Closed My Eyes to Meditate and Fell Asleep — Got in a Fight with My Nephew About Whether That Counts 😅 – Ken H.

to all who read and my name is Ellen and I am an alcoholic. This reading is based on a passage from page 29 of the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Each individual in our own personal stories describes in their own language and from their own point of view the way they established their relationship with God. These give a fair cross-section of our membership and a clear-cut idea of what has happened in their lives. We hope no one will consider these self-revealing counts in bad taste. Our hope is that many alcoholic men and women in our room tonight and listening later on aabloochipspeakers.org will hear our speaker and believe that it is only by fully disclosing ourselves and our problems that any of us shall be persuaded to say yes I am one of them too. I must have this thing and I'm going to introduce the introducer which is Tim Moore and he's going to come up and introduce this gentleman here which is our speaker. Hey Tim, I'm an alcoholic. It's good to be here. Real quick, it's a great night for me to be here. My sobriety date is January 7, 2003. I picked up a white chip at the Gwinnett room in Lawrenceville and it was a terrible time. Couldn't sleep. I was living by myself in Lawrenceville. I basically was not working. I couldn't sleep and I called the, after about 10 days, two weeks, I called the AA hotline. I was going to a lot of meetings and I said what's the earliest meeting I have somewhere to go. And she said well it's a 6.15 a.m. meeting on Roswell Road at 8111. So I drove out there early every morning and I'd sit in the parking lot until the meeting started just to have somewhere to go. This is about two weeks after I got my white chip and I'd sit in that meeting and it was just, everything was terrible. One day I actually shared how bad things were going and a guy walked up to me and said you want to talk a few minutes and we sat down at a table and talked a while. That's Ken. About 30 minutes and I got up to leave and he said now you won't ever have to feel this bad again. And I've never felt that bad again because I found hope that morning. That meeting changed my life. Now I believe God gets us sober. I believe if you want to get sober it's not a person that gets you sober. God gets you sober and your willingness. But I'm so glad he was there for me that morning and he's been wonderful in my life. That was 21 years ago and I promise you pretty much every day. He is in town. He is still at that 6.15 a.m. morning every day talking to newcomers, welcoming them and listening to them babbling coherently just like I did. And that's a standard I will never match. But it's a pleasure and an honor to call him my friend, Ken. Hi everybody, I'm Ken Horvath and it's a privilege to be here. I started my journey just like most of us. Growing up in a nice middle family. Everything was not hunky-dory in our household. My parents didn't get along very well together and at one point in time my mom was explaining the dynamics of the three other brothers or four brothers and my sister. And she said, you know, when the one that's younger than me was born, they just tried to keep the marriage together. Having one more kid. And then the last one, you know, it was an accident. And I was like, I wonder where I fell into that, you know. But I tried my hardest to excel at whatever I was doing so I got the attention that I wanted to get. And when I started drinking, I felt 10 foot tall and bulletproof. And I had a little group of people at my fomestead fraternity of alcoholics. And that was the seniors. And we, coming in as freshmen, picked up. We were the younger. I was called the prime example because I could drink more than anybody else could. And the only way to beat me was to drink more than I could eat or drink. And so I held that spot. I got away with everything I was for doing anything. I didn't think of myself as a real alcoholic when I got here. The first time I drank, I got into my dad's liquor cabinet and got one of his old hair up with gin because it was nice and flat. It looked like a flask. And I drank two bottles of wine, that flask, at the football game at 14. And after the football game, I went up to the local hamburger place. McDonald's was just starting, but this was another hamburger place down the way. And got in a fight with somebody and the cop said, you know, you need to leave. And I walked out the door and I got there. You know, I'm getting back in there, you know. Got arrested. Got thrown into jail. They called my mom. She came up to get me. I was on the wrong side of the cell. Not the side with the urinal, but I was pissing on that side. She slapped me on the wrist and said, okay, don't ever come back. And I had incidents after incident of that. I was driving up across the double yellow line, way above the speed limit. Came across the corner. Brand new K5 Blazer. Set the wheel on its side. Drove another quarter of a mile up across the highway and pulled in. I didn't pull in. I scraped my way in. I came up and they said, have you been drinking? I hit my nose on the steering wheel. I was bleeding. I said, no, this lady ran me off the road. I hit this what? I can't see right now. They said, well, you have somebody that can come pick you up. And my future wife. Was the one that got me and said, you need to go to the hospital. You know, my first two girls were born. You know, I went ahead and coming back from the hospital