He Spent Thousands in Psychoanalysis to Redress His Feelings – Clancy I,Johnny H

My name is Clancy Immerslund and I'm an alcoholic. I carry my assistant George W. with me to provide water, And when it's summertime, he provides lemonade with a little bit of sore throat. We've had it for three years. Started to worry about it a little. But I'm glad to be here. I think that Jim talked about his resentment. And I happened to have stumbled onto the reason for that resentment. he resented me if that's possible for you to believe for something I don't remember ever saying or doing it just seems to me that anyone who resents me is just a guy who wants to get in the majority and I want Jim to know that I forgive him for resenting me because we we've been out here here a lot of years. Now, this is my 29th trip out here at Christmas, and I first came out here 28 years ago. Now does that sound funny? How can you be out here twenty-eight years later on your twenty-ninth trip? That explains why that is, doesn't it? I can see newcomers running. You come out here once, then you come out next year, that's a year later, the end of the first year, but that's your second trip up, and your third trip... You know, we've got that. Let me tell you about the step. We have twelve steps. But this is really kind of nice. I'll tell you, this is about the way the meeting looked probably the fourth year, Jim, when we came out here. Oh, isn't that nice? There's a whole room full. And it was really nice and it really is very peaceful. It's nice that this night falls on Christmas Eve and on a rainy Christmas Eve and all the decent people are home with their families and only the neurotic misfits are fighting their way through the weather and just letting it out there. I don't know why, but we've got to. Otherwise we may have to love our neighbor. So we're all here and safe and sane and sober and I hope we'll be here a long time. Some of the people who were here when I first came out here are dead and a couple are drunk. But Jim led that meeting 28 years ago on Christmas Eve that year too. Some of you may not remember why I was invited. He said he could not get a decent speaker on Christmas if all the good speakers were doing other things and home with their loved ones. And so I came out here and there's the basement of the American Legion Hall. There were about 13 or 14 monks just sitting around and the American legion had decorated their basement that looked hideous and green and an old tattered Christmas tree and it was like a veteran of World War II itself. And I gave a talk and I had this feeling that I'd never been out this far before and I thought, Jesus, I'm so far out must have had a stomach cramp I was so far out in the country I could talk just how I feel nobody would ever know so I told them what I thought how crappy Christmas was I was living alone I was having dreadful living in a sleazy little place at least it was inside but it wasn't very good and I didn't have anything going for me my Christmas was over when I sent some presents to my kids about a week before that that was the end of my Christmas and I thought people who celebrated Christmas were a bunch of sentimental fools and I just hated the whole concept of Christmas I'm glad there were people in AA on Christmas Eve because people who were in churches or in their homes were absolutely full of crap now you wouldn't think that would win anyone's heart, would you? but they couldn't wait to get up to me after the meeting will you talk again next year? I thought, well that's fair I thought about that later it really told you something about the West Covina group more than because I was new and sick but they were old and little by little we can be under all these years and I I was sitting there thinking tonight but it's always heartening in a way the 30 years ago this Christmas 30 years to go tonight it's nice to have things like Christmas Eve or those are things you can remember what you were doing I remember 30 years ago tonight I was sober and I was living in a I was live in an abandoned car at the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax back to the AA club it was cold and kind of rainy that night and I went to a meeting at the AA Club and then after the meeting they closed the club early except it opened at 1 o'clock so they said if we wanted to get home for Christmas And I was feeling terribly sad because I've always been a terrible sentimentalist, and I have, like many other people, I have a tendency sometimes when I'm being overly sentimental to yearn to have memories of things that never were, but it seems they were. And I said, Jesus, I've been sober now for almost 60 days. And I haven't been sober this long since I was forced to be in the insane asylum. And never before that. Wouldn't it be terrible tonight to get thinking about what a hideous night this is and get drunk? And then I was too cold and I couldn't