The Light at the End of the Bottle - NOT!

Last night, my wife told me that this would probably be a bad year to go to Ireland and Scotland on vacation.  Being agreeable and conditioned, I said "sure, and why again?"  Then she said because of your year off from drinking.  And then it dawned on me, one of the major reasons I've wanted to go back to the motherland (I'm Irish and have the liver to prove it) would be to drink a Guinness in an authentic pub like my shorter, prehistoric kinfolk did.  And yes, St. Patrick's Day is my favorite holiday of the year!

Photo by Joe Rodriguez Jr, Copyright 2006

Well, that said, let me bring you up to date on the stats:  I'm entering the 21st day of alcohol free and last week was the first challenge.  It wasn't hard not to drink, just hard not to think about it.  Like much of my military training, it's 95% Mental and 5% even more mental.  Most of you know me well; I love to over-think things to the point of analysis paralysis.  Something few people know is that it was almost exactly 20 years ago, I gave up smokeless tobacco.  Yes, I was a dipper and a chewer.  And it took me a year to get over the urges to have a pinch at various times, but I gave it up cold-turkey and never looked back.

I'd have to say that the my main motivation for giving up tobacco was my disappointment in myself for becoming addicted to such a powerful drug, nicotine.  Around the same time, my father had been diagnosed with lung cancer even though he had quit smoking a few years earlier.  This was about the same time the major news organizations were reporting on the extreme measures taken by the tobacco industry to get people to use tobacco for life.  Shortly thereafter, several major litigious battles came to the forefront of American media and the word was out, "Tobacco can kill you!"  Never mind the other chronic and fatal health conditions tobacco users risk when they use a product that controls them, and we thought it was a choice of freedom.  Just ask any smoker in denial if they can quit and they'd say, sure, but I don't want to.  Only if they'd try to quit would the realize how powerful the addiction is.  I've been there, done that.

At the end of the last post, I touched on 2012 as a year predicted by many major thinkers in our spiritual and philosophical fields about a period of massive enlightenment and awareness in the consciousness of humanity as a whole.  I imagine how this could come about.  Could it be in relationship to tobacco, a highly consumed product, known to kill one-third of the people who use it?  Or could it be something else?  A few of my friends and family have heard me talk about what I call the "Real World Matrix" and maybe I should provide a little background for those who haven't heard my theory yet.

Back in 1997, Warner Brothers released the movie The Matrix staring Lawrence Fishburn (Morpheus), Keanu Reeves (Neo), and many more actors.  This futuristic sci-fi action movie depicted a period where many humans were plugged into power cocoons to the benefit of the artificial intelligent machines as a source of energy for the electronic captors.  My favorite part of the movie, is where Morpheus takes Neo into the Matrix Simulation Program to show him about "The World of the Real" and he asked Neo, "what is real, how do  you define real?  If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain."  The Matrix Trilogy started out very deep and philosophical for me, but quickly became a regular shoot-em-up action movie series design to appeal to the average electrical-signal sensing brain.  The second and third installment simply lacked the thought-provoking appeal that the first movie had. But the original piece got me thinking, what if there was a real-world matrix designed to control us through our brain.  I recommend this movie if you haven't seen it yet, or in a long time.

Another favorite, What The Bleep Do We Know, was filmed here in Portland.  This movie connects addiction and our physical cells to the same chemical and electrical signal connection as alluded to in The Matrix.  In the What the Bleep movie, the filmmakers described how our body's cells sense when we haven't had our fix and tells other cells what to do to get that fix or satisfaction, hence the craving and sometimes, inexplicable or uncontrollable behaviors.  If I've lost or confused anyone at this point, check out the movie and let me know if you get it.  I know some will and some won't, but that's okay.  But what if the key to addicting behavior modification was narrowed down, it would have to be correlated to the direct source, our brain at the root of the situation.

I'd have to say that I am in no way an expert on the human brain, although I have studied many different areas of the human brain, physiologically and psychologically speaking.  In fact, I also own one of these devices and sometimes use it.  Could an affectionate taste for Micro-Brewed Beer be from the tongue or the brain, you decide, but as I've already attested, this quest has been 99.999999% mental so far.  I challenge you to find something you do or experience on a routine basis and resist doing it for a while.  Stop smoking, drinking, sweets, gossip, etc., find something, just for a test.  See what kinds of emotions or reactions come up in the process and ask your friends or family for feedback about what they see from the outside.  My favorite part of the movie Airplane is where Lloyd Bridges is an air traffic controller and several times during the skit, he says it looks like I he picked the wrong time to quit doing something, whether it be smoking, drinking, sniffing glue, etc.  When is the right time to quit doing something?  It's up to the individual.

Photo by Joe Rodriguez Jr, Copyright 2006

Since I've probably already written too much about something that many of you are finding boring, let me leave you with this.  After you've cleared your mind and given up your prejudice to the subject of addiction and consumption, ask yourself, who is in control?  Who benefits from tobacco use, the smoker or the manufacturer and distributor?  Look at something bigger in the connection to the economy and the environment and ask, which will come first: will we run out of oil before the green house gases reach the point of no return, and will the Earth warm up to the level where thawing in the north releases stored methane, a compound 20 times more effective as a green-house gas than carbon dioxide?  Several sources I've read say that at the current rate, 2015 could be that year.  Or will the planet lash out with weather, species extermination like a someone swatting a fly away from their body, thus resetting the system with humans banned from the globe?  But perhaps 2012 will be the year that we finally accept that we might be the source of rapid climate change and have something to do about it.

Keep coming back and I'll keep sharing.  I encourage you to sign up to follow the blog and post replies for others to read.  Tell me if you agree, assimilate, or find me totally nuts...it's all good!

DW