I caught this by accident on TV Monday night while channel surfing.  If you like these kind of shows, here’s a guy to pull for; watch the intro to get his story:

No, not that – one more about catnip!

I’ve posted a good many PSA’s on this site.  But none like these.  Let’s have a little fun on this Caturday.

Law enforcement officials, cat counselors, and state legislators agree—catnip (called “Nip” on the streets) is tearing apart families and destroying lives. Please take a second to read these important catnip PSAs and share them with your cats or kittens. Nip: Not even once.

for more Catnip PSA’s check the rest out at BuzzFeed – http://www.buzzfeed.com/expresident/important-catnip-psas

Thomas Kinkade, the self proclaimed “painter of light” had a dark side too.  

At one time in his life, Kinkade was probably the most financially succesful living painter of modern times;  reportedly earning  $53 million for his work in the period 1997 to 2005,  after opening hundreds of his  Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries shops in malls across America.  Mr. Kinkade died at his Monte Sereno, California  home on April 6, at the age of 54, of respiratory depression as a result of a high concentration of ethanol combined with benzodiazepine use.

Kinkade had battled alcoholism for years and those close to him said he had just suffered a relapse before he died;  burdened in recent years by a separation from his wife, legal and financial troubles, and the low opinion of his work by critics.

The fine-art world overwhelmingly derided Kinkade’s work as little more than commercially successful kitsch.  Kinkade received criticism for the extent to which he had commercialized his art, for example, selling his prints on the QVC home shopping network.  Others have described his painting as chocolate box art and “mall art.”  

iResearch does not reveal whether or not Kincade ever sought help through AA, but if he had, it may have helped.  It sounds like working through the steps may have been of benefit to him.  Thinking about this actually made me dig out the workbook my sponsor and me worked on that dealt with resentments.  That’s me below to the right being halfway anonymous holding my 14 pages of resentments (no exaggeration, I was thorough… and no that’s not a Kinkade in the background). 

Resentment is a mental process. With resentment, we repeatedly replay a feeling, and the events leading up to that feeling, that angers us and lead us to action.  Guess what form of action that is for an alcoholic. 

…What causes the unhappiness that underlies resentment?
a) What we feel people did to us that was unnecessarily mean, hurtful, and thoughtless
b) What people in our lives did not do for us that we feel they should have done
c) When we feel the people in our lives have not done enough for us

It’s kind of scary to read what I wrote back then and where my thinking was some 6 years ago.   But I am glad I did it and glad I still have it.  I’ll have five years without a drink next month…yeah me! 

A lot of people in AA will say resentments are why we drink and resolving these issues will quell our thirst for alcohol.  I did drink again about a year after working the steps, but I do believe they were key to my overall healing process.  I had a good sponsor, someone I felt I could trust with my innermost demons, who was not a member of my family or circle of friends.  Yes, a highpriced therapist would probably have been just as good – but that’s the thing about AA… it didn’t cost me a dime to talk to this guy for hours on end.  Just having someone to vent all my frustrations on and have him call me out on bullshit…was priceless.   

So I have shared some of my dark side; now I’ll share some of Kinkade’s.

The Los Angeles Times reported that some of Kinkade’s former colleagues, employees, and even collectors of his work say that he had a long history of cursing and heckling other artists and performers.  The Times further reported that he openly groped a woman’s breasts at a South Bend, Indiana sales event, and mentioned his proclivity for ritual territory marking through urination, once relieving himself on a Winnie the Pooh figure at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim while saying “This one’s for you, Walt.”  In 2006, John Dandois, Media Arts Group executive, recounted a story that on one occasion (“about six years ago”) Kinkade became drunk at a Siegfried & Roy magic show in Las Vegas and began shouting “Codpiece! Codpiece!” at the performers.  Eventually he was calmed by his mother.  Dandois also said of Kinkade, “Thom would be fine, he would be drinking, and then all of a sudden, you couldn’t tell where the boundary was, and then he became very incoherent, and he would start cursing and doing a lot of weird stuff like touching himself.”

