He Decided to Remain an A**hole for His Neighborhood’s Sake – Sandy B. 😂

good evening everybody my name is sandy beach and I'm an alcoholic how you doing it is a pleasure to be back here again and to still be sober I came into Alcoholics Anonymous on Pearl Harbor Day in 1964 and it's almost Pearl Harbor Day again so if I can stay sober till Wednesday why I'll catch up to my friend Hal M and finished 19 years in this wonderful fellowship and for that I am extremely grateful and I generally start my talk by saying that I did come in in 1964 And I haven't been drunk since my first meeting in Manassas, Virginia. And I owe it all to not drinking. And that is exactly the reason that I haven'T been drunk, is due to not drinkIng. I don't think we need to explore that any further. But if you look at the slogans and a lot of the AA literature, it doesn't specifically say, Don't Drink Anywhere. I don't know if you noticed that. We have easy does it and there but for the grace of God, and we assume that people will pick up on the not drinking part. But a lot of us have ratty little minds when we come in, and hell, if they don't tell us directly, we might coast a while on the theory that no one told me specifically not to do that, so I'll be the one, in case there's anybody new here tonight, to let the cat out of the bag that if you find that you are continuing to get drunk, check your drinking. I would just see if you don't have a glass in your hand and if it isn't getting in your mouth then you're actually swallowing it because this was one of the great revelations of the fellowship is to learn very wise things, you know, like drinking gets you drunk. And I think I understood that on the intellectual level, but I don't think I understand that it applied to me. This is what I think happens in the program. There's so many of these ideas that suddenly have our name on them and they take a new meaning, and this was one of them. If you had asked me back in my drinking days why I got drunk, I had a lot of reasons, and none of them had to do with drinking. They had to deal with family problems, or they had to deal with a boss in the Marine Corps. I had an agent in disguise, and if you worked for him, you'd be drunk too. And getting drunk just happened. I relate to people who come around these houses. Walking down the street, and I was taken drunk. That kind of a thing is... Somebody jumps out of an alley and just pumps booze into you, And all of a sudden, there you are, an innocent victim, drunk again. And so obviously the solution to sobriety and to a happy life is getting everybody else to straighten their act out and to stop causing these situations. And so it was, I don't know about you, but it was very meaningful for me to discover that there was a middle step in the chain reaction where if somebody does something to upset me and me getting drunk And that was what I had control over, and it was just simply for the next 10 minutes or so, don't drink. And then keep doing that for the rest of your life, and its amazing what will happen. I believe the program is a very simple program. There's just two things, and I like to talk to anybody who is new to AA, and I have felt this way all along, there's just 2 things you have to do. You simply don't drinking and change everything there is about you. Those two things, and you will be amazed how your life will turn out. If you could keep that in mind. I had a couple of things I wanted to get out of the way before I talk about AA. One of them I want to make sort of, with Conway's permission, a humanitarian announcement. With this many people in the room, I'm going to try one more time to find this person who I've been looking for since 1964, and I try occasionally every couple of years when I get a big convention. I figure there may be a whole new crowd. And I'm looking for a man, I have no idea, he's probably close to 50 nowadays, and in 1964 you were a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy, and you and I were co-patients in the nut ward at Bethesda Naval Hospital right outside of Washington. And you'll remember me because I shook real bad, I was real skinny and had a crew cut. And I was, in the entire nut ward, the champion ashtray maker in clay class. And so I know that if you're here, you will remember me because you were the second best ashtray maker and you were quite jealous and what I'm talking about is the instance in late October of 64 when we had a clay off and all the other patients had looked at the two ashtrays and saw that mine was clearly going to be the winner when the psychiatrist came in the next day to judge him. And if you recall, you casually walked into my room that night smoking a big cigar, just casually carrying on a conversation. And then you reached over just sort of without thinking and put your cigar out in my ashtray and broke it. Now, I've forgotten the whole incident. But I figure anybody who pulled a stunt like that is probably a drunk, and with any luck, you ended up in the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. And if you've been sober this long, you might be getting around to the ninth step. and you've probably been saying if I could find that guy I could make an amend so I'll be up here after the meeting and maybe it will help your program As I say, I get through next Wednesday where I'll finish another year in the program. And it's been like all the years of sobriety, I really believe they just get better. But it's a challenging