420 Summit

No nukes!

I celebrate six months of sobriety tomorrow.

This may not seem like a long time, but as far as I’m concerned it may as well be sixty years. Three decades of bad habits are not easily broken and I’m pretty damn proud of myself. In this six months I have lost my mother. I have lost my son. I have lost my home, my friends and my livelihood.

It has not been a great year.

I have also lost my fear.

I am no longer afraid. I’ll deal with what life brings and I’ll deal with it like an adult, just like the rest of the world has been doing, around me, my whole life.

This is scary as hell, but at least I’m not bored.

Totally unrelated, but when did volunteer work start to pay?

I’ve been cleaning up a park every morning. A real shithole of a park in the heart of the ‘hood. Every morning, before the day camp starts, we go in and scoop up the broken glass, syringes and drug baggies. It takes, maybe, at the most, an hour.

Recently, they have been asking what I want.

Breakfast? Money? Beer?

I don’t want anything. That’s why I volunteered. I don’t do this because I’m a nice guy with nothing but time on my hands (true, but irrelevant) but because I lived around the corner and always regretted the fact that my kids couldn’t play in the park. It’s simple, I give an hour a day and dozens of kids don’t spend the day stepping over dirty needles and fiddling with cornerless baggies.

Anyway, a wee deposit in the old karma bank never hurts. I feel good about Al and that’s worth more than a few eggs — even if they throw in some bacon and twenty bucks.