Never been one to let the carrier drop

Below is a email I would have sent to HP – had they not given me a fake email address when I asked for a address to send them the solution to.

I’ve worked tech support. I know how hard it can be. And I know that no tech support person would *ever* want to walk someone through the steps I outline below. But you shouldn’t lie to your customers. I’m sure the person I talked to knew it was possible. He could have told me “I’m not allowed to answer that question because HP would rather not spend money on my time to walk you through this.” Which would have been the truth, and I would have been all right with.

The company I worked for doing tech support had a policy of lying to customers. They would commonly tell them they needed a special type of printer cable for “bidirectional” support, when in fact the majority of the problems the customers were having had nothing to do with that.

They also lied to vendors.. but that’s another story. Anyway, I don’t really blame the individual I talked to, and while I started to vent my frustration at him for either A: lying to me or B: not knowing what he was talking about, I quickly reined myself in because I realized I had zero interest in hurting him or making his day worse, and he was the victim of a much larger system as much as I was.

That said.. if anyone else out there is trying to do this migration, here’s how I made it work. Took me about a hour and a half to figure this out – if I can save someone else the trouble, great!

——-

I called tonight (from XXX-XXX-5701) to ask how I could install Windows 7 from the system disk that the computer shipped with (1.5T) to a high performance SSD (Smaller. But much larger than the 40G in use). Your technician, while very polite, was pretty much clueless. He was able to identify that the reason I wasn’t able to use your recovery utility was that the disk geometry was wildly different, but he couldn’t tell me any solution other than purchasing windows install disks for $200.

I thanked him for his time, and offered to email him the solution once I found it. (I’m a career sysadmin and programmer. I knew it was possible. Just not how, yet.) Here it is.

Next I did what I really should have done first, and googled for my problem. The first hit was http://sonic-media.dk/?p=103, which describes how to do exactly what I’m doing. Of course, there are caveats.

To do this, you need a external USB disk with enough space to fit all the bloatware that HP installs on the system. 64G is probably the minimum I would do – but I had a 1T lying around, which let me keep several instances of the backup to try out.

In order to make the NTFS partition *fit* on the SSD, it needs shrunk. This can be done from inside disk manager (see http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/2672-partition-volume-shrink.html), but first you have to disable system protection, virtual memory, and hibernation. (links to how to do all that included)

(optional) You also have the option to delete the system restore partition. I know, tech support is groaning at me about this, but remember your average person bright enough to know they want a SSD is also bright enough to write that data off somewhere else first. Remember that SSDs are *expensive* – you want every gigabyte to go to something you’re going to use, if not every day, at least occasionally. So yes, obviously, make a backup first. (In fact, that’s kind of the whole point of the first article. You’re using the Windows Image Backup tool to make a backup and restore it onto your new media). Then delete it. You can always restore to your original system disk with that partition once you’re done with this exercise.

For a boot disk (the windows backup tool asks you if you want to make one) I suggest using nonvolatile media like a DVD, as I discovered to my chagrin that if you pull the USB drive while shutdown is occuring using USB restore media, you don’t have USB restore media any more. I like my restore media to stay restore media.

Obviously, this is not something you want to walk Grandma through over the phone. But for advanced users, you could forward this email to them rather than telling them that it’s not possible to do what they want to do. SSDs are a great improvement over spinning disks, speed wise, because they have zero seek time – and as the cost drops, you’re going to see more and more people wanting to do what I just did. (Of course, eventually the capacity will be large enough that this issue won’t come up)

Finally, the Vertex SSD I had purchased came already formatted NTFS. For some reason, the system restore utility – even though it said it would partition and format the disk.. got very upset about this. So, I followed the directions in http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-system/no-disk-that-can-be-used-for-recovering-the-system/e855ee43-186d-4200-a032-23d214d3d524 to use the recovery console to wipe the disk.

Also, of course, most of us can figure this stuff out. 😉 I just hoped that calling tech support would save me having to run down all the information myself.

P.S. the computer now takes longer to go through the BIOS stuff than it does to boot the OS. 😉 Windows 7, from 0 to fully online in 6 seconds. Now perhaps you understand why I bothered?

