zip of the lip

Listening to the grateful recovering alcohol-addicts makes me wonder why I am not so happy to be saved.

I know they are sincere, especially these hard-core losers who have stayed sober for years and are now effusive, winning, and touchingly emotional. Even several of the younger people are convincing, those who really understand that they were going to die or go to prison.

Maybe I never really believed I was doomed. You say, "all evidence to the contrary", and I agree but still there is a part of me, as I note in the sidebar, I have never surrendered. A part of me that that is always on the edge of panic---but not the right panic, not human panic in which one flaps his limbs and runs in place.

Instead it's high anxiety about other's perceptions.

But it's not that I fear they will discover the truth about me but that they will "discover" a falsehood. (And I should reflect that strangers are on pretty thin ice with me, so why shouldn't I be on thin ice with them?)

I don't wish to raise my head above the parapet. I'm superstitious about three on a match. I talk about this now because lately I find that I can barely write here, and in the last three months or so I haven't spoken in an A.A. meeting except once, when called. I still have questions. The loaded questions I used to ask counselors and my parents and, once upon a time, a sympathetic county sheriff.

What I know of other people is that , in the main, they are dopey, happy, sneezy, grumpy, sleepy and Doc.
___
There's a fear of discovery of my low self-worth.

Low self-worth! I'll sometimes think, when anyone is so benighted: "well he's the one to know".

Deep down inside myself, when I was in jail and in a twilight sleep I dreamed myself a cipher on top of a short, white Roman style column. Where nothing had ever stood.

Zero, after years and years of recounting and recalibrating, always the same "equals Not".

People come and go, reach into this box of confetti, toss it up in the air for me, "there!" pause "and there!" pause. Flying colored paper confetti , this is you, love.

But the Zed just watches the paper come down, and waits for the merry one to realize that I don't know how to deal anymore.

It's when I pray. As bad as it is, if I am lead back to consider and to pray, there is a reprieve.

But men are slaves to themselves and they forget. So , in my prayers, I ask not to forget that I have asked these things, that I have come to realize these wonders and the miracle of my life. I still can thoughtlessly throw away without extra help.

It's free will with a exacerbated character defects. I face the world as a committed , already ravaged alcoholic.

and it's time for a meeting. Thanks for reading.