on both occasions, you know, you got responsibilities now. You can't be doing what you're doing. Yes, sir. I won't be doing it anymore. Let me go. That was my life. Just let me go. I carried myself well. I did what I needed to do. I moved down here to Atlanta. And started a business. Very successful at my business. You know, I did well with it. I sponsored the guys in a bowling league and another different thing. I had 20 guys working for me. On the way home from the bowling alley, going up 400 and they had just built the median wall in 1988. Going up in the slow lane because I have trouble nodding off at the wheel. So I'm going speed limit. Maybe a little bit lower than the speed limit. Left hand side, the lady cuts across three lanes. I hit her in the back end and she went directly into the median. Went to see how she was. Called 911. The police come up. Took the field sobriety test. Tested all that. Took the breathalyzer. I was one point underneath what the legal drunk was for at that time. They had since changed that. I would have been legally drunk. But I was also, you know, using a lot of pot. And that kind of stuff. And they said, well, we got to take you in for a blood test. I said, well, I'm not going in for a blood test because I knew, you know, I'm not going to pass it. And they said, well, you'll lose your license for a minimum of a year. I talked to my lawyer and, you know, I'm not taking blood. Went through everything and I got in the accident. A lady never woke up and I was in denial over the fact that it was my problem. You say that I'm now Trump's lawyer for here. You know, I wanted to get the best of it. Of anything that I could possibly do to get out of this thing. And hired a private investigator. Drafted out all the things. You know, it was obvious she had previous DUIs. I had nothing. You know, she had accidents, that kind of stuff. Didn't feel like I was, it's not my, it's not my fault. You know, I just was denying it. Had no idea what Alcoholics Anonymous was about or anything that had to do with it. The judge I went to see. For pre-trial said, if I was convicted, that would be a minimum of a year in jail. I had two kids, a business, this may be. My judge went on vacation. And so the district attorney came something to let you off, you know. And so they ended up agreeing on, you know, some weekends in jail, $1,200 fine, community service, you know. Five-year probationary period. He said, I'm not going to jail, so yeah, let's go. And I went with another judge. And the judge, he said, guilty. He said, I don't think what we've agreed on is right. I think you deserve. Oh, my God. Admitted my guilt. And now I'm going to jail anyways. Next thing I know, the district attorney comes up. He starts debating for the, for me. You know, well, he hasn't, he hasn't done anything, judge. You know. He hasn't had his parking ticket. He hasn't done this. He's a stellar person in the community. And he ended up giving me the latter of the quit drinking during that year while I was waiting to go to court and that kind of thing. Stopped smoking pot. I started smoking again. At one point in time, whether it was mood or mind altering, it was much worse when I went back to jail. One of my friends here and I made a bet because my wife was about to leave me. She said, I'm done. You know, you're an alcoholic. I said, I haven't drank anything. It's that. It's the pot, too. So I go, okay, I'm quitting both. February 1st, 1991. Made a wager, $500. Wanted to go ahead and use, you know, loses the bet. You got to go a whole year, you know. I went the whole year without doing anything. But the bet was pot. And I hadn't done any cocaine for 11 years before that. Just like everything else. Much, much worse. Much, much worse when you go back to doing something after being an alcoholic. After being an alcoholic for a long time. And me waiting, you know, telling lies, doing whatever I needed to do to go ahead and get the guys to supply me with what I needed to have. Never convinced my wife. I thought because I was the epicenter of community service and I did everything with my probation officer, they were going to give me early probation. She did. You know. I only had to do a year and a half of probation. And because I was timely and gave them my money and did all that stuff. But I didn't get my driver's license back. That wasn't part of it. Those years without a driver's license. In 93, everything came to a halt. You know. And I heard that he was leaving me. My business was in debt. I was driving a repo truck without a driver's license. You know. Thinking that I still had it all together. Because I still had a home much higher than it should have been. Things were a lot worse than they should have been. So I got in the program on the 27th, 1993. I had no idea how this thing was going to go. I stayed in the meetings. I went to the 7 o'clock meeting in the morning because my wife didn't like to get up in the morning. That was my way of punishing her. Went to the 11.30 meeting. Went to the 8 o'clock or 10 o'clock or whatever I needed to do to get back out of the house again. I thought I'd be, you know, not having any trouble once I did all this stuff. Now take it. I hadn't drank any alcohol since 91. And this is 93. I'm going three meetings a day going, I'm jonesing off of everything. I can't take my wife. I can't take my business. You know. Everything is just way over my head. They said, you know, if you want to know more about sponsorship or have a personal problem, come up after