Recently, one of the sites I admin for came under what I would refer to as a DDOS attack by http://www.80legs.com/webcrawler.html.

This claims to be a ordinary web spider, but it does some things that other web spiders don’t:

1) It makes between 20 and 100 connections to the server, from different IP addresses
2) It makes requests as fast as the server will answer

Now, for a web server with flat files, this is fine. But this particular web server had very complex database content that involved a lot of joins and multiple queries to build each page. It runs on a fairly powerful box – four of them, actually – but it still wasn’t up for 100 connections querying as fast as it would respond. I think probably most database-driven sites would have some problems with this.

As 80legs points out on their web site, blocking them by IP will not work because they are a distributed engine spanning thousands of IPs. Kind of like a botnet. And their indexing is user-driven.. that is, you can pay them to index a particular site for you. Good way to mess with your competitors. 😉

Anyway, my solution was simple and elegent. We already use haproxy to distribute load among the web servers, so I just pulled out the ‘tarpit’ and wrote a quick regex. For those of you not familiar with haproxy, it’s a single threaded non blocking daemon (Oh, i love those! Just like ew-too!) that proxies web requests to servers, automatically adjusts when servers go down, and has a bunch of neat features. It’s free software, and it has worked extremely well for us.

Anyway, I stuck the following in haproxy.cfg:

reqitarpit ^User-Agent: .*www.80legs.com.*

Goodbye, 80legs. Have fun hanging out in 30-second-delay-for-any-request land 😉

For those of you who haven’t set up haproxy before, it’s pretty trivial. It can run on the same box as your web server and just attach to a different interface (i.e. bind the webserver to localhost and it to the outside interface) or a different machine, or whatever. It’s a very lightweight load, as STNB things tend to be.

Random factoid for those of you not familiar with ew-too – the reason ew-too was written STNB is that it was originally designed to run on university computers, and be such a light load that the administrators never noticed it – on machines that were the equivalent of a 486. With a hundred people or more connected. STNB is a very clever approach for situations that it works for.

A confusing problem I’ve run across several times. I wanted to share it with you, because it has me occasionally in mental agony and every once in a while you send me responess that are pure gold in clearing my confusion or building me up.

Let’s say you have person A and person B. Person A is a friend. Person B might be their parents, their spouse, another friend, or any number of possibilities.

Person B tells you not to talk to person A. They might tell you to delete their phone number from your phone, or to never email them again.

In the past, I have always complied with these requests from Person B. Today, I decided to respond to a email from a Person A who has been friends with me for years, despite the Person B request six months ago that I not talk to Person A because Person A was having delusions about who I was and what I represented.

Now, I have a specific case in mind here – although I’ve seen this pattern many, many times in my life – and I want to talk more about this case. I don’t agree with person B. If Person A was confused and thinking I was going to marry them and solve all their problems, I think I *should* talk to them.. to kindly and gently explain that that’s not my path right now.. I love them, I hope they get what they need, but I can’t be that person for them. I wouldn’t want that person to just cut me off with no explanation. But, I complied with Person B’s request because I was afraid of what person B might do.

Now I agree if Person A says please don’t contact me, I shouldn’t contact them. I have a hard time with these some times for a long list of reasons that I’d love to go into with you at a later date, but, I at least agree that I shouldn’t be contacting them.

My struggle is this: The aforementioned incident left a Person-A shaped hole in my life. Person A is my friend, and we share many common interests and I didn’t want them gone.

The angry part of me is saying, What business is it of Person B (their parents, in this case, but Person A is of age) whether me and Person A are friends. They may feel that my friendship is hurting person A, but if so they should explain that in enough detail for me to understand how, not just say “Don’t talk to person A”

I think I hear a threat where there isn’t any. My irrational fear side sees.. weell, are they going to take out a restraining order against me, have me arrested, come gun me down.. all sorts of things that in the real world do not seem to happen to me.

It’s just upsetting. I don’t know the “right” thing to do, and I am conflicted between that part of me that says complience with any request is the “right” thing to do and the part of me that says treating Person A in the way I would choose to be treated is the “right” thing to do.

