Saturday 9.xii.2017Garret Andersen Building. Critical Eye Dept. 9am - 10am.
cultivating good habits on home turf is easier than practising them away from home, and especially on emotionally troubled ground, like Wefan, filled with booze (not me, the house).
Comments on Belle's blog about using supports all the time (not just when it's getting tough, which is way too late):
"And so on a good day I'd have a treat and it'd feel great and on a bad day I'd have to force myself to have a treat, even when doing so [only] made me feel less awful. Doing this repeatedly sets up a rhythm in my brain of good stuff coming no matter what the external circumstances or the wolfie drone is telling me. And forming new habits by DOING new things, not just thinking about or planning them. Sobriety is an activity for me, not just the opposite of drinking but the adoption and practice of new habits. And slowly it rewires the bit of my brain that says I don't deserve anything good until I'm at rock bottom and then I'm too ashamed to ask or receive anyway."
“Of all the things I’ve learned from you, and am grateful for, the lesson that self care needs to be a daily practice not 'apply when needed' is the most valuable. It is what has helped me getting farther along the sobriety path than I have ever been. Along the way I learned that if I practice self care by using sober tools every day, not always the exact same ones every day but something every day, I do not hear from Wolfie. Ever. It is nothing short of amazing in that, in some ways it is so simple! It’s the exact same philosophy with mindfulness practice, you have to do it every day, like showering ... Now I see that I can do this sober thing. Since I can do this sober thing, I am starting to realize I can do so many more things with my life that I had ruled out as 'impossible' before."
Do you have to shower every day? I didn't know that. Brush my teeth, maybe.
Sunday 10.xii It is at last snowing. Slept like a pig until 7am.
Continued with summerhouse. Pol much better (in great pain yesterday). I cannot a) work out how much wood I need (keep multiplying by two when I should multiply by four) and b) work out how to cut a mitred joint in a piece of quadrant beading. Do I have alzheimers'?
Monday 11.xii
Laura, Flost, Harriet and Belle all checked up on me (where's my blog? am I OK?) Gave me a nice warm feeling.
Asked H to join Douglas' New Year's Day walk. She prevaricated, then said yes.
did my penny wise accounting, and my figure for cash in hand was exactly right - very satisfying. Have still managed to spend £60 since Friday.
My email to Belle re my reaction to each phase of the summerhouse - it'll look better when . . . but then all I can see are the imperfections. Pol seems pleased. A lovely sojourn together. She has given me a picture for Christmas.
so nice to be home. Mindfulness tonight. Which was great, and a first - 3 men, two women. We did loving kindness practice and qi gong energy exercises. I thought about directing loving kindness at Clive Tuley but found that I couldn't or didn't want to.
Went to The Crown for a fake beer after. The gents smelled like 5 blokes had pissed all over it 2 days earlier and no one had been in to clean it since. I pointed this out to the bar staff. I do not normally do this. It is because I am sober and therefore always in the right. And cross.
"Dear Belle
Great. Been ministering to the sick, feeding the hungry and housing the homeless (if you can call a summerhouse a home - it does have a bed). A nice sober weekend looking after my ex- who was stabbed in the eye on Saturday (by a medically qualified person, so that's all right then). Anyway hence no message / blog.
Interested in your wormhole pre-write. I need to find mine, keep getting distracted.
and thank you - happy sober monday to you too.
funny thing, I've been working on my ex's summerhouse for a while (in short spurts, we're not neighbours) and each time I do something, I say to myself it'll be nice when I've done this e.g wallpapered it. And then I finish and all I see is the mistakes. And it happens every time I do the next thing. I've carpeted it, put up skirting, put beading round windows and doors, and after each job I say, it will be nice (when I've done the next thing). And each time I finish a job, all I can see are my mistakes. A very drinkery way to think, I think. My ex on the other hand seems genuinely pleased with my efforts. No wonder I drank.
love fatgit"
Wed 13.xii.2017 - Day 6? I could not do the simple maths to work out how much wood I needed for the summerhouse. I made simple mistakes 3 times in a row. I could not work out how to cut the mitred joints in the quadrant beading I was using to frame the windows and doors. I've been feeling increasingly stupid these past few days, and de-motivated. And every day, about 4 or 5 pm, I've felt like I had a mild case of flu. Is this some weird after- or side- effect of not drinking? Or maybe I do in fact just have flu. Or I'm going in to a low phase, which always makes me feel stupid. Belle has a motivational package for low mood which she is offering at a discount but it's still $33 and once I have paid my rent I will have about £120 to get through to the New Year on, unless I get some more work from Cransford Polythene.
