m. but without a stupid phrase in my head, praise be. And this is how masochistic I am: I picked up the printout of Canon's camera-driver "fix" and read it again, and I felt my fingers itching to just TRY IT ONE MORE TIME, in case today the "fix" would work when it failed 504 times yesterday.

This is insane behavior, the definition of which is "to do something over and over again expecting different results."

Here's today's happy thought: On this date in 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright had their first successful airplane flight at Kitty Hawk. For some reason, their "insane" behavior, attempting multiple times to fly a motor-driven aircraft, was rewarded with SUCCESS!

Tomorrow, I think I'll address fractal geometry, which I learned all about in the wee dark hours this morning....

Why Can’t I Read Anymore? (Hey,I'm Not Alone!)

Please see the update at the end of this post.

This is the coffee table in my office.

I haven’t been able to read a book since September 2009.

All my life, I’ve surrounded myself first with children’s books and then with novels and poetry collections and other things like essays and biographies. I can say I’ve literally consumed books, since I ate part of The Travels of Babar the Elephant when I was three. My shelves are jam-packed with books I love and can’t part with, even the chewed-up Babar.

The only time I’ve gone without reading is during my 28-day rehab after giving up 15 years of sobriety. That was in June 2006. Even then, we were reading the book Alcoholics Anonymous every day.

September before last, I don’t know what happened exactly. I had stopped taking my anti-depressant medication and fell into a deep depression. I started blogging, which was a godsend because I couldn’t care about anything else. I won a regional poetry prize and was writing oodles of (unhappy) poetry. The weather turned cold. By October I was on psych units in two different hospitals (not simultaneously).

When I got back home, I couldn’t read books anymore. In the past year I’ve bought several novels by my favorite authors, but they sit by my desk gathering dust. I open them; I close them. I read a few pages of this one or that one, but I can’t go on. Sometimes my friends try to help by giving me a book they couldn’t put down. But it seems I can put it down without any problem.

I remember the last novel I read, and if it’s the last book I ever do read, it doesn’t say much about my literary perspicacity. Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings, by Christopher Moore, is an entertaining marine-science fantasy about saving the whales and the ocean. It won’t win any Pulitzers, but I’m glad I read it, just like I’m glad I’ve read Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut.

When Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize in literature this year, I thought I’d found my breakthrough novelist, the one who was going to rescue me from my sorrows. A novel has saved me from depression before, first in 1984 with mystery writer Ngaio Marsh’s Death and the Dancing Footman, and most recently Louise Erdrich’s magical The Master Butchers Singing Club in 2004. They lifted my spirits out of some kind of angst about living and gave me back my joy.

The news called Vargas Llosa “one of world’s greatest and most adventurous writers” and mentioned some similarity to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, another guy who saved my life once with One Hundred Years of Solitude. I’ve been so insulated, I’d never even heard of Vargas Llosa until the Nobel Prize. So I researched his bibliography and critics and bought two praised novels through the used-book network abebooks.com: Who Killed Palomino Molero? for $4 and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter for $1.

The Palomino novel is thin and seemed approachable. It opens with a detective studying the tortured, castrated, impaled corpse of the boy named Palomino which is hanging in a carob tree. I have no bias against violence in murder mysteries (being a fan of James Lee Burke and Dennis Lehane, creators of violent havoc, and in fact one of Lehane’s novels scared me spitless, which I loved). But for some reason, what has happened to the boy Palomino distressed me a little. Now the book rests facedown on the coffee table in my office, opened to page 14-15. Arrrggg.

The Palomino novel lies on top of a stack of literary journals at least 15 inches high (see photo), and there are two of these towers of Poetry, Ploughshares, Fence, et al, on my coffee table. I’ve read many of them all the way through (skipping the fiction; I don’t do short fiction). (Obviously, I am not doing fiction at all, which is the point of this post.)

