The Monster Gargantua

Gargantuan: Huge; immense; gigantic.

I fumed through my 7AM meeting today, one day after my 29 year anniversary.  This is why I go to meetings - my self-entitled serenity doesn't even last one day and right in the middle of a meeting to boot.  The leader was a guy I really like and he suggested that as the eighth month of the year coincides with the eight step that might be a good topic.  He took great pains to remind everyone that the eighth step is not the ninth step and could we please talk about the eighth step and leave the ninth step for a meeting where the topic is the ninth step and not the eighth step? It did not annoy me that everyone talked about the ninth step anyway.  This is to be expected - retelling of dramatic and successful amends is a lot more fun that describing the slow, arcane, opaque process of acquiring the willingness to do something that no one wants to do in the first place.

What we got was the Gargantuan Share Meeting.  I have probably mentioned before that the average size of the average meeting in Vacation City if pretty big - 40 or 45 people isn't at all unusual and plenty of meetings are bigger than that.  This encourages the long-winded and assertive and pedantic among us to share and share at great length.  I don't care if you're fricking Bill W for god's sake - I don't want to hear anyone talk for that long.  I can barely sit still for 10 minutes let alone listen to someone preach for longer than that.  Compounding my outrage is the fact that we announce at the start of each meeting: "Please limit your share to 3 minutes."  I'm astounded to see that some of the people who were so upset at the antics of a couple of disruptive members a few months back are the biggest offenders, lending credence to the theory that most of us can spot a tiny defect in another at the distance of a thousand yards while ignoring the cracks in our own personal Liberty Bells.

I groused to a few friends after the meeting about the lack of a timer to shut these miscreants up, being careful to preserve my own sense of self-righteous purity by not naming names.  I got a steady dose of shut-the-fuck-up from these guys.  They didn't use that particular phrase and they were very reflective in their comments but the basic message was this: "What can you learn from this?"  Tolerance?  Patience??  Understanding!??

Who are these freaks and why do they bedevil me so?