Why the Knot in Your Gut Is the Real Question – Clint H.

Thank you. My name is Clint Hodges. I'm an alcoholic. Omaha's in good shape, I can feel it. Glad to be here, glad to be sober, glad to be a member in good standing of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous and in In alignment with your custom here, I will tell you that because of God's grace, because this program works, because my sponsor is a step-Nazi, I haven't had a drink of alcohol or any pills that bend me up for quite a while. Now, the last time I did that was August 14, 1966. And that really is a miracle. That really is a miracle I am assuming that there are some new people here tonight There always seems to be a group of new people especially in this part of the country where and I mean by that that AA is you know, you go some places and the guy that's the junior member of the group is 20 years sober and the other seven are up from there. You know they're active in 12-step work. So having fresh blood is very, very good. I'm assuming that that's the case here tonight and I welcome you. If you're new in Alcoholics Anonymous, I welcome you. To be coming in before New Year's Eve is particularly effective there are some people that can hold out until after the new year but we know you've been working hard at it to just limp in until mid-December you get the feeling around AA for a while that you're here to solve a problem and that the problem is you don't know how to drink right and that is not the problem. The problem, or you get the feeling that the problem here is about you can't quit drinking. And that really isn't the problem either. There isn't any... We're good quitters. Most of us have got that down to a fine art. In the last six months of my drinking, I quit on a daily basis. Sometimes several times before noon I would quit. I got very good at quitting. One more half pint of vodka and that's going to be all. I'm going to get out there then and do it. And so I quit a lot. I quit regularly. and with conviction and tearfully, prayerfully, I quit. I quit in front of judges. Sometimes I quit in the cell before I even got out in front of the judge. You have sort of a spiritual awakening right there when they empty the felony tank, you know, and you watch those guys go by, and you know you're next. And it's Judge Ken White on the bench that day, and he was never very gracious with us. He had lost a son to a drunk driver, and he was harsh. And you quit at those times. And sometimes you stay quit for a couple of hours after you get out of jail. and so quitting really isn't the problem quitting isn't it either and we it's important that we get what the problem is I was laughing the other day we were talking about a guy that maybe he'll be in here one of these days I'm kind of saving a seat for him in Los Angeles he's what he did he looked out his back into his backyard one afternoon and he saw his dog out there and the dog had the neighbor's rabbit in its mouth. And it was bloody and all that and he didn't want any trouble with the neighbor and he ran out and he grabbed the rabbit and the rabbit was dead but he brought it inside and he washed it off and he blow-dried the rabbit And he sneaked it next door and put it back in the cage over there. And about a week later, he saw the neighbor out in front. He said, how are you doing? The neighbor said, I'm doing good. He couldn't leave it alone, so he said, how's that rabbit of yours? The neighbor says, funny thing about that rabbit, it died about a month ago and I buried it, but now I see it's back in its cage. I mean, we always seem to be trying to solve the wrong damn problem, you know? And so if you think this is about quitting or about learning how to drink right, that is not the problem. Never was. The problem is what do you do when you're not drinking? How do you handle that? What is the... The problem ist how do you learn to live in such a way that you can live comfortably and never have to start again? That's really what Alcoholics Anonymous addresses. And I am so very glad that it addresses that problem because there isn't any way for me to be alive if that problem isn't addressed. There is no way for my life for me not to move out of that garage I lived in in Glendale if that program isn't addressed. If it is not possible for me to live comfortably without drinking, I am doomed eventually to go for chemical peace of mind and I can grit my teeth and stay sober for once I did it for six weeks. And I don't know how long. Maybe when I'm locked up, I do it a little longer than that. But eventually I have to go back. Eventually I have to wipe out my head because I cannot seem to be able to get comfortable in the world. And Alcoholics Anonymous has made it possible for me to get uncomfortable in the world more and more of the time as the years have gone by. I got here because a bail bondsman brought me to Alcoholics Anonymous. It's just the way that it was. I don't know how you got here or why, but I got hier because a bale bondsman took a look at me one day and what he had done after he'd bailed me out of jail a few times and he had also given me a job selling encyclopedias door-to-door because he had that as a little side business. And I'm working for him doing that and one day he says, where have you been? and I said, I've been drunk. And he said, well, no, I mean for a week. I haven't seen you for a weak. And I said yeah, I have been drunk and it shocked him and he said I'm going to take you someplace today and I thought he might take me back to jail or to Camarillo which is the fidget farm out there near LA or to the county hospital or whatever. I didn't really care where he might take me. When you're living in a garage, it doesn't matter much, you know. And he brought me to you. Of all the astonishing things, on a hot Wednesday afternoon in the middle of