I'm in the throes of a bit of a meeting hiatus right now. I have never done this in my 35 years of A.A. attendance except for the occasional stay in countries where A.A is sporadic or non-existent. I'm not disconnecting from my recovery but I'm staying away from meetings. I'm tired of Zoom (and this from a dude who embraced electronic meetings immediately and has attended hundreds of them); I'm not at all interested in hybrid meetings where the live portion is overwhelmed by the Big TV Screen with all of the people exercising and walking and driving and eating and riding their bikes and logging in and out and killing their video so that the screen reshuffles, all of this sucking the energy out of the room which is where the people who have actually taken the time to get up and get dressed and drive to the meeting are sitting: and I cannot yet abide the folks who ignored laws and regulations and the pleas of health care workers not to gather in large groups inside during the various CoVid surges. It hasn't yet been a long hiatus and it certainly isn't a permanent hiatus but it's a hiatus nonetheless. And it has been quite freeing and relaxing. I'm enjoying it. It has been peaceful. The meetings were making me feel worse.
I took a call yesterday from a Program woman who I like well enough. She's not a coffee friend but she's a friend. A few weeks ago I made an announcement in the Keep It Complicated meeting that I was going to suggest at our next business meeting that we end the hybrid experience. Well, sir, I really pissed some people off. One member told me - across the room, in the meeting itself, in a textbook example of cross-talk - that I was supposed to wait until the business meeting to bring up any topics for discussion in the business meeting which frankly sounds stupid to me. I thought I could talk about any alcohol related topic I wanted to during an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and I'm frankly unaware of any list that details what I can and cannot say about an upcoming business meeting. The woman who called me - in her credit wondering if she needed to make an amends - had declined to share when she was called on at this particular meeting, stating that she was so angry she couldn't even talk. Frankly, I had no idea she was mad at me which made her offer of an amends perplexing. Normally I have a clue that I've pissed someone off and I'm still frankly confused as to why this announcement was so offensive. I just thought it might be helpful - since I knew I was going to be making a somewhat controversial proposal - to let people know what was coming so they compose their thoughts.
I frankly didn't want to talk to this woman, who is sort of a repressed weirdo, in my opinion. I did call, because it was the right thing to do, and we had a short talk. I assured her I took no offense and that I understood the next few months were going to be confusing and will probably contain some more surprises that we can't even foresee at the moment. I did note, with some amusement, that she managed to sneak into the conversation - again - the reasons why I shouldn't have done what I did and why everything was going to work out the way I want them to work out if I just wouldn't force the issue, something that she can't predict and that I frankly don't agree with.
This is why I'm not attending meetings right now. Everyone is irritated and confrontational and I don't want to suck on that negative energy. I was downtown yesterday, having a coffee at my favorite one-off coffee shop, after a walk on the beach, in perfect SoCal weather, and I stopped into this great guitar store owned by one of my best A.A. friends. I hung out with him for an hour. We talked about business and politics and recovery and I had a great ol' time. It was very spiritual. I felt like a million bucks when I left - it wasn't a meeting but it provided for me what a good meeting does. I was enjoying myself so much that I actually blew off a regular Zoom meeting I attend to linger and chat. I would have preferred avoiding the aggravation of having to talk to someone who had acted pretty pissy and continued being pissy even though the pretext of the call was to apologize for being pissy. It seemed to me in retrospect to be a bit of a veiled excuse to tell me - again - why I was wrong.
Again, this is not an existential crisis - this is a temporary, statistical aberration. I shall be back and I shall be bam booming. As my temporary sponsor in SoCal says all the time: "I need Alcoholics Anonymous a lot more than Alcoholics Anonymous needs me."
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