Wendy and the Ice Monsters

Wendy and the Ice Monsters (a Grandma tale)

Chapter One: WHERE’S SANTA?

Once there was an eight-year-old girl with red hair and lots of freckles. Her name was Wendy, and she was very independent and liked to have her own way. She didn’t care what the other kids thought of her, even if they called her names like Carrot Hair or Orange Crush or Wednesday.

One night Wendy was trying to sleep. But she couldn’t sleep because it was Christmas Eve, and who can sleep on Christmas Eve?! She wanted to stay awake so she could see Santa bringing presents for everyone.

So she decided to stay awake, but Santa didn’t come, and Wendy was very ticked off. It seemed like hours were going by. “Ill bet Santa will never come,” she said.

But just then. . .
CRASH!

WENDY FELL THROUGH 

THE FLOOR!

She fell and fell. She fell and fell and fell and fell and fell!

“Help!” screamed Wendy. “I’m falling!”

Then suddenly. . .

She fell some more. She fell and fell and fell and fell and fell.

“Rats,” said Wednesday. She was getting used to falling by now, and wasn’t afraid. Well, she was a little bit afraid.

She thought she might land on a rock or go THUD on the ice. But when she finally landed, she felt light as a feather. But she didn’t land on feathers. It was frost, like you see on the tree branches and leaves in the winter.

“Yikes! This is cold on the bum!” yelled Wendy.

It was very very dark and cold.  She didn’t know where she was. Some kind of ice cave? Talk about scary! Wendy was a brave girl. Most of the time. But this time she wasn’t too sure.

“I want my Mummy,” she said, and began to cry.

POOF!

Chapter Two: Hello, Frost Man!

Something or someone appeared in front of her. He was nine feet tall and BLUE! He was all covered with blue and silver frost.

“You look cool!” said Wendy.

“Thank you, little girl. I am cool. I have to be, or I would melt. By the way, who are you?”

“Who am I?” Wendy cried. “Who am I?? I’m normal! I’m a little girl. You’re the monster, aren’t you?”

When she said this, Frost man began to cry. She had hurt his feelings. Wendy suddenly felt very bad about what she had called him.

As he cried, water ran down his face.

“I’m sorry I hurt your feelings, Frost Man. You’d better stop crying, or you’ll melt,” Wendy said.

“But I’m frightened.”

“Of me?”

“No. You’re not as brave as you say you are, or you wouldn’t make fun of other people.” Wendy felt embarrassed, because he was telling the truth.

“So who are you frightened of?”

“I’m afraid of the Ice Monsters. I can see their shadows moving around in the distance.”

(Oh no, it gets worse, Wendy thought to herself.)

“Listen, Frost Man, I don’t know who or what you are, but I like you. I’ll help you beat those Ice Monsters. We’ll do it together. As a team.”

Frost Man gave her a quavery smile. He really wasn’t sure a little girl could help him with something as scary and powerful as the Ice Monsters. But he was glad to have a friend. There weren’t too many Frost People around in this strange hidden world.
Then, all of a sudden –

BLAM!!

Everything exploded into ice cubes! Wendy was amazed to see that everything around her was made of ice crystals.

“Is this Ice Land?” Wendy asked. She had heard about it in geography. It was a country that sounded very cold.

“No. It’s the Land of the Ice Monsters.”

“So where did all the other Frost People go?”

“They’re hiding. When the ice explodes like that, it means. . . THEY’RE COMING!”

“OK then!” Wendy had made her mind up. “Let’s go

deal with those monsters!”

They made their way through chunks and hunks of ice. Wendy couldn’t see any Ice Monsters. The place seemed deserted. Then. . . What was THAT??

Something was appearing in the mist. It looked like an ice cloud. Then it got bigger and bigger!

It was an ICE MONSTER!

Chapter Three: The Land of the Ice Monsters

“Aeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh,” screamed Frost Man. He started to run away. “Don’t you dare run away,” said Wendy. “You must confront your fears.”

“What does that mean?”

“You can’t run away.”

“Oh.”

The Ice Monster looked terrible. He looked worse than anything Wendy had ever seen. He had awful eyes. He had awful hair, like big splinters of ice sticking out of his head.  He looked like the Abdominal Snow Man, or Bigfoot with white fur, only a lot meaner. He looked ten feet tall!

“I know how to deal with this guy,” Wendy said.

“HOW??”

“He’s an Ice Monster, isn’t he? We can melt him.”