the summer in Glendale, California in 1966, that bail bondsman brought me here. He brought me back to you It wasn't my last drink. I got sober the next month but he brought me here he made it his business to get me to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous he'd never brought anybody before and I don't think he's brought anybody since he has never told me that he has I call him every year on my birthday and I thank him for bringing me to AA it's kind of funny I know he's as surprised as I am that this thing works the way it does because I call him up on the 14th of August and I say, Don, it's Clint Hodges. And there's just a moment's hesitation in his voice. Yeah, Clint, where are you? But I thank him for bringing me to you. I really do. This guy made an extraordinary contribution to my life and I don't know if that was his intent or not. But he certainly accomplished an extraordinary thing. Living in that garage was kind of the end of it, but it wasn't the worst of it. Somehow or other when you get to where you're living in a garage with three other guys, there's no real question about where you are playing in life. You know, it's somehow just being... There was a while that I, you know, we all have this kind of a roller coaster existence. And when I got out of college, I got into the dental school at Oregon. And that was tough because they expect so much of you there. We had class and clinic 44 hours a week, and we studied half the night. And we had on Saturday mornings, we were supposed to be down there at 8 o'clock in the clinic with a patient in the chair. And Saturday mornings don't go well for me because I get drunk on Friday night. I learned in college that dexamil and dexedrine was wonderful to get you moving and going again. And it's just, you drop a couple of 15-milligram spanchels into a cup of coffee and you are moving after that. You get inspired. It's just... But it makes me nervous. I get a fine tremor in my hand. And I had the shakes anyway from drinking and trying to be working on somebody's mouth got interesting. they just come out with those new high speed air driven hand pieces you can take out a quadrant of teeth just twitching first year I was there I made a set of dentures for a guy and he came up the second year to bring his wife somebody was working on his wife and every time he'd see me He'd go, say, Clint. Oh, I hated to see him. Say it. I hated it there. I really, it was just brutal for me to be there. And it was tough because you were expected to look squared away. It's tougher in a way than living in the garage to be here. After they threw me out, I lived in a little rooming house and the pretense was tough there too. But I drank on Skid Row and I kind of liked it there. Skid row is easier in a way. Nobody says how are you on Sked Row. They know not to say that. I remember coming out of a blackout in one of those Skidrow cafes in Portland on Burnside Street. late at night, I don't know how late it was but the place was lit by neon tubes and I was sitting across the table from some an Indian lady I don' t know where I met her or who she was really or quite the full nature of our relationship some delicate flower that I invited to dinner she had chili all over her face it makes you nervous and I was so disgusted and I got up and paid the bill and lurched back to the men's room and it was one of these places that still had a little sliver of mirror on the wall in the men'S room and I looked in there, and I had chili all over my face. We were really a match set, drifting slowly forward into the bowls of chili that had been set up there front. And it was after that that I went into the Marine Corps. And the sign outside of the post office in Portland said, The Marine Corps builds men. And I thought, God, wouldn't that be something? Because for too many mornings I'd looked in the mirror and if I looked at all, I had to say, who are you, Clint? Who are you? My dad used to say when are you going to be a man? And I don't know. I don' t think it's going to happen. There's been too much. I'm a failure as a father and a husband I can't cut it in dental school maybe the Marine Corps will help those questions when I was a little kid were really impossible for me to deal with my mom had some of her own she used to say have you found God yet? no what will you do when you meet your maker who knew I don't know what I'm going to do apologize I guess what the hell would you do where will you spend eternity i realized a few years ago those questions don't have much to do with the day at a time but when you're a kid you know you kind of get my mom wanted me to be an evangelist yeah want me to go to prairie bible institute in canada and become my uncle had been a missionary in china And everybody kind of held him up as the guy that you should be like. And he had a little kid our age, my age. And the kid was held up. Boy, I hated that kid, I'll tell you. Kind of a goody-goody two-shoes from my point of view. And there was no way I was going to be an evangelist. No, I had no idea then that there is a rather colorful side did that kind of work. I may have a certain gift for it after all, we don't know. But I was already mad at my mother and there was no way I would even consider doing anything that might make her happy. You know, it's funny. We pick up... I've been... Last weekend, I flew into Austin because I wanted another look at those years as I was growing up. And the reason that I went to Austin is because my uncle, who is now 73, the one that was the missionary in China, is down there and he lost his wife last year. And it just... He called me and we were chatting and I just realized that I wanted to talk to him and he brought out all of the albums and the pictures and I got a look at that grandmother that I was so angry with and got some information about