Today I'm pretty OK with the Keep It Complicated schism . . . although with all the bitching and attention I devote to it you might think otherwise. I'm attending the original meeting in the original church basement after the facility reopened and the church invited us to start back up with some conditions based on the pandemic, the conditions which infuriated the break-away people in the first place. The joke about the bitching, grouchy break-away members is that they're generally not my group - not that they're bad people or that I'm unfriendly with them or can't learn anything from them but that I'd hope, as the ocean liner was sinking, that they would swim over to the other rowboat. If I got to pick the people in my rowboat I wouldn't pick them first. I wouldn't use my oar to try to fight them off if they swam over to my rowboat but I'd be happier waving at them over turbulent, shark-infested waters. Frankly, if someone had told me six months ago that we could reduce the attendance of the original meeting by asking these bitchers to leave I would have opened my wallet and started throwing $20s at him. A more perfect list I could not imagine.
The minor conundrum for me is that my sponsor is going to that meeting. So I don't really have any interest in talking to him right now because in a general A.A. phone call the conversation inevitably touches on "how's your Program?" at some point, and I do not want to hear jack-shit about the bitching meeting. So do I keep calling him and try to avoid the topic? Do I fire him? Do I just quit calling him and hope this situation resolves on its own as society recalibrates? As you can imagine I'd prefer explaining to him, in minute, exhausting detail why he's fucking up right now because everyone loves unsolicited advice from me.
I hate falling back on my long-term sobriety as an excuse for anything because I think that's a slippery slope. Nevertheless, having a sponsor after 35 years of active, engaged attendance in Alcoholics Anonymous does give me some wiggle room. I talk to members with long-term sobriety almost every day; I write almost every day; I read A.A. literature every day; and I attend a ton of meetings . . . so I'm not walking a fine line between drunkenness and sobriety, but I do like the concept of a sponsor: someone that I'm accountable to, that I see regularly, that knows a lot about me as a result of regular contact.
The idea of calling my sponsor to tell him I'm pissed at my sponsor is quite funny when you think about it.
I did call an old friend from Cincinnati to bounce this stuff off of him. Like me he's an old salesman. I could envision him organizing his thoughts as I was talking; asking measured questions in a slow, considered manner; probing for what was really going on. I like talking to salespeople, particularly those who worked in a technical field. We're used to managing groups of people in chaotic, uncontrolled situations - we had to take control while not seeming too bossy.
"Seaweed, guys like us . . . with a lot of time . . . we basically know what we have to do." If I was new the advice in this situation would be to suck it up or to get a new sponsor. If I was new I would need that sponsor presence a lot more than I do now. It's not like I'm not talking to a lot of people who have a lot of sobriety, most of them with more sobriety than my current sponsor. Still, I need to deal with this situation for my own peace of mind. I woke up this morning and things were clearer. One of the most amazing facts of the human brain is that when you're asleep it remains highly engaged and it can work through things all on its own and present its owner with good solutions the next morning. I don't have to be actively thinking about something to find an answer. This is a feature of the mind. This is also why we "intuitively understand something which used to baffle us."
I believe that for a while I'm not going to make any outgoing phone calls. If I do speak with him I'm going to plead heavy engagement in helping the meeting get back on its feet (which is true but not an excuse for not calling him) and fall back on the aphorism "Out of sight - out of mind" (which is not true but I think some mild evasion in the service of kindness is a good idea).
And that's that . . . at least for a couple of hours.
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