Never been one to let the carrier drop

according to this, I am weighing down the world’s financial markets. Singlehandedly.

I’ve debated long and hard about whether to make this a public post, but I’ve decided that it should be, for reasons that I will later discuss.

As some of you may have noticed, there has been a 3.5 month hole in this blog. The reason for that is that I’ve been away from the internet, because I entered a drug treatment program in San Pedro to address my nitrous oxide addiction. The program went well, and I’ve now been clean for almost four months. (For the very few of you who don’t know, the web counter on www.sheer.us at the top is how long I’ve been clean).

It was a interesting experience, to say the least. I’m not sure what to write about it, other than it happened. I did manage to survive without the internet (not even a cell phone, except for ten-minute segments a few times a week) for several months. I’m glad that I did it, and I don’t ever want to do it again.

It was a 12-step based program, and as many of you know, I have a number of criticisms of 12-step. They remain valid – in fact, most of what was useful about the time is that it gave me a long period of time to focus on my thinking and my addiction and learn to recognize addictive thinking and stop it (with exercises from Smart Recovery. It was also good to have a support system of people to talk to about the problems surrounding addiction, as well as about spiritual principles.

That said, I’m back and I will be posting regularly again. (Actually I’ve been back for some time). I probably will – despite previous comments to the contrary – make another post about religion – although this one won’t be attacking any particular religion or set of beleifs, but merely explaining what the problem is, for me.

I had to debate with myself for a while before deciding to post this publicly, because there’s always the concern that some employer will see it and decide to fire me, or not to hire me, based on knowing that I am a nitrous oxide addict. (After all, the internet never forgets anything). I decided not to worry about that for several reasons:

1) Addiction is a disease, not a moral failing. As such, the only employers refusing to hire me would probably be people I wouldn’t want to work for anyway.

2) I can’t imagine any employer actually reading my entire blog, or stumbling across this out of the 2000+ entries based on a simple web search. Of course, I might be wrong. It did just occur to me that I’ve used the ‘e’ word a lot, so googling for sheer pullen employer would turn this up – and now by using those keywords all togeather I’ve increased the chances. <sigh> I think just about anything I do is going to make that situation worse, though, so I think I’ll leave it there. It’s a pity there’s not a keyword or html code you can put in a single document to indicate that that document, and only that document, shouldn’t be indexed. If I were really bored, I’d figure out how to exclude *just* this entry with robots.txt. I’m not that bored.. or that paranoid.

3) I think that acting as if being a addict is something horrible that I have to hide both feeds the addiction and helps support the social stigma that might lead to addicts being unable to find jobs. As a addict, I was still a hard and (except for a few times when I was on binges) dependable worker, I never stole anything from anybody, and I never had any run-ins with the law. I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume that all addicts are subhuman creatures who deserve nothing but contempt.

The side effect of all this is that I am going to talk about recovery-related topics in this journal. I will tag them as such, and you all can avoid them, but there may be some people out there who are interested in what mental gyrations I go through trying to stay away from nitrous, and anyway, it’s probably good for me to write about them.

So, now that we’ve been through that little digression, my new years resolution list

1) I will make 1 wshr broadcast a month in 2009

2) I will record one new, original song every 3 months n 2009

3) I will not use nitrous oxide in 2009. (So far, I’ve never managed to keep this one, but I think this is the year)

4) I will be able to run 2 miles at 4.7 miles an hour at a 4% grade by the end of 2009. (In other words, I will not be completely out of shape. I’m not going to try to be one of those super-healthy fitness fanatics)

5) I will try to remain open, honest, and willing

Anyway, happy new year, everybody!