It's time to lighten up a bit.
"The Thirteenth Step" July 1997, was an essay done on a lunch hour and slipped into a stack of student exam papers being marked by colleagues. I knew who got it when this person told everyone to stop because he had found a brilliant satiric piece he was so excited to share. He was even more excited when he got to the last sentence. True story. Here 'tis.
And I do know some friends and relatives have benefitted from AA and other 12-Step programs.
I have recently joined a new twelve-step program -- no, really. I know they're a blight on the landscape of the North American psyche, a post-partum sniveling collection of puritan pseudo-ethics unavoidably lodged in the DNA of our affluent culture, but what else is there to do when all of your favourite vices give you gas or a sore back? Hence, I joined the twelve-steppers twelve step program to break free of the need to join twelve step programs. It was scary at first, but each day I feel myself getting stronger and now I'm looking forward to the day I can leave those dingey YMCA and church hall meeting rooms with their ghastly coffee forever, and go out and live some life instead of confessing to it.
From the first meeting I knew this would be a different kind of therapy. No folding chairs in a circle. No mortician smile on the face of a facilitator. And we gathered in a small park in the downtown core. After clearing a space amid the beer cans and pigeon shit on the paving stones, we squatted down to hear Barbie (her real name) tell us her own disgusting but inspiring story. We sat glued to the pathway, vowing silently to check for chewing gum before ever sitting there again as she gave us her wasted life.
She had been raised in twelve-step programs, her parents being both 500-lb, alcoholic shoppers. At the age of six, she had raised her hand at an AA meeting to lisp her first confession of being a secret pacifier paciphile. From then on, it was a continuous sordid case history of one group joined after another, any free time spent in feverish acquisition of new obsessions for future confessions.
Nothing had been too degrading for her to admit to; however, they are too degrading to write about here given the type of readership this journal attracts, so don't get your hopes up, you disgusting slime buckets. At any rate, it was while organizing the foul-finger sniffers 12-step group for former Conservative politicians that she realized she had reached the ultimate bottom metaphorically speaking. She knew it was time to pull out the finger (again, metaphorically), fold up her chair (politely), and to go get a life (really)!
It wasn't easy at first, Barbie told us. She found herself standing up in crowded restaurants to admit to having faked having a reservation, but gradually her interest in the real world became stronger as she began to participate in the simple, authentic activities of city life: honking at tour buses, fingering moped drivers as she cruised through amber lights and wholeheartedly bitching about municipal services. This, she proclaimed, could be our lives too.
Well, many of us wept openly as we stood up in our Calvin Klein jeans now stained forever. And we decided right then and there to take up the challenge of a stepless life, to seek the path of unrepentant living, to meet next time where there were cleaner floors and no pigeons.
Our homework was rigorous. We attended leash-breaking final meetings of whatever 12-step groups we were currently in and snickered audibly as sombre-faced penitents began their confessions. Then we stood ourselves and read articles from World Health Organization or UNESCO reports about human beings with real problems, and then took up collections for refugees.
Riots erupted, of course, and memberships were terminated, often violently. I heard of only one group leader sly enough to reassert control and turn our protest to advantage. He did so by quickly forming a new 12-step group for the chronically guilty rich. I'm told the entire Conservative constituency office in one town immediately formed their own pod.
But, the important thing is that it worked. Here I am, free at last. Free to ignore the obsessive-compulsive behaviours of this mindless culture. Free of the manic needs of daily bathing and laundering and shaving and grooming and wiping ... Hey, come back here. I need to appeal to a few of your higher denominations until my next government cheque comes through.
And I'm also free to pretend I'm a student writing this essay.
Gotcha!