This is a message from a website, www.today@dailyom.com that I receive every day. I’d like to share this with you.

Till Next Time -

Your Humble Road Warrior

Looking At What We Don’t Want To See

It is one of life’s great paradoxes that the things we don’t want to look at in ourselves are the very things we need to look at in order to know ourselves better and to become more fully who we are. The feelings that make us want to run away are buried treasure full of energy and inspiration if we are willing to look. These feelings come in many…

If you’ve been on the site any time in the last 10 days, you’ve seen the same face on the front page video. The woman’s story has been divided into 6 parts, recounting, some times in graphic detail, episodes from her 25 year long addiction to several substances and behaviors. The woman appears very neatly dressed, has obviously had a good education and speaks very succinctly about what addiction has done to her, to her family, to her friends and to her life in general.

When one thinks of the term “addict” her face is not the one that would be…

As word gets out about our website, I have been receiving letters from folks who are currently trying to practice their sobriety from behind bars. Even though inmates are granted no access to computers, I will periodically share some of these letters with you so that those who do not have a voice may be heard. I will type the letters exactly as written. Here is a letter I received last week from a gentlemen incarcerated in Texas.

I wrote him today, telling him that I was posting his letter on our site.  Take a moment and read it, if you…

For the last two weeks I have skipped church and attended a HUGE 12 step meeting that is held every Sunday morning. I never liked this meeting because it seemed to me that is was where people went to be seen. Everybody who’s anybody is there and I had decided long ago to boycott that kind of public display of ego. Well, guess who’s eating her words? The last two weeks have given me the opportunity to hear people share that I don’t even know, to listen to even more opinions that just might open my mind a little more…

Last night I went to a local church in town where a 12 step, Al-Anon and Alateen meeting were all being held simultaneously. Since I qualify for two of the three, I had to make a decision. I chose the Al-Anon meeting because I had never been to this one before. The topic was centered around the difference between compassion and enabling - something with which everyone in the room had more than an adequate amount of experience. Most of the faces were new to me, but the wisdom and strength were reminiscent of other Al-Anon meetings I attend.

Being a…

This morning our office mouse, Cotton, died. Even though he technically belonged to my boss, Melissa and her daughter, he was my mouse. His cage was kept in the little loft where I work and over the past year he had become by best buddy. I would leave his cage, open, on the carpet and he would come and go whenver he pleased.

Over the last several months, he and I had developed a special bond. He would crawl up my leg into my lap and I would put him on my desk, where he explored the tape dispenser, chewed the ends…

Ah!!!! I remember the good ol’ days - comin’ off a binge or resurfacing from a blackout - my hangovers varied depending on the drug or amount of liquor I had consumed. Mostly they were of the jackhammer in the head kind - I would wake up (or come to) in the morning, head pounding, my stomaching feeling like I had just drunk a glass of vinegar that had been filled with dirty cigarette butts and left to sit for a week or so. I would drag my sad carcass into the bathroom, look in the mirror and say to…

Angela, who has worked on this site, sent this to me this week-end. Lest we ever forget….

from The Richmond Times Dispatch

“A woman was killed and a man was hurt yesterday in a single-car crash on state Route 288 in Chesterfield County.

Virginia State Police trooper M.S. Meyer said Megan R. Ford, 30, of the 6100 block of Watchhaven Circle in Chesterfield County was flown by helicopter to VCU Medical Center, where she died shortly after the 12:40 a.m. crash.

Ford’s passenger and husband, Jon G. Brown, 29, was taken by ambulance to VCU, where he was being treated for injuries that were…

funk: /fʌŋk/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[fuhngk] Pronunciation Key - noun

–verb (used with object)

I am definitely in “a dejected mood.” I am not, however cowering. I am not in a state of great fright or terror, but I just want to join The Junky’s Wife and go shopping, eat my guts out, make a mess and leave it for someone else to clean up (which ain’t ever gonna happen). I don’t…

This was sent to me by a friend who lost her youngest brother to alcohol and drugs almost five years ago. Mikey was the youngest of 6 children, had the ability to turn the the most mundane objects into works of art, was handsome, witty, was an excellent cook, an animal lover, a “neat freak”, was very well read and had an undying devotion to his family. He was also lonely, tended to take everything to the extreme, tried relentlessly to stay clean, and often did so for months at a time… only to go back into the dark, a…

Einstein’s theory of relativity is known by many, but I thought you’d get a kick out of this bit of genius!

