AA meetings

Just got done with my Saturday morning meeting. Sometimes I go to AA, sometimes Al Anon, both of them are excellent and well-attended, which really helps a meeting at this point in time. There is a certain critical mass of interconnectivity that having 20-25 people there facilitates, and it gets better up to about 40-45, at which point in time I think it gets unproductive because then the most insecure and the extroverts -- often the same people -- feel a need to pontificate, and they are often the most aggressive getting their hands up, so there's a negative feedback loop.

I got my hand up this time kind of late and didn't get to share, which is totally fine. But I did nonetheless have content already generated in my head, so you get to read it, dear Reader.

The topic was AA meetings and what they've done for us. For me, meetings not only got me sober, but basically opened the world to me. Until I got sober, I had an exceedingly narrow vision of people in the world. I was cool. I had cool hair -- both facial and atop my head -- cool clothes, I listened to cool music, read bad-assed books and philosophers, etc. Cool was a pretty major filter in my life, and I judged people on its basis.

Of course I had exceptions and I think that though I had a reasonable-sized log up my ass, it wasn't the sequoia that others had there. Also I knew that I wasn't nearly as cool as others with greater commitment to an aesthetic, but I could live with that.

When I walked into AA rooms in New York City I was exposed to lots of different kinds of people that I had never spent much time with. And the culture of it is that you sit there and listen while other people talk. I discovered I had a huge amount in common with people from very different backgrounds and that many of those I had previously scorned and felt superior to were in fact pretty deep and interesting.

It was, in essence, a rocket ship into adulting. As I realized how many other people weren't stupid (most of them) but just had different backgrounds, I imagined different paths for myself. Lather, rinse, repeat.