Day 39 Meetings

Hit the morning Anniversary Meeting at 42nd Street. The speaker didn't make it, but some guy had taken a taxi in from Queens to make sure he could hit hit a meeting before he had to be at work... And so he spoke at the invitation of the chair... While he has solid recovery today, this is a guy who has had massive slips, including two comas... The priest read him last rites during one of them... He says he has drank alcohol a coupla times by accident... And when he was going to meetings he knew how to handle it. But the last time he was in a spell of isolation from the program and so told the bartender he had just had his first drink in five years and was now gonna get drunk. He made the importance of "putting the program first" as the topic for the round robin... Incidentally the same priest that had read him last rites also married him to his wife after he got back on the sober path... I shared how I know I'm still in shaky ground at 39 days and catch myself fantasizing about "going back out again for a bit"... I was reminded by the speaker that that's a dangerous fantasy because it's clearly in my nature that "too much is never enuf". I renewed: 1. I'm powerless. 2. I have a strong sense of a higher power. And 3 today, I have the willingness to turn it over and attend meetings and commit to not drinking today... Several people shared how shaky they get when they start skipping meetings. Later I went to the Big Meeting at the Hilton Hotel to celebrate the 74th Anniversary of AA with New York Intergroup. I also picked up the new June Meeting List... A huge book of NYC and surrounding area meetings... (I want to try new meetings this summer during all my free time)... A bit of trivia: that today, 74 years ago was when Dr. Bob and Bill W took their work to the man on the bed... (See picture)... Thus, the third member joined AA.... I was especially taken with a guy who qualified (There were three speakers) and mentioned in his history many gay bars that I also had been known to get drunk in over the decades... Without ever needing to identify that he was gay, he stuck to the topic of alcohol. He was comfortable in his skin, and speaking in front of this crowd... I find I am most comfortable in straight meetings myself, since in gay meetings I would have all those "other" issues kick in... It helps me, to just stick to discussion of alcohol... Today is day 39... They did a day countdown thing and i was prepared to stand when my day was called, but the guy doing it messed it all up, and it wasn't clear as he counted the first few days, then jumped to 30, and then to 60, when he should have done spans... Ah well, nobody's perfect! LOL