If you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces right now, but paid subscribers do have access to monthly premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!
Last Thursday was 14 years clean and sober for me. Congratulations to myself. Let’s take a moment to observe my greatness.
Ahhhhh, okay, thank you very much. I still really enjoy anniversaries… as much as I like to think I have gotten very, very humble over the years, I’ll take a round of applause for my amazingness once in a while.
I was sitting alone in a hotel room in Los Angeles on a business trip on my anniversary day. But as I have written on here before, I love going to 12-step meetings in other places when I travel. So I found a meeting a half-mile away and went for it.
The meeting did not disappoint. They had maybe 100 chairs set up, and I think less than 10 people showed up. They had a microphone for… well, I’m not sure. There were 8 people in the room. It wasn’t exactly a Springsteen concert.
In the early part of the meeting, the chairperson asked if anybody was celebrating an anniversary. I raised my hand and said, “Today is 14 years.” Everybody started clapping and one man stood and faced me. He pulled a Starbucks brownie out of thin air, lit a candle and the whole room started singing to me. I was completely confused about what I was supposed to do, and the chairperson said into the microphone, “Come get your brownie—that’s for you,” so I walked up, blew the candle out and took the brownie.
I sat back down and the speaker began to share. It was on the Ninth Step (making amends to those we harmed) but he took a moment to say how much he was amused when people from the East Coast come to LA and see how theatrical the Hollywood recovery community was. That was indeed what I was feeling.
He shared for about 25 minutes, and it was fantastic. He was a good storyteller, and pretty theatrical himself.
As he spoke, a guy came in and wandered around the room, over and over again. Nobody really flinched. I found it super weird to have a guy circling the room but it didn’t slow anybody else down. I eventually stopped paying attention until he walked pretty close to me, and I saw that his entire ass was hanging out of his pants. I don’t mean that his pants were riding low and his underwear was sticking out. I mean that his entire asscheeks were out, roaming the room, catching some of that cool Hollywood air. This meeting would have gotten an NC-17 rating based on the intense view of this man’s ass.
He eventually left the room, then came back a few times, then left for good. Just as that excitement was dying down, another dude came into the room and just blurted out his name, which stopped the meeting cold. He said he just got out of treatment, and he was a little bit all-over-the-place so it was hard to understand exactly what his deal was.
Toward the end of the meeting, they passed the basket, which included a Venmo account for the treasurer… who was a pretty famous person. I just thought, “Of course the treasurer is a semi-famous person. It’s Hollywood, baby!”
At the end of the meeting, a few people came over and said congratulations, and I exchanged my number with the speaker, who was a delightful dude with 35-plus years sober.
All in all, what a gift that meeting was. Sobriety happens every day, in every corner of this country and this world. Every community—hell, every meeting—has its own identity, and that’s beautiful. If I lived there, I don’t know that it was quite my style. But for one night only, on my very own red carpet, I felt glad to have a VIP seat at my first Hollywood meeting ever.
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
HEARD AT MEETINGS
Show me an alcoholic whose Big Book is falling apart, and I’ll show you an alcoholic who isn’t.
(Credit: AA Grapevine, May 2001, Earl T. from Buhl, Idaho)
Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com.