sleep in that car. I felt too sad. I was cold and lonely. Someone had slipped me a couple of two or three bucks at the meeting to go get something to eat. I thought, what in the world could I do on Christmas Eve to keep from having every good intention goof? I said, Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas. And I walked down Fairfax Avenue to Cantor's Delicatessen. I thought well, nobody in Jewish delicatessen says Merry Christmas and I went in there and sat and had a paper and drank coffee and had little snacks and sat there most of the night and nobody said Merry Christmas once. And just a funny thing, I went back some certain month. I felt pretty good. I went to my car and went to sleep and was ready to go for the noon Christmas meeting that was at Christmas. And I felt a little bad because I'd just been fired as a janitor. A guy named A had hired me as a Janitor. He'd fired me on Christmas Eve as a little touch of class. And he didn't pay me. He was going to pay me next week. I guess he was afraid I might buy myself a present, that goof. Well, I put a terrible curse on him, I'll tell you. And just 24 years later, he died. Well, that isn't so bad. Christians before that, maybe I told you I'm a sentimentalist. I want things to be just right. I was working in Dallas. I'd gotten a job in Dallas, had a wife and a bunch of little kids in El Paso and they didn't have much money but I'd been saving money and I called them up and I said don't bother getting any presents because I will be there and we're going to have a wonderful Christmas and it's going to be wonderful. I came home on the train on Christmas Eve morning after the afternoon about noon I guess and my wife and all her children they were excited and I thought I'm going down to get some presents and you have the kids asleep in the morning they're going to find under that tree something they've never seen so I went down I was going to get a present and the guy yelled at me he said, hey Clancy, how are you doing in Dallas I said, fine, come and have a beer he said no not on Christmas Eve, he said just one well no more now we had a beer he said that's all, I'm going to go shop the bartender says, hey when you moved to Dallas you cost me a lot of business have one more on me just one well sometimes I remember being in New Mexico drinking martinis that's what the guy was doing there and at three o'clock in the morning I woke up and the guy said where's your money you son of a bitch I was sitting in a bar in Juarez the guy served me another Cuba Libre and I had no money to pay for it and I was and I had no presents and I got quite cross with the guy I was screaming the guy said next thing I recall he didn't even take his arm off the bar he just knocked me right out well that's the total once I got out of paying for that drink And I fell on the sidewalk, and I cut a big hole in my head, and I lay there. And I guess the people came by that knew me because I'd been a little bit of a good guy one time there. And they picked me up and took me home. They knew where I lived and opened the door and pushed me in the door and shut the door on the left. And I think as I crawled as far as I could and fell asleep and twirled the blood. And the next morning about 6.30, there was a terrible cacophony of sound and I looked up and there were my children, little girls all there was something under the tree they'd never seen and their daddy in a pile of blood and I tried to explain to them they were going to mix up I also tried to tell them something else and I heard the guy say it sounds good to me Daddy's sick and they didn't go for that either I don't mind them they had a Christmas they had a couple of Christmases the Christmas before that these Christmasses they got in a kind of a bad role there for a while Christmas before then I was at Texas State in the same time directing a Christmas pageant that I've described many times they saw in my record that I had directed a grand opera at the University of Texas. So without them, there is a suicide and it's schizophrenic. I'm taking more shock treatments and I've become a little more flexible. Go this way. They said, would you like to direct the Christmas pageant? It was not quite as complex as an Italian opera of the second grade levels that the whole student body could follow along. I was one of them. Someone had to come on home. As I've said many times, the director's main job was not trying to get to discuss motivation. It was trying to bring rehearsals, trying to keep the three wise men off the Virgin Mary who thought she was Jesus. Get back, Lamar. And I spent a Christmas in the naval ward for emotionally upset people. I spent Christmases in all... I don't know where the hell the Christmasses were that I yearned for. Because Christmas had been crappy as far back as I can remember. The last good Christmas, I guess, I was eight. and my dad took me home in my sled