the CA apparatus and Denial Aisle
CA meetings have a long preamble and endless little Xeroxed formalities they read aloud at the start, is one reason Joelle avoids CA
Context
The Cocaine Anonymous apparatus rendered in ethnographic detail: the long preamble and Xeroxed formalities, the back-row "Denial Aisle" where the fresh newcomers cross and uncross and sniff in everything they own, the standing hard-faced men who never sit. The meeting is a fully furnished social institution with its own geography of resistance — Denial literalized as the aisle you sit in when you're not ready — and the texture is the substance-cage's opposite number, the room built to hold the people the drug has emptied out.