how she grew up and the harshness of her life and I had another look at my mother and some photographs that she had been in as she was growing up and was a young woman she died when I was 14 and so there's most of my family except my brothers and sisters are gone and this one uncle and we had a wonderful time together he told me something that was so interesting he said the only reason I ever went to China was because I wanted to avoid going to a seminary to become a preacher because I hated preachers I thought my god I thought if I turned my will and my life over to the care of God he'd make me go to China to be a missionary. And my uncle went to China to avoid God's will in his life. It's sort of interesting, isn't it? He told me a funny thing. He said, he's not good with language, you know. He just isn't gifted with language but they had to teach and they had learn some obscure Cantonese dialect and he was over there trying to learn all and I guess the distinction between the phrase Jesus Christ our Lord and Jesus Christ our pig is very, very, you can't tell. And I loved him per se and so I went over to China to avoid God's will in my life and told him about Jesus Christ Our Pig for four years and then I came home. I thought, God, I've got to like a guy like that, you know. Wonderful guy. But I looked at him as a kid like he's some big... I could never go to him. If I wasn't perfect, he wasn't going to go for anything I did. And so I stayed away from him. And I was mad at my mother. I was bad at her because there was a point when I decided that I couldn't be the favorite. I decided she didn't love me. And like any snot-nosed kid, the reaction is, you don't love? You don't know me? Great. I don't have you. And you push the caring down. My dad was gone a lot, and there was my mother who I adored. But she didn't love me. I thought, fine, I don't love you. The only point I will now have in finding out what you want me to do is so I can do something else. And you can see kids, we're not born that way But we kind of get a thing going In California the kids that insist they don't care Punk up their hair and have it purple and green And they put safety pins in their cheeks So everybody gets that they don' t care And in my day and age we just walked weird You sat weird at the table and you talk some kind of weird way. All of it, a constant effort to keep from caring too much. Constant effort to Keep From Caring. And that takes a lot of discipline because that's not natural. And yet I know that a lot of us in Alcoholics Anonymous at some point in our life decided that disappointments attached to caring are so painful that our answer to it is to avoid the disappointments by just not caring. And that gives you some interesting notions about how the world is, because after a while it hardens into some kind of a personality, and then you begin to get back what you think it's all about. I mean, if I'm convinced that people don't care, I will act in such a way that pretty soon it will not be interesting to them to show me that they care and then I can be right about that. And I decided when I was seven years old because of a total misunderstanding with my mother that women don't care and you can't trust them and you cannot make them happy and you cant understand them. And I don't know that I thought it through much It's just that it's suddenly quite clear that that's the way that it is. And it's not up for discussion. I don't see it as my idea. And later on, when it says in the book, after I come to you, give up your old ideas, those weren't my old ideas. Those were just my notions about how life and women really were. And they're not up for discussion. And it causes a lot of mischief along the way. A lot of mischief. You can imagine going into a relationship with hanging on to those ideas, no matter what woman I bring into my life. I can't trust her, I can'T make her happy, I CAN'T understand her and i can't please her you can turn them to concrete in no time at all with those kind of ideas and i did that drunk and sober but i didn't know all that you know all i knew as a kid was that i'd push the caring down in my life and then after living like that for maybe. My mom died when I was 14. I never broke. I never ever broke. I couldn't cry when she died. I couldn t cry at her funeral. I could n miss her. I couldn t grieve. It just hardened into a lump of something there. And two years later, at a party after a football game, I was 16 years old and it was vodka and orange juice. And I turned a corner that night, I'll tell you. Sixteen years old at a party. And when the party was over, I was 29 years old living in a garage. And when the party was over the party was over and had been for some time. But I love that booze because when you live without caring there's no peace in it. There's no joy in it, and that booze made a difference. It was a welcome addition to my life. And so the years go by, and I go through this pretense of living normally, and always in the back of my mind is I need a drink and I need a pill. And now it's 1962, and the sign outside of the post office in Portland says the Marine Corps builds men, and I went into the Marine Corp. And I stayed there for my obligatory time and got out at the end of 65 by the skin of my teeth with an honorable discharge and moved to Glendale. I lived in an apartment for a while, and then I lived In the Car, and then in the garage. And it's an interesting life, you know? It's interesting how you make subtle decisions about how much you're going to pay for booze. It's almost like you go into the bar one night and the guy says, You going to drink tonight? Yeah. You want to know what it'll cost? Okay, how much will it cost? Well, the drinks are three bucks apiece and tonight it'll costs you your job. My job? Yeah, your job three bucks a drink and you'll