We’re all just kids from
Around town and so we know
That outside in the real world
It doesn’t matter what we do
We know for us there’s nothing new

So drop your hesitation and come with me
Nothing that we say can hurt us now
Take this night and make it remember us
There’s nothing stopping us now, so come with me

Singing, singing
[Incomprehensible]
Singing, singing
What is the meaning?

Singing, singing
[Incomprehensible]
Singing, singing
I might be singing

I know you’re only here to kill a few more hours
I could be somewhere else but
Now I’ve got my reasons not to go home
I don’t want to be there alone

You know you’ve got to stop
Thinking about right and wrong
Tonight it’s you and me, it’s now or never
We’ve got nothing to lose
We can do whatever we choose

So drop your hesitation and come with me
Nothing that we say can hurt us now
Take this night and make it remember us
There’s nothing stopping us now, so come with

Reach out with music
(Music)
Reach out with music
(Music)

Reach out – music
(Music)
Reach out – music
(Music)

So drop your hesitation and come with me
Nothing that we say can hurt us now
Take this night and make it remember us
There’s nothing stopping us now, so come with

So drop your hesitation and come with me
Nothing that we say can hurt us now
Take this night and make it remember us
There’s nothing stopping us now, so come with me

So, today I’m doing sound for a small venue and a blues band. I’d forgotten how much fun it is (although a fair amount of heavy lifting is also involved). I need to make friends with some bands.. I remember looking at the sound for the Comet Club and being amused that I have a better system sitting in storage.

I didn’t bring the whole system – that would be way overkill for this venue.. I’ve just got one 1801 and 4 450s, two of which I’m planning on using as stage monitors.

After the event:

Well, it could have gone better. 😉 It also could have gone worse. I screwed up and paused the recording, and then when I unpaused it didn’t rearm the record tracks even though the record light was still on on the UI. Grr, digital performer, annoying bug, grr.

But, we got about ten minutes. Available at http://www.sheer.us/stuff/030712-jam.mp3

I had a couple of feedback problems.. I want to get another driverack PA to run the floor monitors through.

Still, I had a really good time and am hoping that more chances to do live sound will be coming my way.

So, I have a really interesting problem.

Everyone in the external world.. Oops, not everyone, but a majority of people.. caution me repeatedly about sleep deprivation and how much damage it will do to me / my life / etc. About half the times that I have experimented with sleep deprivation – either because of the effects of drugs I was using, or because of a concious choice to go down that road.. I have ended up in a psych hospital.

Now that I have heard the conditions for why one would end up in a psych hospital, I know that in fact for most of my life I have qualified for one of the conditions. “A danger to myself”. I had a really bad habit. I participated actively in my own ego-destruction because I didn’t want my ego to get too large, because I found people with excessive egos to be annoying.

At this point, I’m no longer participating that way. I believe that I’m sane enough and a good enough judge of myself that I do not need to insult myself / tell myself that various friends don’t want to spend time with me / tell myself that people who have never given any evidence of hating me hate me / doubt people who have shown over time to be trustworthy. My mind is a much quieter place since I made the irrevocable decision not to hurt myself in this way any more.

It astonishes me how easy this change was. Several of the previous changes that I have made in myself have been very difficult – ceasing using drugs, making the irrevocable decision to not think about or talk about suicide any more. (I did so recently despite my best inclinations on the matter, and I ended up regretting it)

But sleep deprivation is complicated. I’ve seen amazing things, heard amazing things, and seen measurable growth in my dream life and my inner life every time I engaged in it. On the other hand, there’s no doubt that there is some period after 72-ish hours where my decision-making skills become poor, my ability to navigate is seriously diminished, and in general I’m not tracking as well as I normally do. However, I can’t shake the feeling – even though no one I’ve talked to has agreed with this – that there is some plateau hanging out after 100-ish hours at which I will return to my usual level of competency and just, well, no longer need sleep.