Sometime ya just gotta laugh a little!

Till Next Time -

Your Humble Road Warrior

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So here I am, just like every other Saturday morning, at the Blood Bank, with a needle in my arm, listening to the comforting purr and sputter of the large white machine to my left, letting me know that my platelets are being removed. Platelets, if anyone cares to know, are little chunks of larger bone marrow cells called megakaryocytes that enter the blood stream and are the main component in the human process known as clotting. Without these little boogers a small cut would be deadly. People who have leukemia or are on chemotherapy have dangerously low platelet counts,…

I’m going to whine for a while, so bear with me. I do a lot of nice things for a lot of people and try to be pleasant to everyone I come in contact with, but lately I have experienced several days of constant disappointment. I’m not the kind of person who goes into a rage when things don’t go my way, although when I was in active addiction, that was my M.O. I don’t make little children cry, I do not kick animals, and I always hold the elevator for someone who is trying to rush in before the…

Today is Independence Day. That means a lot of things to a lot of people. When I was young it used to mean sparklers burning my fingertips, my little brother throwing fireworks at me, my dad acting like a 10 year old himself ,and watching fireworks over Lake Michigan. As I got older it meant getting drunk or high with friends and maybe watching the fireworks…maybe not…it didn’t really matter.

When I had a child, even though I was drunk for the first 8 years of my child’s life, we still went to watch the fireworks every 4th of July -…

I’ve had better week-ends.

Yesterday was what I can only describe as a “dull” kind of day. Not dull in the sense that it was boring, but dull in the sense that my emotions were brought to a place that I can only describe as flat, lackluster, colorless, listless…I could go on, but you get the picture. I was in bed, reading, not wanting to do anything remotely physical. I fell asleep and had a horrible dream where I was standing beside my car and, all of a sudden, a SWAT team descended upon it, ripping it to shreds, looking for…

I was out of town yesterday recording a series of panel discussions with “professionals” in the addiction/recovery field for a series of videos that will appear on a national recovery website later on this summer. There I was, surrounded by Ph.D.’s, experts on addiction prevention, treatment, and long-term care and I was the only person in recovery in the group. I was told that for each of these panels, there had to be one person in recovery at the table. On this particular occasion that was me.

We taped four discussions, all revolving around prevention and treatment for addiction in the…

I took a 12 step meeting to the psych ward the other night. I’ve done this regularly in the past year or so and I’ve never come away from that experience without thanking God that I am where I am, even if it’s a really crappy place. This night was no different. There are always two of us that bring the meeting, but no more than two, since often there are only one or two patients that come, and we are conscious of not outnumbering the patients. This time we were both females, and three patients showed up for the…

I had a meltdown in the parking lot of a grocery store the other day and ended up sobbing into my steering wheel. I rarely cry anymore. I have sometimes laid in my bed and tried to force myself to cry, but my tear ducts are like 19th century oil wells that have been sucked dry. I cried a couple of weeks ago at the funeral of a friend of mine who died too young. His son read a poem that I had sung years before when I was the music director at that church. The eventual loss of that…

I just went for a massage - not a regular 60 miinute, $90.00 job, but a mini, 15 minute chair massage. It was all I could afford and someone told me about this guy who gives a chair massage for $15.00. Since that fit into my schedule and my budget, I took a chance. For a quarter of an hour I was in heaven, as this manual magician went up and down my spine, manipulated my shoulders until they were ready to gently slide right out of their sockets, and powerfully caressed my arms and hands with a honey-covered strength…

So…I got the bad news from the dentists. Since I have several different problems with my mouth, I have to see several different dentists - there’s a specialist for everything nowadays, isn’t there? Well, the grand total for 3 lousy teeth that you can hardly see is a whopping $6,000.00 - give or take a couple hundred bucks. I have no health insurance, so that’s a major hit to my wallet (actually it’s a major hit to my credit card), and there are so many other things I would rather do with that kind of money - you know -…