year and I'm going to just share a little bit and I hope I can do it and then get on with the talk. um as the year started i was uh eagerly looking forward uh to my fifth wedding anniversary i was very happy i had a nice house and um i was confronted with a situation where i was told there was someone else and that uh the marriage was ending and it was devastating and I sold the house and I moved and started getting my life together and I'm sharing this with you number one maybe somebody else has these kind of things going on in their lives but I'm mainly sharing it with you because of what the program did as far as I'm concerned within a few days I got a phone call from my good friend Hal M and I'll tell you exactly what he said. He called me up and he said, Are you being grateful? Are you counting all the things that you have going for you? And I had to admit that I wasn't. That is not what I was doing at all. And I heard several people talk to me along those lines that this program has the power to keep us in two places at once. this program can enable us to simultaneously go through extreme pain and grief and sadness which is exactly what was going on and i don't know of any way to speed that up i don t do not know of any to tell anyone how you're not going to hurt for the next three months or whatever it's going to take but what can go on in the program is to simultaneously realize how lucky we are to be held in the arms of our AA friends and our AA group and our loving higher power to just carry us in this pain day by day right through to where we're supposed to go. It is as if you are both sad and grateful at the same time. Because of people talking, because of maybe watching someone else do the same thing, i just felt at all times that everything was going to be fine this is the perspective that aa gives us as i sat listening to clancy last night we're talking about what it looks like and what the alcoholic's perspective is and how sensitive we are to having it changed and i've heard him talk before and uh to use his analogy it was as if someone walked in that day and took all the technicolor out of the world and everything was suddenly in the grays and black and whites. And that's how I saw it. And by having the people around, they said, no, it's still then technicolored. You just can't see it that way yet, but you will soon. It's going to come back brighter than it ever has. And I remember Hal telling me, look back on the years of sobriety, some of the things that have happened to you, getting thrown out of Marine Corps and other marriage problems and bankruptcy and all the little interesting things that can come along in sobriety. And look back on each one of those and how, in your own story, every one of them was a step up. Every one was a step up I've never really moved forward in this program without some sort of a paradoxical apparent setback. Left to my own devices, I would maintain the same relationship with my higher power. I wouldn't try to get any closer. You know what I mean? I'd just go, this is pretty comfortable right here. I'm putting in eight, nine seconds a day on the 24-hour day book. You know, I get up and I read that thing, but I'm late for the subway as I get back, try and finish it that night. And, you know, whatever amount of meditation or prayer that I may have had, as long as things are going real well, that's about where I leave it. And so it's just sort of a paradoxical situation that in this particular situation there was no alternative to prayer. I found myself sort of whining the Lord's Prayer about 20 hours a day, you know, just going on and just going, I don't know what the hell this is doing, but it's the only thing I seem to be able to do. And I tell you what it did was it kept me in those two perspectives I'm telling you about. It kept me realizing how grateful I was to have a higher power, to have you all and to have the absolute knowledge at all times that everything was going to be all right. Remember how that was when you knew and you walk into an AA group and you got everything going wrong? Yeah, I mean, you know, the money and the romance and the job and all of that. And then somebody walks over. You haven't even seen this guy before. And he just puts his arm around you, pats you on the shoulder, and he just says, everything's going to be all right. And I don't know how that works. The pressure between the shoulder blades must go down and into the soul and back up to the brain, and we just go, good. God, that's good news. Because if you would ask me from my vantage point, I would tell you it is never going to do that. It's never going to be alright. And I can remember sitting there in probably the month of May and I just said, I don't think I can take this for the next 50 years. Did you ever project ahead when you're a little bit uncomfortable and you sit there and you just go, I don' t know as I mathematically look towards through the 90s of feeling like this I may get drunk around 1992. I mean there's this because about then all of my willpower will cave in I know they say no one ever died of lack of sleep, but I may prove them wrong. You know, this type of a thing. And so the time went on. And the healing power of this program set in. Whatever adjustments are made inside are made. And then the Technicolor started coming back. Sitting at my home group, everybody was funny again. Sitting in my home group, I just felt so interested in other people's problems again. I was