NASHVILLE RECOVERY
Mission
The mission of this web site is to enhance my own recovery. Spending time on this project even when I do not want to forces me to get into the book, and for me that is never a bad thing. It is also my sincere hope that this alcoholism recovery site will complement the recovery of some of you who visit here and spend a little time looking around.
There are several websites that contain the text of the Alcoholics Anonymous book, so why on earth do we need another one? Well, we don't necessarily need another one, of course; however, I am one obsessive SOB, and this project grew out of the first "homework assignment" given to me by my new sponsor, Rick, for whom I am increasingly grateful.
My sponsor's first assignment for me, given to me on the day I asked him to be my sponsor, was to read the first 60 pages of the Big Book, right up to the a-b-c bullet points immediately following the twelve steps (toward the the beginning of the chapter entitled 'How it Works'), and to look up in the dictionary at least one word from each page.
I enjoyed this assignment - I love to read. As my sponsor put it, I am jaded to some degree - I have completed assigments similar to this on many occasions in the past. What could I do to give this assigment more meaningful, to give it some extra power, a boost? How could I make this time different - and maybe make it stick? Well, like a real alcoholic, I found a way to overdo it!
I decided that if I could somehow document this task, it might give it some added power (and believe me, I need it.) Furthermore, I have recently been 'jonesing' a bit for an old website that I deleted last fall when I went back to the bottle, a site that was called Atlanta Recovery (a recovery-oriented blog I put together for our tight-knit group of recovering drunks in Marietta, Georgia). I really do miss that site and all the recovery writing we had done. So, doing this was a natural progression from those circumstances. I am now in the process of documenting this assignment in the following way.
I started out by creating a simple web layout and then input the text from the first page of The Doctor's Opinion. I chose a couple of words from that page to look up in the dictionary and planned to link those words to their definition pages at my favorite dictionary site, Dictionary.com. After doing this, I found that it seemed too interruptive and cumbersome to click on a word, wait for the browser to open the definition page on a different website, read it, then get back to reading the text of the Big Book. I found a better way using an AJAX script, which causes a tooltip/popup type box to appear with the term and its defintion(s), without having to click on the linked word and open another web page.
I won't bore you with further technical details; those of you who want to find out more can always view the source code. Suffice to say that this method ended up working very well and was perfectly suited for this Big Book project. It works in the two most popular browsers (Firefox and Internet Explorer), so that's good enough for now.
Home Group
My home group - well, I have not made it official yet, but I will very soon - is the Mid-Day Break Group which meets at noon Monday through Saturday (12:30 on Sundays, I suppose for the churchgoers) at the Alano club on Thompson Lane near Nolensville Rd. I did not like this meeting at first. Hell, I wanted a Brentwood or Green Hills meeting, but I truly embrace this group. I look forward to getting to know the regulars.
I was out there for about 20 years. Much of the time was pure hell. Compared to many of my fellow AAs, I don't have much solid, consecutive time in the program: just over six months. But I have found comparisons with others to be odius! I am grateful to have recently come back in after yet another relapse. My new sobriety date is January 1, 2007. I suppose that means that I have what must surely be the most common sobriety date ever (the first day of a new year). I liked my last sobriety date better - April Fool's Day, 4-1-2006. It was quite fitting for this fool!
Please visit my original spiritual site. I have not worked on this for a while, but all of the content on the Nature of Spirit Web site is timeless. I hope you enjoy it.
Please visit Let It Happen, my new recovery blog. I update this blog at least five times per week. There are entries from the Daily Reflections meditation book as well we personal stuff and opinionated rants on twelve step topics. It covers drugs and alcohol.