February 2005 Archives

I skied the Bluestem Trail at Bird's Hill last Sunday and I drove to Portage and skied some of the Bittersweet trails at Rossendale yesterday. I had problems both days, and it has been a struggle. I am not as fit as I was in the fall, and it gets worse each week. The cycling dropped off in October, and I have not maintained the same level of activity. As Mike says, a weekly game of shinny without proper conditioning and stretching hurts and inspires a week of inactivity. It doesn't cut it.

Addictions therapists and theorists, like addicts, have their stories. It has become fashionable to identify drug use as a (reasonable?) psychological response to the unhappiness and ugliness of life, and addiction as a long term response to emotional pain.

In Michael Lynch's book about Truth, which I mentioned back here, he mentions Harry Frankfurt's paper "On Bullshit". It has just been printed as a very short book. The paper was available on line here and elsewhere, but Frankfurt's publisher - the Princeton University Press - has been asserting copyright. [Updated March 16/05; it was availabe when I wrote this post but taken down]. Frankfurt is going to be on The Daily Show. Blog news about that at Crooked Timber.

Before e-mail spam started to arrive in torrents, it used to be fun to read some of the messages. Now, most of my spam is screened by my ISP and autoscreened in Mailwasher, and I clean up the rest when I see an obviously suspicious return address or subject line. One in a while I still read one for fun.

The Nigerian Bank scam (also see this link or the RCMP web warning) is so well-known that it ought to obvious, and the pitch is stale. Sometimes the con artist ads a nice touch.

Addicts and the people around them have different versions of the story of the addict's life and role of drugs or compulsive behaviours in the addict's life.

One of the stories Fr. Britz mentioned during the 2005 St. Ignatius Parish Mission - the story about John XXIII and wine and company at meals - resonated with me. Fr. Britz said he was a young seminarian at the time.

Last week I went to a parish mission for the first time in my life. A mission is a short series of homilies or lectures offered over a few days to sharpen religious knowledge and spirituality. It is almost always presented by a guest preacher, and it is common to hold the mission during Lent. This year the mission at St. Ignatius was presented by Father Andrew Britz, a Benedictine who spent about 20 years as the editor of the Prairie Messenger weekly newspaper. He spoke over three nights, February 14-16.

I picked out Truth in Religion, The Plurality of Religions and the Unity of Truth by Mortimer J. Adler (see previous post)- as I was browsing at the library. It was a quick and worthwhile piece of reading.

In the last couple of weeks I have been reading some books by Mortimer J. Adler, a teacher and writer with a broad grasp of the history of philosophy, and an advocate of living the examined life through understanding the "Great Ideas".

"Sideways" is worth seeing. It was released several months ago and is still playing in theaters. I saw it a couple of weeks ago at the Globe (which is a great theater for independent film in Winnipeg).

British broadcast journalist Jon Snow of TV4 has run a poll to have Britons vote on a modern restatement of the 10 commandments. The new list seems to run to 20 and includes try your best, be honest, be true to yourself, enjoy life, nothing in excess, live within your means, appreciate what you have, never be violent, never kill, be true to your god, enjoy life (sex, drugs, chocolate??) and protect the environment (put the toilet seat down, flush/don't flush???). Although they sound bland, it isn't a bad set of moral principles, if we knew what they all really meant. There is a marked underemphasis on worship and fidelity to belief, and some emphasis on being nice. Sweet waffles for principles.

A story from the Guardian about the practitioners of energy medicine and faith healing questions studies that claim to show this stuff works. The writer treats New Age therapies like Reiki, some forms of Asian traditional medicine, and prayer as different versions of faith healing and that's a reasonable approach. They all "work" by mysterious mechanisms.

BBC Sports reports that Lance Armstrong, now sponsored by the Discovery Channel and riding for Team Discovery Channel (warning: that's a slow link to a site loaded with adware - I would view it with Firefox and set the adblocker to simplify future visits - but check out the Official Team jersey for $100 US and other merchandise) will compete in the 2005 Tour de France.

We should see TV coverage in Canada which will be entertaining and hopefully inspiring to the lads. The BBC Web sports site has good cycling coverage like this link to the 2004 Tour. Bicycling Magazine has a Tour news site. At this moment, it's still mainly news from the 2004 Tour, and it hasn't been updated for a while but it will be worth watching.

My last entry in this series was about the idea of recovery, and I mentioned AA and 12 step programs. This time I want to talk about treatment. Addicts may take a long time to decide they need help, and when they do, reliable help may be hard to find.

There is an old joke about the difference between a drunk and an alcoholic. A drunk doesn't go to meetings.

[Originally posted in Rise Again].

I haven't posted in Rise Again since August. I used to post the news about Dave here, but in September 2004 I started to post the news about Dave in my public blog, A Sea of Flowers. If Dave stays addicted, he will probably not care about my having written about him. If he gets better, he may not want to be reminded about his story, but it won't hurt him.