able to go over and start talking to the new people and the birds were coming out again and the sky finally got blue again. And all of the joy of the program came in and it seemed stronger than it had ever been. And then I was so lucky to meet somebody else and all those nice feelings are back and I know they're mutual and life is going on And it is so different. When I look back, I thought I'd probably start crying. I'm glad I didn't. When I Look Back, I go, where would I have been without you, without AA? What would I Have Done? I probably would have tried to fight it, which is our traditional way of solving problems. Let's attack it. Let's go, what is just doing? I'm going to will my way to something. And I don't know how you will your way on any of those things. and all we did here was just collapse, surrender, our wonderful first step. If you're going to turn it over, if you trust all of the things that we've been taught in AA, we just sort of lay down and do the best you can, saying whatever prayers you can and then watch what happens. I want to thank everybody. I'm just so glad to get that part out and now I can talk about something that I had on my mind and that was um i always like to think of some subject otherwise i just hear my same talk every time and uh it's boring it's a terrible talk i can give it to you in a thumbnail sketch i drank a lot and then i came to aa and got sober and so that's basically my drinking story and a lot of people's stories can be condensed down to that drank a lot came to a got sober um if you came to hey, hey, and didn't get sober, you don't get to talk. So you never hear that story. It's one of the advantages of staying sober. You get to walk. You get the talk. But I got thinking about, if I were to talk about what I want to talk about is the problem with God. That's what I would like to talk about. I mean, this is what I see as the problem with God. Because, you know, AA is a spiritual program, and we hem and haw around the bush about it being a spiritual programme. We talk about higher power, and I said higher power for seven years. And then I got on an efficiency kick. And I said, I'll shortcut that, and i shifted to God. And i've been using that particular word since the seventh year. And you can use whatever word you want, but I think we all know what we're talking about we're talking about something bigger than ourselves that either exists or doesn't it either applies to us or it doesn't and there's a lot of other people keep talking about it and even if you don't want to deal with it they keep bothering you and it keeps coming up places and they keep building churches and putting bibles in hotel rooms and everywhere you go they go oh that's subject it's around again and ever since you're little you're either going to deal with that or not and uh you can postpone dealing with it you can pretend you've dealt with it And you can do whatever you want, but every human being seems to have to confront this issue. I don't know anybody who can totally block it out of their mind. They can try not thinking about it, but eventually it creeps back in. It was even creeping in in my drinking years, you know, this idea, well, I wonder what all that stuff the folks are talking about. I don' t see where it' s doing any good. It seems to start more wars than anything else, you now, religions and all the various ideas. and we have a chapter in our big book called the Chapter to the Agnostic. R.O. referred to that, I think, when he was talking about it and reading out of Chapter 5. And for many years, in the early years when I was in Alcoholics Anonymous, I was not a big reader of anything because I knew stuff without reading it. I don't know if you you just know ahead of time what's going to be in the chapter so why actually read it and I was aware of the chapter called to the agnostic or we agnostics and I knew without reading it that that was where it explained in AA how you stayed sober if you were an agnestic now if you're new and you think that too then let me tell you what it says and then we can maybe proceed from there. I can shortcut the whole chapter, I guess it's around, Hal would know, 10 pages or something like that. What the chapter says, if I were to get it down to three or four words is, change your mind. That's what the chapter said. Oh, am I agnostic? Change your mind, and uh that sounds like a rather weak course of action just change it what about evidence what about well you remember when we changed our mind about being an alcoholic one day we weren't the next day we were we had no new evidence we had nothing we just said okay I'm an alcoholic you know what I mean each one of us I don't know you're sitting in a meeting and you're just oh I'm tired of being a non you know the weight of the world and maybe another guy from your class showed up in AA well my god class of 53 well if he can do it then I thought well alright and then you just change your mind there you were he's alright I'll admit it I'm an alcoholic. And then look what happened. The doors that opened and the things that that made available to you and me and everybody who's done that are immeasurable. What came into our lives by one little changing of the mind there, just going, all right, I give up. I'm finally going to stop denying it. Whatever it took, the pain, one more detox, whatever it was. But what happened there was, I changed my mind. Changed my mind that I'm an alcoholic, but I don't need AA, I'll tell you