Frost Man looked doubtful.

“There’s no electricity down here. We don’t have any blow driers or anything like that.”

Wendy thought and thought. She had no idea how to melt the Ice Monster. But it got worse! Just then she saw another TEN Ice Monsters coming up behind him! They looked awful! They looked scary!

YUCK!!

“Aaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!” screamed Wendy and the Frost Man.

But then she had an idea. “It’s Christmas Eve, a magic time. Maybe that will give me magic powers!

The Frost Man looked doubtful. “Are you sure?”

“No. But do you have any other ideas?”

“Uh, no. Let’s go for the magic powers.”

She pointed her finger at the Ice Monster. “ZAP-A-DOODLE!” she screamed. A lightning bolt shot out of the end of her finger and hit the Ice Monster!

“Ow,” he said.

“He’s melting!” cried Frost Man..

“Zap!” yelled Wendy. “Zap-a-doodle-doo!”

Chapter Four: VICTORY!

Bolts of lightning were flying everywhere! All the Ice Monsters began to melt like icing on a hot day.

The Ice Monster began to turn into slush as he screamed and ran away. “He turned out to be a big coward,” Frost Man said in surprise.

“We won, we won!” said Wendy. “He’s just a puddle now.”

 “Yay,” said Frost Man.

“But wait a minute. It’s Christmas Eve! I’m supposed to be in my bed, waiting for Santa.”

Frost Man looked at her. “Remember, this is a magic night.”

“It is?” Wendy wondered if she had used up all her magic zapping the Ice Monster.

“Of course it is.”

ZAP-ZAP-ZAZZLE!

All at once, the dark ice cave vanished, and Wendy was miraculously back in her bed.

“Wow!” she said. “It’s so good to be home. Nobody’s going to believe what happened to me.” Then she thought of something. “But I miss Frost Man. He was such a good friend to me.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “Even if he comes back, how am I going to be friends with a person who has to stay frozen all the time? I wonder if I can keep him in the freezer.” She was very discouraged.

Then she heard a sound outside her window. A sort of sparkly, tinkly sound like ice crystals hitting a pane of glass.

Slowly a pattern formed on her window. It was a face! A face made of frost and starlight. And not just any face, but one she knew very well.

“It’s you! I knew you’d come back.”

“Merry Christmas, Wendy.”

“Merry Christmas, Frost Man. Well, it’s not quite Christmas yet. So Merry Christmas Eve. How did you get here?”

“This is a magic night, remember? So here I am.  Every Christmas Eve, just look out your window and make a wish, and I’ll be there.”
POOF! The Frost Man disappeared, as Wendy watched in wonder.

When Wendy woke up the next day, she shook her head. “I’ve never had a dream like that before. It was a doozy.” Then she noticed a strange sort of pattern on the window.

The sun was shining through it and it was all glittering blue and silver, almost like diamonds.

“Pretty,” she said, and ran downstairs to see what Santa had brought her.

THE END

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Bob Dylan's biggest bomb

Douglas R. Gilbert/Redferns
Bob Dylan behind the Cafe at Woodstock on July 1st, 1964

BY DANIEL KREPS | November 30, 2014

The lyric sheets of two unrecorded Bob Dylan songs, typed out with handwritten annotations by Dylan himself, will hit the auction block at Christie's on December 4th. The folk legend's original four-page manuscript for "Talkin Folklore Center," published by Dylan in March 1962, is projected to sell for between $40,000 and $60,000, while the two-page "Go Away You Bomb" from 1963 expects to draw bids of $30,000 to $50,000, the auction house estimates.

According to the New York Times, Dylan gifted both sets of lyrics to Izzy Young, the founder of the Folklore Center on Macdougal Street and an influential presence as Dylan climbed the ranks in the Greenwich Village folk scene; it was Young that secured Dylan's first "important concert uptown" at New York's Carnegie Chapter Hall on November 4th, 1961.

"At first Dylan seemed like anybody else that came into the store," Young said. "But I noticed after a while there was something different about him. He would take every goddamn record I had in the store and listen to them. He was the only one that read all those scholarly communist books, as well as all the folk magazines. Anything I had in the store, he would read."

Dylan wrote the 43-line "Talkin Folklore Center" after being asked by Young to pen a song about the Folklore Center. While the song was never performed or recorded as is, some lyrics found their way into early performances of Dylan's "Talkin' New York," theNew York Times reports. Young, who relocated to Sweden in 1972, plans to use the proceeds of the lyric sheet sales to help support his current venture, the Folklore Centrum in Stockholm.