I save the journals because there are poems I like in them, and because if I’m in the mood to write a poem but can’t get going, all I have to do is browse through a journal, and POP! goes the weasel muse. I’ve written hundreds of poems in the past few years. Lines of poems race through my head at least once a day. Yesterday it was: “I wanted a thing and I wanted it bad.” I’m trying to compose some rhyming poetry, which I never do, for TFE’s Poetry Bus, and that line had a certain meter to it. I didn’t say that lines of great poems race through my head.

This morning I was brushing my teeth and opening the blinds in my gorgeous sunroom office when I suddenly thought: I wonder if poetry has ruined my ability to read novels? I wonder if poetry has given me a literary form of ADHD?

Oh, gak!

I think I'll just go gopher hunting, get a little violence in my life. We have one in the garden eating the hollyhocks, the precious little arsehole.

****** Update 8:30 p.m. ******

The comments you've left for me today have been hugely helpful. The biggest bonus is that I'M NOT ALONE. After reading some of the first comments, I wrote my own little fantasy (reprinted here for your ease and edification):

...Is anyone else in blogland experiencing this novel-reading difficulty? What if we've tumbled onto an actual disorder caused by blogging? What would happen then? Would we all have to go into treatment to become novel-readers again? Would there be rehabs? Would one of the pharmaceutical companies develop a pill that costs $20 each and then develop off-label uses for it and create a nationwide need for their drug (like, say, the manufacturer of a drug that rhymes with seroquel-don't-get-me-started-on-that)?

(Beware: I'm about to leap to a highly unscientific conclusion.) The majority of the bloggers responding to this post do indeed experience some perceptible change in their reading habits, i.e., a novel-reading reduction. Is this a blogland-wide trend? Anybody want to throw in their two cents? Any two-bit theories? I'll try to keep track of the, um... (what's the right science-y sounding word here?) DATA TREND here.

On another note, the gopher won today's skirmish and so has lived to tell the tale. He/she/it backfilled the tunnels into which I buried traps, good traps that were not touched by human hands but were baited with a banana. I was disappointed. I had actually been lucky enough to find the intersection of three tunnels! What a gold mine! But I only had two traps. Apparently I picked the wrong two tunnels. Hm. This gopher is smart. But I'm tenacious. Tomorrow is another day.

Gopher: 1 ----- Chris: 0

Pardon Me While I Scream

This is what happens to people like Ed.

We had a good rain last night for the first time since last spring. All is wet and happy this morning. From my glass office I watch my neighbors decorate their homes for Halloween as the broken clouds overhead play tag with the possibility of more rain.

When my daughter was young, I loved walking the neighborhoods with her. Then we moved here, to a housing tract on the edge of a tiny rural town, and we learned that every family in the countryside drives here for trick-or-treating. Said daughter didn’t want Mom to tag along anymore. I have been stuck for the past 12 years answering the insistent doorbell to hordes of ghouls and the occasional cute ballerina. It drives my dogs batty. And for some reason, it drives me batty too. My husband likes it, so he’s the greeter while I hang with the dogs in the bedroom and eat my own Halloween candy.

To ride the Totalfeckineegit’s internationally-famous Poetry Bus this week, we must deliver something ghoulish. I would like to deliver the hundreds of greedy children who will descend on us Halloween night. I would like to frighten them away from my house. But all I can do is howl. So I shall howl, and you may investigate other howlers on the Poetry Bus at devious Liz’s place.

Ed, You Talk Too Much

“Women of 20 are as mature as a man of 40,” Ed declares
perched on the edge of my couch in his gray running suit.
His hands play imaginary piano on his knees. The right leg
twitches. “But I wonder,” he says, “when she says, ‘Ed,
you're just not mature enough’—What does that mean?”
I stare at him, feeling the pen like a sword in my hand.
“I don't want to talk about that,” I say, taking a long puff
off the fake cigarette I have made from a shortened straw,
a bit of tissue for drag and a bright red painted tip.