that. I may be an alcoholic. I don'T need all these damn meetings. I can tell you thaT. So I didn't go to all those meetings. And then I was not very happy, and there came a time when, All right, I'LL GO TO THOSE MEETINGS, BUT I'M NOT GETTING A SPONSOR. I'LL TELL YOU THAT. I'M NOW ALWAYS DRAWING THE LINE. You know, when we change our mind, we change it in very little degrees. This very minor will move one quarter of an inch forward in the direction with these fanatics. And I want to get in the whole mess of that whole thing, you know. The next thing they'll have me doing is the steps. And I'm, you Know, I like the crowd that was saying put the plug in the jug. That sounded enough. Why complicate it beyond that? Keep it simple. That's what Dr. Bob said, right? Put the plug in the jug, and that's it. And there you sit. The plug is in the mug. You put the plug into the jug and you've got a .45 up to your temple. You know, life is still miserable and we don't have alcohol to fix it. And we're sitting there and so we change our mind again on some minor point and get a sponsor. Now, that's a bad thing to do because that gets us to change our minds about a lot of other things because we've let a guy or gal into our lives who takes our inventory for us and finds many, many other areas that need to be changed. Almost all of our ideas need to the inventory and many of them need to change. And, of course, all of them are moving us... And see, this is the problem with God. All of them, whether we know it or not, and I think we know It, are moving Us closer to a decision about God. That's the problem with doing any of this stuff. You get a sponsor, you know, and he believes in a higher power, talks about it. If I hang around this guy, eventually that topic is going to come up. And I'm going to have to deal with it in my life, you Know. And I believe my group is a higher Power and so on down. But we see beyond that, eventually I'm Going to have To think about this for me. and i'm reminded of um some of these these choices that we get to make are laughable now but when we're making them they are difficult because of the perspective we have at the time and i am reminded of the great line in the jack benny radio show from many many years ago when the, all you hear are the sound of footsteps, Benny's footsteps walking down a hallway, maybe some of you remember this, it's just click, click,click,click and then a voice your money or your life followed by silence and more silence as Benny is thinking about and finally the stick up man says well and Benny says I'm thinking I'm thinking. And he was confronted with a terrible choice. And I love the story of the alcoholic who's up in front of the judge, and the judge says, young man, you've been here ten times this year for being drunk in public. I'm going to have to really come down hard on you now. But I'm gonna give you a choice. One AA meeting or a year in jail. Same thing. The guy's out there just going, one AA meeting or a ear in jail, that's a tough thing. What jail? Um, what jail? Oh, why am I always up against this kind of conflict? One AA meeting or a year in jail. Because we know somehow what one AA meeting might mean. It's longer than a year and a half. A year in the jail. It goes on and on. You remember, you know, you hang around the bar and you're drinking with guys and one of them joins AA. And you never see him again, you know what I mean? Never, never comes back. Guys go to jail, they come back. But AA is forever. They just go away. We never see them. So there's something very intimidating about one AA meeting. And then we come in the chapter of the agnostic as an interesting little choice. we take away our first step treatment centers all the education we're having about alcoholism suddenly confronts us with the severity of this illness and the hopelessness and what being powerless really is what it means to be powerless over alcohol i sometimes like to use the analogy of taking somebody on top of a 70-story building over here the um plaza and pitching them off and as the sidewalk is coming up about eight feet from the sidewalk if we could have a big hand come out of the sky this is A.A.'s first step and it grabs him just before the sidewalk hits and says, excuse me sir we're conducting a survey do you believe in God? And this, you see is the wrong time to ask that question It would be much better to ask it at the bar when we can all give our intellectual dissertations on the existence or non-existence, but what we have with a fatal illness, with the sidewalk hurtling up, we don't really have anything about creating the existence of a higher power, but there's sure the need for one. Or else. And I think that's what happens when the recognition of our illness sets in and it's like somebody pulls the rug out from under us and we're firmly planted in midair and all of our self-centeredness everything is not going there is no other plan and in the chapter of the agnostic there is this little choice and Bill wrote to die an alcoholic death or to live by spiritual principles is sometimes a difficult choice and again I just relate to that here's a crossroad in your sobriety And all of a sudden you go, God, you know, if I go this way, I'm going to die an alcoholic death. And you already know what an alcoholic life was like. Vomiting and all of that. You go, oh, God. That must be bad. They call it an alcoholic debt. We've heard a few horror stories of somebody drank a few decades longer