lose your job my job yeah you want to drink or not well yeah i want to drink but god i'll get another job and then a while later you go in and it's almost as if they say you're gonna drink tonight yeah you know what it'll cost No. Well, three bucks a drink and tonight it'll cost you your car. My car? My car. Boy, now they're getting a little close to home. In fact, the car was my home. Oh, set them up. Forget the bus. I didn't lose my car quite that way. It just seized one day on the streets. I'd been saving up for an oil change, you know. But it's really an interesting lifestyle. Did you ever get a half a haircut? You're in there and the guy's doing it and you say, hey, I got to go. He says, I'm almost done. Yeah, I've got to do this. I've gotta go. Five minutes, I'll be... I've Gotta Go Now! and you walk out of there a little, you know mailing address was Glendale general delivery. One night you walk in the bar and the guy says you want to drink tonight? Yeah. Know what it'll cost? What? Well, tonight is three bucks a drink and it'll be three bucks and it will cost you your wife. Okay. some decisions are easier to make than others somebody said, I don't know who it was that there was nothing sadder than seeing a guy come to AA after having lost everything but his wife I know I know But that's the way that it was. When I came here, you asked me if I was powerless over alcohol. Interesting question. You didn't say, are you alcoholic? And I knew the answer to that. No, I'm not. Alcoholic's a guy on Skid Row. I don't live on Sked Row. I got a garage. An alcoholic doesn't have a car. I got a car someplace. I've got a cop. But you kind of gave me a little slider. You said, are you powerless over alcohol? I know what alcohol is, and I'll tell you someplace deep in my gut, way down there where I really live, I know how to do it. I know that's not what powerless is. I know What It Is. You know What it is. Powerless is when they say, put your hands behind your back, and you do that, you do that. We were out last night in Marina Del Rey and walked across the street and there was a squad car and a guy out beside that squad car with a 45 leveled across the top of the door at somebody who he had ordered on his knees and the guy was on his knees on the sidewalk with his hands up in the air. And I just realized why I reacted to that. I mean, today I like to see those kinds of dangerous people off the streets. But I had a reaction to that because I knew that they were going to tell him, put your hands behind you. As soon as some backup came along, that guy was going to get cuffed. That guy was going to be told, get in the car. And he would get in the car, and he was a huge man, and he looked tough. And I knew he would get in that car. He would get in that car because they told him to or because they beat him with a stick, but he would go in the car. And when they got him downtown and said, get in the cell, he will go in this cell. And I have done it many times. And you do that, and you are totally powerless to do anything else. Powerlessness is when they say, just relax your hand, we'll do it, and they roll your finger over because you can't quite get the hang of the fingerprinting process. It's powerlessness. And I'll tell you something. When you asked me if I was powerless over alcohol, I didn't really have to think a lot about it because alcohol and powerless come together in my life. and powerlessness had me in that little garage it was cut up into four rooms and I had one of those little rooms little sticky linoleum floor bad smell in there soggy mattress little light coming out of the ceiling a little sink toilet someplace I never did know where the toilet was you got the sink you don't need that toilet it's really great you know we don't give up our social life very easily there's male alcoholics those little rooms I guess they have them in Omaha I've been in them sober I've pulled guys out of those rooms I've lived in those rooms and we just have sort of a thing there we hate to give up our social lives so there's always an old copy of Playboy magazine laying around in there or, you know, honey, I'm home, right? We really gave up a lot when we came to AA, didn't we? Powerless. I'll tell you, the last time I got arrested for drunk driving was 10 o'clock in the morning and I stopped that car at a red light and that light, I just stopped. I'd been drinking a little bit but I was in pretty good shape. But the light turned green and amber red green amber I was resting guy right behind me was in a squad car so pretty soon he's up wrapping at the window and got me out of the car had me touching my nose I was so shocked when he said you're under arrest I always got their badge numbers didn't you I want a jury trial you know what i wanted justice my sponsor clancy suggested to me after i'd been around for a couple of years that that cry for justice may be a little inappropriate he thought i'd had about all the justice i could stand i said go for mercy maybe but but he arrested me and three weeks later I'm in some guy's office and I'm looking at the police report and this cop had written down I discontinued the field sobriety test because the suspect was injuring himself and I want a jury trial right so if you're new and powerlessness and alcohol come together in your life welcome aboard good to have you here welcome home welcome to the lost and found department of Omaha and then what you get sober and then want and you will and you will stay sober and then what I mean that you already know that you will do that if you choose to do that you will do that. And you know that you will give a little nod in the direction of the steps, and a little nod in the direction of a sponsor, especially in this part of the country. And you'll call your sponsor, and every once in a while you'll throw him a little bone, give