One of the possible ramifications of being lost in plato’s cave – which I will readily admit that I am – I have no idea how much of the reality I experience is internally generated (“the map”) vs how much is externally generated (“the territory”). To put it another way, I’m pretty sure that a fair amount of what I experience is at least somewhat under my control, but it’s not under my *conscious* control.

To add to the fun, I am not at all whether my subconscious mind is pro me getting the experiences I want, or against. It seems pretty clear that whatever part of my mind that is responsible for creating my dreams has a history of not liking the part of my mind that is experiencing those dreams as subjective reality, since the dreams that I have are often nightmares. I’m not sure what to take from the fact that most of these nightmares are about unsolvable problems.. I recently had a dream in which people were slamming cinderblocks against my head. One advantage of not sleeping is not having to deal with the dreams I have when I sleep. I have a few good dreams.. and a much higher percentage than I did a year ago, so I see improvement, and improvement is a good thing..

Anyway, back to the debate.

Here are some of the pros and cons:

Pro: Intense and very good visual experiences (including starbursts, pretty lights, hallucinating the muppets)
Permanent improvement in my ability to visualize
Temporary improvement in kinesthetic abilities i.e. skating, dancing, playing the keys
Temporary periods of fearlessness which enable me to investigate the folly of most fear
Permanent improvement in number of nightmares I experience
Permanent improvement in my ability to think outside the box

Con: Risk of harm? I haven’t yet been harmed by any of my adventures in sleep-dep land but large numbers of people keep telling me this is luck and could change at any time
Risk of incarceration (Mental hospital or jail, it’s basically the same animal)
Lowered considerably by my learning that mental hospitals do not in fact help me get better (although they can be fun) and understanding my legal rights in WA regarding
being placed in such places for more than 72 hours
Poor decision-making skills
Risk of losing friends (?)
Frightens my friends (:()
Do not always correctly respect other people’s bounderies. <--- BUG, must fix Basically, when I look at the cons, what I'm saying is that it's high risk behavior. Apparently considerably higher risk than, for example, taking a hit of acid. On the other hand, I've never found drugs to be anywhere near as mind-expanding as not sleeping. If this does turn out to be a addictive behavior with only bad effects, or with more bad effects than good ones, I expect I can get free of it using the same process that got me free of my other addictions. There is also the question of what would happen if I didn't sleep but also used a antipsychotic or other psych med to help compensate for whatever issues I have. There are people who claim that sleep deprivation will cause death, but then, you can find people who claim that just about anything will cause death, and thus far I haven't died, not even once. 😉 [In point of fact, if quantum immortality is true, I've died many, many times and just not experienced that death because as the subjective observer, I can never die]

Is it possible that we’re living in a beta version of Earth?

If so, is it possible there’s a release version available, and we just need to ask someone for help upgrading?

No, I’m not using any drugs, nor have I been. Apparently I’m capable of off the wall thinking even sober. 😉

I thought I’d post this just in case anyone else has the same problem I did with 10.04 hanging on ssh login (it also hangs on telnet login, but control-C will fix that. SSH users are not so lucky)

The problem would seem to be that /usr/lib/update-notifier/update-motd-updates-available is trying to access the network and failing – or just taking a very long time to succeed. I seem to especially have problems with this on nodes running on Amazon’s EC2 network.

The easy solution is to edit /usr/lib/update-notifier/update-motd-updates-available and add a ‘exit’ at the top of the script. Of course, this disables checking for updates whenever you log in, but personally I’d rather be *able* to log in. 😉

You will also need to edit /etc/update-motd.d/90-updates-available and similarly add ‘exit’ to it, so that the next time these files are generated this fix continues to work

So, for those of you who have followed my ongoing adventures, you know that today marks a year away from any sort of recreational drugs or alcohol use.

I had some thoughts I wanted to post as a result of my adventures thus far. They’re not very well organized, but after all, it is my blog. 😉

First off, I don’t think drugs are bad. I’m glad that I had the adventures I had with them, and I think I learned a lot and had a lot of good times as a result. I think that specific people have specific weaknesses to certain drugs, probably as a result of psychological or emotional issues or their physical biochemical makeup. If you keep trying different drugs, sooner or later you will probably find one you can’t handle. That’s pretty much what happened to me.

