James's comments (member since Oct 23, 2008)

James's comments from the K.S.R. Kingworth group.

I consider my stepfather my true father; my biological father basically gave me half my DNA and a first decade full of abuse that nearly killed me. My stepdad filled the role of father, as it sounds like you did for your adopted son. M. Scott Peck wrote in The Road Less Traveled that love isn't so much about emotion as about behavior - what you do for someone; love is work. My stepfather did the work. I counted him as not only my role model but one of my best friends from the time I was 12 until he died in 2003. A wise, funny, gentle man.

Once when I was in 8th grade, my mom had told me she needed me to start part of dinner cooking when I got home from school. If I didn't get that done, there'd be hell to pay when she got home. Mom was loving and devoted, but had a flamethrower for a temper. Well, I got home and immediately accidentally locked myself in the garage - I could get out into the yard, but not into the house. I thought for a while about how insistent Mom had been that I had to get dinner started right then, and finally decided I had to get into the house no matter how. So I kicked in the door from the garage into the house. When Mom got home from work and saw the door she flipped out, and the thing she said most often was along the lines of "you just wait until George gets home!" He got home, looked at the wreckage, and asked "What happened to the door?" I told him, and he just laughed and said, "Well, you'd better fix it."

Yes, I think one of the best of the many good things I learned from my stepdad was his guideline, "As long as you're meeting your responsibilities and meeting your family's needs, don't miss opportunities to have fun."

When I was in high school, my parents took the family to Colorado for a week every summer. We'd rent a cabin on a lake and spend the week fishing from shore or from rowboats, hiking in the woods, and just relaxing. It was a tradition and a high point of the year.

One year we had real money trouble; our mom and George, our stepdad (my hero and role model, the person I want to be like when I grow up) had barely saved enough for the Colorado trip. But a heavy rain came through, the beginning of the mid-to-late summer rainy seasons, and within minutes water was leaking into the house in several places - dripping from ceilings or light fixtures which had to be gingerly turned out, and coming out from under the baseboards in the hall, so that wall was shot.

They did some figuring and realized that getting the roof fixed would cost almost exactly the amount they'd saved up for Colorado. I could see which way things were going to go, and I understood the idea that you take care of what you have to do before you go play, but I was bummed.

Then George stood up - he was 6'4" - and looked very thoughtfully at my brothers and me, and smiled. He turned to Mom and said, in his rumbling deep voice and faint Louisiana accent, "You know, Carol, somehow I can't picture these boys in the years ahead reminiscing and saying, "Wasn't that a great roof we had that summer?" In short order we were loading the car.

We knew it might rain more over the next week, but somehow we just didn't worry about it. When we got home - in a driving rain - the house had become a swamp. But even as we were cleaning up, dragging carpets outside (once the rain stopped), going on the roof to try and spot each place that was leaking - we kept thinking about getting a week at the lake instead of a new roof at that point, and laughing - we thought our parents were kind of crazy, and we were proud of their craziness.

We were able to get the roof redone a little later; George landed a couple of lucrative jobs and that paid for it.

Yeah - dark green, so they must have been Trekkies who thought it was Vulcan blood. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say maybe the light wasn't good enough to tell the difference. Maybe we got off lightly when they didn't take Paul's jacket too.

The water utility referred to the well water as groundwater, so I took that to be the term. Anyway, I wonder what cause of kidney failure is more prevalent in other places? Maybe it's having money - that's definitely less prevalent here than in most other states!

Thanks, Laurel-Rain - it was suspenseful for my parents, but my friend and I were blissfully unaware of what was going on until we got back to my house. Kind of funny to think we were just cruising around town for hours without a clue that the police were looking for us.

Will, the groundwater is from wells - they're just now starting a project to also take water from the Rio Grande and San Juan rivers because the city's water use has outgrown what they can take from the aquifer (it's a problem of unsustainable growth and development without planning or oversight, but that's a whole other issue). It doesn't taste very good. Here's a link to the city water utility's info page on the arsenic thing http://www.abcwua.org/content/view/282/5... ; we have since gotten a high-end water filtration system.

When I was in high school my friends and I spent a lot of time just driving around town at night. Once I was out with a guy named Paul, one of my friends who was kind of a theatrical personality.

I was driving. Paul took off his coat and turned around and tossed it into the back seat; it slid off the seat onto the floor. He reared up in his seat, grabbed the coat, and threw it forcefully onto the back seat again and pushed it down, yelling "Stay!"

A couple of minutes later I noticed that another car seemed to be following us. I sped up and took several turns, and they were definitely following us, so I decided to lose them - we were in an old Plymouth Valiant and they were in a Mustang, and I knew I couldn't outrun them on pavement. So I led them to an area on the edge of town where the pavement stopped and we were on some pretty rough washboarded gravel road - they had a lot less ground clearance (and were probably less willing to beat up their car), so we lost them pretty easily there.