the meeting. So I went up after the meeting. And that was my sponsor. To be my sponsor. And he gave me his calling card. And some of you might know Papa Bill from, you know, days back at 8111 Club and that kind of stuff. He's well traveled. He got sober when he was 67. He died with 30 years of sobriety at 97. And he went everywhere and anywhere. Some of my first experiences with him. First, you know, after I got into the program, I couldn't take it. I would go on the weekends. I'm thinking I'm calling his business line. It's his personal line. He said, well, where are you? And I said, well, I'm at the Hampton Inn over here. And he said, well, I'll be over there then. Or you want to come over here and have a hamburger with me? He said, I've got a three-quarter house. And I said, no, I'm good. I'm just going to watch the basketball games and that kind of stuff. And I did that. And he came over. And next thing I know, he's on the door. And I'm not one for talking that much. And three and a half hours later, I'm done talking. And I go, I felt a lot better. I felt a lot better. This guy knew where I was coming from. And the next weekend, he wasn't around. And I went back to the clubhouse. And some people would ask me how I'm doing. And I go, yeah, I'm doing fine. You know, I'm doing really fine. I'm doing real fine. He started to wear on me. I came up a couple of times. He said, you want to talk? I go, yeah. Next thing I know, I felt better. I go into meetings with Pop. The first meetings I went to was in the end of March, I guess. And we were going to down at Northside Hospital. They had a first-step meeting. Because they would house people. They had actually had a halfway house facility there at the same time. And got in the rooms there. And as we're going to the meeting, he's driving his Volvo. And it's raining out. It's raining pretty hard. Crosses the double yellow line. And I grab the steering wheel. I pull him back into our lane. I go, Bill. Did you see where you were going? He says, I can hardly see at night. And I can't see at all when it's raining. I'm like, what the heck? You know? And from then on, I started hanging with him all the time. Two weeks after I got in the program, I got my driver's license back. I had to actually take the physical driving test to go ahead and get my driver's license back. But I could drive his car. And I could go ahead and go. So went to the Monday one at Northside. Turned around on, I think it was Wednesdays, we would go to Charter Peachford and do the first step meeting there. On the weekends, we'd go out to Kennesaw and do a first step meeting out there. On Tuesdays, he went to the prison, which is the bus yard up in Alpharetta now. It was for low profile people that were picking up paper on the side of the road. I couldn't go in because I was a convicted felon. And so I would drop him off and go to a meeting on the side and then come and pick him up afterwards and that kind of stuff. Eventually, they let me come in. Hearing in the rooms for a while, I'm so glad I didn't hurt myself or hurt somebody else. I don't know how long it was. It was at least six months. I just broke down in tears. First time I accepted the fact that I might not have thought I was at fault, but I didn't avoid it. I didn't have the wherewithal to go ahead. And I might have. Wasn't one Richter scale under the legal limit or hadn't been smoking pot earlier that day or just blurted out in the middle of the meeting that, no, I am responsible for somebody else's life. And that's something I have to live with. And, you know, hanging around somebody as active in the program as he was, he saved my life. You know, I didn't have, other than drowsing and doing all the things that I was doing at some point. I got a pager. I got a page from somebody in the meeting. It was a guy I had subcontracted some work out for and I had given him $2,000 to do this grading and some labor work for me. He called to tell me that he couldn't do it for the money that I gave him. That, you know, the concrete work and the other stuff, he just couldn't do it. He couldn't afford to do it. He didn't really have the wherewithal to do it. But I could use his subcontractors. I was angry. You tell me I'm losing $2,000. I grabbed him by the neck. The situation worked out the circumstances. I might lose a little bit of money. I might not. Maybe lose a lot more money. I go, that's not me. I'm the one that's going to go beating on his door. I'm going to go get my money one way or the other. And it was the first realization that, you know, a power greater than myself might be able to restore me to sanity. I'm willing my life over to the care of something greater than myself. My relationship wasn't, out of my understanding, was the one I grew up until eighth grade. To be a choir boy, I was a choir boy, but I couldn't be an altar boy because I couldn't fathom the Latin part of it. And my learning difference was profound enough that I wouldn't be able to do what my brother. You know, my sponsor would say, you know, you turn your will and your life over to the care of God. And he'd cuff his hands. You're in his hands. You're not changing your thought process. You know, your will is not different than it was before, you know. But the outcome has never been yours. When I went into the court and said I was guilty, you know, nothing I could do was going to change that person's mind. But it got changed, you know. There must have been something else going on. You know, fighting through those circumstances, it's