The Morning Pages – January 23, 2022

derailleur

dĭ-rā′lər

noun

1. A device for shifting gears on a bicycle by moving the chain between sprocket wheels of different sizes.

I’m going to get fancy today, so I’m breaking out the French. OK, maybe it’s French, maybe it isn’t. It depends on how you pronounce it. But my word of the day is derailleur, or as we called them, de-railers.

I’m sure everyone is familiar with the gearshift mechanism on a ten-speed, 18-speed or 21-speed, or however many speeds the have on today’s bicycles. You push the lever on the handlebars, and it moves the chain from one gear to another. Sometimes, if it’s not adjusted right, it moves it right off of the sprocket altogether, and you wind up with a chain dangling loosely around your ankles, which results in grease stains on your trouser cuff and possibly a scraped ankle.

I have my own derailleurs that operate mostly as de-railers. They take me off track, and send my train off the rails and down into ravines from which there is no retrieval. They can come in the form of a thought, or a random event or confluence of events, or even a well-meaning text or phone call from a friend.

It can be anything that messes with my intention and focus when I have set an intention to do something, like wake up and do these Morning Pages, for example. A derailleur would be something else that occurs to me during the time I am just getting started that tells me, “You don’t want to do that just yet. You need to do this first.”

They can be innocent little things like having to get up to pee, and then deciding to brush my teeth while I’m at it, both good and necessary items. Consolidating tasks requiring my movement from the couch can’t be bad, right? Efficiency is good; why make two trips?

But then two items become three, since I’m already up, and then original intention to sit down and write these pages is lost.

Some items take priority and can’t be helped. I will take a phone call or a text from a friend at any time, because that is important to me. I’m new to the whole phone thing, so I haven’t set up boundaries yet. A call or text comes in, and I will drop everything and engage fully with the person who has taken the time to communicate with me. It is a priority of mine.

Ding. I literally just got a text right now. How perfect to illustrate my point. I will return after I see who it is, what they want and respond back.

OK. I’m back. It was my mom. She’s canceling our Sunday morning video chat due to babysitting obligations. The babysitting obligations would be a derailleur for her, if her intention was to make sure she kept her weekly chat appointment. The weekly chat appointment could itself be a derailleur for me, if I was intent on getting these morning pages done.

Not waking up at a decent time is a big de-railer. It will throw off my entire day. When I wake up at 7:30, the day still has possibilities. If I sleep in past 9:00, everything gets shoved back, reshuffled and re-prioritized. I’ll be hungry, and I won’t want to sit here for two hours writing three pages of forced material. All I will be thinking about is “how do I get out of doing this exercise?”

That goes for my regular exercise, too. If I wake up too late, I’ll be too famished to want to do my twenty minutes every other day workout routine. It will be postponed until later in the day, or somehow rationalized right off the schedule.

Habits are good and helpful for keeping things on track. Routines are habits that have become concretized. Rituals are routines that are done with a certain reverence and attention to form. Saturday music and creative exploration has become a ritual that I have elevated to a religion. I drink coffee, smoke weed and play the guitar on Saturday. That is what I do. I seldom let anything derail me from fulfilling that agenda item.

Yesterday, however, it was a Saturday, and I had other plans. There was a DBSA walk in Roseville at 11:00 AM. I prioritize DBSA stuff because the group and the people in it mean everything to me. I would even rearrange my holy days, just to make sure I don’t miss a social event with my peeps. I was conflicted, though, because I really do like the wake and bake Saturday thing. 

“So,” I thought to myself, “why not do both?” 

Not the best idea for innumerable and obvious reasons. I decided to ignore all those reasons, and drank some coffee with breakfast, and took my one giant hit of weed before hustling myself out the door down to Auburn to pick up another member before heading to the walk in Roseville.

Driving stoned is just dumb. Driving stoned to an unfamiliar town, down a highway that I seldom use is just asinine. Although I'd left in plenty of time to arrive punctually at Paul’s house, Google didn’t account for the snail-like speed of a paranoid person like me behind the wheel. A good number of other drivers were probably cursing me as well for throwing off their timetables with my slow-ass, old man driving.

Smoking weed right before a social event is a big derailleur. I tend to be a bit self-conscious when I’m high. I don’t get effusive and bubbly. I get paranoid and withdrawn. For a person who is already socially awkward, this makes things a thousand times worse. It isn’t just a derailment; I am likely to blow up the tracks right under the train and take out the engine, all the boxcars and the caboose. Self-sabotage at its finest.

I guess I listened to the little devil’s food hawker who was shouting in my left ear: “Go for it! You can have it all. Keep your Saturday ritual AND keep your DBSA date. It will be fun. You won’t get stoned and dumb, you’ll be elevated and brilliant.” Ha. I really gotta stop falling for that Charlie Brown football ruse. Things never go as promised by that little chocolate dessert cake solicitor.

I got to Paul’s house about 20 minutes late. Probably ten of those minutes were spent on his street, driving back and forth past his house, unable to find his exact address. I must have done ten trips around his neighborhood before closing in on the final destination. I told Paul about my dilemma, and he laughed. He’s a stoner too, so he could relate.

I’m not really a stoner, although I have been one in the past, so I know what that’s like. I do it just enough to say that I do it, but not enough to be good at it. In other words, it still affects me, since I haven’t built up enough of a tolerance to it to make me immune to its effects. Fully functional potheads don’t get the full benefit of the drug, and they generally settle for a less complete version of functionality, since in the long run, it does tend to dumb you down.

And just like that, two texts come in: Emery, showing me a picture of the pearl necklace her parents got her for Christmas, and Denise responding to a text I’d sent last night regarding George Winston.

And ten minutes later…

See what I mean? I can’t not respond to my friends. That takes precedence over every other activity. It is my number one priority. Order of operations. Always do this first. I have to be responsive and prompt with my replies to texts. It means a lot to me when people are responsive, so I want to be that way for my friends. 

I’m trying to find a quote from Overboard on the internet that is a reference to something taking precedence over something else. I may have to go fast forward through the movie, just so I can get it correctly. This is another instance of derailment. I will spend as long as it takes to get the quote, even if it means abandoning my original task for quite some time to do it.

Ha. It was a brief quote: “This takes precedence over your friend’s love life.” It was during a scene when Kurt Russell had employed a Coast Guard boat to take him out to intercept Goldie Hawn when they were powering away in her luxury yacht after she got her memory back. Someone called in a report of illegal fishing in protected water or something like that, and that took precedence over Kurt Russell’s big romantic gesture, at least as far as Coast Guard protocols. 

Two and a half hours later, I’m still on the couch. I’ve fielded a few texts from Emery, and I’ve typed a paltry bit here. I’m not letting anything fully derail me, though. It’s more like a detour. I’m still pedaling, just taking a couple of extra miles out in a different direction, viewing some scenery. When it comes to my talks with Emery, the side trips are worth it. 

 

A couple of my responses, snipped from our conversation:

“Ha ha. The most damaged individuals generally tend to gravitate towards psychology. Not a slight, just a general observation.”

“I’m not sure whether I would rather be blissfully unaware of all the mis-wired things going on in my brain or not. I feel that it is the socially responsible thing, for me to try to figure out how I am screwing up, so I can be a better person, maximize my potential, blah blah blah.”

“And if, in so doing, I can shed light on the some of the common issues that seem to plague people, and thereby help them, well, good karma points for me, I guess.”

 

I am, however, getting hungry, and those pushups, sit-ups and jumping jacks aren’t going to do themselves.