{"id":31572,"date":"2015-06-15T01:00:23","date_gmt":"2015-06-15T05:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=31572"},"modified":"2015-06-08T09:14:30","modified_gmt":"2015-06-08T13:14:30","slug":"qotd-the-modern-alcoholics-anonymous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/06\/15\/qotd-the-modern-alcoholics-anonymous\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The modern Alcoholics Anonymous"},"content":{"rendered":"

I picked the wrong year to quit drinking.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve never been to an old-school AA meeting, imagine Vince Lombardi\u2019s locker room if he\u2019d been coaching Pilgrims with Tourette\u2019s: a spartan, Quaker-meeting setup, all bootstrapping, no bullshit. A newcomer dumb enough to whine about their \u201cfeelings\u201d gets ordered to scrub out the coffee urn by a gruff \u201cold timer.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not what I slunk into in 1992, by which time then-faddish PBS fixture John \u201cFinding Your Inner Child\u201d Bradshaw had accidentally turned Alcoholics Anonymous into a New Age unicorn-and-rainbows therapeutic weep-fest that would\u2019ve disgusted Greatest Generation founders Bill W. and Dr. Bob, who probably kept their fedoras on in the gutter.<\/p>\n

Some meetings even served decaf.<\/p>\n

Believe me: \u201cLow self-esteem\u201d is not<\/em> your typical boozehound\u2019s problem. Then again, about half the people I met in \u201cthe rooms\u201d weren\u2019t even alcoholics, just neurotics too cheap to get real therapy.<\/p>\n

Remember, it was the 1990s, the era of The X-Files<\/em> and Oprah at her tabloid low: at every 12-Step meeting, you\u2019d meet \u201csurvivors of ritualistic Satanic abuse\u201d and \u201crecovered memory victims\u201d and alien abductees and even \u201cstarseeds,\u201d the self-proclaimed spawn of spacemen who\u2019ve been sent to Earth to\u2026do something or other. (Luckily the latter two never came to blows.)<\/p>\n

There were so many \u201cmultiple personalities\u201d at some meetings, we were probably breaking fire codes without knowing it.<\/p>\n

And I lived in Boystown, so lots of the real drunks were gay, bi, trannies, lesbians of convenience, and even \u201ctwo-spirited\u201d (AKA gay Indians).<\/p>\n

Despite all this, I never drank after my first meeting (ODAAT), worked the Steps, got a new job, and ten years later, I looked around at all the people who still hadn\u2019t and thought, \u201cI didn\u2019t get sober so I could spend the rest of my life with these losers.\u201d<\/p>\n

It took me a decade to notice that none of the 12 Steps is \u201cGo to meetings.\u201d So I stopped. I couldn\u2019t take the crazies. In retrospect, I was the crazy one for thinking I was rid of them.<\/p>\n

Kathy Shaidle, “My Otherkin Headmate is a Two-Spirited Starseed!”, Taki’s Magazine<\/em><\/a>, 2013-03-05.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I picked the wrong year to quit drinking. If you\u2019ve never been to an old-school AA meeting, imagine Vince Lombardi\u2019s locker room if he\u2019d been coaching Pilgrims with Tourette\u2019s: a spartan, Quaker-meeting setup, all bootstrapping, no bullshit. A newcomer dumb enough to whine about their \u201cfeelings\u201d gets ordered to scrub out the coffee urn by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,57,41],"tags":[104,139,871],"class_list":["post-31572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-science","category-humour","category-quotations","tag-booze","tag-psychology","tag-self-help"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8de","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31572"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31572\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31573,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31572\/revisions\/31573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}