"Go Away You Bomb" was written after Young mentioned to Dylan he was compiling a book of lyrics for anti-nuclear songs. The next day, according to Young, Dylan walked into the Folklore Center with "Go Away You Bomb" in hand. However, the book of lyrics was never published. The song was written around the same time Dylan was at work on his second album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, an LP that shares similar anxieties about the state of world affairs at the time.

"Go Away You Bomb" was previously up for sale at a 2013 rock memorabilia auction in London, but it failed to sell. A representative from Christie's tells the New York Times that the venue was likely the cause for the lack of interest, and that a manuscript auction in New York is a proper setting. The December 4th sale marks the first time "Talkin Folklore Center" has been on the auction block.


You know, it strikes me as amazing that Dylan can still get rich from cleaning out his desk.

Those two "found" songs - Talkin' Folklore Center and (wince) Go Away You Bomb - sound so out-takey that I wonder why anyone would bother with them.

But Dylan, in spite of or because of being the troubadour of our times (and, admittedly, author of some of the most astonishing lyrics ever written by anyone), keeps on finding new ways of marketing himself. It's often called "reinventing", but I wonder if it isn't the same thing. And I do sometimes wonder if he just needs the money. I've read various Dylan bios, and one thing they agree on - well, it's a couple of things. He goes through women like water, and he can't keep track of a buck. Money just sort of flows through him like the River Jordan.

It's partly our fault. OK, ALL our fault, for devouring the worst stale crumbs fallen from his table, for obsessively collecting the belly button lint of this decrepit old legend. His cigarette butts are probably being collected and used for DNA even as we speak, to spawn a whole new generation of Dylanettes.

Think about it. Lots of kids have been named Dylan for the past 20 years or so, and whyyyyyy? Not because of Dylan Thomas, the disreputable old sot (and not nearly the genius writer most people say he was - God, he wrote some abominable crap to read on the BBC, no doubt to pay his beer bill). No, it's a Bob Dylan thing, and when people name their sons after you - dear God, it all becomes downright Biblical, a reverence akin to worship.

When I was a teenager, I was slavishly devoted to Bob. I collected pictures of him. I drew knives stuck into photos of his doll-like little wife Sara Lownds. I listened to everything he did and tried to like it, but after a while it got a mite watered-down.

The bizarre, hallucinogenic power of his metaphor ("jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule"; "They're selling postcards of the hanging/They're painting the passports brown/The beauty parlour is filled with sailors/The circus is in town") dwindled after a while, and though songs like If Not for You and Forever Young were pretty enough, they didn't pack the gut-wallop of "money doesn't talk, it swears," "you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows," and "he not busy being born is busy dying".

I think everyone really expected him to kick off young, to do the Lord Byron thing. Joan Baez, the biggest Dylan groupie who ever lived (Diamonds and Rust!!), once wrote in her memoir Daybreak, "Look closely after him, God. He's more fragile than most people, and besides, I love him."

Fragile, my ass! If Baez turned out to be tough as old horsehide, Dylan is the saddle. These two leathery old comrades are probably going to pull a Pete Seeger and live to be 106.  I'll give him this much, whether he was in fashion or out, he always kept on going. Kept on recording, kept trudging along on that never-ending tour, which some say is a refuge from the emotional emptiness of his life. But the Christmas album (perhaps a horrible remnant of his born-again days) somehow just didn't make it for me. 

When people meet Dylan, they always remark on how small he is. Not fragile-small, but elf-like, in this case a withered and poisonous old elf who has been living underground for a couple of hundred years. They also notice his eyes, "bluer than robin's eggs", though they've probably become a mite rheumy since his Diamonds and Rust days. He's odd, oddly apart. There's something abnormal about him. A genius? I would have thought so in his early days, when he could rip off a song like Chimes of Freedom, dedicated to "every hung-up person in the whole wide universe". 

He's strange enough, surely. His artifacts, his napkin-scribbles, his old beer glasses, the pencil he dropped at the hungry i in 1963, all are sacred objects now. For all we know, he sat down and typed out Go Away You Bomb last week on the last remaining Olivetti portable typewriter. Typed it standing up, with two fingers, while Joan Baez crammed food into his mouth as if he was a baby bird. But the truth is, he never wrote tunes for those two lyrics and never recorded them because he knew they weren't good enough.  Too bad the rest of us lack that kind of wise discernment.

