...but I came back. I have people who love me here. And some birdies who love me. And a cat who demands my attention. And several fish who think I care about them, but I really don't.

Cichlids piss me off. They eat each other when they're not tearing each other apart. All I saw when I first got into them were all the pretty colors. Years later, they are, at times, frustrating to watch.

Ca-chink.

I can generally get through to narcissists. We'll see. I'm open to being shocked at my own inability to recognize true narcissism.

If Eric is constitutionally incapable of being honest with himself, he will end up drinking or using in the not too distant future. But since he has sex and food addictions to fall back on, it may be a while. Right around his age (which is also mine), all mental disorders become more intense. Bipolars start cycling more often and the amplitude of their swings can be quite acute. Alcoholism, if it becomes activated, can take a person out of the game within just a couple years.

In the meantime, the high school years were a different time for Eric. There was active alcoholism and addiction taking place in his life at that time. So he wouldn't have been feeling a damn thing the way a normal person might. Alcohol is a CNS depressant. Since then changes have been made. People can and do change...I know because I have seen it in others. People have seen it in me.

If the people writing all these critiques are members of the local NYC recovery community, I would need to know that. That would put a whole different spin on matters.

If the rest of this nonsense is spewing out of the mouths of people outside of NYC recovery looking in on a person who isn't operating completely inside their world, they're full of dogs*t. They are ignorant and need to be educated.

Went for a nice ride on my bike today. Settled in at a local Starbucks with a Viet Nam vet friend who just ain't getting the whole sober deal. Now his ex is filing a restraining order against him and he is about to be arrested for throwing a rock through one of her windows. I made it clear to him where I thought he was in the real world in no uncertain terms.

This was a guy who got shot down in Nam, had lead all up in his ass, but he carried the dead body of his pilot and friend for six days in the jungle heat, slogging through a river and back to base camp.

He came back home, became a successful businessman and the mayor of a small to medium sized town. But in seven years he's blown through 8 million dollars trying to reconcile his compulsion to be involved with abandoning women with his otherwise normal intellectual capacity to choose to do the right and honorable thing at the best moment.

And it's all booze and a screwed up childhood come home to roost. That's it. No drugs. Sure is keeping me sober watching him torture himself the way I used to. Sure is nice to know that all that misery and pain I went through has yielded some sort of useful information for a fellow human I feel deserves a million second chances.

I say this stuff because I am a serious person with a serious life who is not as crazy as he might, at times, sound. I don't mind people joking around, but I detest people who sit on their backsides, pissing and moaning about how other people aren't living their lives right and proper, while there are people who need real help just to get through the day.

So...in addition to leaving YOUR house today, I hope you swing by the local homeless shelter and clean their toilets, maybe help somebody come down from the shakes or the DT's. Or whatever the fek it is that you can do to make yourself useful in this life because you sure as hell haven't impressed me up here in this forum. Not even a little bit.

...Charlton Heston's character decides to push the plunger down on humanity, putting an end to a pathetic, alienating existence for all concerned.

You should learn to take your own sense of inadequacy less personally.

In your case, it will only get worse over time.

...in this case, this is what it has come to. Tit for tat, zero enlightenment, maximal childishness and a complete disrespect of the personhood of all parties concerned.

Kinda of a world political situation in microcosm.

We can turn off the spiggot the ol' fashioned way, or we can apologize to one another for being willfully ignorant of the lives and needs of other people occupying the planet at this point in time and space.

For the little bandwidth we're costing, I'd say this whole mud-wrestling match is a value-added activity.

For me. And it's always ALL about me, isn't it?

...the only thing more annoying than No Name Given has been watching George W. Bush wipe his backside with the U.S. Constitution.

But after watching this new "Charles Manson" dispatch with constitutional government as we have once known it (and all of our civil liberties), it is the prosaic feigned self-righteous indignation of No Name Given. Without a doubt.

Dick "Jepeto" Cheney is a close second, but the whole, "unknown-comic-bag-over-the-head," mystique of No Name Given can not be outdone by the world's only battery-operated life-size war criminal action figure. The smirking chimpiness of Cheney is atrocious, very literally, but No Name Given is second only to the Shrubster in banality and sheer gutter-level ignorance.

Perhaps we can take No Name Given to a local bakery and use her face to mold a batch of delicious assh*le cookies.

Mmmmm goood. We can feed them to Karl Rove until his face puckers with delight.