Month: August 2024

Introduction by Matt (W6CSN) In early August, my family and I had occasion to take a road trip totaling nearly 2800 miles (4500 km) across six different U.S. states. The title of this posting might lead you to think that this trip was dedicated to doing Parks On The Air activations, but that was not … Continue reading Western States POTA Roadtrip Summary →

Many thanks to Gavin (GM0WDD) who notes that ML&S have posted a product page for the new Yaesu FTX-1F.  I was curious what new product announcements might come out of the Tokyo Ham Fair 2024–this is exciting news, indeed.  The following specs and details all come from Martin Lynch and Sons: The new FTX-1F will … Continue reading The Yaesu FTX-1F Portable HF Transceiver: Yaesu’s replacement for the venerable FT-818 and FT-817 →

I’m grateful for a Friday morning. I’m grateful for where I’ve been. I’m grateful for an excellent cheeseburger. I’m grateful for how I got here. I’m grateful for the sun and the smile on my face. I’m grateful to be sober today.

Mystery ?? Button

song of the week:

I’m not sure how the whole “song of the week” thing began. There is now a whole process around the selecting of the songs; invariably, that carefully constructed, deliberative approach gives way to hearing a song I haven’t heard for a long time and then not being able to stop listening to said song. This is what happened with this song.

Maybe it’s not the happiest of songs. I can remember listening to it a long time ago, like the early 2000s. I was a very unhappy, hard-drinking alcoholic. There were lots and lots of problems all around me. My marriage was already in a shambles, I was going through some fairly wrenching events and upheaval in my professional life. In those days, I mostly “slept” on the sofa in the family room, the three dogs surrounding me, the TV flickering some military history documentary all night long. The cauldron of fear, anger, shame, regret, guilt, hopelessness and loneliness was always overflowing, my stomach roiled with every boil-over.

I was still almost a decade away from finally seeking help for the thing that dominated my life. My memories of that time are tinged with dislocation and desperation. I felt empty and lost, I was so tired of living a double-life. But I had no idea how to stop. This was an extension of the realization I had in a black naugahyde booth listening to the Electric Light Orchestra:

I don’t know how this ever ends. How will this ever stop?

I remember hearing this song and so viscerally identifying with it. I listened to it over and over and over, thinking how perfectly it encapsulated my sad, desperate, entrapped life.

I remember painting the basement (I like painting) and listening to this song on repeat for three days. I was angry. I was lost. There was no sign of land and I had no idea which direction to paddle.

I drank. A lot.

I’d play this song in the car and sing along, feeling the satisfying burn of resentments and anger washing over me, creating the perfect conditions for an afternoon, or an evening, or a mid-morning rendezvous with that chanteuse, Kim Crawford. My wife knew I drank, she just had no idea how much or how often, or what happened when I did.

I was the classic Jekyll and Hyde of the Big Book, turning routine trips to the Home Depot into hurried visits to the Legal Sea Foods in the mall next door. I knew the bartenders there could be counted on to get me the three or four glasses I needed to continue the day—and I only had about 30 minutes. I still needed to get to the Home Depot and buy whatever it was for the project I wasn’t actually going to do. I lived the life of a spy, always constructing a cover story to generate time “in the black,” time where I could drink.

I got the “in the black” thing from a book I read about operations at the CIA station in Moscow in the 1980s and 1990s. Everyone leaving the US Embassy complex was, of course, heavily surveilled. It was necessary to elude the tail, using disguises and ruses and trickery, all employed to generate what they called, “time in the black.” Time when they weren’t subject to surveillance, weren’t being watched and had the time to do what was necessary.

They did spy stuff; I drank Sauvignon Blanc at the mall.

Then I would drive home listening to angry music in the car. I realize that one of the very excellent things that drinking did for me was to turn the fear into anger. Fear is a terrible feeling. The emptiness, the heart pounding, the stomach doing somersaults, the blood running cold, the sense of impending tragedy and doom—it’s all just overwhelming sometimes. At least it was for me.

I have always struggled with emotional regulation. I was subject to runaway feelings, scary racing thoughts, from a pretty early age. Scary things that I was not able to dispatch on my own. Fear was such an overwhelming feeling for me, I was afraid to be afraid, if that makes any sense. My imagination produced incipient catastrophes from relatively minor concerns, but I was 12, I didn’t know they weren’t real.

