I’m having a “running away” fantasy.

I take bankruptcy, erase a lot of debt, and then sell my house and pay off the remaining debt plus have some money.

I sell all my stuff except for a couple suitcases of clothes and other personalty that can fit in the trunk of my car.

I take off and go live in S.C. where my sister who recently visited lives and start and brand new life.

It’s a geographic cure.  The downside is that I’ll be taking myself with me.

What I won’t be taking with me is a lifetime of memories about this town and a lifetime of friends and lovers I care about deeply.

That doesn’t necessarily fit into a dufflebag of clothes.

So the second big idea I have is one that was handed to me last night.

I listened to a woman who is being assaulted and doesn’t know how to escape her situation.

I would solve that problem — if I could — not only for one woman but for all of them.

I have enough co-dependency, knight in shining armor stuff going on that I could devote my life to that cause.  And feel good about myself if I only “saved” one life. 

The downside:  it would kill me.  Such women have a tendency to go back to their abusive men.  It makes my soul shrivel when that happens.  Too many of those women and I would be suicidal.  About the second or third time I heard “He’s sorry and says he will never do that again”, I would put a gun in my mouth because I know they will be back with another broken nose or worse.

So my third big idea is to be a fashion model and write a book about something inconsequential, because those are the books that really sell and make money, not good books as one might think.

Salmon Rushdie’s Satanic Verses sold only a tiny fraction of Stephen King’s any book you can name but certainly The Stand.

The downside:  I wouldn’t make a living modeling and writing is a constant, word by word struggle between my gigantic ego and microscopic self esteem that always leaves me vibrating like a quartz crystal in between.

So my final big idea is to do what I’ve been doing — the best I can from day to day — and try to have a better attitude about it, which is totally an inside job — inside my head.  To simply accept that to live is to have problems and to seek solutions, knowing that solving some problems will simply mean that others will appear.  To live knowing that the best I can hope for is to raise the level of my problems:  it’s better to have money problems than physical security problems, for example, and it’s better to have relationship problems than money problems and it’s better to have to decide between a mountain vacation and beach getaway than to have to decide between buying medicine and buying food.

It seems to me that most of our “problems” are merely choices.  We make our choices the best we can and then judge our choice by the outcome.  Odd, since most often we are not capable to determining the outcome by our choice and we have no certain way to compare the outcome with the outcome that might have come from a different choice.

Now that we’re past my AA “re-birth day”, the anniversary of my birth comes around next week.  I’m still a bubble off plumb, I can tell.  This weekend, I may well go to Dallas on a modeling excursion for Elastic Cafe and the lovely Juliet.  In all events, I know myself and I’ll spend some time reviewing the past year and being hypercritical of my choices.  It feels so good to make myself feel bad.  YUMMY!