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Why I quit AA

This is a piece I wrote some years ago while I had a blog on Open Salon. It drew an unexpectedly large response, almost all of it negative. The only comment that really sticks in my mind is, "Where did you go to meetings - in a mental institution?" I should have thanked them, for the surliness and blistering sarcasm in these responses neatly proved the point I was trying to make. You can't step outside the bounds of AA convention without severe and rather nasty consequences from the AA mafia. But now I wish I'd kept those responses, perhaps paid a little more attention to the emotion and loyalty behind them rather than reacting with so much anger and offense. I didn't change the piece much, because except for the dates - my granddaughter is now eleven! - I still stand behind everything I said.

My sobriety date, which I will never forget, is November 30, 1990. Today I celebrate twenty-four years of sobriety.

The other day I was lurking around in the children’s section of my favorite bookstore, trying to figure out what a four-year-old grandgirl might want for her birthday. Flipping through the $30 board books and propaganda about toilet training and environmentalism, I heard someone call my name.

I looked up. Oh, hi, Jim. Oh, I’m doing OK. Yes, really. Just doing a little shopping here. No, really, I’m OK. How are you?

It’s hard to be looked at with a mixture of embarrassment and pity, but that’s what I was seeing in Jim’s eyes. Clearly he didn’t want to run into me, as he had been making certain assumptions: that I had either “gone back out” and was drinking again, or else was in such a state of “dry drunk” rampage that I was making myself and everyone around me miserable.

Welcome to the wonderful world of an ex-AA. As with an ex-con, the sense of ensnarement never ends, at least not without a Velcro ripping-away and endless guilt.

There was a time when I needed AA like I needed to breathe. Yes, I am a real alcoholic, and I didn’t fully realize it until I crawled into a meeting on my belly in 1990. Scared sober, I became enmeshed in an organization that quickly took over my life. Moreover, the more embroiled I became, the greater the praise heaped upon me. If I went to a meeting every day, I was a “good” AA member; more than once per day, and I was a spiritual giant.

It’s often said at meetings that you never graduate. This might be OK if I at least had a sense of moving on to another level, but this is discouraged. People with 20 years sober are supposed to say at meetings (whether they feel it or not) that they are at exactly the same level as the newcomers, and are only one drink away from disaster.

I agree with this part: I’ll never be safe to drink again, and I’d better not forget it. After years and years of having this fact jackhammered into my head, I think I’ve accepted it (for after all, “acceptance is the answer to all my problems today”).

From the very beginning, I was disturbed by certain pervasive beliefs in the organization. Conformity is one. Don’t ever speak outside the pre-set AA rhetoric, or other people will assume you’re not doing it right, fighting the mighty and immutable truths of sobriety. There is such a thing as AA dogma, often promoted by what is called the elder statesmen: one elderly man, a veteran of World War II, came to the same meeting at noon every day (supplementing it with evening meetings nearly every night) and talked at length about The War. He talked about The War as it applied to AA, of course, about how he drank his way through the horrors of the battlefield (who wouldn’t?), came home to a wrecked life, and began to set himself straight on the Road of Happy Destiny.

I can’t begrudge an old man the comfort and safety of sobriety, but why do exactly the same dynamics have to apply to a 15-year-old kid? In AA, one size fits all, and if it doesn’t fit, YOU are made to fit yourself to it. If you ever hear a criticism, it’s always couched in terms of “well, I used to object to this and that” (I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind, but now I see). But glory hallelujah, now I see the light.

The 12 steps, forged in the ‘30s by a failed stockbroker and an inebriated doctor, are all about breaking the will, surrender, and absolute reliance on God “as we understood Him”. Though the founders were in some ways quite spiritually evolved, leaving the door open to diverse interpretations of the divine, the actual practice of the program involves the God of Sunday school and revival meetings and “that old-time religion”. As usual, the practice is light-years removed from the original text.

We constantly hear things like “ninety meetings in ninety days”, “it works if you work it”, and reams of other cute sayings (my favorite of many acronyms: sober stands for “son-of-a-bitch, everything’s real!”). None of these are found in the main text of Alcoholics Anonymous, usually known as the Big Book. Though many members preface everything with “the Big Book says”, their interpretations are often pretty far off the actual content.

But that’s not what made me quit.