When I ignore him, Ed crosses the patio and stares out
the barred open windows at Santa Barbara, then leaps
on the stationary bike for a furious ride. Schizophrenic,
he has spent the better part of the afternoon wailing
in his room, two doors down from mine. He returns
to my couch and stares at me, as I puff on my straw
cigarette and write about him. A girl wanders in
to start a load of laundry, tears puffing up her face
like they have mine, a soul sister of the broken mind.
Not a word is spoken. Ed watches her and I watch Ed,
and when she leaves, he smiles. “Alex is sure cute,
isn’t she?” he asks. “I wonder how old she is. Do you
think she’s 20?” The drugs have kicked in, and I feel
the cool, sweet Santa Barbara air, a hint of salt from
the sea to the west. I rest my puffy eyes on cypress
trees beyond the window, a procession of palms
running through them, and I admire the red flowers
on some exotic shrub I don't know, a rich blood red
amid the green. Ed’s mindless chatter splits the peace
of this place like a buzz saw tearing at the bushes,
and my pen becomes a sword in my hand lashing
at his mouth, writing my hatred on his face. Red
flowers bloom in his eyes when he understands
finally that silence is everything, silence is better
than contact with humanity, even his, even mine.

Joining the World Again

I've been on "retreat" in a hospital three hours from my home for the past week and a half. I got home an hour ago, feeling like a new person, or the old me, both of them good.

One of the questions asked of me last week was: What is your most cherished possession and why?

My answer was: My laptop. It contains my manuscripts and everything I need to stay connected with a bunch of good people.

We didn't have access to computers or cell phones. I missed my people, and I'm going to browse some blogs and check in with a few of you.

We did have a lot of meetings, but if I never again hear someone call out "Time for group!" I will not be sorry. The time was good and well-spent, but am I ever glad to be home.

Today's picture is by Matisse. A print of it has hung on my wall at home for decades. I love the vibrant magenta and gold, and the woman arranging some kind of order on her crazy table. Joe, my husband, has worked hard to keep our home in order while I was away. He even dusted the knickknack shelf for me. The kittens have grown six inches at least, and the dogs are acting like wild things in their efforts to shake their tails off their hind ends.

I wrote no poems while away, so there's nothing new to share. But I'm posting here what might be my favorite poem:

How an Egret Saved Me

I lay prostrate on the couch & worried & worried
The newspaper scattered like leaves around my bier
The syllables of war trip over the tongue like poetry
Afghaniraq darfuristan & the birds are fluttering
Into extinction In the latter days the seas arise
My aunt says God is coming soon but where is he
Where is his sign I’ve lost you to the television
& the latest tennis match among the titans
Worried & worried until I saw the water’s reflection
On the wall there A dancing curvature of light
& through the glass I saw the egret winging past
The long white neck folded & long dark legs folded
Trimly as a package born aloft on broad white wings
A love letter airmailed from a distant God

Chris Alba (c) 2009

Expectations Run Amok

Have you ever wanted to tell your significant other something important, and he/she listens with only half an ear? Ever had something momentous happen, and the SO just seems intent on getting dinner on the table and watching a game of sports?
Sometimes I want to yell: Just Listen To Me! Stop What You’re Doing and Hear Me! I Want to Be the Most Important Person in Your Life Right Now!
Yelling might get his attention, but I can’t do it since I’m not one for yelling. I like civilized discussions.
So I came in here, my little conservatory-office, and wrote a poem. It doesn’t paint him in a very flattering light, but his response when I read it to him was “That’s wonderful.”
He’s easy to love, even if he is sometimes hard to talk to.

The Wife, Suffering Deep Depression, Goes to the Therapist

I come home to you, my husband of 17 years,
and you pull the chicken out of the oven and say
How was it? while you get the spinach ready
and set out knives and forks and plates.
How was it, that visit with the therapist?
You say, I’m going to eat now; how ’bout you?

I stand in the kitchen like a big crow,
black and shiny and standing in that little kitchen
like I don’t belong there; how am I going to eat
this food on this plate, for instance?
At moments like these, you tell the truth or lie,
so I said It was strange. You were eating
and the Phillies came up with another run.

