destiny's kisses and dope-slaps
What metro Boston AAs are trite but correct about is that both destiny’s kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person’s basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life
Context
The AA doctrine of powerlessness lifted out of the meeting and applied to Orin's whole accidental career: the program's least fashionable, most correct claim — that you engineer almost nothing that matters — narrated straight, "trite but correct," as the frame for a life that turned on a blocked punt. The Program's epistemology stated by the book in its own voice, outside any meeting.