And underneath there's a basic underlying anxiety - something I must do, but I don't really know what it is (write this blog? write to the taxman? make Laura's drying rack? cash in my Royal London pension?). So I do nothing, just sit here worrying - time for a drink.
Today I was supposed to be meeting my financial adviser to discuss my pensions but he has asked for a postponement until January because the pensions pot holders won't answer his questions (I'm not surprised, I lost the will to live just reading them - ridiculous really, just box ticking - when all I want to do is turn all my investments into cash or bitcoin or p2p lending or a wood and try and escape the moils of the global financial system and its imminent demise). Also I think the financial adviser may be struggling a little (evidence of chaos at his end, which doesn't fill me with confidence). And I want to get my money off Royal London without paying silly amounts of tax. Yesterday it appeared that my IFA had been struck off by the FCA but it turned out to be a slightly different outfit (Advanced as opposed to Advance) and based in Sheffield - momentary total panic as thought occurred that all my "investments" were actually pie in the sky and had already evaporated, and would I be half so smug happy as I am if that happened. No, in short.
Left an intelligent comment / suggestion on the Economist website about buy to let market (turn it into a shared ownership market, underwritten / supported / encouraged by the government for those who do not have a bank of mum and dad). Interesting to see if it gets any comments or recommends.
Esme is having a total melt down - doesn't want to be left behind, doesn't want to go to nursery, Laura (quite rightly) won't give in, but won't force her into the car either. So Esme's screaming (it's a death weapon) the house down and probably damaging her vocal cords. I think Esme may be about to surrender. Such a basic terrible life lesson - sometimes you can't get what you want, and how do you deal with that? And when do you just give up screaming, and admit defeat? (Have any of us, yet, really?)
And another excitement - the extra solar asteroid is attracting attention and being investigated even though it's leaving the solar system now - cigar shaped, about the size and shape of the London Gherkin - definitely rock - they referred to "Rendezvous with Rama" - I wonder if they read my comment on the Economist article. They didn't mention the fact that it's been accelerated by its sling shot round the sun (now travelling away at 2 million miles a day, having arrived at 1 million miles a day). R4 interviewed an astronomer who did wonder if this was a practise run (why? who? how long would it take to do a practise and then do another? why didn't she think there might be something inside the flying gherkin?). Odd. Amusing. Interesting. But in our scale (of time and space) this may be all we ever know about extra terrestrials travelling through on their way to somewhere more interesting / important - we're just ants on the path as this giant steps over our heads and walks off, or a metal box of unimaginable size and speed zips down the road.
They've called it oumuamua which is Hawaiian for "messenger from afar arriving first". Which is rather sweet. and it's spinning about its axis - every ten hours - internal longitudinal gravity just like AC Clarke specified for Rama. (Actually in the video it seems to be spinning end over end, so if there are aliens inside I expect there's a lot of vomit too.)
science alert says it has slowed down to 87,500 mph. So maybe it's come to stay. Or wipe us all out.
I think the answer to the low mood issue is to do whatever the hell I feel like doing, including nothing, except obvs to drink. And that doing nothing (stay in bed all day) is a thing.
I have also discovered that my Text tool has a save feature (Ctrl-S would you believe it) although it has no help that tells me this. And now I have found the full list of keyboard shortcuts. And I get the source code and can start modifying it (no I can't / won't, but I might, one day, when I feel less stupid).
