Day one, again

This day is going to be my next, first day of abstinence. It's times like this that I don't feel like writing, but I know that I really should. What do you say though when you chose to go against everything that's good in your life? I did it for Sushi? *sigh*

Can that be right? Did I do it because I like sushi AND I wanted to eat tons of crap food and feel ill and stupefied? The crime somehow... just doesn't seem fair. Being on the outside of program just feels so terrible, and for what seems so little a misstep. I guess I am just whining. It's not like I can handle my own food. It hasn't been my history that anything else I have ever tried has helped me be healthy and lose weight. I have a discreet need and program is what fills it. Now if I can just get over the "No sushi forever" mandate, I might start to understand how blessed I am.

wipeout

My abstinence has been shot. It's not a matter of a crouton or an ounce extra of something. This is more like going to the sushi bar with a few old buddies and blowing over $200 on sake and raw fish. It's not like it at all actually, it's exactly like that. I was celebrating our reunion, and I was running from problems of my own. My boy was at his grandmother's and this was a chance to really let loose the way I used to. I knew the chance would not come again for a long time, or EVER because I was trying to lead an abstinent life. It's the EVER part that is really making me crazy. So I made a conscious decision to blow it all.

I also want to report I had the time of my life. This is factual and the more I think about it the less I really think I regret doing it. What I regret is what came after. After dealing with a minor hangover for the morning after, I went out to the supermarket and loaded up on all the crap I had been craving for months. Then I found every drivethru in the area, and sampled those for a few hours. My day was shot on just eating. My wife had no idea where I had gone when I told her, "I'd be right back". I abandoned her and my son for a period of hours where upon I just gorged myself to sickness. That was Sunday. I ate through most of yesterday too.

As for the possible excuses, I had some uncertainty at my job as some people close to my position were getting laid off, and I screwed up my checking account so it was overdrawn in a month where I was shopping for home loans. I was able to fix my account before the nightly update on Monday, which is good. Also I still have work, thank goodness.

I just felt cornered. I really wanted an escape. Besides, did I want to explain the ins and outs of program to my old buddy? Tell him that I'm not allowed to eat the best food and drink on earth with him? To celebrate life and each other in the best way we know how? Sushi is a sort of religion for me, by the way. It is probably the single reason I resisted getting a sponsor for so long. And in the end Shushi wasn't the real problem. It's everything else. That is to say it's the cookies, whoopee pies, peanut butter bars, candy bars, milk shakes, brownies, fried chicken, ice cream, double-quarter pounders and on and on and on... that make it so I can't have sushi. At least now. There doesn't seem to be a happy medium for me, of course.

Can I blame program? Can I blame "abstinence"? After all if I eat a jujube at a movie, it's the same as if I eat an entire Chinese food buffet. There are no grey areas there. This is probably why I have had what little success I have had. Give me a tiny bit of wiggle room and I will find a way to fit a pint of Ben and Jerry's in there, trust me. Naturally, I didn't have to eat the rest of the gunk. I didn't even have to go to the bar and lose a king's ransom in unagi and sake-maki rolls. I could have told him I had to get home, or that I had plans. Easy! Never would have been a problem then. No lengthy discussions about my disorder or even a mention of it.

It was my decision. Every bite and drink was a decision I made. Everything I ate after that too. I don't know if I can stop eating right now. I went into this morning with a solid determination to stop, but now... What is really scary is that I could have two, or ten or a thousand of these days ahead of me where I am unable to stop. I may never stop really. There are too many out there like that for me to pretend that it's not a possibility. It WAS me only two years ago when I had no hope at all, just like today.

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Something was really bothering me. In a sense, I was actually terrified. It was an artifact from my previous life. The one before I met my wonderful wife and I realized that I probably could be happy instead of reveling in misanthropy, beat poetry and cheap cigars my whole life. Back then, I really didn't think much at all about the next day, or even the day I was in. All that really mattered to me was that my comforts were readily at hand, food included. I kept going back to college as a way of 1. looking like I was trying to do something with my life, and 2. keeping my head active and me out of my mom's basement. It was a lifeline really. I had at least that much sense. And when I met my wife at school, I knew I was on the right track.

I ultimately dropped out again(you dumbass!), but we were married in four years and now seven years after that we have a 1 year old son who is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. The trouble is during those years of working/college/working/college/smoking weed/college?/ I had racked up amazing amounts of debt, terribly bad amounts for a guy my age. All of it in default by the year 1999.

My credit was a wreck. Eventually my then fiancee found about it. And we fought for weeks on and off over what to do. I was certain that I could turn the boat around myself, or I said I was. What I really wanted was for her to butt out of my sordid past and let me be a failure so she wouldn't find out how bad it had gotten. But she didn't give up on it, and despite considering it seriously a few times she didn't give up on me. I eventually relented and she made a bunch of calls and got the whole picture straight. After that it was a slow ascent of consolidation loans and payment books and mistakes made. After about four years I started to get offers for credit cards and got one. Made payments on time and the such.

