2006-12-11 - 7:07 p.m.
Last night, my pigeon called me, saying she wanted to drink. She had stayed home to watch a football game with her husband (not sober) and his buddies (ditto). She was kinda weepy and looking for sympathy, and I pretty much laid her out.
If you want what we have, do what we do. And by that, I mean put your damn sobriety before a football game, even if it is the Cowboys. (Who, incidentally, had their butts handed to them by the Saints.) Anyway, I talked to her about going to more meetings and actually doing the steps instead of thinking about them.
She called me tonight, asking about the meeting time, and I'm going to go with her. This is the meeting that is so tiresome as to defy description - the one where we read a paragraph and every one around the table gets to discuss it before we read another. Please recall that I live in a state where the average person cannot shout "Fire!" in under ten minutes. This procedure started in September, when we were on the first Forward to the Big Book. They are now about halfway through the Doctor's Opinion. Those in the know will understand my pain.
We suffer from a peculiar form of Big Book worship here. People treat the text Alcoholics Anonymous as though it were the received word of God, instead of a basic text, written by drunks like us, describing how they got sober. Reverently discussing every word is a fool's errand. We got a lot of fools.
It won't kill me to go to a tedious meeting, though frankly, it does hurt when I roll my eyes like that. I just have to remember: "must...keep...mouth...shut..."
Update: The group discussed a three sentence paragraph for forty five minutes. I rest my case.
