The Journey's the Thing…

Good morning, world. It’s another day this morning and it started with a drive down to the VW store to pick up my Jetta. She needed a fairly good amount of work done to her (shocks, exhaust system, wipers, new tires) and it wasn’t cheap, but it’s done and I won’t have to have those items fixed for a good while. Now I am back home for just enough time to jot these thoughts in space and then run out and go to the noon meeting in Great Barrington. From there I drive to Pittsfield and pick up my good friend J who is leaving detox today. We then drive down to Canaan and deliver him to a rehab where he will be spending at least the next 3 weeks. If I’m lucky, I’ll have time enough when I get home to have a quick nap and a snooze, and then it’s back to Great Barrington where I’ve been asked to speak tonight and share my experience, strength, and hope. Somewhere along the line I’ll eat. I promise, I won’t forget. Tomorrow I’ll have some time to decompress . I think I’ll put the finishing touches on my college essay and fill out any remaining paperwork needed for the orientation meeting next Wednesday.

I’m very excited about this college thing. There is no real fear, just some nervousness and the general feeling that I won’t measure up. ‘Measure up to what?’, I ask myself.

The yardsticks of accomplishment and success are a damning bunch. What is ‘success’, really? When will I know that I have accomplished any goal? The lines between ‘doing’ and ‘done’ are never very clear to me, and they run like ink in the rain. I tend to judge myself based on what I view as the successes of others around me, mostly my family members. This is something I have always done, and always to my detriment. The expectations I put on myself are never achievable because they are based on the successes of those that I admire and those that I wish to be.

The lesson for me today is that I can only be myself, no matter how hard I try to be like someone else. I can view others as inspiration and not the end-all and be-all of how I want to live.

The rain falls down, and I can’t stop its falling.
My garden grows because of the water.
Even the weeds grow.
They are part of my garden
And serve a purpose
Beyond what I know.

Johnnyboy

And so am I, it seems. I will not be writing about death and disease this morning, so, everyone, breathe a sigh of relief. I will mention, however, that my sister will be in London on Saturday for a couple of days. She’s an academic and is combining her trip to Iran and France with a lecture on 19th century female literary figures. Of course I am worried about her safety, but I think this will be the end of hostilities for the time being in England. All war is tragic and cruel, but this kind of warfare seems to be the most tragic, cruel, and cowardly of all.

So I have joined the online DVD rental company called Netflix. It’s pretty cool, but I won’t go into it, because they can advertise by themselves. This means that I can finally indulge myself in a real guilty pleasure, one that I acquired during my first year of sobriety, waiting around for meetings to start: The X-Files. I was lucky to be able to catch 2, not 1, episode every day except Saturday, starting at 5PM. After the X-files, I watched “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” with no less enthusiasm. So my weekdays were scheduled and structures along 2 things. My meetings came first, then X-Files. It really worked. I think I ended up watching most of the last 2 seasons, before Robert Patrick took David Duchovny’s place. But really, how can you replace a character as quirky and funny as a guy named ‘Fox Mulder’? What were they thinking?

So anyway, I now have the first 3 discs of season 1, and am having great fun noticing the low budget offerings of a fledgling sci-fi detective show. One thing I saw right off the bat was that Mulder has to always request a car and sign it out before he leaves the building. Good continuity, certainly, but in later episodes, he and Scully are wholly independent from much of the goings-on in the FBI.

So, with 8 seasons to watch, that’s a whole lotta Mulder and Scully. But without commercials the episodes are only 40 minutes long. That should take me, let’s see…

Johnnyboy