PoM 208
Step Nine:
Steve,
If you will just weigh and measure your food, not eat flour or sugar, eat no “individual binge foods”, and not eat in between meals, like FA says, you will always know precisely what your relationship with God is.
Just that alone, perfect clarity in knowing God’s will, would be gift enough.
But, if you are willing to let go of meat and dairy, grow as much of your own food as you can in your home and work out vigorously…I will give you anything you want.
You know me. You have seen me complete the only two vows I have ever taken, so you know you can trust me.
Think about it…
PoM 209
Step 10 Daily inventory:
I know I’m getting better.
To fulfill a commitment on an offer I made to my child and adolescent in the previous Office, I purchased an $1100 microphone and a $300 Digital/analog converter to record my music.
It arrived today along side a 10 page hand written letter from my mentally challenged brother.
I choose to read the letter first.
That gives me hope that my “selfishness and self-centeredness” is diminishing, as well as my obsession.
PoM 210
In 1762 The French writer Jean-Jacque Rousseau, the philosophical architect of the French Revolution, in his book “Emile”, presents the concept of “Muscular Christianity”.
He was a devout Christian but he knew something was fundamentally wrong with his religion because no one paid attention to their bodies.
I am a devout 12 stepper, but like my spiritual better, Rousseau, 12 step without paying attention to the body is unthinkable to me.
I mean, how do utilize a racing engine without a chassis and body?
How do you play a symphony without an orchestra?
How do you discover a bacterial illness without a microscope?
You get the picture…
I understand the need to emphasize the spiritual 86 years ago when 12 step began, but to not acknowledge the physical component, now, in a spiritual life, is either ignorance or negligence and I don’t want to be spiritually stupid or sloppy…
…besides, my wife already says I’m retarded.
PoM 211
Dear S,
Forever, in my mind, I have you associated with Michael C., because, the last time I ever saw you, you two were together, trying to get me to come back to the University of Virginia, after I left to seek my fortune in the music world (which I thought was very loving and compassionate).
Michael and I started out as friends, and then he got romantically interested in me and was rather insistent in expressing his amorous desires.
Through simple and direct use of boundaries I was able to keep him at bay.
One night we had been taking drugs all night long and he came over to my apartment and there was the usual awkward forwardness.
I was the only Caucasian living in all African American, 90 unit, subsidized housing project in Charlottesville, Virginia.
After a while he got angry with me fending off his advances and said “You will have problems with money all your life”.
He was right.
But, I joined Debtors Anonymous in 1988 and have not debted since.
I later joined Under-earners Anonymous and have had a “sane, sober and humane living” my whole recovery life.
And now, wonder of wonders, people have recently begun supporting my writing through donations.
I know, now, Micheal was just expressing his teenaged anger through passive aggression…but, in my codependency, I believed him.
It’s nice to be free of that hex…
PoM 212
“I feel like getting plushed to the scuppers.”
The Purple Rose of Cairo
I used to say:
I was wasted.
I was totaled.
I was wrecked.
I was toasted.
Notice how all those sentences begin with Me?