Continued from below: Given its history — drunken, rowdy, half-cocked — it should not be surprising that there are more AA meetings in SF than there are in Brooklyn, and that’s saying something. Not only can you get yourself a dose of program, if you’re down with that kind of thing, at nearly any hour of the day up to midnight, you can find one that might specialize in people like you. Not just drunks, Jewish drunks (the 12 Schleppers), recovering Deadheads (Wharfrats) and the motorcycle punks who make up the infamous Tuesday night meeting in the Mission, Boys Night Out.

I knew that this meeting was going to be slightly unorthodox when the opening statements were read to backtalk and cavils from the regulars there; instead of “higher power” one dude kept calling his higher power “vagina” (works for me) and some of the standard AA texts, like the excerpt from the Big Book chapter entitled How It Works, had been freely and obscenely adapted as well. The meeting never actually came to order but just when I thought things there might be too out of control for the first timer I had brought with me, a funny thing happened.

In order to speak, meeting members had to wear a plastic Viking helmet, complete with horns, and when these guys donned the ceremonial helmet people shut up and most of what the speakers said was more familiar. Reocovering drunks and junkies talked about how much better life was now that they weren’t living just for themselves, but cared about other people, and when it came to recite the serenity prayer at the end, even God got his due.

Her due, I should say.

Having lived in NY now as long as I lived in SF (16 years) I find my loyalties rather divided. For a long time after I went east and decided I liked it, I derided what seemed to be the predominant mood in SF: tiresome self-contentment flecked with liberal guilt. People in NY are generally too miserable to feel either contentment or guilt for too long, and that keeps the cycle on agitate here, with just enough lack of total disappointment to keep things from flooding over. Think of Wally Shawn’s definition of a good day in My Dinner with Andre (no cockroach in coffee cup) and you’ll get what I mean.

But on this trip west I felt a shift in my prejudices. Most of my old friends there confess to finding the city’s love affair with itself boring but they are proud of their priorities. No matter how rich some people in the Bay Area are (and the richest are some of the wealthiest in the world) everyone has had the experience of finding a meeting cancelled because it’s just too beautiful out. How many times has this happened to you in NY? It’s not exactly “Surf’s up!” (though the waves near Devil’s Slide have become the stuff of legend) but the impulse is the same: what could you possibly be doing that is more important than getting out into this beautiful day? All of nature has conspired to make your human plans seem petty.

That will keep your load in balance.