I also don’t think drugs are the end all be all to our evolution. I think that you can have all sorts of spiritual and personal growth without ever using any recreational drug, and I think that – like driving a ATV, flying a plane, or any number of other high-risk activities, drugs are potentially dangerous. I’m not going to be standing up and saying that you should use drug X because it will result in a evolution of your thinking. They’re a tool, and they can be a powerful one – but like any other powerful tool, they are potentially dangerous. Choose wisely.

I believe we should have the freedom to experiment. I don’t believe in the drug war. I do believe the world should have lots of resources to help people who are struggling with emotional and physical issues (one reason people take drugs).. and I think that it in fact does. If you are a addict who sincerely wishes to stop, there is a lot of help out there for you. Your biggest enemy is your own worst thinking.

I do think that children should stay away from drugs – I applaud the age limit on purchase of alcohol, and think that in a world where legalization of other drugs occurs, they should have similar age limits.

I also think that some drugs cause dangerous behaviors, and it should not be legal to use them unless you are in a controlled environment – basically locked up where you can’t hurt other people. I think a look at violent crime statistics and drug use would quickly identify which drugs come under that category. But I’m not writing this post to reform drug laws, or even to propose reform. I’m writing about my own experience.

The reason I put those first few lines in is to say – if you’re a drug user, and you’re happy with your choice, I applaud you. I’m not writing this to give a extended mental finger to all people who play with their blood chemistry. But I needed to stop, because the drug I was using and the way I was using it were getting in the way of personal growth, and getting in the way of me moving away from situations which were not healthy for me.

When I decided to start using drugs, I was curious about the experience of being someone else, of seeing the world through different eyes. I wanted to know what the experience of being altered would be like, and I found it to be very interesting. I don’t think that I would have been that curious about having my emotional and mental state altered if I hadn’t been at least somewhat unsatisfied with the default states.

I will be the first to admit that I may have badly misprogrammed my mind. I probably made some very poor choices about who to trust and how much when I was very young. It’s also possible that some of my problems were the result of my physical state although a lot of them have been increasingly addressable through software (my thoughts and beliefs) – I’m learning how to not be unhappy, and how to have the experiences I want to have and get the things I need. I’m learning how to not hurt myself and not believe that I should be hurt.

When I found my “drug of choice”, at first I was just hooked on spending time not experiencing fear. Then I discovered that I could communicate – with my mind – with someone who wasn’t me. I still don’t know who it was – but the experience was fascinating. I was hooked on the mystery. I wasn’t thinking ahead to the crushing hangovers, the moments of utter irrationality that would follow as my body chemistry came unwound, the empty bank accounts and mounting debts, the frightening friends and loved ones, or any of the other downsides that accompany drug abuse. I had not yet learned to – as the 12 step people say – “play the tape all the way through”.

The ability to experience a communication with someone who isn’t me has not left me. These days I talk to a lot of people ‘out there’ – and it’s possible, as I’m sure many of my friends would point out – that these people are just my imagination. If so, I’m still glad that they’re there, because they have helped me understand the faults in my own thinking in ways that I’m not sure anything else would have. They have exhibited knowledge and abilities that make me *very* skeptical that they are just me. 😉 I think this is a experience that I have always wanted to have, and I’m glad that I’m having it – it’s one of the things that has me hooked on what tomorrow’s going to bring in my current life. I think that the people I have been talking to via whatever this method is have been much more able to communicate with me since I stopped using. I note that contact with a higher power is a suggested part of one of the more popular addiction support groups, which suggests that I am not alone in this experience.

When I decided to stop using drugs, I found a number of good, valid resources available to help me. As with so many of my problems (and my biggest problem was and continues to be paranoia) the real struggle was within me. It’s not that the world didn’t provide resources to help with addiction, because the world does. It’s that the filters that my mind provides, and my defense mechanisms, made using those resources challenging at first. Obviously, I’m glad I persisted. I have found many of the things I was searching for with drug use in other things – often better than any drug I ever tried ever was. If you are a addict reading this and wondering if getting clean is worth it – it is. You will learn a lot about yourself and about the world you live in, and you will discover a lot of new adventures and new experiences. And, if you’re like me, you will be a lot less unhappy after having gone through some of the process.

