California Sober

I took a couple of phone calls from a very dedicated long-timer this week.  This man shows up at the Keep It Complicated meeting twenty minutes early every single day that he's in town and he's usually in town.  He believes that one of his most important contributions to our Program is making sure that anyone who shows up early to the meeting isn't going to find the room empty.  Many days he's alone except for the secretary who's responsible for opening up the church basement.  I find him an important member of the group and I really respect his contribution.  I also find him sorta dull and uninspiring.  He's one of those guys who talks often and talks too long, providing way too much detail about the excruciating minutia of his life.  He's one of those guys who tells you how to build a watch when you ask him what time it is.  I'm afraid one of these days I'm going to scream: "Get to the fucking point!"  The point is that his manner of relating his experience, strength, and hope doesn't really resonate with me.  I also know that it really resonates with other people.

Here's a line from the Plain Language Big Book: "We pointed out that A.A. members are more helpful to each other when they can disagree respectfully.  Learning to see things from multiple angles helps us become more accepting and tolerant."

There's an older man who has been attending for several months now.  He's kind of a hard case, a hard-headed guy, not surprising for someone who has continued to drink until he was sixty-five years old.  It came out recently that he smoked some weed.  His sponsor - another regular long-timer at the meeting - told him to reset his sobriety date and this pissed off the new guy.  No shit, right?  Both his sponsor and the long-winded guy didn't use drugs so drug use is pretty black and white for them vis-a-vis sobriety.  As I've mentioned I have spoken with our New York Central Office about this matter of drug use and they basically told me, in a very kind way, to mind my own fucking business, that a member is a member if he says he's a member and he's sober if he says he's sober.  We're in the recovery from alcohol business - not the recovery from drug business.  That being said my experience is that most members refrain from using illegal drugs or using legal drugs illegally procured.  Not every single one of us but most of us, myself included.  I share often that my A.A. sobriety date is about five months after my last drink.  Maybe you can smoke weed and grow spiritually but I sure as shit can't.

The long-winded guy called me a few days ago to relate a conversation he had with the hard-headed guy.  Out of the goodness of his heart he contacted the new guy and offered him some work at his house.  The new guy started talking about his drug use and veered off into some personal beliefs that our long-timer found offensive.  Well, the conversation deteriorated from there to the point that the new guy was a no-show for a few days at the meeting.  This distressed the long-winded guy.  We don't try to drive new people away but from time to time we piss them off and they drive themselves away.  I'm happy to report the new guy is showing up again but I can feel some tension.  I've found that most of the men and women I meet respond to positive encouragement better than to criticism, no matter how kind and gentle it is.  And I've found that sometimes we need to be blunt with people.

Apparently I was doing California Sober when I was living in Indianapolis.