I am so enjoying my self using this little Chrome and Text-app. Suddenly it feels like my machine. Get github to write software to make this machine look upgrade-able to Google. Add more memory? Is Chrome open source? Bet it isn't. (Quite funny - Google's spell checker doesn't think Google is a word).
and i don't have to finish what i'm doing. i can just get up, go downstairs and eat my porridge. wow! like right now! just don't check anything, just walk away from all these lists, open tabs, half read shit, half written notes, and do something else. it's called freedom. i give it to myself. i am allowed to be completely irresponsible. talking to H the other day about people who just throw brown envelopes in the bin. I said it was because they were rich. But it's not, it's because THEY JUST DON'T GIVE A SHIT. The only time I have ever felt like behaving that way was when I was either totally desperate (30.iv.2013 for example) or completely out of my head. I'm doing it now . . . .
and that's the quality i admire in pol, Joe, Laura - they just fucking do it, whatever they want when they want. and maybe why Ingrid drinks - because she is so wonderfully Swiss, doing things, being organised, keeping her house beautiful, which is great for everyone else but she ends up drinking and taking anto-depressants. what's my excuse? i'm not swiss. eldest child syndrome? I did have a Davos sledge when I was small, and I do like speaking German. and there's good old catholic guilt, which none of the aforementioned seem to suffer from.
and the funny things is, it is sometimes quite hard to tell the difference between the two extremes. I often do what I shouldn't (!? says who) or something irresponsible, or impetuous / impulsive, and the others often do something considered, considerate, for someone else's sake, but what drives each of us to do what we end up doing even if more or less the same as the other, is completely different. not better. probably all this agonising is just the false self disappearing up its own fundament.
I get such a warm feeling of control and security updating my cashflow with my cash spending - it says I have £47.73 in my wallet, and that is exactly what I have, and I know exactly what I wasted it on. It's the joy of double entry book keeping. Ditto finding out from the bank what the mysterious £2 I don't have available is - Amazon test payments, because it turns out I have two Amazon accounts (trouble with ordering from Amazon when drunk in Greece and losing patience and opening another account - i think it was to buy Alba a present). Killed one and complained to a poor Philippina who was obviously terrified of losing her job but wouldn't stop talking and was almost unintelligible, but explained the CoOp should have released the authorisation after 10 days, automatically.
Loving kindness mindfulness practise (audio emailed by Barbara) on my younger self - aged 23 / 24, before Sukie and the children, alone in Porden Road, Hammersmith. Possibly meditating. And I wonder if I/he then feels a slight waft of something nice as I sit here wishing my younger self well. And of course that person, place, time do not exist - what does exist is the echo, like the Cosmic Microwave background radiation from the big bang, the faint ringing 13 billion years after the bell has been struck, and in the same way, the shadow of me then, here embodied in myself now, in my memories and my body, and I can be kind to him, drop a lump of loving kindness cream on the sore bit, on all the sore bits, on other peoples' sore bits, and make it better. Not different, just not hurting, any more.
cultivating good habits on home turf is easier than practising them away from home, and especially on emotionally troubled ground, like Wefan, filled with booze (not me, the house).
Comments on Belle's blog about using supports all the time (not just when it's getting tough, which is way too late):
"And so on a good day I'd have a treat and it'd feel great and on a bad day I'd have to force myself to have a treat, even when doing so [only] made me feel less awful. Doing this repeatedly sets up a rhythm in my brain of good stuff coming no matter what the external circumstances or the wolfie drone is telling me. And forming new habits by DOING new things, not just thinking about or planning them. Sobriety is an activity for me, not just the opposite of drinking but the adoption and practice of new habits. And slowly it rewires the bit of my brain that says I don't deserve anything good until I'm at rock bottom and then I'm too ashamed to ask or receive anyway."
“Of all the things I’ve learned from you, and am grateful for, the lesson that self care needs to be a daily practice not 'apply when needed' is the most valuable. It is what has helped me getting farther along the sobriety path than I have ever been. Along the way I learned that if I practice self care by using sober tools every day, not always the exact same ones every day but something every day, I do not hear from Wolfie. Ever. It is nothing short of amazing in that, in some ways it is so simple! It’s the exact same philosophy with mindfulness practice, you have to do it every day, like showering ... Now I see that I can do this sober thing. Since I can do this sober thing, I am starting to realize I can do so many more things with my life that I had ruled out as 'impossible' before."
Do you have to shower every day? I didn't know that. Brush my teeth, maybe.
Sunday 10.xii It is at last snowing. Slept like a pig until 7am.
Continued with summerhouse. Pol much better (in great pain yesterday). I cannot a) work out how much wood I need (keep multiplying by two when I should multiply by four) and b) work out how to cut a mitred joint in a piece of quadrant beading. Do I have alzheimers'?