One of the things that I had a big problem with at first was thinking that if I didn’t agree with any part of a recovery program, they couldn’t help me. I have since learned to take the good and ignore the bad – in some cases, the bad will become good later as I understand more, and in some cases, the bad is just *shrug* wrong. For me anyway.

I won’t claim that it isn’t a lot of work. Learning to accept and love yourself is challenging if you’ve strongly programmed yourself to be critical of yourself. I don’t know what challenges other addicts face and I can only speak for myself – but Whitney Houston’s ‘The greatest love of all.. is easy to achieve’ is utter BS for me. It is NOT easy to love yourself, or accept yourself, starting from the position I started from. It is very challenging. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing – a lot of things that are worth doing are very challenging. I am also not claiming to be a paragon of self-acceptance now. I am just no longer interested in hurting myself with constant harsh criticism of my thoughts and actions. I am no longer telling myself that my dreams and desires are small, or stupid, or wrong – even if they don’t align at all with the desires of the rest of the world, or they don’t make sense in the context of what I “should” want, or they’re not what other people would choose. I’m no longer interested in even talking or thinking about suicide. I want to find ways to make my life as awesome a ride as possible, and I believe that it can be as good as I am willing to let it be.

I think in my case that addiction really translated to a malfunction of my free will, and that this was present all over my life. I was wanting things and not taking actions to get them. I was taking actions that previous experience suggested would continue to lead to unpleasant results. I had set up rules for myself that made no rational sense, based on cognitive distortions or on complete fallacy. I believed a whole large number of things which were inconsistent or impossible. In general, I was stymed by cognitive distortions – bad thinking. I was also seriously negatively impacted – and continue to be negatively impacted – by paranoia. Unreasonable fears. I once emailed a list of fears I had to a friend and I think I sent about 70 before I stopped – and I hadn’t listed them all or been completely honest about them. I still think the process of doing that was a huge step forward for me.

Overcoming my fears – especially the ones that I understand in my conscious mind to be irrational – is a journey that I have not yet completed. In some ways I feel like I have just begun upon it. However, I can already see the fruits of my labors. I am *much* happier now than I was as a drug addict. I am much more aware of how much of the fear and discord and negative emotions I experience are the results of my own subconscious thinking and problems with my mind that are within my power – eventually, with time and work – to fix.

A lot of things about my view of the world have changed in the last few years. I also don’t think I’m done changing – I’m still trying on beliefs to see how they fit, trying on thought patterns to see which ones work, and trying on possible futures to see which ones feel like they are me.

I would like to thank all the friends who have helped me along.. sometimes with kindness, sometimes with a thought-provoking comment, and sometimes just by being there.

I wanted to say a few more things, and these are messages directly to fellow addiction sufferers, because I think it’s possible that some of you will land here because of google keywords. (Certainly my blog seems to get tens of thousands of hits a month already for *some* reason)

First of all, own your power. The first step of the twelve steps is extremely misleading when you’re thinking like a addict. It is not saying you will *always* be powerless over whatever your addiction is. It’s saying that *right now*, because of the fact that you have in essence a mental illness, you are powerless and need help. It’s also saying that that help is available – and it is! But I think if you just wait for some external higher power to fix you, you’re going to have a long wait. That’s not saying you won’t receive help from other people – sometimes visible, sometimes not, sometimes supernatural, sometimes not. But you can have a lot less suffering, and much more growth, if you also work yourself towards reaching a day when you are not powerless. Try to have power. You may not always succeed, but you will sometimes and each success will make you stronger.

Second of all, don’t beat yourself up over failures. DO learn from them. Shame and guilt and fear are your enemies – they are the emotions that keep you in bondage, that keep you from being mentally free. I think a lot of the reasons for working the steps (if you’re a 12-stepper) is to remove your shame and guilt over your past mistakes, and to encourage you to develop a way of living which leads away from making more of the types of actions you have to feel bad about when you look back over them. You can’t make good decisions if you’re being whipsawed by your own shame and guilt every time you think anything.