I am frustrated with Dave's situation. He has been able to bend so many situations to his advantage, and he seems to keep avoiding the consequences of his actions. I have helped to guard him against some of them myself and I have been reading some of my old posts with dismay. I have seen the problem and I have seen how useless I have been at helping Dave, and how has manipulated me, again and again, but I keep trying to help, and I keep repeating my mistakes.

All the other players in the system keep putting the responsibility for getting Dave into drug treatment on Dave. I keep hearing that no treatment program will have him until he is "ready" but I wonder if that isn't an excuse to avoid having to work with him. No one seems to want to take hold of Dave and work with him. I also keep hearing that the treatment resources for amphetimine addiction are simply not there. I would like to just get him off the street, get him away from the drug and get him working on his own recovery. I can't do it because I can't hold him or lock him up, and because he doesn't keep his promises when he lives with me.

Last Thursday Mike and I went to R.A. Steen to skate on the outdoor ice, and we were drawn into a pickup game of shinny which was a lot of fun, as Mike has written. Like Mike, I confess to being a lousy hockey player. The sudden turns, stops and accelerations challenge my skating skill. The sprints challenged my lungs and my aerobic recovery, and the whole thing challenged some muscles that don't come into play during cylcing and skiing. On Saturday and Sunday I found that it was painful to cough because my abdominal muscles were sore. But, like Mike I would do it again.

The Thursday night shinny was the first of three or four workouts over the last 4 days. I have skied twice, and I had a workout with a snow-shovel this morning.

Steve has changed servers. His domain name is still the same, and the domain name registry has been configured to redirect users to his new server. Old links seem to work, and my browser is redirected to the new location of his home page and weblog. He reports that he can't run his own custom blog CMS any more, and he is using DocBook for his blog now. He saved the posts entered under his old CMS and imported them into the newest version of his blog. (Update - February 14/05: Steve has taken down his web page and blog for the time being).

Mike has launched a Wordpress blog called Meanderings. His cycling exploits can still be seen in his Cycling Log. The log stopped in November, but a cyclist's spring is only a few weeks away.

Over the last two weeks my relationship with Dave has been reduced to picking him up, driving him around, buying him a few meals, and buying tobacco, groceries and few other articles to make his life at the Salvation Army a little easier. He has not been able to give up drugs and he is still avoiding drug treatment. He continues to ask me for resources while lying about his addiction and his plans to deal with it. Today (February 8) I told Dave that I was not going to keep meeting him and buying things for him while he is avoiding drug treatment. I finished a conversation that we have been having over the last few weeks.

The main BBC Web site home has a lot of links to interesting internal resources. There is a page on Religion and Ethics. There is a box on that page which links to an Index of Religions in Britain The Guardian Online has its own Guide to Religion in the U.K..

I took some personal time on Thurday and Friday to drive to Bird's Hill Park and ski. The weather had been above freezing balmy earlier in the week, and I wanted to ski on before the tracks got too icy. Thursday was cooler at about -8 C and Friday was about -12 C. Back in the (Swix) green wax range.

This is a book review I wrote and published for Blogcritics. The book is True to Life, Why Truth Matters by Michael P. Lynch ( ISBN 0262122677). It's not in the Library in Winnipeg, and it's one of the few books I've bought lately.

My cell phone died before or during my Sunday ski with Steve on January 23.

Addictions are rewarding in the judgment of the addicted person, when he or she is engaging in the addictive behaviour. Addicts will pursue their addiction even when they know, or should know, that their addiction is harmful to physical health, economic potential, social status, and to the survival of supportive, trusting, and intimate relationships. Some addictions alter perception and judgment, and all addictions seem to offer such powerful rewards that the disadvantages and side-effects are disregarded. Psychologists have run a variety of interesting and cruel experiments to see exactly what harm rats and monkeys will endure for different rewards. These studies tend to reveal what kinds of sensory and psychological experiences are inherently attractive to mammals and primates and to provide insights into the psychology of value, but they don't even begin to measure the harm that human beings can endure and inflict under the influence of addictions.

The first recipe I tried in the 2005 Canadian Living Slow Cooker cooking special was a success. I adapted it a bit, mainly in spicing and preparation. It makes about 6 good servings. It's a simple beef vegetable stew.

My illness and surgery came at a time when Jan and her family had already decided that I had a problem.

Good for giggles. I found this link to a Travel section article in the Guardian online.

"Perhaps I just don't have a soul. But then, I'm from Cardiff where we don't have New Agers. Or, if we do, we call them by their other name: weirdos. And although I am almost too perfectly the target demographic - thirtysomething, female, single (marketing-speak for credulous, desperate and liable to spend money on any old rubbish) - I've never really got the whole spa thing. Yes, it makes your skin all shiny, but then what's a loofah for?"

What is an addiction?

An interesting story, courtesy of the BBC World News Web service about a survey of American teens. One of the findings is that American teens tend to be authoritarian in defence of patriotic values. They tend to think the First Amendment is too liberal and promotes anti-American values. The group responsible for the survey has its own web site with a page devoted to the survey.