than we did. And God, do they look awful. And they tell some rather scary things. And even though we say, no, it'll never happen to me, We're starting to get that squirmy uneasiness That if we went back it might well happen And yet there's this term That is suddenly thrown at us You can either have that Or, choice B Live by spiritual principles By spiritual principles Well, how bad is an alcoholic death? Let's pursue that one a little further Aren't there drugs or something that you could ease the pain? I mean, you know, has Medicare got something? Cripes. What's choice three? So we run out and buy every damn pop book that they got in drug fair. Celery and beyond. You know, rock and roll and yoga. All right, that'll do it. No, we're left with, and this is our dilemma. At least it was mine, probably is on a daily basis. My own way or some other way? I've got all these plans for myself. I have so much insight into things versus a spiritual way of life, whatever that may mean to each one of us, whatever that means in terms of this program. and i feel that as an alcoholic i have the advantage often well you know i hear people talk about i'm grateful that i'm an alcoholic it's bad enough to be grateful that you're in a but if you're new and you hear the speaker up there saying and i'm also grateful that i'm alcoholic you're like yeah that's going too far that's just uh makes me vomit to think that somebody would stand up there and say well the reason that i think some of us say it is the illness of alcoholism took away the choice we would have taken had we not been an alcoholic where they said you're either going to live by spiritual principles or be mildly neurotic. You know what I mean? You could just sort of mediocre your way all the way to senility. And there was no reason, compelling reason, to ever get into this other thing called character building or whatever goes on in this AA way of life where you have sponsors and they're suggesting things and they are moving you towards what I refer to as the mainstream of life. Boring, boring, boring mainstream of Life. You know, the main highway, the mean road. There is no massage parlors on the main road. There is a... Boring boring people. They get up in the morning. Click, click, click. Hey, I am going to work. And they go directly to work their job. They stay there all day. Work, work, work. Then they get in their car and they come home to their home, their own home and they'd stay there with their family and they would be a nice father. A little Johnny would put the people to bed every day. And, you know, the program is going, if you really get with it, you can be like that. Come on! Why would I want to be like this? I don't want to look like that! That's exactly the opposite of the way I want to be. That's what just a dumb guy with no resources, he's condemned to living that way. I got more and I want to get more out of life than that. Well, you know, and you get a sponsor and they're just going, you are, you're getting nut wards, jails, police, DTs, convulsions. You're getting all the goodies. You don't have the resources to go to work every day and come home. You couldn't come close. You have no idea why that is so joyful. You have not idea why that is such a marvelous way to live and such a creative way to life. You've never done it. And I would say, I can tell without doing it it wouldn't be any fun. I can tel without doing i. I can tel, you know, that marvelous contempt prior to investigation out of one of the stories in our big book. I don't have to try that. I can teel without doingit. It isn't any good. You ever have that feeling about AA? You looked into one smoky basement, you said, what, go there every night and you're going to be happy? Wrong. You didn't have to physically do it. And that's what the program gets us to do. Change your mind. Change your mindset. Change your brain. Change your body. And so what I'm grateful about is with the fatal illness, I often look at my alcoholism as like some guy with a .45 caliber pistol about two feet behind me. And he's just there in case I change my mind about staying in AA. And I'm sitting there and I'm just going, you know, this doesn't make sense anymore. I think I'll just take a walk. And all of a sudden I hear click. And it's that hammer cocking back there. And it is my fatal illness. And all OF a sudden everything makes sense again. You know what I am talking about? I go, hey, I just had another spiritual awakening. I see the world clearly again. I see why these meetings are so exciting. Oh, yes, what a wonderful thing. And so we are driven by two things. We're driven by the fatal illness and we're driven by the attraction and the rewards we get from the trying. I'm reminded of a bird flying along over the rocks and if you don't keep flapping you're going to crash into the rocks And so initially we're flapping like mad in our fledgling sobriety to just avoid crashing. But the longer we flap, the higher we get. And the higher up we get, the better the view is. And we keep working at it and we're looking around and we've got a perspective we never dreamed we'd have because we never thought we could flap that long. Or would. We were quitters. We never hung in with anything. And it's almost by default that we were forced to find the resources within ourselves to get to places we never would have gone. And so we're either going to flap like mad to stay up there with a good perspective, or we're going to find ourselves flapping