Ticket Brokers & More Recovery Thoughts

Today is Wednesday April Seventh Two Thousand Oh Ten. I have that god damn "This Is New Hampshire" parody song running thru my head and I have only heard it once. I guess I should be pleased that Lady Gaga is no longer in my head, I had that one running around there for a couple of days. I always seem to hear crappy tunes at the gym that stick its terrible. Why can't a song I like do that I wonder, its always the crappy ones that stick. Am I really a Lady Gaga fan ? God I hope not, all those years of listening to good music right down the drain.

I was reading an article about scalping in Rolling Stone the other day. This company used "bots" created by Bulgarians to circumvent the "fairness settings" on the ticketfucker website. They would then of course, resell the tickets to brokers and then the brokers would pass it along to fans. The article caught my eye because one of the bands they mentioned was PH!SH and how they had purchased twenty five hundred tickets to the Hampton shows a couple years back. I was wondering why tickets were so fucking hard to get for those shows. I mean yah, the band was playing again after a five year break but usually I am able to find someone I know who has a couple of tickets. That time I didn't know anyone who got tickets the normal way, everyone I know who went got fucked by a ticket broker. Ticket Scalping is supposed to be illegal but yet all these ticket brokers exist. And they pay taxes on their gains so it ought to be pretty easy to figure out what their profit margins are and if it isn't then just audit the heck out of them.

For the first time in twenty years of going to see PH!SH I had to go thru a broker for my Fenway Park ticket. I paid forty dollars over cost and while that pissed me off I did it anyway. It was my first show sober and it meant a bunch to me to be able to see the band I love so much in Fenway. Plus I got to smoke butts in the stands at Fenway and thats got to be worth at least twenty bucks right there. I'm glad I went to that show solo as I could escape if I didn't feel comfortable. That didn't happen but it made me feel better that I had stuff planned out. People always ask me how I am able to handle seeing so many bands all the time and I tell them the key is to know when to take action. Hmm, I think I've heard that somewhere before... If I don't have an way out of a show and an actionable plan to get home when I want to then I won't go. It was a little different when I went to PH!SH at Mansfield last summer but we did park in vip parking and the lady I went with would have high tailed it if I had wanted her to. You just have to speak up and tell the people you are going with what the deal is and that you have different needs than the average concert goer. It has worked for me so far and I've only left one show early and that was because my feet hurt due to my new cowboy boots!

I met with my sponsor last nite and while it was enjoyable its as if he knows there is something wrong but doesn't want to ask me about it. Its weird, after going thru step five with him that guy knows more about me than anyone else but we can't seem to talk about what is wrong with our relationship. I guess I have not said anything because I am deciding what to do. A few weeks ago I was all ready to tell him that I wanted to find another sponsor but I decided to wait. I will write this over and over again but "one thing I've learned in recovery is ..." its cool that at age forty that I'm still learning shit. Anyway, one thing I've learned in recovery is not to be so impulsive and to think before I act. This is a case of that, I really respect him and have gotten to know him and I shouldn't be so quick not accept his personal quirks. He is very supportive and was very crucial to my early sobriety as well as my continuing recovery. I shouldn't be so quick to judge and decide that I want to work with someone else. I think I owe it to him to work on whatever problems I have talked myself into having with him and to learn from the experiences. For example I will never invite him to another Celtics game because the odds are he won't show up until well into the second quarter. I should invite him to stuff that is ok for people to be late to and that way I won't get so pissy about it. I think other than avoiding confrontation, I didn't bring up my extreme displeasure at his tardiness the other week since there is nothing I can personally do about it.

I need to remember that the world doesn't revolve around me and my thoughts and that I can't hold everyone to whatever standard I have set for myself. I am a freak when it comes to being on time and not everyone is going to be like me. I could interpret his being late to things as a lack of respect but then again I can interpret anything my way. I just need to settle the fuck down and not take everything so seriously. I've said it before that if I ever meet a woman who is early to stuff I would marry her, well consider it anyway. I always used to laugh at my pop when he would wait in a running car while my momma diddled around the house. Pop is also chronically early to everything and I think I can count on one hand the number of times he has been late in meeting me. I need to remember that there are more important things in life than being prompt and that while that may be the case for me it isn't the case for everyone else. Its difficult admitting stuff like that but thats just another blessing of recovery.

I didn't get sober to be miserable, if I wanted to be miserable I could just start drinking again and pretty soon I would feel that way. At first I got sober so that I wouldn't get fired but after a while my continued sobriety has served to enrich, lengthen, and improve my life. My life is much simpler when all I have to do is to wake up at a specific time and go to work. That used to be so hard when I was active, I would never wake up at the same time and many days didn't need an alarm clock because my body would wake me when it sobered up. God, what a shitty way to live, I can't believe I did it for so long. I was talking to my sponsor about when I knew I was an alcoholic and how I knew. I always drank more often than most of my friends once college was over but I don't think I depended on it till I had surgery on my knee and was wrapped up in opiate addiction. If I had painkillers or heroin I didn't need to drink all the time but if I didn't have them then I drank every waking moment. My momma always asks me what I do when I want a drink and its hard for me to explain to her the correlation between my opiate and alcohol use. I was just so used to being high in some way that I was miserable when I wasn't. Or, I was just a total pussy who couldn't deal with life as a normal man and then felt really sorry for myself when I wasn't drunk or high. Thankfully I have discovered that life is really cool when I'm sober and believe it or not I enjoy having the ability to feel the life I am living. Life on life's terms or something along those lines.