Chair and Share

So the meeting format, here in the The New City where they are clearly doing it wrong and surely waiting for me to set them straight, is to have the chairperson share for 5 minutes to establish a topic.  At that point the chair calls on people to comment, at his whim, picking favorites, ignoring Gods of Sobriety like me, just for meanness. 

Anyway, I was asked to chair a meeting.  I'm assuming this was because everyone was sick to death of what every one else was saying and not because I had anything to say that would be interesting to anyone except for myself.  Normally I need several hours to get my point across but agreed, begrudgingly, that I would do my best with the shorter time frame.

As I begin my little talk, some poor soul wanders, a guy who would have to take the elevator up a few flights to get to the Low Bottom Drunk level.  This man was surely welcome at the meeting and I was glad he was there, but he . . . ahem . . . roamed around a lot and did some chatting when he felt like it, in a voice that was probably louder than he realized.  It was one of those situations where it was hard for me to keep a train of thought intact and even harder for anyone to pay attention to what I was saying, which wasn't too much.  The guy roaming around was a lot more interesting that I was.  It did wonders for my humility.

It reminded me of the first time I spoke at a jail that catered to multiple DUI cases.  I was newish in sobriety and prepared to go in there and save them all.  I stood up in front of 50 or 60 guys and began the talk that would change all of their lives.  I quickly saw that maybe 5 of them were paying any attention to me at all.  If that wasn't deflating enough, most of the remaining guys were audibly talking and laughing among themselves, reading the newspaper, even lying with their heads on the lunch tables, sleeping.

It's all about me, after all.