Once they were out of sight, I headed back into town and got on one of the main drags heading back to our neighborhood. Along the way we came to an intersection where the police appeared to be in the process of setting up some kind of traffic checkpoint, but they didn't have the street fully blocked off yet, so I just blew by and kept going.

By this time I was getting low on gas, so we drove to Paul's house. He got in his car and followed me back to my house, where I parked my car, climbed into his, and off we went again.

We finally decided to go home somewhere past midnight, and when Paul pulled up to my house to drop me off, all the lights were on, which was weird. I saw my parents looking out the front window. Paul came in with me, and they looked very worried and asked whether we were okay - we were puzzled and told them we were fine. They asked whether anything bad had happened that night, and we were even more puzzled and said no. Then they told us the police needed to talk to us, and called the cops to tell them we were there. Now I was really confused and getting worried.

It turned out that the people in the Mustang had seen Paul's goofy behavior with his coat and decided they were seeing someone being beaten up in my car - they had tried to follow us, and had called the police on their CB and reported the situation, including a description of my car and where they'd last seen us heading when I lost them. The incomplete traffic checkpoint had actually been a roadblock to try to catch us. They'd traced my license plate and shown up at my house, which scared my parents; we were rowdy kids and the possibility of us having gotten into some kind of fight didn't seem out of the question to them. Then after the cops left, my folks had heard me pull up when we switched cars, but we were gone by the time they got out the front door. They'd called the police and told them the car was back but we were gone; the cops came back to the house and searched my car for evidence, with my stepdad looking over their shoulders. They did find a dandelion digging tool (I had a part-time job cleaning up around a shopping center and a couple of office buildings) with what they considered suspicious stains - dandelion blood! - so they took that; I never did get it back.

When my folks called the police and told them we were back, they came back and questioned Paul and me for some time, but were finally satisfied that the only violence in my car had been committed against Paul's jacket. We finally got done with it all around 3:00 a.m.

My wife and I were at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale - she was going to have surgery there, and they did about the most thorough exam and workup imaginable (incidentally, the people and their work are absolutely top-notch). We were making the rounds seeing a whole series of specialists, with her getting various tests done and then going through the results (we got caught up on a lot of reading sitting in various waiting rooms.) At one point, we met with several of the staff to go over some lab work; they were reading down a long list of findings, and then they paused, and the doctor said, "Your lab work also indicates elevated levels of arsenic in your system." At that, they stopped reading, and every head in the room except my wife's swiveled my way and they all just stared at me.

Well, the groundwater where we live in Albuquerque has elevated arsenic levels, and it shows up in the tap water. It's an ongoing issue with the city and state government, but they just don't have the budget to improve the processing enough to get the arsenic levels down to where they should be, although it's not really high enough to be dangerous.

My wife started laughing and we explained that, and assured them that they'd see the same thing in lab work on anyone from Albuquerque, but they didn't look convinced; they kept giving me the hairy eyeball for the rest of that meeting.

Incidentally, her surgery and recovery went well, so everything turned out fine.

Great icebreaker, Will...

My mom had been in a bad wreck on her way to work, and her face had been smashed through the window on her car door. It had torn her up pretty badly. She went to the hospital and got her face sewn up, then got a ride home - she was resting on the couch in the living room, then remembered that my brothers and I would be coming home from school soon (1st, 2nd, and 6th grades). She was kind of woozy from the painkillers and reasoned that if we walked in and found her on the couch we'd be alarmed, and she should meet us at the door so we'd know before we came in that she was there. So she kind of propped herself up on the couch, which was next to the front window, and told herself she'd just keep an eye out for us through the window. She fell asleep again with her chin resting on the window ledge; the curtain was behind her head. So we came walking up and were greeted by the sight of what appeared to be our mother's ash-gray, bloody, severed head sitting on the window ledge. We were alarmed.

Congratulations on your surgery coming out so well, Karey!

I don't adhere to any formal religion, but I know God is present, because I've experienced it in my life in some of the hardest times - it isn't that God will keep bad things from happening, but that if I am open to it, I'll be given the ability to cope no matter what. It's a matter, as your son said, of acceptance.