I will tell you, those first few drops of alcohol, “pink jesus punch” at Deak R.’s house out by the backyard trampoline, fell on fertile soil. I describe myself as a “white light drinker,” meaning that I immediately recognized this was the answer. Drinking was the thing that could let me navigate the world around me.

It did this by making me care substantially less about things that I used to care more about—relationships with other people being in that category, along with a lot of other stuff. It did this by making my fear feel less piquant and more distant. For whatever reason, I ran on a lot of fear from a fairly early age and part of the problem was how familiar I was with the feeling of fear—it subconsciously directed me to seek out situations that would generate even more fear, making me feel weirdly “at home.”

At some point, the dangerous alchemy occurs, when drinking finally solves whatever thing it was supposed to fix and the alcoholic brain recognizes its true champion. For me, this happened when drinking began to turn my fear into anger. I didn’t know what to do about fear, I didn’t know how to feel less fearful, I didn’t know how to pop the weirdly distorted cognitive bubble that grew in my head. Until I drank enough and the fear metastasized into anger.

Anger gave me way more options. I could direct it at people in order to make them feel a taste of the pain they were causing me. I could employ it passive-aggressively to emphasize to loved ones what it might feel like if I was really gone. I could use it to justify doing whatever the f*** I wanted to do at that moment. Anger was useful, anger could be expressed —when drinking.

Much later, as I was on the way to ruining yet another relationship, I would spend most of my evenings with my bartender friend, Antoine, talking about basketball and quietly nursing resentments as I made my way through yet another big green bottle.

One super useful skill I acquired as a Boy Scout was learning how to start a fire, even in wet and windy conditions, or in the snow. The critical thing is creating a small burning core and then gently growing it, so that it can consume the bigger pieces of kindling that had been pre-gathered. I would cup the nascent flame, gently blowing on it to coax a little more temperature and encouraging its spread. Hopefully, there were dry pine needles involved, because when you got the flames big enough to ignite that shit—well, that was an explosion and now you’re off to the races.

I guess you could say I drank like a Boy Scout.

Once I’d turned enough fear to anger, I’d engage in some passive-aggressive texting with the girlfriend, hinting at all kinds of resentments from my barstool. I’d usually hustle home around 10:30—she liked to call around 11ish to say goodnight. Since she thought I was sober, I didn’t want to do that call from a bar. If I’d hit that magic mark, just enough to get me angry, but not enough to make me sleepy and loving, well, we could have an actual and very satisfying fight on the telephone and by text.1

There were way too many mornings that would unfold with me stretching gloriously in my bed, feeling relaxed and maybe even happy for a moment or two, then reaching for my phone and realizing,

Shit, I think I we broke up again last night.

This happened more than once. This happened a lot. The duration of the break-ups ranged from two hours to two months. We always got back together, well, except for that last time. Why? We were both too scared to let go. That was also a very familiar and comfortable spot for me—the feelings of being trapped, the feelings of claustrophobia, that came with knowing that I was in the wrong place. Letting go meant going back into the dark unknown. I was too scared to do that, but it was exactly what I needed to do.

Drinking turned my fear into anger, a feeling I had a better chance of managing and expressing. The problem is that anger and fear send very different messages. The anger told me that I had been wronged, under-appreciated again, taken advantage of, and expressing that to the wrongdoers was very satisfying and also very futile. The problem was the inexhaustible well of fear down there, which meant there was going to be a need for a corresponding amount of flinty white wine.

My fear was telling me something very different. My fear was telling me that we were a long way from home, and that it was getting dark and it wasn’t really obvious where the path was. My fear told me that my life, as I was living it, was not sustainable. My fear was telling me I was really lost, that I had lost sight of myself.

Anger locked me into conflict, it rooted me to a life that I found unsettling and unpleasant. But for a long time, feeling angry was way better, and much more tolerable, than feeling that fear. So I hung in there, woke up every morning feeling more disaffected, more fearful, counting the minutes until I could wash those feelings away and turn them into self-pitying razors of death I could send whizzing at the people who made the mistake of loving me.

Living in fear sucks. Sitting with feelings of fear sucks. Fear sucks. But only by sitting and listening to my fear, over and over, was I finally able to discern the true message. My fear was really telling me that it was necessary to change and even pointing to the thing that needed to be done.