It sounds like he was going down in a drunken blaze of glory – Thomas Kinkade was arrested for drunk driving in 2010, the same year his company filed for bankruptcy.  I can relate.  Although I didn’t lose 50+ million dollars. 

I think he could still have afforded AA.

Adam Yauch, better known as MCA of  the Beastie Boys, passed away today after a three-year battle with cancer. The multi-instrumentalist/film director was diagnosed with cancer in 2009 after discovering a tumor in a salivary gland in his neck.

MCA arrived on the scene as the beer drinking, pot smoking, gangsta who fought for our right to party.  As a college student back in the glory days of MTV, you could say I looked up to him for all the wrong reasons.  But like me, he changed.  Over the years he transcended that persona and embraced sobriety and became a dedicated adherent to Tibetan Buddhism and was personally acquainted with the Dalai Lama.  From 1996 to 2001, the performer helped organize the Tibetan Freedom Concert, a series of rock festivals held in North America, Europe, and Asia supporting the cause of Tibetan independence.

In a 1994 interview with the mag Tricycle he elaborated on his transformation:

Tricycle: A lot of Westerners became interested in Buddhism through drugs. Was that part of it for you?

Yauch: I would not say drugs opened me up specifically to Buddhism. But when I first got interested in spirituality in ’88 I was smoking a lot of herb and taking a lot of hallucinogens, and that starts to open you up. It removes your whole doubt system and opens up your chakras [centers of subtle or refined energy], and it becomes easy to start taking in a lot of information. Using drugs is a fairly uncontrolled way of approaching that stuff. Drugs are not something you can go too far with, but you start seeing things that don’t fit into Western teachings and then you have to take it from there. Everyone has a different path. I’m not saying anybody should or shouldn’t do anything, but I realized that drugs weren’t going to go very far for me.

Tricycle: Do you think there’s any connection between a lot of kids taking LSD now and the growing interest in Buddhism among younger people?

Yauch: I don’t necessarily see it in terms of Buddhism specifically. I just see that when people take a lot of hallucinogens and drugs it just starts to open them up a bit, and that’s definitely been going on lately.

Tricycle: Are you still taking drugs?

Yauch: No. I don’t even drink or smoke or anything.

Tricycle: Is that an intentional decision?

Yauch: It started out as something that worked for me, and I’ve gotten more regimented about it recently because it’s nice to have a policy. I’ll go to a party and see some friends and they’ll be like, “Come on, have a beer.” It’s just easier to have a set decision that I don’t drink than trying to decide if I’ll have one beer, or maybe I’ll have two beers and wake up in the morning with a headache. I stopped smoking herb three or four years ago. The one thing about doing hallucinogens is that they open up your solar plexus chakra and allow you to take in the energy of everybody else around you, whether you want to or not. Hallucinogens blow that chakra wide open and you can start taking on a lot of negative energy—worries, jealousy, anger, or whatever other contractive emotions are flying around. I just can’t even mess with that now. I feel a little more in control by keeping my energy separate.

In April 2012, the group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  Yauch was inducted in absentia due to his illness.  His bandmates paid tribute to Yauch; a letter from Yauch was read to the crowd.

In 2011, Yauch received the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters from Bard College, the college he attended for two years. The award is “given in recognition of a significant contribution to the American artistic or literary heritage.

This is my favorite Beastie beat with Adam Yauch, aka as MCA, as ”Cochise” played by Nathan Wind…gotta love it.

This morning Fox News clued me in to the fact that their former super anchor Laurie Dhue is the subject of  a recent and revealing article for Renew Magazine.  For those not familiar with Renew, I think of it as the magazine you see on the coffee table at your recovery center of choice.  It’s very well done, as is their website and well worth a visit.  But you probably wont find anything about SynchroDestiny there…jk.  I recently bookmarked it as one of my favorites.

