Anonymity

We live our lives as if they were all a secret - nobody watching what we do. Why would the package store clerk notice that every week I would buy a fifth of McAllen Scotch? Even if I spread the wealth and came around every fourth week by the time I returned, wouldn't he have noticed that I like Mrs. Jones and Mr Malden come round regularly for the same stuff? Clockwork really.  Why would the Deli man notice that after years of ordering three beers and a cookie for lunch, that when I ordered a pastrami sandwich and coke should I have expected anything but the query "what no beer"?

 What makes us think that our behaviors are so insubstantial? And again, did you think that they aren't? Do you care? If you didn't then why do you behave as if you did by acting as if this were just a routine purchase?

We think we live furtive lives because we are ashamed of ourselves.  That's the plain and simple of it all.  We are not hiding from others we are symbolibcally hiding from ourselves.  Because that is why we isolate, we do not want to face painful feelings, issues and facts.  I can't name all or even some of them.  They differ from individual to individual.  One man's fear is another's fodder.  One woman's shame is another's glory.  But the arch of the act, the feeling of shame that the drink causes is usually the same and we all travel that same route.

This morning in the municipal parking lot behind the church I was sitting in my car smoking when I noticed Gary thundering up in his Harley, his slight figure practically enfolded by the immensity of the machine, the noise swallowing his form in a gulp. But as he passed in front of the rising sun his silhouette traced an image akin to a comic book character, chiseled jaw, German WWII troop helmet covering his head as he gently nestled the bike into the parking space. Harleys don't sputter when you turn them off, they KACHUNCK, KACHUNCK with a percussive vibration that you feel in your toes until the deep throatiness KACHUNCKS to a halt.  And I thought to myself how in the world could I ever have imagined myself becoming friends with this tattooed motor biking chiseled jawed, German-helmeted, comic book character out of an Easy Rider extras call, had I not been in AA.  It would have been an extra ordinary circumstance to have met him.  Yet he is just an ordinary guy.  Sure, he's been in jail for two felonies, but what the hey, he still has artistic tendencies.  And not for nothing, his four year old daughter is the most charming kid this side of the Saugatuck River.  And this guy's greatest fear is that he will do something stupid that would keep him from seeing his little girl.  There is real growth in that guy, and I've seen this over the two years I've known him when he has remained sober and I have not.  He did something more righter  than I did!

I'm trying the draw the measure of myself against the model of these men, friends that I have made in the rooms.  And they are friends.  I don't know them all by name but I know them by sight.  And if I were to ask any of them for help I no doubt would get the same response "always say yes to a cry for help" or "never say no".  We do that because we never know when we will need that helping hand ourselves so in a sense it is a call for the behavior of self preservation. "Do unto others for your own selfish ends and you will feel good about yourself.  It always works that way, you know."

There is a price for anonymity, it is called notoriety.  Hide as we may from our own worst behaviors we are tattlers on ourselves in the worst possible ways.  We don't mean to be.  We didn't mean to throw up in all those taxis or fall down all those stairs.  Or mean to break all those bones, or noses, or dent all those bumpers.  We didn't mean to do all those things.  And if those things were done quietly and nobody knew who the culprit was then we "got away with it."  We try so hard to remain anonymous and we are befuddled and angered when someone suggests that we may be at fault (rightly or wrongly) for some mishap, as if we could not possibly have been the perpetrators and sheepishly ask "who me"? 

I have a friend who was used to tying one on just about every night.  He had enough to drink one winter evening and on driving home he stopped for gasoline having noticed that he was low.  After he filled up, he noticed that an hour had gone by since his last drink at the tavern so he decided to find a late night liquor store to cap off the night with some vodka.  This added an additional hour to his evening's sojourn and when he reached home he entered the house and his wife immediately quizzed him about his whereabouts.  He had lame this's and that's but the reason for the third degree turned out to be that she had been visited by the police who claimed that a car registered to their address had broken a gasoline pump! The police had left a half hour before his arrival home but my friend was required to go to the station in the morning to clear things up.

Nobody notices us hmmh?  Well apparently he had driven away from the pump with the pump nozzle still in his gas tank, resulting in his ripping the hose from the filling pump. The oil company eventually billed him for the $500 of damages but strangely his was not charged with any crime.

So we want to be invisible and think we are until we aren't and we wish we had been.

The point, not to put too fine of one on it, is that we have isolated ourselves so much in our heads that we believe we exist in an opaque bubble and so are invisible; we don't want anyone to pay attention to us so we wishfully think their attentions away whether it is paid or not.  Our invisibility is a figment of our imaginations and only when confronted by harsh reality, usually having to do with the law, or a restraining order or lawsuit, do the blinders come off.
res