Cookies and Such

I was milling around the kitchen this morning waiting for the tea kettle to heat up when a new woman walked in, looked around, and then admitted she was looking for something sweet, to no avail.  A few beats later she returned, following one of our older, sugar-obsessed members (not to my level, naturally, but still pretty impressively addicted) who directed her to the church refrigerator.  They pulled out a container that held some sketchy looking cookies of unknown provence or age, undoubtedly pawed over by countless grubby fingers, and each grabbed a few before happily heading off into the meeting room.

"Ah, my people,"  I thought.  I'm pretty sure that if someone had come in over the weekend and scattered stale cookies around the periphery of the room that Special Jeff and I would have spotted them immediately, brushed the ants and big pieces of dirt off before gobbling them down.  If all that weed I smoked in college didn't fry my brain a few ants aren't going to do much damage.

The leader this morning referenced this passage from the Big Book: "But when self-will had driven everybody away, and our isolation had become complete, it caused us to play the big-shot in cheap barrooms and then fare forth alone on the street to depend on the charity of passersby."  I like the phrase "fare forth" quite a bit.  Very Victorian.  Very strong memories of becoming increasingly isolated as my drinking progressed.

I must admit this fact: The Keep It Complicated group is a special group.  It has infuriated, frustrated, and annoyed me more over the years than all of the other meetings I've attended combined, but a more relaxed, amusing, tight-knit group you'll be hard pressed to find.  There were several of us long-timers who really stuck with it over the last couple of post-Covid years until the group built up a critical mass and has grown to a sustainable size.  While I was one of the guys that kept coming back I was also noted for the bitching and complaining and judging I did along the way.  

The Dali Lama: "From the time we are born to the time we die we suffer mental and physical pain, the suffering of change, and pervasive suffering of uncontrolled conditioning."