Causatum

Right after the events of 9/11, I sent an e-mail to an old friend telling him about what happened to me on that Tuesday, and attached the missive that I wrote in the days afterward (which I re-published yesterday). His only reply to me was this:

"...and what have you learned?"

Cryptic at best, insensitive at worst. I took it as the latter, and for a time, I did not speak nor write to my friend for a long time. I mean, we're talking about one of my oldest friends here, and all he could muster was that remark? I was furious and frustrated. This is a guy who knows me better than myself at times...and all he could do was send that?

Five years later, I'm beginning to understand what he meant by that. You see, for a long time I wasn't true to myself; I wasn't following a path that I should have taken. When I got out of school, I should have basically said, "Screw the $18K carrot, and do what you want to do with your life and teach". Instead, I opted for the money, the corruption of my ideals, and did what society expected me to do.

Society dictated that I was supposed to get a good job, get married, buy a house, have kids, and be the good little consumer I was supposed to be. I was supposed to pay my taxes and trust my representatives in Congress to do what was best for me. I was supposed to come home, have a few drinks to medicate myself, and watch the pablum that was fed to me on the Evening News. As long as I continued to do all of these things, my little corner of the world would be fine; I would reap the benefits of capitalism and a free society. After all, I was living in the greatest country in the world. I would never know a war on my own soil, nor would my government allow that to ever happen.

So for a few years, I sold out. I put my ideals on hold; my politics even changed. Whereas I used to be a caring individual (and one-time socialist!), I became less-caring and more concerned about me...my family and situation, and the hell with everyone else. My political pendulum swung to the right, and I voted the same way. I know a lot of people who did the same thing, so I just saw it as an "evolution"; a fact that perhaps I was growing up.

Let me clarify for the record here: I am a registered Independent. When I was in college in Vermont and Upstate NY, I was a registered Socialist. After college, I registered as a Democrat when I returned to Staten Island; I've been an Independent since 1992 when I moved and registered to vote in New Jersey. I have always pretty much voted with the candidate and not with the Party (except in college); it's just later on in my life I tended to vote Republican. Yes, I even voted for the current occupant of the White House, but only in 2000.

It was the biggest mistake I ever made in my life, and believe me...when you're a recovering alcoholic, you make a ton of mistakes in your life...but that single vote still haunts me to this day. Now I know how the Germans who voted for Hitler in 1932 felt. This was one of the things I have learned in the past 5 years.

After 9/11, there was also a period of time where I shut everybody out, including my wife and kids. Everything I had worked so hard for, everything that I believed had just come crashing down me. I didn't know who I was anymore. Was I that idealistic humanist of my teens and twenties or that self serving egotist of my thirties and forties? I had survived a terrorist attack...for what? So my life could go on just like it did before? My career meant nothing to me anymore...there had to be more to my life than that. I survived for a reason...but for what? I began to ask myself the fundamental questions of life, which were stated so eloquently by J Michael Straczynski in Babylon 5:

Who are you? What do you want? Why are you here? Where are you going?

I had no clue...none. So for a year after 9/11, I went to work two blocks from Ground Zero, and saw the wreckage of the South Tower every time I went outside for a cigarette. I would shake for no reason, have nightmares, and wake up drenched in sweat screaming in the night. The only way I could stop the shakes and put myself to sleep was to drink. Based on a few of my earlier posts, you've probably noticed that I liked to party, and yeah I did. But after my first daughter was born, I stopped smoking pot and outside of the occasional "long lunch" and a beer or two when I got home from work, I hardly went out at all anymore. After 9/11, all bets were off, and as we like to say in AA I was "off to the races".

Around the one-year anniversary of 9/11, something happened at home that I won't discuss here; I'm saving that for my 4th and 5th step...but it was enough to make me realize that I needed psychological help. So, I went out and saw a psychologist once a month for a few years who prescribed me some anti-depressants that worked to a degree...but since I continued to drink (and as alcohol is a depressant), I was kind of negating their effect. I also was seeing a therapist for a time, but that wasn't as often as it should have been because my boss was inflexible, to say the least. More on him in another post...I promise...but he became one of the reasons I had a breakdown in May of 2004.

I was a lost soul who was drowning himself in booze; I also started smoking a lot of pot again...after a 5 year layoff, no less! I sequestered myself in my basement in front of my nice large screen TV with the super-duper home theater audio system that I bought for the thirty pieces of silver that I had sold my soul out for. Believe me, Judas had it easier; I was dying a slow death and shutting out the world. It got even worse when I was downsized in December of 2004, and I got full salary and benefits for all of 2005. I drank every day, all day just to shut out the memories of 9/11 and the mess that had become my life...and got PAID to do it

Like I mentioned in my first post "Apotheosis Rebooted", in March I straightened out my alcohol problem. I will be sober 6 months on September 27th. I know, I promised that this would not be a recovery blog...which it won't, I promise...but it's necessary here to explain how I am still answering my friend's question. It also drives me to write this Blog in a coherent fashion and give it some direction and purpose to the original point of this Blog:

• My belief that if we as individuals change ourselves, our way of thinking, and our small part of the planet, we can affect change throughout the planet.
• In the process of doing this, we take the part of us that is God, The Universe, whatever you want to call it...and cast off that which binds us to the material and the earthly concerns of our daily lives.
• We can then affect the changes necessary to bring Humanity to the next phase of its evolution; taking care of ALL of Humanity in such a way as we can TOGETHER achieve that which is our true destiny as Human Beings.
• We will achieve oneness with that which created us in its image, we will fulfill the promise of our creation.

This all starts with understanding yourself first...so to answer my friend's question:

When you find out that you don't understand...that is when you begin to understand.