like hell to avoid hitting the rocks. We have no choices. Was that flapping? Oh. So anyway, this program and all of the forces in it, all of these senior members who sit around watching us with their evil eyes, making sure we're moving in the right direction, saying the right things, are pushing us closer to a personal decision about a higher power. That, to me, is the inevitable task of every human being, whether in the program or not. The subject just doesn't go away. I personally think that there was something born inside of me that is just there. And a lot of my problems and anxiety were caused by trying to find non-spiritual answers to a spiritual problem. I thought alcohol was the answer to that particular spiritual problem. If I am a mental, physical, and spiritual human being, I've got to grow in all areas, or I feel funny. I feel torn. I'm not a balanced person. I've moved along in these two dimensions, but I've left out the third one. And so when you're into advanced denial, you go, well, I don't have that dimension. And everyone says it's obvious. and we try to find some other way of addressing the pain that is caused by not growing in that area and vodka worked very well. For me, vodka was a higher power. I had great faith in vodka. It worked from the inside out just like a spiritual program does. It made me feel better without changing the circumstances. It was something I had great faith in even after I got sober. I don't know if any of you have done this. You're sober three months No liquor in the house, but you've got a $50 bill hidden in your wallet just in case the program doesn't work. You know what I mean? You've got to cover yourself, right? I mean, what if the whole thing falls apart? And then that will take us back and then we just have this mild reservation. So I just have the feeling we just get nudged along towards this decision and they are always difficult. And I suppose the final decision, which has to do with making a decision, turn our life over, that whole premise, the whole idea of attempting to become the best possible person that I can become, those kinds of targets. When we talk about a spiritual way of life, there's no middle ground. There's no way of partially giving up drinking. There's not a way of doing it. There's now way of partial... You know, you can't ask the higher power's help to be semi-honest. Dear God, help me to be honest most of the time. And he says, do that on your own, you know. That's sort of your own way. And so I go, I'm not sure I want to be that good a person. Did you ever start thinking about the implications of our steps and they're taking us too far? You know, here we are. I'm worried about becoming too good and my mother's going, I wish it straightened out. You know there's that kind of a strange perspective on things and I remember going through things like well, I don't think I better work this program too hard for my neighborhood's sake. If you know what I mean. In other words, a guy that good would stand out in the neighborhood and then they would be uncomfortable by having someone of that magnitude. So for their sake, I'll remain an asshole. You know, that kind of thing. Why move ahead? You know. You've got to think of other people. It's amazing what our little minds will do to help us not get into making the decision or problem with a higher power. The problem with the higher power is it's perfect. That's the problem with it. The only kind of help that seems to be available is perfect help. Do you really want to become good? Well, I'm not sure. What does that entail? It doesn't look like there could be any fun there. Images of priests and nuns and monasteries come into my mind. I'm like, I don't know what to do. I'm going, I've got no idea. I'm just not sure I want that much help. I enjoy certain things that they don't do and I'm worried that God would call down and go, that's it why did I take that step the great reluctance to move ahead and this is the kind of dilemma that a spiritual program presents and whether we want to avoid it or not, it's there and I think we look at it every day and we look out days to be lived the best we can and look back over the years we're in. And there's no way to measure whether you've done any better than anybody else, but have you done better than you did last year? Have you done besser than the year before? And I think if we don't see progress, then we're endangered. If we can't see some growth, then мы must be dying because there's nowhere to stay just the same. There's nowhere for us to be in the middle of this environment, this kind of activity, this much interacting with each other and stay the same. We're going to be moving, and we move along to the... I always like to use this little example, and then I'll close, of the little boy, I think I told this here a few years ago, the little Boy with a Toothache. So it's my favorite analogy of the problem with the higher power. And this little kid had a baseball game the next morning, and he had to get up bright and early when he wanted to get a good night's sleep, and he woke up at about 1 a.m. with a toothache, And it started twingling away back there. So, like the rest of us, he said, well, the first thing we're going to do about this is hope it goes away. This is a normal way that I do whenever I get a bill I didn't expect. I put it down and go, maybe it'll go away. You know, I still fantasize that problems can be solved that way. If you don't address them, maybe