Excerpt from the article “Recovering Out Loud’ by By Steve Diogo

“There are so many celebrities out there whose success is 100 percent due to the fact that they are sober, but they don’t talk about it; they don’t put themselves out there,” Dhue says. “There are celebrities who should be dead 10 times over, and instead, they’re Hollywood royalty. And the fact that they are not advocates for sobriety really ticks me off. I wish these people in Hollywood would be out there, but that’s the stigma of this disease. People don’t want to talk about it, and I don’t get it.”

Instead, she says, the media focuses on the train wrecks and ignores recovery. This, in turn, causes celebrities to keep quiet, and that maintains the stigma that ends in death.

“The media likes to focus on Charlie Sheen imploding or Lindsey Lohan imploding or Demi [Moore] strung out on whippets,”

Dhue says. “The media loves to focus on the salacious rather than on stories of recovery. The public and the media do not understand this disease. They lump all of us in together, like we’re all Charlie Sheen. We’re not. We need more understanding in the general society and more acutely in the media, but we all know that sexy stories sell, and it’s much sexier to talk about Demi Moore’s marriage collapse and anorexia than it is than to talk about people turning their lives around.”

To get a better look at Renew Magazine check out this link http://digital.reneweveryday.com/i/30919

I have posted many times on Deepak Chopra’s concept of SynchroDestiny.  Most I’m sure, scoff at the idea, but I think it’s a great way to look at things with a different perspective.  The basic concept of SynchroDestiny is that instances of coincidence contain a purpose.  They contain a meaning.  They have a direction.  They have intention.  It’s the universe sending a message to you.  But you have to be willing to receive it, decipher it  and act upon it to give it meaning.  I know it sounds like a bunch of new age mumbo jumbo, but I enjoy finding instances of it and thinking about what they mean.  Sometimes,  if I can think of something proactive to do to take it to the next level, I will.  These moments can be something as grand as a lunar eclipse to something as small as a song.

Which brings me to this post.  The day before yesterday, I posted a video of a young man pouring his alcoholic mom’s $2000 stash of liquor down the toilet.  The video featured the melancholy inducing song ”Blue Jean”s by Lana Del Ray.  Yesterday, The Fix posted a story about her newest music video for the song “Carmen”, which is a cautionary tale of an alcohol and meth abusing teen.  The internet is now all a flutter about comments she posted in response to a viewers heartfelt appreciation of the piece: 

My best friend in the world just got clean off meth a few months ago, and when I showed her this song we realized this song hit such a soft spot for both of us … as soon as I watched the video and saw the “how does meth change our brains” part I just lost it and bawled my eyes out … It’s like this song has a hidden meaning only my friend and I can understand, and I wish I could meet Lana and tell her how her music affected us, but I know she’ll never see this. Love her.

Del Rey did see it, though, and left a revealing response. “I see you,” Del Rey wrote. “Love you. I got clean too, so I know how it goes.”

Is the above an instance of SynchroDestiny? 

I have read that Del Ray has admitted to having been a teenage alcoholic, but was she also a meth addict?  I have not seen any definitive admission to either after some fairly extensive iResearch. 

So I will practice a little proactive SynchroDestiny for Lana to come out and come clean on the subject.  Here would be a great place, in my humble opinion, but any platform would be appreciated by the many who have struggled and wonder if a brighter future awaits them in sobriety.

So what if Lana responded to this post?  Would it be proof of SynchroDestiny.  No.  But it sure would be cool.  The more likely reality is that this post will not even register in her universe.  Does that disprove SynchroDestiny?  Not to me.  I will keep on looking for meaning in this crazy coincident filled universe.  

TDA sent me this video of a son exercising a little bit of tough love. At first thought, $2000 worth of liqour sounded like it would be a roomful; but if the average bottle was just $30 – that would be only 65 bottles. I know I had that many near empty bottles in my stash at any given time. For more info, check out the young man’s facebook page linked after the video.