Strange how? you asked. I didn’t know how.
I sat beside you, not like a crow but like a woman,
and I carefully ate that plateful of chicken & rice.
I had told her I was sick of the cheerleading
that the darkness was too big and I was scared,
that we needed to talk about why I melted down

and had to go to the psychiatric ward and all
the crying and the sense of pain. There were long
lengths of silences that I didn’t bother to fill.
She offered me no answers. I’d have been surprised
if she had. It was strange that I couldn’t connect

with her, and now I can’t connect with you.
I take my five pills, or seven, and hope they fix
whatever is in me that is wrong and so unspeakable.
that the best I can say is I am a crow in the kitchen.


Chris Alba © 2009

Coming Home From the Psych Ward

The Santa Barbara air had a clean fragrance, and a nice breeze wafted through my hair, which hasn't been washed for four days. I smoked a Djarum, which has been outlawed here in California, and savored the familiar old inhale/exhale routine.

The nursing staff had lost my wallet, containing practically all my life. They sent me off with promises to find it and mail it up to me. I was content with that. It seemed a small thing to lose, when you have fought a monster in your mind and then emerged triumphant.

I went off too many meds and did it quickly, sometimes without consulting my doctor. I knew I was in trouble when I won the big-deal poetry prize, was happy for a moment, and then the black monster reappeared, took out my brain and shook it real hard.

I worked my AA program to the best of my ability. But I've had this mental illness since long before I was first hospitalized for depression at age 16.

I think it's time for the rah-rah cheerleader to take a break and explore the black sorrow for a little while with my therapist. The medications will take time to work, but patience is a virtue I learned in AA. At least there is hope, where before there had been despair, carefully controlled.

Thank you to everyone who wished me well and sent prayers my way. I believe in the power of prayer to change things, starting with changing yourself, for that moment or that day. The support I had from you kept me sane when I wanted to explode (the Ativan didn't hurt, either). I'm no longer on Ativan, no drugs that start the phenonemon of craving. Just loving you guys and looking forward to tomorrow ( writing this at night). Have blessed days, each one of you.

Love,
Chris

Bowing to the Psychiatrist

Look at that smile! This is my beautiful daughter, heading for a party on her 23rd birthday.

She's on the top-10 list of reasons why my life is so blessed. She has a good job, and a fine man, hopes in her heart, and gifts she has only begun to explore. She has her hurts, but she has her faith, too.

Milo is her name, and she was raised in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

She knows all the slogans by heart, and her intuition is strong.

She came by the house last night to share a song that made her think of me. I was sitting with my husband and an old-timer AA woman who were both helping me make arrangements to go for psychiatric help.

God sometimes sends us out to be the Big Book in some needy person's life. Last night, Milo was my Big Book, reminding me to be honest, trust God, and wait patiently for His help. She cried a little, hugged me a lot, and practiced the principles of courage, faith, and tenderness with those who are hurting.

I have tried all the years of her life to be the mother whose love is abiding, forgiving, encouraging, and strong. I have tried all these years to be the mother I didn't have. She says I have succeeded. And while she is afraid of my mental illness, she believes in my sobriety, and she knows recovery through Alcoholics Anonymous will pull us through, no matter what we face.

No matter what we face, we don't have to give up, give in to the compulsion, and be the failures we used to be. The 12 Steps change us. They give us an all-powerful God who can carry us easily in His arms when we're too weak to take another step.

Sometimes that God makes us an instrument of peace in another person's life, if we're willing to be used. He makes music in us, no matter how decrepit we might be, that sings hope into another's heart.

I have to go pack a bag and drive to Santa Barbara for help with my medical condition. But if she should read this post today, I want to leave her with a message: The future awaits us, one day at a time. It is good. We are loved. We can make a difference in someone else's life, if we just reach out a hand in a time of need.

Love,

Chris