him a little problem that doesn't bother you much. And when he gives you an answer, you say, oh, that's the most wonderful thing, thank you. And then you get on with living your life without interference. And you wonder, what's the least I can do around this place and stay sober? How little can I do and not get drunk again? And then one day when you're sober a while, you kind of get the notion that you're not going first class, that other people seem to be a little more comfortable than you. See, the ultimate question around here is how's the knot in your gut? That's the real question. And we all know the answer to it on any given day and we know it just like that. And I did that. I didn't get a sponsor for a while. I got sober in Glendale and I moved over to the other end of town and I watched a guy named Clancy and a group of people he had around him and this is 1968 now and it was a small group of people around him but they looked like they were having fun, they were a little intense but by God they were involved in life and I finally asked him to be my sponsor and things began to move along for me. By this time I'd written an inventory, by this time I had done a fifth step and I was soon to begin doing awkward things like paying child support every payday. He encourages that sort of action. And you list your phone number and your right name and you... But still, what are you going to do i mean what about these steps what about all these meetings isn't there some point at which all of this is just a bit much i mean you get on the aa merry-go-round and you wave at your sponsor every time you go by I would like to encourage you tonight, if you're new, to do something that was sort of exemplified in that movie about the field of dreams. Somebody mentioned it tonight. I don't know if you've seen that movie or not, But it's a different kind of a movie about an extraordinary event that takes place concerning the building of a baseball diamond and the use to which it is put. But if there's any message to that movie at all, for me, it was don't be reasonable. Don't be unreasonable. If you're new here tonight, it isn't reasonable for you to be sober. You know that. reason did not get you sober if it had done if you'd been able to do it by reason you would have done it before you got here, wouldn't you? really, I would have I would've done it in dental school I wouldve done it at the Marine Corps I wouldn't have moved to the garage I would not have done much jail time because I never did like it that much. Don't be reasonable because it'll slow you down. It isn't reasonable for you to get a sponsor and it isn't unreasonable for you to do what that sponsor tells you to do. You know that and I know that. So don't be unreasonable and it is reasonable and it's not reasonable for you to go to meetings and it isn't reasonable for you to work these steps. But I will tell you that in order to have the rich life that is yours, you will do those things. And I'm going to tell you why you might want to do it because after having said don't be reasonable, I'll give your mind something to play with. one of the things that seems to be such a part of us is the fact that we spend most of our time up here in our heads. And that's not exactly productive time. Reality is not my constant companion, you know? I was watching a guy drive the other day. I was behind him on the freeway, and I just knew that he was up here. He was not driving that car. He was up there fighting with his wife or whatever he was doing, but he would get up on top of the car in front of him and then have to hit the brakes. And then he'd go way back and people were trying to get around him. And then he'd drift over to the dots and the lanes. And you just knew that he wasn't doing what he was doing. I mean, I think the goal for all of us has to be to do whatever you're doing 100%. And that's one of the wonderful things about coming to Omaha because my experience of Alcoholics Anonymous in Omaha is that you do here more than a lot of places whatever you are doing 100% I mean, I see people pitching in and doing the thing and everybody is doing it 100%, except those, of course, that are not doing it 100%. But it's... Out there on that end of the country we play ball and we go on moves and we do all of this and we don't know what to do. We do all that. And somehow or other doing those things 100% is important because on Monday morning I want to be doing it 100% there, and on Wednesday night at the meeting I need to be doing that 100%. And being reasonable about stuff just seems to slow me down. So don't be reasonable. I'll tell you what you might do if you're new. You'll be told to go to lots of meetings and to take these steps. And why would you want to do that? Well, in the meetings, something happens to us that doesn't happen to us any place else at first. Because we spend, see what we do, we spend our time up here in our heads and that means that we cannot be in the room with one another. You can't do it. You can'T possibly be up here trying to finish that last fight with your wife and really be in the room. We can be one or the other and it's about the only choices that we have and it is not really very productive for us to be up here in our heads that is not reality. This thing up here is designed to give us survival, it is designed so that if the building is on fire it says get out of the building but it hates to be out of a job, so it's always saying the building is on fire. I think one of the reasons it is so attractive for me to come up here is because this is where my problems are. And who would I be without my problems? I'd love to get in a discussion meeting and say, that's my problem. Look at that baby. Is that a problem or what? And we get everybody talking about my problem it's a socially acceptable way to be self-obsessed in