It was when I stopped running from my fears that I found myself.

One of the things that grabbed me about “Hanging Around” was the way it started,

and then the dark part is there in the very first stanza:

and then,

That’s not really the story of any particular relationship, it’s the story of my life while drinking. I spent much of my life, maybe what could have been my best years, on a barstool; witty banter and white wine flowing, just waiting it out and giving way, way too much away. Sometimes it feels like I let a whole life drift away on a river of golden wine.

I love the mornings. I love, and have always loved, getting up in the dark, taking in the delicious quiet, watching the sun slowly come up and seeing the possibility of every day emerge anew. I never feel alone or lonely in the early morning hours. Me and my coffee, maybe on the pirate balcony, watching the sun emerge over the power plant and the RFK bridge is pretty hard to beat.2

I love this song, but it makes me sad to listen to it. I think about what was and what could have been. But that doesn’t matter, it’s what is here and now that does. I can only make my mark on my today, and that’s exactly what I intend to do. There’s no more hanging around and feeling sorry for myself. Fear was my guide to the promised land, listening to it was hard but necessary. But it was listening to my fear that has unlocked so much about my life, generate so much happiness and content.

As I may have written in the not-so-distant past, this is more my vibe in the mornings these days:

Happy Friday.

Many thanks to Micah (N4MJL) who shares the following guest post: Activating W7U/SL-022 on a Layover by Micah (N4MJL) As an airline pilot, I’m always on the lookout for POTA/SOTA sites that are near me when I have long layovers in different cities across the country. Salt Lake City, Utah is no exception. I always … Continue reading Maximizing a Layover: From the cockpit to the summit of W7U/SL-022 →

by Teri KO4WFP As much as I enjoy the pursuit of my 2024 goal of 60 new parks, this Wednesday, August 21, I suspended my pursuit of that goal and headed to George L. Smith State Park, a park I activated last fall.  Why? I did so in support of K2D and International Dog Day. … Continue reading The POTA Babe Goes to the Dogs →

I’m grateful for showing my visiting friends some beautiful parts of Colorado and being reminded how lucky I am to live here. I’m grateful for my dog’s daycare place taking good care of him. I’m grateful for how my Higher Power is constantly working, whether in the foreground or background, to let me see clearly what’s in front of me and focus on the next right action. I’m grateful to allow myself to feel emotions – including negative ones – but not dwell on them in unhealthy, unsustainable ways. I’m grateful for listening to diverse perspectives and seeing how they grow my own understanding of the world. I’m grateful to feel pride about elements of my past and use that emotion to infuse positivity into my present. I’m grateful to have squeezed in my daily run despite the day being packed.

My week has been a little chaotic, but primarily in positive ways. I’ve been looking to settle my mind as a bunch of competing priorities emerge so Step 11 has naturally crept to the forefront:

Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

Prayer and meditation are two tools in AA that I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface around engaging with deeply. Importantly though I’m glad that I’ve not been hard on myself when it comes to needing to find an immediate answer. The key for me is to continue keeping an open mind. Judge less, learn more is my personal motto around Step 11.

On this front I do give myself credit, especially over the past year. Whenever I hear tidbits of what people share about their experience with prayer and meditation I log it as something to use – if not now, then store it in my memory bank for later. I don’t shut down immediately when something isn’t immediately relevant because at this stage of my sobriety I’ve collected enough evidence to know that these sleeper pearls of wisdom can swoop in at any point to restore my sanity.

In the “Twelve and Twelve” I love how they describe the evolution of my thinking here:

Perhaps our trouble was not that we used our imagination. Perhaps the real trouble was our almost total inability to point imagination toward the right objectives. There’s nothing the matter with constructive imagination; all sound achievement rests upon it. (Pg. 100)

“Point our imaginations toward the right objectives” – that’s crucial for my journey. Before I could nitpick with creative gusto around how terrible any religious rhetoric is. I do come from serious religious trauma so I had to spend time training my mind to pivot from its instinctual nature to ignore when advice on prayer and meditation is shared and instead actively listen to see what elements I could use today.