Monday 11.xii
Laura, Flost, Harriet and Belle all checked up on me (where's my blog? am I OK?) Gave me a nice warm feeling.
did my penny wise accounting, and my figure for cash in hand was exactly right - very satisfying. Have still managed to spend £60 since Friday.
My email to Belle re my reaction to each phase of the summerhouse - it'll look better when . . . but then all I can see are the imperfections. Pol seems pleased. A lovely sojourn together. She has given me a picture for Christmas.
so nice to be home. Mindfulness tonight. Which was great, and a first - 3 men, two women. We did loving kindness practice and qi gong energy exercises. I thought about directing loving kindness at Clive Tuley but found that I couldn't or didn't want to.
Went to The Crown for a fake beer after. The gents smelled like 5 blokes had pissed all over it 2 days earlier and no one had been in to clean it since. I pointed this out to the bar staff. I do not normally do this. It is because I am sober and therefore always in the right. And cross.
"Dear Belle
Great. Been ministering to the sick, feeding the hungry and housing the homeless (if you can call a summerhouse a home - it does have a bed). A nice sober weekend looking after my ex- who was stabbed in the eye on Saturday (by a medically qualified person, so that's all right then). Anyway hence no message / blog.
Interested in your wormhole pre-write. I need to find mine, keep getting distracted.
and thank you - happy sober monday to you too.
funny thing, I've been working on my ex's summerhouse for a while (in short spurts, we're not neighbours) and each time I do something, I say to myself it'll be nice when I've done this e.g wallpapered it. And then I finish and all I see is the mistakes. And it happens every time I do the next thing. I've carpeted it, put up skirting, put beading round windows and doors, and after each job I say, it will be nice (when I've done the next thing). And each time I finish a job, all I can see are my mistakes. A very drinkery way to think, I think. My ex on the other hand seems genuinely pleased with my efforts. No wonder I drank.
love fatgit"
Wed 13.xii.2017 - Day 6? I could not do the simple maths to work out how much wood I needed for the summerhouse. I made simple mistakes 3 times in a row. I could not work out how to cut the mitred joints in the quadrant beading I was using to frame the windows and doors. I've been feeling increasingly stupid these past few days, and de-motivated. And every day, about 4 or 5 pm, I've felt like I had a mild case of flu. Is this some weird after- or side- effect of not drinking? Or maybe I do in fact just have flu. Or I'm going in to a low phase, which always makes me feel stupid. Belle has a motivational package for low mood which she is offering at a discount but it's still $33 and once I have paid my rent I will have about £120 to get through to the New Year on, unless I get some more work from Cransford Polythene.
And underneath there's a basic underlying anxiety - something I must do, but I don't really know what it is (write this blog? write to the taxman? make Laura's drying rack? cash in my Royal London pension?). So I do nothing, just sit here worrying - time for a drink.
Today I was supposed to be meeting my financial adviser to discuss my pensions but he has asked for a postponement until January because the pensions pot holders won't answer his questions (I'm not surprised, I lost the will to live just reading them - ridiculous really, just box ticking - when all I want to do is turn all my investments into cash or bitcoin or p2p lending or a wood and try and escape the moils of the global financial system and its imminent demise). Also I think the financial adviser may be struggling a little (evidence of chaos at his end, which doesn't fill me with confidence). And I want to get my money off Royal London without paying silly amounts of tax. Yesterday it appeared that my IFA had been struck off by the FCA but it turned out to be a slightly different outfit (Advanced as opposed to Advance) and based in Sheffield - momentary total panic as thought occurred that all my "investments" were actually pie in the sky and had already evaporated, and would I be half so smug happy as I am if that happened. No, in short.
Left an intelligent comment / suggestion on the Economist website about buy to let market (turn it into a shared ownership market, underwritten / supported / encouraged by the government for those who do not have a bank of mum and dad). Interesting to see if it gets any comments or recommends.
Esme is having a total melt down - doesn't want to be left behind, doesn't want to go to nursery, Laura (quite rightly) won't give in, but won't force her into the car either. So Esme's screaming (it's a death weapon) the house down and probably damaging her vocal cords. I think Esme may be about to surrender. Such a basic terrible life lesson - sometimes you can't get what you want, and how do you deal with that? And when do you just give up screaming, and admit defeat? (Have any of us, yet, really?)