AA. Just give me a, here's my problem. That is a beauty. Got a camera slick? Let me get a few snapshots of that. Somebody says, hey, I got a solution. Not yet, not yet. I'm not done with the problem. In the book, it says something interesting. The guy in one of the stories says that nothing ever happened to me that was bad enough to get me drunk. and that's true I think for all of us what happened whatever happened to you that was bad enough to get you drunk and this guy goes on to say it was the not the events of the day but the fear of what might happen tomorrow or remorse over yesterday that got the job done many times and those are thoughts that's up here in our head I can either be up here in my head or I can be in the room with you and the room is where I belong because it's where we're doing it 100% it's what we should be doing it's a place where I can get that you care for me it's somewhere I can get that I love you and it's I can't do it up here I must be in the room with you. And the reason that you would want to go to a lot of meetings is because you have got to get in the room, because what's up here in your head will not comfort you at all. You know and I know that one of the big objections to getting sober is, how am I going to get to sleep at night? Am I going lay there and stare at the ceiling and have all that crap going through my head? I can't get to asleep that way. This is not friendly territory. The sun never shines up here, and one of the reasons you know what you've already discovered that you'll feel better after the meeting than you did before and I think it's because we for a few moments in every meeting will get in the room somebody will say something or you watch a guy take a 60 day chip and you want to cry because you know that guy can't stay sober and he's staying sober and you're happy for him and you want nothing in return. And so you get two guys about the same length of sobriety they go to the same meeting and one of them says afterwards that was a beautiful meeting and the other guy says that meeting bored me to death. I know where they spent the meeting. The guy that loved it was in the room and the guy that didn't was up here someplace. And we do that, you know. We drift in and we drift out, but the more that we can be any place where we can be where we are, the better off we are. I remember thinking when I was new on the way to the meeting, I'm going to get a drink after the meeting. And the meeting would be over, and I would be home in bed, and it would occur, I was going to go get a drank. Oh well. Oh well! i would kill for how did that become oh well it was because i would have said a meeting and i was in the room for a few minutes i remember i remember one night in wilshire and normandy maybe the first time i was kind of new and the first thing i did was i was in a meeting with a friend i really got captured was a friend of mine named gail who has since died sober was at the podium and I liked Gail although she and I really never became close in any friendship way or any way I just admired her and I was always interested in what she had to say and on this particular occasion she got me in the room, I'll tell you she was talking about coming out of a blackout she was sitting up on the little ledge over the fireplace in her apartment in Hollywood with her cat and there was some cat food and vodka up there little something for everybody you know up on the mantel and the reason she was up there is because there was about eight inches of water on the floor and that was because she'd started to take a bath last Tuesday and and the whole deal had gotten away from her somehow. They're watching furniture float by. You've got to like Gail, you know? She's a pig. You would drink with Gail. She said the alcoholic's prayer, dear god what's wrong with me well i was in the room that night you know i was right there i remember one night i was in the room with alan mcginnis since dead sober and he was talking about step 11 and he said there's only one time that any of us can have a conscious contact with god and i didn't know what he was going to say about that but i was listening because i don't know much about a conscious contact with God. Not in those days. And this was 1969. He said the only time that any of us can have a conscious contract or a conscious contact with God is right now. Right now. I mean, it's sort of like getting in the room. There is no... God's grace is not available to me tomorrow. It's now. Or never. So it's important to go to these meetings because it gives us some focus and we need it badly. We need to be doing what we're doing 100%. And we need something that will get us because there's some security in these rooms. We're not subject to arrest here. We somehow get that we're not judged here so much. It isn't like being at work where all those questions they ask are at home. We can just kind of take off our pack here and relax. I was laughing, a friend of mine named Jack was at a party in Los Angeles, a big party at somebody's home, 100 people in this place, a birthday party for somebody that had been around a while, and he's in the kitchen, and somebody came up to him and said, there is a lady in the living room that you have to meet. she's from Honduras and you really are going to like this lady and he said where is she and they looked through the crowd and could see her on the couch in the red dress and he says yeah I want to meet the lady and they're walking from the kitchen through the dining room out into the living room to go meet the Lady from Hondura and Jack's thought is God I don't want to live in Honduras boom right up here so go to lots of meetings now why would you want to work these steps well you know this grand central Chuck C used to call it his grand central head and it is a problem and the meetings provided temporary