Though there was one defining crisis that caused the actual split, there had been a steady accumulation of episodes that disturbed me. No one seemed to be willing to talk to me about any of this, as they were too busy going on and on about humility, surrender and the “incredible journey”. (Many AA members I knew literally had no friends or even business associates outside the program, and had brought their spouses and children on-board. Those who didn’t usually ended up divorced: AA widows abound, and affairs rage in spite of the organization’s unrealistically pure motives.)

Item: I was a couple of years in, doing well, stable, sober, and going to five or six meetings a week. Anything that bothered me about AA and its principles was relegated to some sort of seething pit of doubt that was without question my fault, due to my arrogance, lack of surrender and refusal to absolutely rely on God.

For you see, “everything happens for a reason”, everything happens “the way it’s supposed to happen”. (When my son’s roommate was savagely kicked to death outside a bar, an AA member I knew said it was “all part of God’s plan.”) You hear this at nearly every meeting. Though I didn’t voice my objection, because you don’t do that at meetings, this seemed like passivity to me. “Self-will run riot” was the ultimate evil, but it often seemed that having any individual will at all was somewhere between a sin and a crime.

My friend Louise told me this story: she had been horribly abused as a child, bullied by a sexual tyrant who was now beginning to abuse his grandchildren. As she sat around a campfire meeting, an exclusive club in which your deepest feelings were expected to be revealed, she finally shared the agonizing decision she had made: “I’m going to lay charges against my Dad.”

There was a brief, embarrassed silence, followed by this from the meeting’s ringleader: “Louise. . . I believe you have a resentment.”

There followed a long discussion (or rather, a series of uninterrupted soliloquys: AA doesn’t do “cross-talk”) about how Louise had to surrender, let go of her anger, forgive. This was what she “should” do. I met her several months later and asked her how she was doing. “Much better. I’ve left the program. I was tired of twisting myself into a pretzel.”

Another episode, even more harrowing, involved a young woman who had been systematically tortured by her father. Her sponsor told her she must pray for the person who abused her, and wish for him everything she would want for herself. If she forced herself to keep doing this for long enough, she would actually want these things for him and feel mercy and forgiveness towards him. She was also told during her Step 5 (the confessional step) that she must always look for her part in everything that ever happened to her. She wrenched her brain around trying to figure out what her part was in being sodomized at five.

She stood up at the meeting, looking fragile as glass, with tears running down her face. “I just don’t know how to make amends to my Dad. My sponsor says I’ll feel so much better if I do. But I feel like killing myself. I guess I’m just a lousy AA member. This is supposed to work! I’m not supposed to feel this way. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”

I would have talked to her after the meeting (God knows what I would have said) except that a phalanx of members swarmed her afterwards, eager to make her case fit the unquestioned (and unquestionable) model. I wonder what happened, if she ended up like Hannah whose background was similar. Unable to endure what had happened to her, she committed suicide. Members talked about “people with grave emotional and mental disorders”, and carried on.

If I am painting AA too darkly, if I am leaving out the tremendous compassion I found at those early meetings, then I apologize. But as time went on, I found I couldn’t keep the dogma fresh. Except for some of the stories in the back, the Big Book has not changed since its first printing 70-some years ago. What other self-help program wouldn’t update itself in so many decades?

What about all the discoveries we’ve made about family dynamics, about heredity, about mental illness? What about issues of race, of gender, of sexual orientation? (There are a few “gay AA” meetings in which members are held in quarantine. But in the general assembly they have to keep their mouths shut. I once saw a man at an open meeting refer to coming out, prompting an old geezer to literally stomp out of the meeting saying, “I didn’t know this was a meeting for fags.”) No, it’s all swept into the great gulf: obviously the program “works if you work it”, so why make any changes?

But I have come to believe that if the program works, it is because people sublimate their individuality, their power to differ, discern and object. The fact that the 12 steps have been applied to every addiction and disorder in existence alarms me, as if the steps truly are the holy grail of recovery, unassailable, irreplaceable, and beyond question.

My irritability mounting as the years went on, I finally hit a real crisis in 2005. I had suffered from some kind of psychiatric disorder all my life, and in spite of years of good remission I feared a return, but was repeatedly told in AA that it would never bother me again if I stayed sober and constantly relied on God. It was obvious to them (though not to me) that it had all been caused by the demon alcohol.

I secretly took two drugs to control my whatever-it-is (and in all that time I’d never had a correct diagnosis, because the psychiatric system is so incompetent, abusive and full of shit that it deserves to be torn down forever). Suddenly I learned over the ‘net that both these drugs had been recalled at the same time. My doctor had no idea this had happened. So I was left with a choice: try something new, as my doctor recommended, or go “drug free”, as all my AA friends had been urging me to do.

