Too Busy To Die

For several years in The Old City - if by "several" you mean "three" - I attended a jail meeting with my sponsor.  This facility catered to non-violent felons convicted of crimes directly related to drug and alcohol offenses, and the protocol was geared heavily to all kinds of educational and social classes, groups, and programs to sober these guys up and keep them on the straight and narrow.

I don't think my use of the word "catered" is appropriate here.  It makes it sound like the facility was pretty worried that the residents might not like the protocol and go somewhere else, which they were not going to be able to do.

Protocol is pretty ridiculous, too.  It kind of works but it was the first word that came to mind and I'm too lazy today to come up with something more appropriate.

Anyway, the meeting we hosted was entirely voluntary and on a good day we got 15% of the men in our particular cellblock.  Mind you, most of them should have been there but you can lead a horse to water, etc, etc, and etc.

What do you think about "hosted?"  It sounds like we were throwing a little party with cucumber sandwiches and petit fours, which we were not.  No coffee, no cookies, no tap water. The jail had a culinary program as one of its offerings and each year they would invite all of the volunteers for a free banquet.  My sponsor went.  I did not.  He didn't rave about the food.

OK, on occasion our meeting would fall on a holiday, such as Thanksgiving or Super Bowl Thursday or Guy Fawkes Day, and attendance fell to a vanishing point because the guys were given the day off to watch TV or to . . . well, watch TV, I guess.  It was a telling fact.  These guys literally had to walk 20 feet to get to the meeting and they didn't do it.  Now I'm entirely sympathetic - recover is a grind, especially at the start, especially in a jail setting where the authorities are making you jump through a lot of hoops.  But it requires some diligence, too.  We wondered what would happen on the outside with no one telling them what to do and plenty of pleasant distractions and dangerous enticements available.

I saw a few of them at meetings over the years, but not many.  And there was an intense grapevine in the jail so that if someone slipped and got busted it was common knowledge almost immediately.

Kept me sober.  Which is the point.