In 2003 we needed a new car and my credit wasn't up to snuff then, so the auto is in her name. I was so distraught over that. Even in the intervening time I've had school loan problems, deferments and a few near defaults, along with other late payments here and there to various other creditors. A few stretches of unemployment that I shudder to remember are in there as well. That's not to mentioning a rent dispute with my wonderful land-overlords that ended up being their fault. So to me the last five years have been a little spotty. When I knew the kid was coming I also knew that an apartment wasn't going to do for too much longer.

I got into program around that time and was busy lying to my sponsors and breaking abstinence when she started to talk about getting a house. The market was on fire at this point so we both knew it would be a long ways off. My wife, bless her heart, had already been saving for a down payment for a few years and about then I started to divert funds into CDs and the like to build our capital. Then the boy arrived, and the housing market started to tank. And boy did it ever. Even here in the crown of the Northeast, prices began to fall at amazing speed. So we started looking at houses. The say, "act as if", I guess I fooled my wife and the agent because I had no clue what my credit was like or whether I could even get a loan. My last credit report was such a horror I couldn't even bear going in on one of those 'free' ones. I was too afraid.

Credit horror stories are a family tradition for me. Mom is living in the house she grew up in (thanks grandpa!) and my Father is still renting a house with his new family. He just got a car loan in his name for the first time in ages in 2003. So I had grown up hearing about these things. I felt even worse because I realized as I got older that lots of these financial hardships grew out of the divorce in the first place. Well, that's another tale.

At any rate the time came to fill out the loan app and send it in. An office pal of my wife's used to work at a small local lender, so on her advice we went with them. During this time I literally quaked whenever the subject came up. My blood turned to ice and all I could do was pray sometimes, asking the Goddess to help me. I confided in my wife that I was a nervous wreck over this, and she tried to console me but I was certain that I was a poison in the lending house. Of course I couldn't sit up an whine about my terrible credit, because I really didn't know how bad it was, more to the point even if I did know the score or had a report I had no idea what it would actually mean to a lending manager since we're both on the application. I hadn't felt so powerless since my academic reviews in college where most of the time I was told to pack my bags.

This morning I have recently learned that we were pre-approved for more money than we could ever use. It is only a pre-approval, but it's a lot further than I thought we'd get with my name and social on the app. Now there is a decent chance my son won't have to grow up in an apartment building, have a place to live in that isn't cluttered all the time, and have a basement of his own to live in when the time comes. It's a great feeling. Staying abstinent throughout the process feels even better. Thanks to my wife and this program I am taking real steps into the next chapter in my life. Coming from the hell I was in once where even imagining anything like this was impossible, I have no more words to describe my gratitude. I thank the goddess for all of you.

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So really, how much salad can you eat? Day in, day out, same crud. Even cooked veggies, which I have leave to substitute for leafy greens via my excellent sponsor, are seriously boring me now. I get hungry, but I don't want to eat my lunch. I just don't feel like it. Lunch for me used to be playtime, eat a carload of crap and feel sick afterward! Wheee! I was killing myself, and I always hated it after the fact, but at least it was something I could look forward to. The chance to slake my insane lust for cake and grease, or just greasecake when I could find it was the highlight of my day. What I life I had. It was all I really looked forward to. That, sex and video games anyhow.

Life is certainly better now, as is my health, but I am BORED with my food. Just imagine that funny guy who you hung out with just for his nice car and endless bankroll just turned into your middle school science teacher, with lettuce for hair. I grew up thinking that vegetables were a personal enemy of mine, a kind of culinary nemesis. I still don't like them but I am more accepting of them. I can eat them when I need to, even enjoying a salad made to my exactly specifications. I have made nice with spinach, cauliflower and pickles. And I have new vegetable buddy in broccoli to go with my old stand bys peppers and onions. But there has GOT to be another way. I've nearly skipped my mid-day meal on more than a few occasions.

Sometimes I end up eating my breakfast food twice in a day (minus the cereal) just to vary things. I told my sponsor about this once and he said, "It's ok this time, but don't do it again." So I just did it again, and not for the first time either. I was really hungry and I just couldn't eat the salad. I have got to come clean on this I think, at least just to get a little help here because it's driving me nuts.

Fourth of July

You can put this one under the 'selfish introspection' tab I think. Concepts of country, sovereignty, and patriotism always seemed strange to me. America is where I live, where I am, but I know it didn't HAVE to be. Nobody controls where they are born, and to a smaller degree what nationality they get to have legally. If you want to be technical, and I usually am, my parents made these decisions for me. So were they really sewn out of the whole cloth of the state? No, because they had no control over where they were born. The fact you are even here is totally random circumstance, forget the impossibility of existence at all, so how do we own this land, the flag that signifies it or have pride at the calendar date of July the 4th?

You can't point to the Earth and say you own it anymore than you can point to Utah and say you own it, but people do. Our government does it, and they have all the weaponry and clout to make sure that it is true against the entire world community's aggression. No one is taking Utah from the USA, count on that. So where can you really understand this? Where does this 'ownership' come from? Our founding fathers said it was god, and that's about the best answer you are going to get from anyone on the subject. You can possibly make arguments that we have been here a long time, built all this stuff, grown a massive population, tilled, planted and machined the land over hundreds of years and therefore we can claim it. After all we were the ones to have put in the most effort, right? This concept falls apart when you see that any town government in the country is not going to just give you vacant public land, even a tiny quarter acre, just because you've planted tomatoes and built a shed on it. You'll be lucky if you don't end up in court over it honestly.