been the case for me quite often. If I don't want to do something, at that point in time, I was doing it. Didn't want to call the people that I owed the money to. I was $32,000 in debt. Didn't have a driver's license. Driving a repo truck. Wife's leaving me. It was, you know, a lost cause. I can't. I was running home to get the lien waivers out of the mailbox before my wife got home. You know, just anything just to keep the heat off. And, you know, when I turned around and which one did I want to call? I called that one. I called him up and I said, you know, I'm the one you've been chasing for the last couple of years. Been looking for you forever. You know? Well, now you got me. So, he said, so how much money can you give us? I go, I can't give you anything. I don't have any money. So why are you calling? Because I got to be responsible. You know? I'm going to give you some money as soon as I get some money. But I don't know how much. But I will call you back every week or every other week. And I'll tell you how much I can give you and I'll give you that money. You know how many people I owed money to? There's a lot. My will and my life was getting turned over to the care of God. You know, whatever's going to happen is going to happen. People will come and go to me. You know, I got to go to court. I go, congratulations. They go, no, no. You don't understand. I go, I do understand. You know? It's going to turn out the way it's going to turn out. It doesn't make any difference how many sheets you get signed or how much you turn around to do something. It's not in your hands. It's never going to be. That little thing just made so much difference when I started looking at things in my life. You know? I started looking at my character defects. My one sponsor. I had Bill the whole time. Through all my sobriety. But I got other guys along the route. There was another guy named Jerry Montgomery. He was a black guy. Younger than I was. Had more time in sobriety. And I loved what he shared. He had breakfast with me. He said, okay. I'm debating in my head about asking him to be my sponsor. And I said, would you be my sponsor? He said, yeah. Why did you ask me? I go, because I didn't want to. He knew if I didn't want to do something, I'm going to have to face that thing that I didn't want to have to do at some other point in time. And there was a reason. Somebody's kicking me in the ass. I want you to ask him. I get that sensation in the back of my head. I don't want. Okay. What's making me think that? You know? There's something up there that's going on that's saying, no, don't do that. But instead of getting in the argument with myself, I go, that's the best way I'm going. So he wrote down for me when we did my fifth step, my character defects. And he put a list down. Defensive, condescending, judgmental, justification, ego. All I know for me is it starts off with defenses for me. And the assignment was for 30 days, three times a day, out loud, on my knees, ask God to remove these character defects. And that's what I did. I'd have to wake up at four o'clock in the morning some mornings because I was not going to have to do my 30 days all over again. And that's what the story was. If I missed the time and I missed the date, and I couldn't see any of the quality of that. But what it did was it made me in the middle of the day say that prayer, you know, and list out those things and then catch myself when I'm getting defensive because somebody's pointing their finger at me. And if I got caught at defensive, I didn't have to get condescending. I didn't have to justify what I was doing. I didn't have to be judgmental over what they were saying. I could go ahead and say, pause long enough, maybe, to not act out on those character defects. Going through the steps with other guys, I had the good fortune of being able to understand the fact that the way I do it worked for me. It doesn't work for everybody. You know. So one of the guys, the first couple guys I worked with said, well, you know, for me, I can't say those negative annotations for the things. I'm not going to repeat negative words. But I will do the anonym for it and I will make it a better, whatever it was. And I will repeat those things and ask for my character defects to be removed and these to replace them. You know, I go, that's a, that's another great way of looking at it. And then the other guy would turn around and say, I'll do it that way and then I'll do it that way and then I'll also do the character defects. So that way I can be more aware of those. Everybody's circumstances are different. Everybody does it a different way. But the fact is, you know, all of it is a conscious act to go ahead and do something different. You know. For me it was that little voice in my head. You know, catching myself when I'm getting defensive. You know, whatever else I was turning around and doing at that point in time. It makes me more and more conscious of the fact that I can keep on working on this thing. You know, it doesn't just stop right there. You know, enlisting my people that I had harmed in getting ready to make amends was having to take a look at those things for what they really were. It was still a blame game for me. Otherwise, when I was doing my fourth step for the umpteenth time, it wasn't about the resentments I had. It was about the patterns that I drew when I got that resentment. You know, somebody would point the finger, you know, and I'd get defensive and I'd go ahead and try to change their view of