CHICAGO CARLESS

(Photo: Talk to the hand or take the green light in the middle? No one to choose but you.)

Some people don’t like hearing about recovery–mine or anyone else’s. To others, stories of recovery are helpful tools on their own journeys to healing. I’ve heard both opinions regarding my recovery blogging here on Carless. The solution? Self select. Read or not as you are so inclined. If you find my story has meaning for your personal recovery journey, then my putting this out there is worth the discomfort of less understanding souls. I give myself permission to write my own words.

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(Photo: How do you picture all that is? Credit: Omnos.)

These are, perhaps, the most unexpected words I will ever write in my life. Tonight, I came to believe in God.

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Impending moves breed future-flavored angst. Such it is with my upcoming move back home to New York City–how exactly does one say goodbye to a city as wondrous as Chicago? (No, really, if anyone knows I’m dying to know, too).

Not long ago, a colleague and fellow writer clued me into “Jamestown”, a novel by fellow New Yorker Matt Sharpe. Funny thing, the novel smacks more of my move from NYC to Chicago than back the other way, but except for the gratuitous (fictional) blood-shed, the parallels are, frankly, annoying.

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Letting go is difficult when you don’t want to do it. It’s when you want to but can’t that you really get into trouble. Madness can set in, turn you into the emotional equivalent of a launderer obsessed with an inexplicably persistent stain. You’ll scrub until the cloth before you falls apart, yet, to your own amazement, witness the stain remain. You may, in turn, scrub away at other stains on other quickly disintegrating garments. Never able to rid yourself of the stain. Never knowing why. Never witnessing your pattern.

Such is the story of my life.

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(Photo: This is not a Duchenne smile.)

Will the real Hillary Clinton smile please stand up? Last week, the NY Post reported an ongoing feud between Clinton’s New York and D.C. campaign staff. Apparently, the home-state staff, who got Clinton elected to the Senate playing on heartfelt themes of hearth and home, feels left out of the 1980s-pop-music-esque overproduction of Clinton’s image being put in place by the Washington crew for her 2008 presidential bid. The Post mercilessly pegged Hil on the New York staffers’ point: Ms. Clinton is all polls, but little pulse.

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