Excerpt from an email to Lorea reprinted here…
The conference was amazing. I had such a good time. We got there Thursday morning, early early and our hotel check-in wasn’t until 11. We drove in to San Francisco over the Bay Bridge and the bay was fogged in so we couldn’t really see much of downtown. We drove around a little to get a taste and then tried to find Haight/Ashbury. We eventually asked for directions and got a map. I don’t think we actually found Haight and Ashbury, but we were all so sleep deprived and hungry that it didn’t even matter. We found a semi-gay part of town and partked the car. we walked down to a cafe and I had a smoothie and a buttered bagel while I read a printed copy of The Onion. I didn’t even known The Onion was printed. I only knew of the online version. Anna called Alcoholics Anonymous Central Office in San Francisco and found a morning meeting at 8:30am in downtown cause we had time to burn until the hotel would check us in. We got to the meeting – In the Tenderloin district. It is essentially the ghetto of ‘Frisco that Main and Hastings is to Vancouver. At first I was apprehensive to go in to this meeting but I’m glad I did. It turned out to be a really amazing meeting. The four of us were probably some of the most sober people in the room and we were all definitely the youngest and definitly the most well-dressed. At first I felt oddly out of place, like some rich kid that was squatting on a junkie’s meeting. But as soon as the meeting started I felt at home, I felt reminded that if this thing is a disease that I suffer from it just as much as the rest of these junkies and crackheads. More over, I have sober time and I know a solution to staying sober, thus placing me in a position to be of service to these people and in fact I felt obliged to be of service to my fellows. It was a pretty amazing experience, and definitely an unexpected highlight of the weekend.When we got our room, I passe out for several hours right away. I had just driven 18 hours through the night with little sleep.It was still thursday and the conference didn’t start until Friday night. It was nice having a day to readjust and relax prior to the weekend. Hmm, i’m rambling… and I still haven’t slept since driving back to Van since yesterday… maybe i’ll try to truncate this. There was a whole mucnh of meetings over the weekdn from the huge meeting Saturday night where they did a ‘sobriety countdown’ from 70 years down to 24 hours to smaller panel meetings, not to mention the Marathon Meetings that ran 24 hours a day all weekend in a conference room. Friday and saturday night there was two dance rooms, a hip hop room and a house room. The hip hop room was the most popular, but i can’t pretend I know how to dance to hip hop, and frankly ‘dancing’ to hip hop is boring and seems to be more about ego and attitude. So i got all raved out and danced my ass off for hours in the house room. Thinking of you the whole time, of course, and wishing you and I were dancing to together. So yeah, the speakers, the meetings, the dancing, being with my friends, and oh yeah… every morning i went running outside in the hot Cali sun for 30 minutes and then ate a banana in the pool and then hot tubbed then steamed. then went for breakfast with the Vanouver peeps and the Seattle peep at 10:30am. It was such an amazing way to wake up every morning. Wish i could always do that.
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