Shut-Up, Seaweed

Intolerant:  Unable or indisposed to tolerate, endure, or bear.

Sometimes I think that anyone who thinks that a period of long sobriety requires them to talk at meetings should think otherwise.  Maybe it's some particular people with a lot of sobriety who seem to talk at every goddam meeting I go to that should think about me and how they're irritating me instead of thinking about themselves and talking when I don't want them to talk.

Yes, I know that I'm not very tolerant.  Or maybe I'm just intolerant.  Whichever is worse, that's the one I am.

I don't think that we should have the inmates running the show, either.  I think that old-timers are a good steadying hand at most meetings unless they talk too much.  And for too long.  And at every meeting.  Why would anyone sit down in a crowded room, a place where even if everybody who spoke only consumed a minute of time we'd still not hear from half the people there, and then talk for seven minutes and twelve seconds?

Sometime let me tell you about the nifty stopwatch I have on my watch.  If I'm going to get all up in your face and justified I'm going to have some facts to back me up.  All I'm saying is that I didn't pull that seven minutes and twelve seconds figure out of my ass.

Maybe I should listen to what the person is saying instead of staring at my stopwatch tick off the interminable minutes?

At the end of my beloved meditation meeting a couple of new folks talked.  Such great stuff.  The trouble I have with some sobriety under my belt is that I get in my head too much.  I'll be talking and listening to myself talk and think: "What am I, some kind of Program lecture guy? I can't find my ass with both of my hands."  I need to be cuffed around the head and neck when I do this.  I find I really connect with people who manage to combine the principle with a real-life living problem.  I mean I've heard a lot of great spiritual teaching, recovery principles, in all kinds of places but it was only in The Rooms - when delivered by other people who were clearly as crazy as me but still managing to maneuver the Big, Bad World that was totally eating me alive - that it made sense to me.

I heard one woman talk about watching a harried clerk take a lot of shit from a bunch of impatient customers, and then paying her a compliment.  I heard another talk about the stress of making a big presentation at work in front of powerful, important people but walking through the fear and making the presentation, anyway.  I heard yet another talk about entering a swimming contest where the idea was to swim as far as you could in an hour.  It reminded me of standing in a pool at 50 years old getting ready to take a swimming lesson from a 30 year old who came up to my sternum.  It was embarrassing to struggle to swim half a length of the pool before taking a snootful and having to come up for air.  People look at our pictures from Cambodia and ask:"Were you nervous?"  Uh, yeah.  Not as nervous as my first trip to a wild locale where I felt like throwing up as I boarded the plane but still pretty damn nervous.

Hey, old-timers, maybe shut up for a while.