And another excitement - the extra solar asteroid is attracting attention and being investigated even though it's leaving the solar system now - cigar shaped, about the size and shape of the London Gherkin - definitely rock - they referred to "Rendezvous with Rama" - I wonder if they read my comment on the Economist article. They didn't mention the fact that it's been accelerated by its sling shot round the sun (now travelling away at 2 million miles a day, having arrived at 1 million miles a day). R4 interviewed an astronomer who did wonder if this was a practise run (why? who? how long would it take to do a practise and then do another? why didn't she think there might be something inside the flying gherkin?). Odd. Amusing. Interesting. But in our scale (of time and space) this may be all we ever know about extra terrestrials travelling through on their way to somewhere more interesting / important - we're just ants on the path as this giant steps over our heads and walks off, or a metal box of unimaginable size and speed zips down the road.
They've called it oumuamua which is Hawaiian for "messenger from afar arriving first". Which is rather sweet. and it's spinning about its axis - every ten hours - internal longitudinal gravity just like AC Clarke specified for Rama. (Actually in the video it seems to be spinning end over end, so if there are aliens inside I expect there's a lot of vomit too.)
science alert says it has slowed down to 87,500 mph. So maybe it's come to stay. Or wipe us all out.
I think the answer to the low mood issue is to do whatever the hell I feel like doing, including nothing, except obvs to drink. And that doing nothing (stay in bed all day) is a thing.
I have also discovered that my Text tool has a save feature (Ctrl-S would you believe it) although it has no help that tells me this. And now I have found the full list of keyboard shortcuts. And I get the source code and can start modifying it (no I can't / won't, but I might, one day, when I feel less stupid).
I am so enjoying my self using this little Chrome and Text-app. Suddenly it feels like my machine. Get github to write software to make this machine look upgrade-able to Google. Add more memory? Is Chrome open source? Bet it isn't. (Quite funny - Google's spell checker doesn't think Google is a word).
and i don't have to finish what i'm doing. i can just get up, go downstairs and eat my porridge. wow! like right now! just don't check anything, just walk away from all these lists, open tabs, half read shit, half written notes, and do something else. it's called freedom. i give it to myself. i am allowed to be completely irresponsible. talking to H the other day about people who just throw brown envelopes in the bin. I said it was because they were rich. But it's not, it's because THEY JUST DON'T GIVE A SHIT. The only time I have ever felt like behaving that way was when I was either totally desperate (30.iv.2013 for example) or completely out of my head. I'm doing it now . . . .
and that's the quality i admire in pol, Joe, Laura - they just fucking do it, whatever they want when they want. and maybe why Ingrid drinks - because she is so wonderfully Swiss, doing things, being organised, keeping her house beautiful, which is great for everyone else but she ends up drinking and taking anto-depressants. what's my excuse? i'm not swiss. eldest child syndrome? I did have a Davos sledge when I was small, and I do like speaking German. and there's good old catholic guilt, which none of the aforementioned seem to suffer from.
and the funny things is, it is sometimes quite hard to tell the difference between the two extremes. I often do what I shouldn't (!? says who) or something irresponsible, or impetuous / impulsive, and the others often do something considered, considerate, for someone else's sake, but what drives each of us to do what we end up doing even if more or less the same as the other, is completely different. not better. probably all this agonising is just the false self disappearing up its own fundament.
I get such a warm feeling of control and security updating my cashflow with my cash spending - it says I have £47.73 in my wallet, and that is exactly what I have, and I know exactly what I wasted it on. It's the joy of double entry book keeping. Ditto finding out from the bank what the mysterious £2 I don't have available is - Amazon test payments, because it turns out I have two Amazon accounts (trouble with ordering from Amazon when drunk in Greece and losing patience and opening another account - i think it was to buy Alba a present). Killed one and complained to a poor Philippina who was obviously terrified of losing her job but wouldn't stop talking and was almost unintelligible, but explained the CoOp should have released the authorisation after 10 days, automatically.
Relief to have you back. I love your wandering all over the universe!
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