Prayer as I define it for myself can be a repetition of important phrases I’ve heard in AA that lift me up – “PAUSE – Postpone Action Until Serenity Enters”, “THINK – is what I’m doing/saying Thoughtful, Honest, Important, Necessary, Kind”, “From Pillow to Pillow”, “KISS – Keep It Simple Sean”, “Forgiveness is Love in Action”, etc.

Prayer as I define it for myself can also be repetition of actions. My daily gratitude list mad lib around “I’m grateful for ______” lulls me into a calm, reflective, and pleasant space. Even saying “I’m grateful” without finishing the sentence elicits a spiritual reaction. Making the bed in my specific way and opening the blinds for the houseplants every morning in silence is prayer in motion for me because of its recurrent nature.

Finally, prayer of late has become tied to its traditional definition too: the Serenity Prayer, which I absolutely adore, and certain ones from my religious background, the Gayatri Mantra or Shanti prayer. The last piece has been super interesting for me because I can now recite these mantras and not have the baggage of my past take over. Instead I have nostalgic associations with those Sanskrit words. I’m stilling investigating the roots of such a drastic shift. Part of it could be missing my culture, my family, and my youth now that I live in Colorado. But I think it’s deeper than that and I’m still on the path of discovery here. What I do know is that prayer in all its versions has become a bit more demystified in AA and I’m able to embrace it rather than flee. What I like as a summary of my thinking around this is again found in the “Twelve and Twelve”:

Just saying [a prayer] over and over will often enable us to clear a channel choked up with anger, fear, frustration, or misunderstanding, and permit us to return to the surest help of all-our search for God’s will, not our own, in the moment of stress. (Pg. 103)

Now with meditation feelings were similarly complex. It is something I would joke about doing at meetings. I’d make an excuse to fellow that because it’s something my grandfather would force us grandkids to do when we were little I don’t take mediation seriously. I associate it more with goofing around with my cousins, trying to get out of being yelled at to stay quiet. However such calcified thinking prevented me from moving forward and staying curious. Slowly but surely I no longer use that story as a reason for why I don’t explore mediation. I just do it now – or make moves to do it seriously. Meditation for me involves writing these weekly Substack posts, thinking for at least 5-10 minutes about what I’m grateful for daily and sharing it with others, not listening to anything while I take my dog out for a walk, quietly watching my mind during periods of unrest, etc. Meditation hasn’t yet morphed into me sitting on the floor, eyes closed, and pondering what life is about, but it doesn’t have to be that for me….today. I can gradually move towards such a state if I so desire. All I need to do now is to welcome moments of stillness, draw them out for a longer period when appropriate, and simply learn sans judgement from the thoughts that cross my mind.

I’ll end my little take on Step 11 with this gem from the “Twelve and Twelve” that got me in the feels:

Perhaps one of the greatest rewards of meditation and prayer is the sense of belonging that comes to us. We no longer live in a completely hostile world. We are no longer lost and frightened and purposeless. (Pg. 105)

I don’t need to define right now what prayer and meditation are for me. I don’t need to define it ever. I simply need to keep the channels of communication open around engaging with these twin tools and let them give me that sense of belonging that alcohol ripped away from me for many years. As long as I do that, I’ll be good.

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Many thank to Bob (K4RLC) who shares the following guest post: Marconi Revived – Activating the Marconi sites in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia by Bob K4RLC VE1/K4RLC Alanna K4AAC and I just returned from a wonderful trip to Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, Canada. It was a bucket list trip. One goal was to visit and … Continue reading Chasing Marconi’s Legacy: Bob and Alanna’s POTA Adventure in Cape Breton →

On Saturday, August 3, 2024, my wife and daughters drove to Edneyville, North Carolina, for an annual family get-together/reunion. It’s always a lot of fun catching up with my wife’s extended family. And, I must say, the food is always spectacular. I’m talking every amazing Southern dish you can dream of! After the gathering, my … Continue reading POTA at Mount Pisgah: Punching through patchy propagation and dodging dodgy weather! →

I am so grateful to be sober. I’m grateful for a day off, for rest, for books and for fresh air. I’m grateful for thunderstorms in the summer, for a fridge full of groceries, for all of the good things I have in my life. I am grateful for my family, for Timmy, for T, for my friends and their kindness. I’m grateful for quality time with myself and for a fresh day with new opportunities.