I had a real problem with people responding to loss and tragedy by saying that it's God's will and we just don't understand the big picture. Then I ran across a metaphor I love, many years ago. I was on a vacation in Carmel, CA, and came upon an exhibition of sculpture that was really striking - it was 'found object art', all assembled from trash, large and small pieces of junk and broken stuff the sculptor had picked up. There was a sign explaining that his rule for himself was that he did not break anything himself in order to get materials; he would only take things that were already wrecked and try to create some beauty with them. I had a flash - God is a found-object artist. God doesn't wish or cause harm or pain on anyone or anything, no matter what - that is not within the nature of the God I know. But when it occurs anyway, because we have free will or because things do just happen, God takes the wreckage and brings some good out of situations that would otherwise be a total loss. An example would be Anne Frank's diary.

Re Tolkien, National Geographic did a couple of excellent videos on his life in relation to the Lord of the Rings trilogy: here are links -

http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/shopp...

and

http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/produ...

(the first one focuses on The Fellowship of the Ring and the second on The Return of the King - I don't know why they didn't do one on The Two Towers.)

I just tried to sign up again and got the same error message as before. Could you please let me know whether you have my address, or should I keep trying the link?
Thanks!

Yes, the best way to find good friends is to be one; and if you put up a front and don't let people know the real you, they never have the chance to like, love, or respect the real you, because they're relating to someone who doesn't really exist. That kind of thing seems to generate a lot of comedy plots for movies and the TV, but isn't so great in real life.

My books are: The Addiction Counselor's Documentation Sourcebook, 2nd edition; The Addiction Treatment Homework Planner, 3rd edition with the 4th coming out in the spring; and Integrating the 12 Steps into Addiction Therapy. The first two I co-wrote with a colleague, Brenda Lenz, and the third I did solo. All are published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

As far as what I'd say to someone who was being judgmental - first, I'd point out that the American Medical Association decided decades ago, based on their research, that chemical dependence is a treatable disease, and ask them whether they really thought they knew more about it than professionals who've spent their whole careers working on this. If the person who is "on a high horse" has a moralistic attitude because of some kind of religiosity, I'd refer them back to what their own holy texts tell them about it, i.e. "Judge not, lest ye be judged..." and note that their own lives and behavior are also imperfect, though in different ways.
I'd also have to just keep in mind that I'm dealing with someone whose moral/psychological development is stunted and immature, someone who is blind to his or her own flaws and dark side because on some level he or she is afraid of those parts of self; so instead of looking in the mirror and saying, "Let me get my own act together here," (which takes work and courage), they take the easy, lazy way out - find someone else who has a problem they may not share, then attack and shame that person so they can bask in the self-righteous warmth of feeling superior.

All of which boils down to - it's their issue, not mine, and I refuse to buy into their outlook.

I'm working on the 4th edition of one of the books on addiction treatment I have in print (co-authored with a colleague), and on revising a proposal for a book on treatment program design and management - I submitted it a few months ago, and the editor sent me some suggested changes and said she thought she might be able to market it as a textbook if I make the changes.

I'm also playing with ideas for a science fiction novel, but haven't gotten farther than a few pages of notes, mostly for details of the setting or characters.

Karey,
I clicked on the link and got the page where I filled in my street address, but when I clicked on the button on that page, I got an error message saying I was already in the group.

Do you need/have my address?

Some things I learned about worrying about other people's opinions of me - your post made me think of these, Blooming:

First, it's mostly futile to try to impress people - they don't usually notice because they're too busy trying to impress you.

Second, as a friend of mine put it, "What you think of me is none of my business."

Third, if someone is giving you a hard time, it helps to stop and ask yourself why. I've found that it can be effective, if someone says something hurtful, to just say, "Ow! That wasn't nice," but not to get worked up about it. Or if someone tells me about a rumor, is gossiping to me, etc., I'll just calmly look at them and ask, "Why are you telling me this - what's your motive? What do you expect to happen because of it?" It turns the situation around and puts them on the spot instead of you. If they're trying to generate some drama, as they usually are, they'll learn to go mess with someone else who's less frustrating than you and more inclined to play their game.

Thank you for the invite, Karey!

I'm Jim - I am a 49-year-old psychotherapist and author of three books in print on addiction treatment, also working on a proposal for another on treatment program design and management. This is a second career - I was in the Marines for 20 years and retired 12 years ago.

I live in Albuquerque, NM with my wife Jan, who is a clinical social worker, and our elderly cat. We live on the same block where I lived as a teenager. I have two adult children, a son and a daughter, and two grandsons.

I've been an insatiable reader all my life - if I'm eating breakfast and don't have anything else to read, I'll read everything on the cereal box. My favorite genres are psychology, history, politics (I'm a solid liberal on most issues), science fiction and fantasy, and general science.

My other hobbies are fiddling with computers, target shooting, collecting pottery, and taking our grandkids to the zoo, natural history museum, Explora science museum, aquarium, and/or various parks (we have all the parks with good playground equipment marked with stars on a map of the city in my car.)

This looks as if it's going to be a fun group.