what I was doing. You know, and that's how I handled my situations all through my life. I have a belief system that's based on past history. It's not based on what reality is today. It's based on what had happened days before. You know, my only reality is all false. It doesn't make any sense. Because I started believing in the absolutes. Every time I was going golfing, she was going to get pissed off at me. That was not true. It just felt that way. So I started changing what I did. Instead of going ahead and, you know, going out and asking if it's okay if I go out golfing, I would go out and sneak my golf clubs out to the car in the morning, you know, and hope that my wife wouldn't say, well, you got a lot of sun today. Were you golfing? Yes. So the next time I put sunblock on, I didn't want to get caught. I didn't see that my resentments were... She wasn't the one that was causing it. I'm just trying to change my environment so I look better. If I keep on doing that, I'm not getting any better. I'm not going to be able to play a great round of golf. A guy asked me, do you want to go out on Monday? I got another guy that wants to play. We can play at my club. You don't have to pay. So I pack my bag, I get it all set, I go back to my wife. I go, I'm going to be able to go golfing with a guy that might be a potential player. People aren't doing things to me. I'm collateral damage. I'm turning around and trying to change my environment to make myself look better. And I'm blaming all these other people. And all these other people are my angels. They're the ones that are showing me the way to not have to do things how I perceive them. I was an egomaniac with an inferiority complex, to the largest degree. When I started having to do my amends, still doing them, still making those lifestyle amends. The biggest one for myself was my mom. She's 94 years old right now. She's kicking it. She reads 150 books a year. Well, in my age category, I can get Uber for a dollar. Go anywhere I want for a dollar. So she does it. She pays a five dollar tip. Goes anywhere she wants. Because, you know, she'd ask her neighbor, she'd source out whatever she wanted to do. Wanted to go to her hero now. You know, that relationship has gone, you know, a full 180. And, you know, I'm proud to be able to go ahead and enjoy the times I have doing the things that I do. It's part of the steps, you know, soccer, prayer, meditation, to improve my conscious contact. You know, I like to do prayer and meditation. You know, my form of meditation, the biggest percentage of the time is I get quiet, I close my eyes, and I go to sleep. I got in an argument with my nephew. He goes, that's not meditation. I said, that's meditation for me. You know, it's meditation for me. All I know is 20 minutes you can do it any which way you want. That's meditation for me. I have to seek to improve. I have to practice. You know, my one sponsor said, a minute, two minutes, three times a day. Just get quiet for two or three minutes. You know, I read all the books and think of all the things and just try. Over the years, you know, went to the call center, did a hotline, did, you know. And one of the guys, Tim was talking about it earlier, he had quite a few years of sobriety. And he hadn't been going to meetings as much. So he said, that you're going to do 90 meetings in 90 days. But he's not going to do any sobriety and that kind of stuff. I'm thinking I'm really lacking in my program. Sometimes he says to me, you're the only one I know that people can come back years later and go, I knew you were going to be here, you know. So if that's all I can give, you know, that's sometimes that's more than enough. And that is meet somebody new every day. Try to talk to them. Try to hear from them. I don't remember half of them. I went up to a meeting up at the Alpharetta group years later in sobriety. Afterwards, the guy sitting next to me goes, do you remember me? I couldn't put a name stuff to it. He was my sponsor. He was blind as a bat. Up until the end, he had a positive mental attitude about everything in his life. He had went from independent living to assisted living to independent living. And then the final stages was back in assisted living. And he's up in a lot smaller place through the door. It's beautiful. And I take him to the movies. I went and saw the Christmas Carol one time and the animated version with Jim Carrey. And he gets out of that movie. Seeking to help somebody is always going to get me out of me. If he can spend any time. And it doesn't have to be with somebody in the program. There's a way that nobody needs to know that you were the one that did it. I remember trying to go ahead and do that stuff. And I pulled the garbage can up for my neighbor. I wonder if my wife's looking at me. There's a little button here. The program's given me everything. And I have more miracles. It keeps on getting better. I had no intention of buying this house this weekend that we went up on Easter weekend. Went to the grandkids, you know, affair and that kind of stuff. But I had sent my wife pictures of this place that the real estate guy had given me. And she goes, wow, it's really got some nice light. It's got some nice lights. A roadblock. It went away. It went away. There's no way. I don't make enough money to do that. Went away. Looked at it. Put a price down on it. Thirty days later, own it. And so much for sharing that with us. It's nice to hear your experience strengthen her. I'll see you next time. Bye now. . . . . . . . .