False Analogies

I said, at a meeting, sparsely attended because of snow, that it was like finding a great bar. Someone agreed: “Well,” he said: “We are all alcoholics.” But it was an unfortunate analogy, not least because it was false.

I had earlier read Augusten Burroughs hit an equally flat note: “The room applauds. Applause is a constant thing in A.A. It’s the way we buy drinks for each other.”

It wasn’t the flippancy: Burroughs was discussing a meeting at which a woman reveals that she has terminal cancer (both breasts, liver, stomach, lungs, and lymphatic system – enough cancer to kill off a small village or a large city block). He could have been discussing yet another embarrassing and harmless episode of drunken pubic nudity. It was just that it was wrong.

It wasn’t a hopelessly flat Youtube Nessun Dorma, just instantly untrue, like Barbara Streisand singing My Man (“All my life is just despair/But I don’t care”); like a writer meeting a deadline with the first usable thought.

I am getting close to a half-decent vocabulary to describe drunkenness but sobriety is the harder word. I have an idea of what it is not, though, and applause at an A.A. meeting is no more the way we buy each other drinks than a good meeting is like a good bar.