By the Book
Daily Gratitude List 2.21.23
I’m grateful for a rainy day and a long to-do list. I’m grateful for a trip to the library. I’m grateful for that certain swanky umbrella. I’m grateful for Apple trackers. I’m grateful for eccentricity. I’m grateful for bookmarks and card catalogs. I’m grateful to be sober today.
I love books. I love libraries. I think some of my earliest memories are of going to the library with my dad to check out books about dinosaurs. Later, I got to spend some Saturday mornings at the massive University of Iowa Library and that gigantic, football-field sized card catalog.1 I loved (and love) the card catalog for the same reasons I love the subway—isn’t the idea of being able to get almost anywhere (for $2.75!!) completely intoxicating? I’ll answer that for you: Yes, it is.
I have a literal shit-ton of work to get done today. Much of this was to be done over the weekend, but here we are. So it’s going to involve a trip to the library today. It’s a rainy day (and I know someone with a very swanky umbrella) and at some point I’ll be walking up 79th Street and doing this:
I spend a lot of time at the library and I think they know me as the guy who actually uses the card catalog. I wrote about that in November and there’s even a voice-over if you’d rather listen to it:
Terms of Endearment
Anyway, the plan of record for today involves spending the afternoon at the library getting things done. And that makes me very happy. Don’t ask me to explain, it’s just how I am. Books have always been the key that unlocked the world around me. When I wanted to express what I thought of the world unfolding around me, I wrote it down in books. Books were the things that opened my mind, showed me the world and where I wanted to go.
In retrospect, it seems odd that it took me so long to find the answer for my alcoholism, when it was written in a book. A book I owned and had read. From where I’m sitting, I have about five or six different versions of the Big Book within my grasp, including my very first copy of the Big Book. I write in the margins and underline when I read (unless it’s a Library Book!!) and the marginalia in that first copy, well, it’s revealing and funny and in light of actual events, kind of tragic:
I was at a meeting with the Sponsees the other night and heard someone say this:
“If you know me, I live life by the book…[long uncomfortable pause] [nervous laugh] Oh, not the Big Book! “
After the meeting, we were talking and I wondered aloud why people go to the great lengths of going to AA meetings, even on cold, rainy nights, to tell those assembled how much they don’t enjoy AA or would never read the Big Book? To be fair, I did some of that in my early days. I went to meetings all the time and it was very often the planned prelude to a day of drinking. Since I wasn’t making too much progress in the getting sober department, I would be one of those awful people who would maybe suggest that this whole AA thing was a bit simple-minded. I could see how it would appeal to the motley crew of alcoholics and addicts in that room; you folks were pretty far gone, to be fair. It makes sense that you need the small-minded comfort of meetings with other alcoholics and that whole quoting from the book written in 1939 thing. That wasn’t going to work for someone as sophisticated as me.
Not surprisingly, the period of time I thought that coincided with a very long stretch of disastrous drinking and a very, very difficult time for the people who tried to love me. It’s pretty easy to find all of the Big Book rejectionist stuff out there, but here’s a quick summary of the major themes:
It was written in 1939
It is a weird culty thing that has a lot of God talk
It is a form of organized religion
It is a product of the patriarchy and the words only apply to white men
It is unscientific
It is hokey and kind of simple
Why would this work when nothing else has?
It’s too long and complicated
[fill in other reasons to continue drinking]
Here’s what I learned from studying all 164 pages of the Big Book:
I am definitely an alcoholic (see above)
Alcoholism is definitely a disease, it’s just not very well understood by medical science
My symptoms were strikingly similar to the symptoms described in the Big Book and suffered by other alcoholics
The challenge and the opportunity of recovery is found by transforming your life, not mourning the loss of alcohol
The insane lure of drinking diminishes in direct proportion to the effort put into working the steps
The answers are mostly written down (and not just the odd-numbered ones in the back of the book)
The official program of Alcoholics Anonymous is found in the pages of the Big Book, not in random shares at meetings
The story of recovery told in the Big Book is highly, highly repeatable—you can definitely try it at home.
Someone actually wrote this to me on Twitter earlier this morning:
Reading AA literature(the book) is basically non helpful to the family member, since it is written for- the alcoholic, heck, it takes US a long time to "get it” all.
As far as families go, I think reading the Big Book is a great idea. If the Big Book and the Twelve Steps are the undergirding for lots of the recovery programs around, well, I think it’s kind of essential reading to understand just what this whole AA thing is and what turning over your loved one to the program actually means. But that’s just me. I also think that lots of people would benefit from being able to see AA meetings. Which is why one of the many things we’re doing is launching an AA meeting on Zoom. It is going to be Tuesday evenings and it will be starting in March.2
Surprise! It’s going to be a Big Book-based meeting and we’ll have a Beginner’s focus on the first Three Steps. It’s going to be an “Open” meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, meaning anyone can attend. As we know, the only requirement for "membership” in AA is a desire to stop drinking and “Closed” meetings are only for “members.”3 This will be the opposite and I'm hoping that people who are curious about AA, either for themselves or for a loved one,4 will be able to check it out in a pretty low-risk setting.5 Anyway, stay tuned for the exact details.
I don’t want to have this start being a shoe-banging on the podium exercise. I think the Big Book is beautifully written—not because the phrasing is always great or the word choice is dazzling—but because it tells an unbelievably powerful and authentic story about an alcoholic like me. It showed me that if I followed the steps this other alcoholic had taken, well, I could expect a similar result. The trick was that it wasn’t just about “reading” the book, it was about actually doing the things described in the book, in the same way. It was about letting the Book guide me to a new way of life. But it’s not a way of life with a stale, musty book at the center, it’s a way of life with a vibrant power that glows pretty fucking bright when you let it.
I’ll be spending the bulk of the day surrounded by books, which makes me pretty happy by itself. But among all of those smelly, dusty books, well, there aren’t that many that unlocked this much treasure. That sounds kind of pirate-y, so here, I’ll give you the treasure map:
362.292/86
If I start talking about my time in the Bound Periodicals section on the Third Floor, we’ll never get out of here.
The exact time and schedule are TBD but will be announced soon.
Note: There is no one checking “membership” at meetings and we sadly have no secret handshake or anything.
A better phrase here would be cool. This is kind of funeral talk.
Sitting in your kitchen with the camera turned off on Zoom is maybe a bit easier than walking down that dark staircase to the church basement. Or maybe there’s not a good church basement nearby.
Greetings from Al-anonic who also finds sanctuary in the library. How about pics of the much lauded umbrella?
I’m an NA guy and I love the Big Book. So there. I’m also grateful that I get to see fine photos of my hometown on your ‘stack. I miss NYC but grateful to live someplace warm.