Morning my friends (: As per usual I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend full or rest or fun or family or whatever makes it an exciting weekend to you!

I’ve been sitting here, brainstorming what to write and I think one of the things I owe every one of you is an apology. I am sorry that my posts haven’t been the most spiritual or positive lately, honestly for several months now and I am so grateful that you have continued to bear with me as I navigate weird and uncomfortable feelings.

I took off from work last Friday and today. Friday I booked a massage because yah know self-care and as I’m sitting in this incredibly tranquil and serene place I already feel myself wanting to put lemons in our Brita, eat only raw and organic food, buy one of those things you put your face in when you get a massage because..SO comfortable. I was ready to buy pink peppercorn and lemon grass essential oil to lather myself and our apartment in, become a yogi, move to Nepal, sell my soul to the wonders of wellness because THAT is what’s going to fix me.

It’s not the big extravagant things that stick for me. I.e. I bought a little stool once, I think I wrote about it here, where I was going to sit and pray every morning in a little spiritual corner I was going to build in our old apartment. Well, I sat on it to pray about twice and now almost a year later we use it as an actual footstool like it was meant to be used.

It’s micro moments and actions that build up over time, those are the ones that stick for me.  Starting with the past two days where I have forced myself to journal even though I really didn’t want to. And hopefully that will build up over time and I’ll be journaling every day again. I did NOT put lemons in the Brita but that doesn’t mean I can’t make small choices to just eat a tiny bit better.

When I first got sober one of my home groups was an online meeting and truly, without that meeting and the 79th St. Workshop I do not know where I would be today. But since I’m off this fine Monday I am going to the 12:30 in person meeting for the very first time to sit in an actual room in person with those people who saved my life. THAT to me is a micro moment.

They say we’ll love you until you can love yourself. I think that’s something I missed back then that I’m paying for now. I love parts of myself but not my whole being – I can be this awkward human who word vomits and gets lost in so much anxiety that it feels like the entire world is crashing down on me. I was speaking to a friend just the other day who so simply said that she prayed on something and a little while later clarity and the right words came, and I genuinely thought to myself ‘wow. I miss that’. Followed by ‘What the fuck am I doing??’

I have strayed so far from my path these past few months, if I’m being fully transparent. I had a performance review at work that was more ‘areas of opportunities’ than it was ‘here’s why you’re perfect’ and it crushed me. Working from home all the time has taken a toll because I am literally never leaving this apartment. My sponsees have dwindled down into zero and that feels like a very legitimate break up. I have stopped talking to God and to be clear I absolutely do not want to drink BUT I have been to enough meetings to know I’m probably not that far off if I don’t make changes – micro or not.

My expectations for MYSELF are far too high but I compulsively feel like I must meet them all of the time. So, when I say I’m sad and I don’t know why – that’s a lie. There are a few circumstances that were beyond my control for sure. But for the most part it’s me – it’s the too high standards, it’s me crushing myself and being afraid to be vulnerable. It’s me asking for help in only superficial ways. I need help deep down on the inside, I need help loving myself and that is not what I ever ask for. Why? Maybe because it’s embarrassing. It makes me feel like a failure. It makes me feel vulnerable and weak. But at the end of the day, I am scared – and I make myself feel very alone in that place between my ears.

I promised myself long ago that I would always be honest when I write here. Sometimes I’m already thinking about the work that needs to be done after I write so I just throw things together here and call it a day and I find myself complaining or just blankly saying I’m sad and that is a band aid over a bullet wound. I haven’t told you that I’m uninspired, that I’m lost. That so many good things have also happened but there is something inside of me that’s so heavy and it’s been outweighing all of that good.

My job just last week told me that I’m doing perfectly. And when the weight of the world wasn’t lifted off my shoulders like it normally would have been because I was told I’m doing good again – that’s when I knew that somewhere along the way the rock formed inside my chest that never used to be there. And now all that’s left is God who can fix it.

Xx

Jane

by Teri (KO4WFP) Daisy and I awoke the morning of Thursday, July 18, ready to attempt our third SOTA activation of this trip. Today we’d head to Mount Jefferson State Natural Area (US-3846), a short drive from New River State Park. Along the drive, I spied quite a few farms for Christmas trees. Mount Jefferson … Continue reading The POTA Babe Gets Wet – Day 5 →