Don’t Drink and Don’t Die

This is meant to be reflections on my modern-day experience of being a longtimer in the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. The title comes from some cryptic advice on how to become an oldtimer.  Much of what is written and findable on the web and in books, etc, deals with the experiences of the early oldtimers. Much of that deals with their thoughts and concerns about the ways in which they saw AA changing.

I went to my first AA meeting in 1978, and I had my last drink to date in 1984. I was just under 22 years old at that time. I have lived more than half of my life sober in AA, and all of my adult life has been spent this way. I feel beyond a doubt that it is the AA program and people that have enabled me to live to any good purpose, and that I owe it my very life.

I’ve grouped the posts under several categories. My Story is the very long version of, well, my story. That is a “lead” in AA, and it tells “what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like today.” Step Six is where I’m working my way through the step line by line. This being the third time I’ve undertaken a formal reworking of the steps, I thought I would start out in a different manner, because my reworkings before have started with Step One and ended with Step Five. I work the other steps, but I haven’t formally looked at them in a long, long time. Step Eleven has my recent thoughts on prayer and some of the newer prayers I’m experimenting with in my new quest for serenity.  Everything Else is where everything that isn’t my story, step six or step eleven is going, for now. For my older readers who are not familiar with blogs, I’ll tell you that you may click the categories and then you will see only those posts, with the most recent coming first.

I’m trying to stay anonymous at the level of press, radio, films and internet, but if you know who I am, please feel free to share the link and my name.