Keep It Complicated, Redux

Irony:  The state of affairs that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result.

The topic of today's meeting was Acceptance.  (Ed. Note: Acceptance is bullshit.  Fie on acceptance.)  The leader read the famous section where Doctor Paul opines that everything is exactly as it should be in God's world and herefore any upset that he's feeling means he's simply not accepting things that he should be accepting.  While I get the general intent of this chapter I don't quite buy into the concept whole-hog.  His intent, as I perceive it, is to remind us that we're really not in control of very much so it isn't a good use of our time to rage against things we can't control.  Again, which is everything.  Acceptance, in my pea brain, means I should keep my nose out of the business of other people, places, and things with exceptions for extraordinary  circumstances.  Obviously, if I see someone flogging a small child it isn't right to say: "Oh, well, everything is as it should be in God's good world."  I default to the Serenity Prayer which  reminds me that there are times when I need to do something.

The irony is this: a dude showed up this morning who has been drifting in and out for the ten years I've been here.  He's a smart guy but the cumulative effect of whatever drugs he's consuming in concert with his drinking has rendered him hopeless.  This dude is not . . . going . . . to . .  .  get sober.  There may have been a chance at one point but that point is in the rear view mirror and it's receding rapidly.  Today he was in the middle of some kind of episode: eyes rolling up into his sockets, neck flopping back and forth, laughing and greeting people way too loudly, the whole "constitutionally incapable" playbook.

When we were trying to get Keep It Complicated up and running after CoVid - no small feat where the survival of the meeting was not assured - there were five or six of us long-timers who came often and we did Herculean battle against a large contingent of homeless people, things getting so disruptive that we quit making coffee, the debacle finally culminating in a spectacular morning extravaganza where one of the coffee-drinkers lost control of his bowels and befouled a lot of inside real estate.  I hung in there.  I persevered.  I was a stand-up guy.  But no more - I watched this man today in the throes of his psychotic break with a morbid curiosity, totally distracted from the meeting, riveted by the spectacle, and then I simply got up and took a walk on the beach.  I wasn't mad or upset, I just didn't want to be there anymore.  His antics either didn't bother everyone else or they were able to ignore him - this is super-nice Southern California, after all.

Whew, we're not an easy lot to get along with sometimes.