My first reaction was a huge flush of euphoria, of tremendous energy, and an eerie turning back of the clock. I had never had so many compliments about my appearance: I looked ten years younger! Looking back on photos of that time, my eyes were like pinwheels and I was constantly beaming, but apparently no one thought there was anything wrong with this.

Oh, and the compliments on finally being “clean”! “Oh, thank God you’re finally off all that stuff.” “I knew you could do it!” “See, you don’t need to lean on pills because you have God in your life.”

My sleep was whittled down slowly, but by the time I was down to two hours, strange things were starting to happen. In deep hypnosis (by a friend who didn’t know what he was doing), I had an encounter with the Divine that was completely shattering. Almost at the cost of my life, I learned that “meeting God” isn’t at all peaceful or pleasant. The ancient belief that we will die if we see God face-to-face turned out to be true.

The sickening free-fall that followed, the dive into a depression that pushed me below ground, is beyond my powers to describe. It was three years before I began to feel like a human being again. I am now on five drugs and have finally found a decent, competent psychiatrist on the recommendation of a friend. I no longer take medical advice from people who aren’t doctors or try to “heal myself” on milk thistle or coffee grounds But when I think how close I came to giving up and committing suicide, it makes me shudder.

AA did not help me during the most harrowing time of my life. All I got was more unhelpful rhetoric. I wasn’t surrendering, I wasn’t practicing the principles, I wasn’t adhering to the tenet of “no mind-altering substances” (another thing that’s not in the Big Book, but often “quoted” by members with a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other).

In other words, it was my lack of commitment that had made this happen. Almost everyone assumed I had “slipped” and was drinking again (which I wasn't – I had a healthy terror of the stuff by then). At first it was subtle, but then I felt roped off, excluded, unable to strike up a conversation with anyone. I stood in the crowd after meetings looking at a lot of turned backs. Even my sponsor always seemed to be busy.

I had been a loyal, sober member of the program for 15 years.

It didn’t really occur to me, because I had been so thoroughly indoctrinated, that there were other, equally effective ways to be peacefully sober. So I ventured out. I rediscovered a close friend who had also dropped out, and we compared notes. I began to realize that in any other case, if a human being were relentlessly exposed to the same simplistic information over and over and over again, it would be reasonable to assume they “got it” and wouldn’t need any more exposure. Do we go to Sunday school until we’re 47? Do we need to have the Golden Rule blasted into our ears by loudspeaker every morning?

OK, I realize that if AA no longer means what it used to, I don’t have to attend. But the guilt still sometimes jabs at me like pinpricks, even two years after I left. The pity in Jim’s eyes, the sense of “oh, she’s going to fly apart at any minute” was palpable. In his view, there is simply no way that an alcoholic can ever stay sober and be happy and productive (though the program is not very big on “productive” and even seems to discourage normal ambition) without relentless exposure to the principles of the program.

I hope I don’t drink again, but I know there is no guarantee I won’t. I am profoundly committed to the sober life. I do appreciate what I was able to learn from my many years in AA, but I don’t think I’ll attend meetings again unless my view changes or I find myself in a dangerously slippery place. And if I do, I will not expect “fellowship” or any kind of a welcome. I can imagine what they would think if they saw me again: some smug or even pitying version of “I told you so”.

I no longer see AA recovery as real recovery: as with “that old-time religion”, no one questions the tenets, assuming they are infallible. Longtime members creep me out. They are broken records of recovery, parrots fed on the same bland diet, grateful to be huddling together in a place where everyone accepts them and nothing ever changes.

But that’s not life. Things don’t stand still except in old Jimmy Cagney movies, forever frozen in time. Life necessitates constant adaptation to change which is often unexpected, wrenching and unwelcome. But we are not taught that in AA. We are taught to rely absolutely on God “as we understood Him”, to believe that everything happens for a reason. When adversity hits, we’re told it’s “all in God’s plan”.

If this is so, then I think I’ll make a plan of my own.

For more on the subject of AA, click the link below to watch a 48 Hours program (including complete transcript) dealing with AA and the threat of violence against women. This is a subject the program has refused to touch and will still not acknowledge, claiming it's an "outside issue".

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-sober-truth-investigating-the-death-of-karla-mendez-brada/

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