respite. What if there was some way, with all of these crazy thoughts up here, because you cannot just ignore them, you will go up here. All I'm saying is you'll feel better the longer you can stay out of there. And you won't solve my sponsor. You say, oh, you're going to go home early and get caught up on your worrying, are you? I wonder if there was a way you could take a paper and a pencil and write down all those thoughts that are driving you crazy. That would kind of move them from up here into reality. That's called step four. Crazy idea, but there it is. What if you, after you wrote all that stuff down, could read it to somebody? That would kind of drain the swamp a little bit more, wouldn't it? Step five. What if, after You did that, You could scan that material for Your contribution to the problem? There's an interesting notion. I don't have any contribution to that. I resent that person because they did this or said that. And then you get over to one of those and you're finally face-to-face with the question, yeah, how did you get them to do that? You say you resent them because they didn't do it. How did you do this? How did they do this to do this for you? i mean ultimately we have to accept the responsibility for what's going on in our lives and it usually means that for my from my perspective there's an event in my life it isn't a problem but i decide to plug into it with a character defect i can turn an event into a problem in no time i just i get a little greed or a little envy or a little lust or a lie or something like that. Now it's not an event, it's a problem. And I'm the author of it in that form. In that book it says we think our problems are of our own making. And it also says that the problem of an alcoholic centers mainly in his mind. And it says that we have to give up our old ideas. And it took me a long time to get the simplest of those old ideas clearly in mind. The ones involving women that started with my mother and a second grade teacher. What a shock to discover that every woman I brought in my life was there to do me in and treat me badly. They just had it as their life's mission, every failed relationship. and then I noticed something rather unpleasant. I noticed that all of those bad relationships had one thing in common. Me. I came upon that unhappy truth some years ago now. It's been not that many years ago, about five. I was talking to my friend Tom down in Orange County. He said, do you want to change that? And I said, in great alcoholic fashion, I said I don't know. And Tom said, well who should we ask? I said lower your voice Tom, we're in a public restaurant here. And the search was on. you know most of us walk around and if you're new here you may have this I did a sense of impending doom you know what I think that might be I think that might be the notion that I'm going to walk out of here and out on the street and somebody that I hurt back then is going to come up and hit me right in the mouth and I have it coming that'll make you That gives you an edge. It doesn't make you terribly comfortable to be around. What if there was a way that I could make a list of those people and become willing to make amends to them? That's called step eight. That calms you down. That'll continue to calm you down You sleep better when you've gotten there. What if there was a way that I could actually contact those people and set the record straight and get their money back to them? Matt C. used to say, they don't want your money, they just want their own back. It took me 12 years to pay that father-in-law the $14,000 I owed him. and you know what happened after i got him paid off my income went up gets the flow going i had one more on my list a guy whose couch i burned down when i was in dental school he was mad about that couch i'll tell you and i should have long before that taken care of this one but i hadn't and it was the last one on my lista from those drinking days and I wrote him a letter and I sent him a check he was so wonderful within a week I got a letter back from him he was thrilled that I was sober he was delighted that I was a member of AA he sent the check back he said donate it to AA maybe I will someday bye Mike bye Mike It calms you down, I'll tell you that. It does. And what happens when this begins to drain out a little bit? What happens when we don't have all that crap running around up here? We spend less time up here. See, this is boring. You talk to somebody and say, I'm bored. We know the drill up here, he spends all his time up there watching the parade of horribles. well you know how they're dressed we know what they're going to say we try to change it once in a while but we go it's boring when we're up here trying to manage all of that crap and the steps move it from here out in the room and dissipates and then without much going on up here we can get in theroom more you see if there's a lot going on up here, it's like having a tooth out in your jaw. You can't keep your tongue out of it and we just go up here. But if you'll drain the swamp, you can come in the room with us, not just during the meeting but wherever you are, which makes it easier to do it 100%. You lose your defensiveness and you gain an appreciation for the people around you. And And it helps very much in a relationship, I've discovered. I'm under an assignment. I'm one of those guys that doesn't do well in relationships. We've been together, young men and I have been together about four years now. When I get angry, I withdraw and I quiet down. My dad was a violent man and I never wanted to get that angry and so I just worked out a different way to fight. and it's a snotty nasty little way because I just close down and I punish by pouting and I'm under an assignment and the assignment is you can do that you want to do that that's great it's not a little game to