My Twelve Step Program

It's time to come clean. I'm in a twelve step program. I'm a recovering new ager, and I'm taking reality one day at a time.

I was seriously addicted during the 70s and 80s. In fact I went back to college and got a BS in Numinology, followed by a masters in holistic geology, and finally a doctorate in astropsychics.

I was convinced that one could have everything one could imagine just by meditating on it, picturing it, visualizing myself having it. There was the beachfront mansion in Pebble Beach, the new Mercedes, the forty-foot yacht, the perfect trophy wife. The great thing was that I didn't have to work hard or study or make any effort. It was like, visualize and chant and be one with the abundance of the universe, and these things would just materialize.

And the best part was that if I win, no one else would lose. It was all about abundance: everything for everybody, every time, forever. Scarcity was a fiction made up in the unenlightened minds of the up tight and totally uncool.

I also believed that all you need is love, so if some crazies were trying to bomb the building I worked in, I just had to love them unconditionally, and they'd put away their explosives and join me, arm in arm, for a rousing rendition of Kumbaya. We were all children of the universe, all children of a benign god whose only purpose was to make us feel good.

It did help if we were stoned, as then we would feel like we were all merged into one universal being.

Still, after two decades of this bliss I woke up in a flea infested apartment in a lousy neighborhood, with threadbare furniture and a landlord bugging me for the rent. Maybe it wasn't all that bad, but it was a long way from that mansion in Pebble Beach. My Mercedes was a 15 year old motorcycle, and I froze my butt off in the winter. I did have the feeling of oneness with many women, most of whom never told me their names and often emptied my wallet before sneaking out in the middle of the night.

Well, I go to meetings now. I know that the universe doesn't know me or give a damn about whether I live or die. Most people are out for number one, and if I'm not, I'm going to be taken for a sucker. I shake hands with my right hand, while my left is clamped on my wallet, and the only way I'm going to get out of debt is to work my ass off at a boring job for ten hours a day for an idiot boss.

It's been seventeen years, eight months and fourteen days, but sometimes I miss it.