The Journey's the Thing…

Well it seems I know what to do and when to do it, or,…hmmm…not to do it, perhaps.

The ongoing ‘issue’ at my regular AA meeting is foaming, but only at the edges. The meeting today was great, and many people stayed on the subject of Step 1. There was one guy, though, who had to bring up the running controversy and detract from the point of the meeting. He is a troublemaker, for sure, but the rooms are full of them, all in varying degrees of sobriety. There are a lot of control freaks, but some of us have learned restraint of tongue and pen. This fellow is set on playing his passive-aggressive little deck of cards and disrupting a perfectly good time. The extension is that always has to be some kind of response from the other side. Unfortunately the chairperson felt that he needed to take sides with one of them, instead of the whole of the group…yaddayaddaya.

Be sure to read Wednesdays entry…There’ll be more!

All is well for me, though. I don’t need to play those games, and I can say what I mean, when I mean it, but only after I have run the idea past someone else first. I can practice restraint of tongue and pen only because I practice the program of recovery set up by those that came before me, not those sitting to my left or right.

Someday this will end, and I’ll be able to write something worth reading.

Johnnyboy

I am awake so I figure I might as well post todays blog. I have a lot on my mind, mostly dealing with fear of the unknown, of the future, and all that stuff. Oddly enough my going back to school is not one of the things of which I’m afraid. That’s actually a pretty exciting aspect of my new and sober life. What I fear is returning to my homegroup on Monday for the noon meeting and putting up with the weird comments, stares, and other crap that may exist as fallout from my last appearance. If anyone has been keeping track, I had to use the gavel to actually restore order to a meeting that was veering off on another tangent. Whatever. It’s done. This kind of fear is very familiar.

It is the fear of the wreckage of the future, and it is complete bunkum, as far as I’m concerned.

What other people think about me is none of my business.

I was speaking to a friend tonight and she revealed to me that someone else in our little sober world may be sober, but he still has all the unhealthy behaviors. There is a joke that starts, “What do get when you sober up a drunken horsethief?”. This is pretty much a rhetorical question, but it applies to this fellow, who we’ll call Bert. Bert is shucking and jiving, hitting on the girlfriends of other people, trying to scam people with internet get-rich-quick schemes, and generally just being a slimeball. He is still obviously very sick in the head. He is not working his program to relieve himself of his horse-thievery. Maybe he’s not working any program. I don’t know, but I’m glad he didn’t ask me about the get-rich-quick scheme. I know a thing or 2 about those things, unfortunately. I might have felt compelled to alert the authorities, if only for his own protection. I will not, though. It’s not my business. That is a big change from the Old Johnnyboy, who would have suddenly become an expert and braggart on the subject, gotten in too deep, and been thoroughly fleeced.

Sweetie Pie is lying on my couch, sound asleep. The picture up top is where I found her the other day. She was asleep in my bathroom sink. It was pretty hot outside, so I think the sink felt cool. She is too cute, right?

Johnnyboy