they'll just go away, unless they don't, unless they're there. Thirty minutes later, he starts wrestling with the issue at hand, and that is, is he going to wake his mother up and get some aspirin or not? And so he wrestles with the decision. He says, you know, if I get her in here, she'll give me the aspirin. It'll take care of this little pain. I'll go to sleep and that'll be it. But he doesn't call her because he's still wrestling with the magnitude of the problem. That's not the problem at all. And he waits two hours, loses two more hours sleep before he calls up out and she naturally comes running in. Yes, yes, yes. I'm a toothache. Oh, I'll get you some aspirin, he gets them, boom, he's back to sleep. And the question is, why did he wait two hours before he called her to come in and take care of his problem? And, of course, the answer was that he knew his mother. And he knew that she wasn't going to stop with the aspirin. He knew that the next morning she was going to get on the phone and call the dentist. And he was going make an appointment with the dentist, and then they were going to go into the dentist and the dentist was a nosy guy also. And he wasn't gonna settle with just that tooth. He was going to say, hey, while we're here, let's have a full checkup. And then they were going to get the nurse in there and they were gonna check a condition of every tooth in the mouth and they're gonna mark down if there's cavities or not. And then you're gonna set up a series of appointments until they put them out in perfect condition. And all he wanted was a couple aspirin. He didn't want to get them out than perfect condition will do that later. All I want, but his problem was the source of help only came as a full package. And so I would say to anybody who knew, who's wrestling with this, you either buy the whole deal or you do it yourself. And this is what I, the way I feel about AA. Take the whole package as soon as you can. Just cave in to the whole idea. Become a full member, in the fullest sense of your AA group. Get right in the middle. Not in the fringes. You can't fall off the middle You know what I'm talking about? Because somebody's going to see you going, hey, hey. And as a group, we just move this way. Don't stay on the edges. Get in the Middle. Get active in there. It is the action that does the work. The action of going on 12-7, being part of the group, of making the coffee, of being the secretary, of handing out the chips. Whatever it is, it is the action that causes us to eventually get our feelings to move along. A day well lived. Let me close with a day well-lived. What does a day-well-lived do? We talk about a day at a time and the power of a day. And I was thinking about why a day is so powerful. Because we sit, and I don't know about you all, but I said my mind vacillates between the past and now and the future. You know what I mean? And I look back in the past, and when we first come into A, all we can see are an endless series of days that we screwed up, and we have guilt and remorse, and oh, God, I hate looking back there. And then we look at today, and we're not doing a very good job here, so we look AT all the rest of eternity, and we see ourselves just being the same damn jerk, the same result, the same whole thing. There is no comfortable place in time for our brain to think on. And then we get with a program, we get it with a sponsor, we get following directions, we get our literature and we just plug away doing the best we can for a whole day. At the end of that day we sort of inventory it and we look back and we go, you know, I did pretty good. We surprised ourselves and we say, that's just wonderful how well I did today. I made a little screw up but I ran back and apologized and I had a little situation over here and I fixed it. You know, and I did good here and I met with this person, normally I get upset and I handle that. Not bad. And then in order to look back on the past, we have to go through that day to get there. And it changes the whole color of the past. The past is still filled with all kinds of screw-ups except for the most recent past. And it's not bad. So our feeling about the past haunting us loses 90% of its power just by one day well lived. And then we start looking off into the future and we go, wow, what's my future going to be like? It's going to been an endless series of days like today. We go, God, that's not a bad future at all. That's a hell of a good future to look forward to. And that whole fear of the future is diluted by 90% by just one day well lived and the same thing happens with one day not well lived the past gets real wrong from me again and the future looks awful again. So we have a program of a day at a time, and we have God, a higher power. This is a power tool program. Those 12 steps are power tools. We don't work them alone. We plug in, and then we're able to do them. And if I say anything to anybody who is new, I would just tell you what a marvelous thing it is to be in the today. And you just can't stay there alone. You cannot just will yourself to stay in the today. What you can ask for is help to stay in today. You can ask for a higher power to keep you there and your group and your AA program and 24-hour day book the AA literature those all provide the resources to stay there and we just urge you stay in this stay right in the middle stay right in the center of this group and may we all be here next year. God bless you all. Thank you. Thank you.