PoM 330

The Addiction of Artistic Preoccupations:

I have a need for safety.

It is right above my need for air, water, food, sleep and exercise.

That safety is expressed as physical safety: Not getting eaten by a roving brontosaurus Rex or being tortured by Ivan the Terrible.

It expresses itself in the need for emotionally safety: not having a controlling mother or shaming and blaming father.

It expresses itself in that most embarrassing of middle class ways…financial safety: Rent/mortgage, food, clothing, medical/dental care and old pristine John Coltrane albums.

As an American male, after fear of death and penal length, my greatest fear is being a loser, a failure, a has-been or a never-was.

As an American woman, my greatest fear is not death, it is being fat…or being caught at a party in the exact same dress as my rival.

The fear of failure is a mother/father issue starting about age 14 when I enter puberty and begin differentiate from my parents. It is a good and healthy fear. Fear of “Failure to launch” is very real.

If I have abuse, or neglect, in my childhood, the higher order need for creativity becomes exacerbated and there develops something that looks like obsession. It is not. It is the need for safety though seeking the “Second super-real world” that children live in when they play with their trucks and dolls.

The two needs are now fused. “If I am not successful at my art…I am not safe”.

This con-fusion of needs is so dissonant within my mind and heart that I can’t stand myself and I become a fawning female, reeking of codependency, or a tyrannical, overbearing, controlling, humorless, narcissistic ass as a male.

Since I hate myself, alcohol, pills, food, sex, bad relationships or shopping at Neiman’s are perfect solutions to eradicating myself.

That was certainly my experience…ask either of my ex-wives.

That will work, for a while, and then if I am very, very lucky, something will happen. I will run into someone I love; a potential partner, or my own child, and I will want to love better. I will want to become better. I will want to become better so that I can love better.

How do I resolve this conflictual confusion?

I can throw away my art. I have done that twice in my life for about 18 months…but that very real need, the need to be childlike, comes seeping back in.

Jesus used to say that you can’t get into heaven, except as a child…and he was a pretty smart guy for a blue-collar worker.

The problem is a matter of boundaries and the solution is simple: I must get both those needs met…but not in the same place.

I must have money: There is a guitar I want or an Hermès scarf.

I must have art: so that I can express my soul.

For me, even though I saw it as a failure at the time, teaching was the financial solution. It paid well, had short hours, I was the boss..and no commuting through LA traffic.

Composing nasty, disagreeable, avant-garde music in impossible situations on ridiculous instruments filled my need to be a tortured, misunderstood, isolated artist fighting the musical sloth, greed and immorality of the selfish-ignorant world at large, right out of an Ayn Rand novel, made me into the hero…that my father never thought I was.

John Lennon, who I was suggested to play with by John Cage, used to say “It’s easy…all you need is love”…and a lot of step work led by “Still Dave” on the weekends.

PoM 331

Step 11 “We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, asking only for knowledge of His will for us, and the power to carry that out”. “We ask God for inspiration, an intuitive thought or decision…We come to rely on it”
Big Book p86 and 87

This tells me that that God can give me an intuitive thought.

You gotta be careful though cause you can end up like Charles Manson…of course, you can end up like Joan of Arc, too. But, neither ended up very well, so caution through sharing with a sponsor or a group is wise.

I have been thinking of something that HP inspired me to think last week in the Joshua Tree Desert. It was “Why me?”

It took me a week to figure it out (We had a lot of extra paper-pushing administration to do this week at PrayerCall).

When Alona and I were in Laos she was concerned about sex before marriage.

I rather cheerfully offered to be chaste to help assuage her fears and to assure her that I loved her, for her…really loved her.

So, at the time I was to being obedient to the Christian part of God as she understood it.

What I noticed is that my spondylitis noticeably improved.

That’s not really all that surprising because I felt proud of myself…so, I walked taller. No magic here.

I interpreted that experience, and Alona noticed it, too, as my closeness to that part of her God.

But, what I did not attribute it to was the chosen chastity that was giving me high self-esteem and it’s effect on my carriage.

Hence the question “Why me?” makes sense.

Motivated by my love of my wife to be, I chose to be obedient to her God…but it was using the tool of chastity that did it, not the particular avatar of God that I was worshipping.

Today our family took a three hour walk and I carried a tux jacket to get fitted that I bought before I dropped ten pounds, with my sponsor’s permission, ten years ago.

I have not been that close, physically, to another woman in 4 1/2 years.

I could feel the heat of her body. I could smell her. She touched my arm and chest, almost imperceptibly, as she placed the pins in my jacket.

When we were done, as she slid my coat off she said, in the worst Cantonese/English possibly imaginable, “You need to stand up straight” and it hit me…the “intuitive thought”, of what that question meant.

I went home and, all day, gutted the Gandhi Offices to more user friendly topics, which Miss Alona will hyperlink after our Sabbath.

I am really curious about this and want to know more.

One of the things I really like about the stories about Jesus is, whenever he did a miracle, he never said “Wow! Look at me!”

He would say “Your belief has healed you”.

That says to me that the power to heal is inherently within me…and all of us. I just need a kick start.

A finite period of chastity works pretty good for an alcoholic, sexually addicted, food addict like me.

PoM 332

1939, in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, a line was published “Why don’t you choose your own conception of God”.

In 1986 The Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous program published a text with following five lines:

“Apparently God was not interested in relating to us as a parent might to some helpless child who was always getting into scrapes.”

“God seemed to want some kind of partnership.”

“Perhaps we were supposed to develop our full human capacities, instead of passively turning ourselves over to God as a wholesale protector or a punitive, omnipotent dictator.”

“We had progressed beyond an overseeing caretaker or parent-like God to the sense of being in conscious partnership with this Power.”

“This relationship appeared to be structured more along the lines of a conscious adult partnership centered on mutual sharing and cooperation.”

I don’t know, but that doesn’t sound like Charlton Heston coming down from Mount Sinai to me.

It sounds more like good negotiating between partners.

Men, we don’t need this stuff. We just grunt coarsely at each other…and reach for the claw hammer.

But you can’t successfully communicate in a functional relationship that way, when working with someone of the feminine ilk. It’s better to use those five suggestions that SLAA makes.

That feels, just a little bit, like the feminization of God…to me.

PoM 333

I set out on this Sunday afternoon to create amateur art, like the weekend warriors that I had made fun of all my life.

I am having so much fun.

Instead of the dozens of microphones that a professional studio has…I have one beauty.

Instead of the 96 inputs that pros use….I have two.

It is bare-bones simple and so beautiful to my eyes and heart.

Thank you God for my priorities…without forgetting my needs.

Amen