Basics

As editors with, we trust, an appropriate desire to do our job well, we are occasionally overtaken by an attack of a disease which on the face of it seems even more complicated than alcoholism. The disease has no name that we know of, we'll call it the Let's Junk All the Old Stuff and Start All Over Again Syndrome. The idea is to put a brand new face on things. Now some of this is a good thing, to avoid sameness, staleness. But when it comes to what the Grapevine is trying to say --what we really hope that each issue says, the truth is that our story is an old one --which is ever new. It's the story of getting and staying sober, and learning to live the joyful sober life. Our 'basics' are AA's Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. Let us go one step further: we never think of the Grapevine as a substitute for the AA Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous, which still seems to us to be the best general statement of "How the program works;" we hope you will not overlook reading it.