>>>>>When I go to AA meetings I don't feel nuts. When I go to meetings I feel it. But when they get going about the higher power they drive me away.
>>>>
>>>>Get to a meeting and stop with the excuses! The AA meeting is a higher power, the AA group is a higher power, your sponsor is a higher power. Remember it is a higher power as *I* see it, the big I is you buddy not anyone else. Get thee to a meeting and stop the bull sh*t. Mike you know what you have to do and you know how to do it and you know when to do it, now just do it damn it!
>>>>
>>>>>Who cares what a drunk thinks? How worthless is that, even at Christmas?
>>>>
>>>>Nobody cares what the bottle thinks, but a lot of people care what you think, even at Christmas.
>>>
>>>Hi Jim.
>>>
>>>I slept off most of the craziness. Vodka didn't used to make me so crazy. Now it does, or maybe I know more about what it does to me and it's the guilt that gets me.
>>>
>>>My usual meeting is at noon. I'm not going there hung over. I won't drive and Allie is pissed off at me. Emily is with her mom.
>>>
>>>I am not giving up on AA. There is a great group here in Round Lake. Maybe I have temporarily reached a plateau. Some of the ones who come all the time -- most of whom have been sober for a long time -- want me to "take the next step" and embrace a higher power. I can take the group itself as a higher power for step 2 but not for step 3. I'm not there yet and I don't like the pressure.
>>>
>>>I do not use a single thing as an excuse for my alcoholism.
>>>
>>>You have always been one of my favorite people online. Truly. (Still got that plaque?) This is just a really hard battle.
>>>
>>>I haven't given up.
>>
>>Why won't you go with a hangover? Can you not afford a taxi there? Now is exactly when you should be going, hangover or not. If you are trying to hide your drinking from those at the meeting then you are not really committed and are looking for more excuses. Get over it and go the meeting.
>
>Nobody shows up drunk. Ever. It would be rude.
>
>I almost had a sponsor, the person I should be talking to now. He is a person very unlike me. (Actually I think you would like him ;-) ). What I wanted was someone I could check in with every day and call when I was in crisis. We were all set, then he said let's get together tomorrow and start working the steps. I don't want to work the steps. I don't believe all the steps.

We have a saying in Liverpool, as an answer to such lines: "Suffer then".

I presume AA is a tried-and-tested m/c and yet you don't think you need all the steps. Now if I were to sign up for an IT course, and the first few weeks were "Getting to know Windows", for instance, I think I'd not bother. But you're not yet an "expert" recoverer.

> AA is keeping me more sober than anything has, present evidence excepted, but I am not ready for the whole program.
>
>Here is my problem. I don't believe in God and don't believe the dances around God being the higher power. Sometimes the book says one, sometimes it says the other. I know which they mean. The whole AA concept is based on spiritual belief. It's a colostomy bag hung off the side of a biochemical condition.
>
>That's the hump I can't get over. And my pass seems to have expired.