Get Up. Bucky Sinister

ways to spend a preteen Friday night before Nintendo invented Tecmo Bowl and killed the board game industry. There were video games before that, but the best the Atari 2600 and the Intellivision had to offer couldn't compete with the geniuses at Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley. Families everywhere had board games. But while all the games inspired long readings from the rule books as to the exact interpretations of said rules, Monopoly's rules were meant to be broken, amended, and ignored.

      No two families played Monopoly the same way. According to the rule book, the Free Parking space gets you no money, when a property is landed on but not purchased it goes up for auction, and when you run out of the toy houses or hotels, that's it, you're not allowed to substitute anything for them. But these three rules seem foreign even to veteran players. The rule book seemed like vague guidelines for play.

      That's the way I see recovery meetings. All of them are a little different, but they're all using the same book. Some allow no drug talk, others do. There are speaker meetings, speaker/discussion meetings, Big Book readings, and step studies. There are different types of people in each one, varying in gender, ethnicity, social class, and age. Emphasis on Higher Powers vary from meeting to meeting. If there's something that irritates you about one meeting, try another.

      There are as many different types of meetings as there are bars. Just as there are many bars you would never ever go to, there are likely meetings that you will never like either. But just like your favorite bars, if you look long enough, you will find a meeting that feels like home. Once you feel that community of the meetings, you won't miss the bars so much.

      My favorite part of the poetry readings I went to back in the '90s were what happened afterward. It was the best place to look if I was looking for trouble to get into later. I loved rolling into some bar with a bunch of crazy poets and tearing the place up. As morose and defeatist as many of them were in their writing, they were lots of fun when they had a few drinks in them. Getting wasted and talking about writing, bad readings we'd had, and gossiping about other writers was a blast.

      The meetings have a similar dynamic. Now I get the same feeling as before when a dozen of us all meet up at some restaurant. It's great to walk into a place, say that we have twelve coming, then count them as the motorcycles pull up on the sidewalk and cars pull up with a number of riders spilling out clown-like from the seats.

       What Do You Want, a Cookie?

      Little victories are the ones you'll celebrate in your first few months of sobriety. You'll pay your phone bill on time. You won't have $300 ATM withdrawals that you don't remember. You'll get to work every day. But no one in the rest of the world will care. You can tell them, “Hey! I've gone a whole week without blacking out!” and they will not understand what a big deal that is. Perhaps someone will say, “What do you want, a cookie?”

      In 12 Step, we often have cookies for you, in the back near the coffee. I know that's a cheap metaphor, but it works here. You can stick up your hand and share any of your successes and get legitimate applause. You can also tell other people that you are thirty-three years old and don't know how to work a washing machine, and no one will really question it. They'll help you.

      The stories told in the meetings are going to do you more good than any other passive activity in 12 Step. All you have to do is sit and listen. The steps require action, but the stories require your presence and attention. At many meetings, you will be able to sit there with a cup of coffee and a handful of cookies. How much better do you want your life? You haven't been treated this well since kindergarten. Cookies, coffee, and the story of The Little Junkie That Could. The only thing better would be if it came with a nap.