Going back to god giving George Washington the deed to North America, this one is undone even more easily when you ask the native Americans what god they worship. Clearly they were not passing the plate on Sundays PLUS having been living on this land thousands of years ahead of our great migration from Europe they have grounds for ownership in the previous argument anyway. So what the heck, right? Independence Day... from what? England was formed from the Germanic tribes, who knacked it from the suddenly defunct Roman Empire, who stole it from the celts who supplanted the legendary picts and dannans, who stole it from the freaking formors. So we're a concept based in circular logic that won independence from the metaphors of a different concept.

It's all people, people! It was what people have decided over the ages, through war, law and simple convenience. This dirt has no flags on it, leaving us essentially no better than the tribes of protohumans who have predated us by millenia. These are just bigger tribes. Our concept of nationality is formed from the continental landscape, and our external needs and the outward pressures we exert are decided by the resources at home in those landscapes, but that does not make them ours. Politics and diplomacy and all the international law you can shake a stick at is a reaction to the horrors of war. Avoiding war is the aim in that case. The necessity for it's creation does not come from the flag, our "American Values" or any god given right. Here in our homeland America values itself, and we are not unique in those sort of sentiments.

I think that when people assume America is forever they are really missing the point. We are a young county in the global community, a fantastic empire of wealth and ideas. Whatever we did to get here, good or bad, we are here now. It was not given to us, but we fashioned it out of practically nothing. However saying that we own the land is crazy, because someday there is going to be America in space, as in football and Burger King in space. In that future we will hopefully understand that you can't own your mother.

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Gotta talk here. Not sure why but I feel like I'm at a very delicate point in this recent bout of abstinence. My obsessive thinking about food feels less intense than it has in the past. The constant murmur of the cookie aisle and yearning has receded a bit and I'm not sure what to think. It has to be good, but why this feeling of impending doom?

I recently realized that I am still as big as a house, and that messed me up for a few days. "Big as a house" as in I still have over 100 pounds to lose. After having suffered enough to lose 80 pounds how can there be so much left to lose? I'm distressed enough with the sudden arrival of my rib cage, I feel as though a hundred pounds down the road I won't even be recognizable. I probably haven't weighed 200 pounds since I was 16. I can barely imagine it.

It just seems like I'm at a major crossroads. I could really buy a mountain of junk right now and throw it all out the window, but I'm probably not going to. Part of me wants to gorge and binge just to prove that I am still in control. After all I've been doing what my sponsor tells me to all this time. When do I get a turn? I guess I'm still having problems seeing the good in all of this even though I'm hit in the head with it every day.

I feel amazing, compliments have been rolling in, sex has been better and better and I've been more rested and alert than I ever was when I was eating. So what is the problem? Can't eat whoopee pies. Can't eat ice cream. Can't eat candy. If the devil walked up to me now and told me I could buy a body impervious to binge eating with my soul, I'd have to think about it. I have to try to remember what it was like when I was in it, how miserable I was, all the poor health I had and other sad side effects I won't get into. None of it comes to mind when I'm standing in front of the bakery racks at the supermarket. I'm still very sick.


This video is about milk.

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Today is my first ever 30th day of back to back abstinence. About two months ago when Sam called me up on Mother's day morning and told me that he'd lost his abstinence after FOUR years, I really just wigged out. He couldn't be my sponsor any longer and I would have to find a new one, but the real damage was the realization that even if you've been straight up and down for that long, you can still fall off. I was seriously confused. Don't we get any respite? Doesn't this crap ever have an ending of some kind? I knew in my mind that people lived with their compulsions for a lifetime, but I didn't really understand it until then.

So I ate and ate and ate. Two weeks of practically nothing but junk and I gained back 20 pounds all the way up to 327. I was despairing hardcore and I didn't know what I was going to do. Luckily I went to my men's meeting and took the 're-commitment' chip from the chipster and got another sponsor. It's a shiny sliverlike coin with the OA emblem on one side and the serenity prayer on the other. If I made it to 30 days I would get another one, so I focused on that. Somehow it helped. My new sponsor is an amazing dude named Jerry and I can only hope that he has better luck than Sam did.

Now I'm down past my previous low and I'm feeling really healthy and energetic. My clothes are falling off of me and I have no money to replace them, but it's only a problem every so often. My wife is dieting too so we can both bitch about food now, which is a nice change. I have to admit that I've been skating through these days, not really working program very well, just calling, praying and weighing my food, but I think it's enough for now. If I did everything that is usually recommended, I'd be working two jobs instead of one. Perhaps it's gets easier as you go.

I just wanted to get all that out and say that I'm still here and still in OA. I'm changing the name of the blog to something more up-beat because I feel like it. Talk to you next time.