Meetings

 I attended an Ohio meeting this morning, one that I was a regular at for many years.  It made me laugh the difference between the general tenor of the sharing and the comportment of the attendees.  Don't get me wrong - the Alcoholics Anonymous in California is great and just perfect and so is the AA in Ohio.  I'm not complaining or judging . . . for a change.  I tried that once after we moved from Chicago to Cincinnati - I was grousing about how much better AA was in Chicago during a visit back there and was handed my severed head on a silver platter by some old-timers.  I don't do that anymore.

In CA we call milestones "birthdays."  At in-person meetings the birthday boy or girl is serenaded with Happy Birthday, in a horribly mumbling and off-key way, and is actually given a cake, a fucking birthday cake, often delivered by sort of a posse of the people who are instrumental in his or her sobriety.  I have so far refused this honorific, choosing instead this very nice mentally challenged lady who has severe hearing problems but comes early every meeting to set the room up.  SHE is the only one I'll "take a cake" from.  The coup de grace is that, after extinguishing the candles, one is expected to tell "how they did it," to give a little speech, to hog the spotlight for a few minutes.  As if I have any fucking idea how I did it.

In Ohio you get to announce your "anniversary" for an entire week but that's it - no cake, no posse, no speech, no song.  You get a "coin" instead of a "chip."  So this morning I chimed in with my 33 years - or, as a visitor from Ireland told me on Thursday: Tirty-Tree - and . . . that was that.  Crickets.  Blank stares.  Nobody, not one person, made even the briefest mention during the course of the meeting.

I'm amused at the regional differences in the 7 different states in which I've lived.  Ohio is very Midwest - people tend not to call attention to themselves.  It's bad form.  In California, home of the movie star, the rock stars, Big Personalities are rampant.  You can even see this in the meetings, which are generally much larger than in the Midwest and tend to have a group of Big Personalities who seem to be the behind the scenes puppet masters.

I do like getting a breakfast cake, though.  The pandemic has screwed me out of my fucking breakfast cake.