play but if you want to do it you do it but the assignment is you will announce it when you're doing that You've got to say why you're mad, how long you're going to pout. It is really funny. It takes some of the fun out of the game, I'll tell you that. I mean it goes like this. I'm mad. And she says yeah. She knows about the assignment. And she's curious. why are you mad well you remember this morning when we pulled into that parking lot yeah you said there's a parking place right there well let me tell you something i've been driving a long damn time i don't need you to be telling me there's a parking place right there and so i'm mad and i'm going to sulk till two o'clock this afternoon i'm not going to really talk to you much i'm i'm gonna answer any of your questions and if we run across anybody i know i'm I'm not going to introduce you to him. Well, you can't get through the announcement without starting to laugh. And notice what has happened. I've moved... See, the thing is, it's all up here. Now, I can't... That's not enough to be that mad about. So what do I have to do? I got to go back three weeks and bring a couple other items up So I can really get into it, you know. Is that a loving thing to do? Not hardly. Does she treat me like that? No. So I have to communicate it. What does that do? It gets it out of here and into the room where it has some perspective, where it can be laughed at, where it seems... High hilarity comes out of that. otherwise a weekend is ruined and so these meetings have been extraordinarily important and these steps have been important and I've discovered something else and then I will sit down but I want to tell you about something that's been going on in my life for the last few years I always had this notion that it took a long time because I did it that way it must take a long time to work these steps and I was putting on I was doing something with there were I did a meeting I led a meeting that was solely devoted to step nine and so I had to read what it says about that step in the book and I came across an astonishing thing those people that wrote these steps who wrote that book you know what they have to say about step 9 and how soon you should do it. They said, you may want to wait a couple of weeks to make sure you're on the right path. A couple of week. I took 12 years. I was shocked to be put in touch with the fact these guys did not horse around with it. I mean, there's just sort of a sentiment that it takes a year and a half to write an inventory. Two years. It does. It takes two years and an evening to write in inventory. Eighteen months and an afternoon. Well, a guy was sent along who was maybe 60, angry, hadn't been around AA before, a journalist, had been the bureau chief for Newsweek in Los Angeles. Somebody sent him over to me, and I liked him. And I also knew that I had to set a hook for this guy, that he would be gone. He'd had far too much psychiatric treatment to survive. He was going to outthink it. He was gonna get reasonable. And so I told him to write an inventory and show up at my house one Saturday morning at nine o'clock, and he did that. And we started at nine O'clock with step one and two and three. And he had written four, and so we did five. And we took a break for lunch, and then we went back to work and we did six and seven. And it took quite a while for him to really get his contribution to all the mess and for him to really see that he did you know what happens when you really get that you've created it, you understand something that you cannot otherwise see and that is that life is fundamentally fair and when you get that the anger begins to go away and the caring comes back up and he made that list of people that he'd harmed it was a long one and we looked at it with some trepidation and there were only a few people that he was willing to make amends to and I didn't want to let him go and the sun is going down now and I said great let's start with those how would you make amens to them by phone or in person or by letter and there was one he could telephone I said that's a telephone right there you may recognize it from the little and he called them and they were home and it was a good call and he looked back at that list and there was another one now that he could call and another one and he wrote some letters and he made some agreements with me about money and paying it back and I'll tell you something when he left my house at 9 that night he was different than he had been at 9.00 that morning I watched that man in a span of 12 hours because of the power of the steps of AA transform into something that he had not been and I grabbed another guy and I did that again and another guy and I suppose in the last year there has been every other weekend at least one day devoted to somebody that's there with me in my den. And we do those steps. And I've watched people transform. And I have had those phone calls made to people that they vowed they'd never talk to again. And amends made. They all seem to have relatives on the East Coast. They use my phone for it. I don't know. I had one guy not long ago from Tehran. now there's a thrill i'll tell you you get some bird on your phone talking to his mother in farsey you don't know if they're making a drug deal or he's making amends i'm going to put a payphone in there what do you think it's been astonishing i've developed more respect for the steps of the program of aa in the last three or four years because of watching of getting a front row seat to that miracle that takes place than I ever had before. I mean, these last four or five years have been years of excitement for me, years of knowing that I'm making a contribution, years of becoming willing more and more to accept responsibility for what goes on in my life. And I've enjoyed being in the room with you tonight. Thank you.