From the video description

Me pouring out my moms alcohol… Worth over $ 2,000 My mom is a recovering alcoholic ( Abuse of Alcohol ) with a condition that doctors say will kill her if she continues to drink and while I know I can’t stop her from drinking I’ll do anything I can to reduce her access to it. I really do love you mom and while seeing this might upset you, I know I had to do this. I just want the old you back.

http://www.facebook.com/fornerds

 ..Join the discussion.

The song in the video is a personal favorite, Blue Jeans by Lana Del Rey

George Will is an opinion writer for The Washington Post and has recently written two well thought out pieces on the legalization of drugs in America.  He believes that while there is no doubt legalization will increase the health problems associated with drugs, that government administrators are becoming more agreeable than ever as a whole on legalization, due to the high costs of maintaining current levels of enforcement.  I think he may be right…but I also think there is a lot of money being made by a lot of people who will fight for the status quo; and this includes people on both sides of the law.  So my gut feeling is that any real change is many years away.  But that’s just my opinion.   And if you ask me if I think legalization would be a good thing, my gut says no (keep in mind my DOC is of the legal nature already), but honestly I feel like I really don’t know.  I guess it depends on too many unforeseen factors that could come into play.  It would certainly be a huge social experiment.   

Excerpts from The drug legalization dilemma - published April 4, 2012

The costs — human, financial and social — of combating (most) drugs are prompting calls for decriminalization or legalization. America should, however, learn from the psychoactive drug used by a majority of American adults — alcohol.

Twenty percent of all American prisoners — 500,000 people — are incarcerated for dealing illegal drugs, but alcohol causes as much as half of America’s criminal violence and vehicular fatalities.

Prohibition resembled what is today called decriminalization: It did not make drinking illegal; it criminalized the making, importing, transporting or selling of alcohol. Drinking remained legal, so oceans of it were made, imported, transported and sold.

Another legal drug, nicotine, kills more people than do alcohol and all illegal drugs — combined. For decades, government has aggressively publicized the health risks of smoking and made it unfashionable, stigmatized, expensive and inconvenient. Yet 20 percent of every rising American generation becomes addicted to nicotine.

So, suppose cocaine or heroin were legalized and marketed as cigarettes and alcohol are. And suppose the level of addiction were to replicate the 7 percent of adults suffering from alcohol abuse or dependency. That would be a public health disaster.

there is no reason to think today’s levels of addiction are anywhere near the levels that would be reached under legalization.

Excerpts from Should the U.S. legalize hard drugs?  - published April 11,2012

Amelioration of today’s drug problem requires Americans to understand the significance of the 80-20 ratio. Twenty percent of American drinkers consume 80 percent of the alcohol sold here. The same 80-20 split obtains among users of illicit drugs.

More Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses or drug-related probation and parole violations than for property crimes. And although America spends five times more jailing drug dealers than it did 30 years ago, the prices of cocaine and heroin are 80 to 90 percent lower than 30 years ago.

People used to believe enforcement could raise prices but doubted that higher prices would decrease consumption. Now they know consumption declines as prices rise but wonder whether enforcement can substantially affect prices.

Would the public health problems resulting from legalization be a price worth paying for injuring the cartels and reducing the costs of enforcement? We probably are going to find out.

 

For the newcomer here, Sober Toolbox Additions are where we revisit posts from the past that were more focused on the nuts and bolts of recovery and re-post them in our new Sober Toolbox tab.  This time around we might even put some in our handy new tool belt courtesy of Cyanide and Happiness @ explosm.net.   This batch of posts catches us up to the fall of 2007.

When Does It Get Better? - You will never get the answer if you don’t start working.

Bosom Buddies: Procrastination and Alcoholism - It’s not wise to put off that meeting.

Backup and Recovery – The importance of  backup and maintenance plans.

Train Like a Champ - You did not get there and you will not get here overnight. 

Quality of Life - recovery is not a definable state.