In general, don’t kick yourself. Learn to recognize when you are hurting yourself, and learn to stop. The more often you stop, the better you will get at stopping. You don’t do anyone on earth any favors by making yourself unhappy. It’s not going to help any of the people you have hurt. It’s not going to help you.

Third of all, learn about stinkin’ thinkin’ (12 step) or cognitive distortions (smartrecovery) and learn how to spot them in all your thinking, not just your thinking about drugs. I did.. and do.. a lot of very questionable thinking. Bad thinking is your enemy. It’s what makes you the destroyer of your own free will, it’s what sets you up for bad decisions and bad results, and it’s something that you can learn to recognize.

Fourth of all, believe that it’s possible. Believe you can be clean, or free of overeating, or gambling, or whatever your problem is. I know that believing is much more difficult than just saying you believe, and that belief comes about somewhat because you put a tiny little feeler of faith in the water and get back experiences which validate that faith – belief is at least somewhat controlled by experience – but to whatever extent you can, make sure you’re open to believing you can succeed.

Fifth of all: Also consider the possibility that your problem is just a symptom of a larger problem. Work to fix the symptoms, but also work the larger problem. In my case, my constant and blinding paranoia was a much larger problem than my drug use ever was. While I’m no longer using drugs, I’m still working to address my fear issues. My belief that I deserved to suffer, and my willingness to hurt myself internally by negative self talk, was and is a much larger problem than my drug use. Also still something I’m addressing. I hope at some point I can come back and write one of these posts about overcoming irrational fear, and overcoming negative self talk. It’s possible that no one else will ever read it, or even want to read it, but I think it will be good for me to write it.

Sixth of all, figure out what you really want. Make a list. On paper. Be honest. Even if they seem impossible, be honest. It’s very hard to get what you want if you don’t know what you want.

Seventh of all, find positive activities to keep you busy. Work. Write music. Dance. Skate. Bowl. Go for long walks in the woods. Kayak. Waterski. Learn to fly a plane. One could list hundreds of different possible activities here – my point is that in my experience, you’re not going to be experiencing stinking thinking or a craving for drugs when you’re doing something else that keeps you aware and engaged and interested.

Eighth of all.. one of the people I talk to over my internal link has a saying. The people in heaven and the people in hell inhabit the same physical space. The people in heaven try very hard to reach the people in hell. Make sure you’re open to accepting the gifts the universe and all it’s inhabitants offer. Make sure you’re open to being helped. Be ready to leave hell. Make sure you don’t need the pain, the suffering, the drama. If you find that you do need them, figure out why and figure out if you really want to live that way. All of this is your choice, but choosing is a complex and layered thing. Expect to have to put some effort into choosing a good life experience, especially if you’ve put some effort into choosing a bad one.

One of my favorite sayings, from Fred Brown Recovery Services – a place where I learned a LOT – is a simple mantra. ‘We don’t have to live that way today.’. It’s what I have told myself, this past year, whenever I was tempted to buy and use. I’m also learning to tell myself the same thing whenever I start to think things which are hurtful, or which imply I don’t deserve to have a wonderful life, or to be loved.

Whoever you are, I wish you the best of luck. There are many people out there who love you – probably more than you will ever know. There are many resources to help you. And, obviously, I’m not altogether “better”. This isn’t a post to say I’m cured. It’s a post to say I’m progressing. I just wanted to share some of the important lessons I learned along the way, in case they can help you too.

I slept last night for about 3 hours. I awoke with the feeling that I was staring at a blinking cursor under the word ‘READY’ – like I was waking up at exactly the right moment. I had one problem-dream, involving moving cars about in a parking garage. It had not progressed to the nightmare stage when I exited it.

Lucid dreaming is still beyond me, but I do have certain new capabilities, like the ability to find the exit in dreams. It does seem that I think less circuitously and more directly when I get more sleep.