in the snow and I wanted a pony and didn't get it for many years and I wished to Christ I'd never gotten that I got in the rain some I had a few dreary newcomers who came by my house today in the ring they don't know when it's raining just step in here these newcomers and I took the wheelbarrow, and we followed the path of that horse. It would rain, and he picked up horsey poo, and the horse smirked at us and laughed, and went back to where we just came up and did it. And not only that, but a guy named Ken, who was a friend of ours just bought that horse a lovely little fur jacket to wear on cold days. And we didn't have any, so the horse was great and we were cold and thick. I want to thank this group for that horse. The horse cost me literally thousands of dollars in hay and straw and vitamins and carrots and doing nice things for people I can suck in to help me clean that's all but it's really a good night but the last good Christmas I had was maybe eight or nine waiting for my Aunt Alma and Uncle Vern to come down on the tree and it's always been this shimmering thing and Christmas was never never approached that and the trouble with Christmas for me is that I all I want out of Christmas is what they seem to promise you and it seems that everyone else may be having. And it took me a great many years and almost cost me my life to discover that it's all, it really is an illusion that probably occasions such as tonight are one of the great lethal moments for people like me, and I presume like most of you, because I have a combination of circumstances in my life and in my makeup that make it imperative for me to stay reasonably comfortable most of the time. Never stop and think about that. That is the curse of Alcoholics Anonymous. Do you know what they make you do here? They make you stay reasonably comfortable most ofthe time. Isn't that a terrible thing to ask? Oh, god damn AA! Just all that crap! Because they make you have to be reasonably comfortable. You don't realize that's the case, but that's what it is. And I, like most of you, I'm sure like many of you when I was in the nut house in Texas I knew about AA. I'd been going to AA up and down for seven years. When I came home with the money and stayed drunk all night in Juarez, I'd be around AA eight years. When I went to Los Angeles and walked 71 blocks off Skid Row on Halloween 1958 I'd have been around AA nine years. And I didn't have the slightest conception that Alcoholics Anonymous could help me. Because of one major, terrible difference between me and them. I'm sure if you're new tonight, there's a residual part of this in you. I am not like them because my problem is not really alcohol. It is kindness. I can talk jail. I've been in jail 30-some times. I've had to go to a veteran's hospital. I've gone to a city hospital. I've stayed in St. Nathanael. I've lost everything. I've left my home, my family. I've let my front teeth kicked out. I'm living on the street. But I'm not really an alcoholic. I wish I were. I wish there was something that simple, that uncomplex, that type of thing that could be redressed by such a thing as stopping drinking. I discovered when I was a boy and when I Was a teenager and when i was in my 20s and I was in 30s they got worse each decade. There's something different about me. My emotions don't come together quite right. They do but not the way other people do. I have intense feeling maybe it's because I want things to be right and other people don't care maybe it is because I would like things to be good and other people just are slothful I think one of the greatest lines I ever heard I heard after I was sober when I was sober about two weeks I was sitting around the club one night and a guy had a couple other guys he took except for his apartment in Beverly Hills. But there's a program on it about alcoholism. I thought you guys would like to see it. And, oh, Jesus. You know, I see a program about alcoholismo. There weren't many of them, but they were bad then, too. But they had this Playhouse 90 show about alcoholisme. It was called Days of Wine and Roses. It came out in 1958. And I watched that, and the guy watched him become a drunk. Then I watched him marry this girl and then watched her become a drink. And then he got sober and went to AA and then he talked to her and she was going to AA. Just another smarmy, goddamn weird ending. You know what helped me in that? When the girl said the death can't find him. He was now living in a little apartment with his daughter because she was an unfit mother. She's on the streets drinking. And she came to visit her daughter and he said, the daughter's in bed now. Can't you stay sober? Won't you go to AA with me? It'll get better. She said, You just don't understand and you never will. And she walked with him over the window into the alley down there and said, Look, that alley is dirty and full of garbage and there's some dreadful dirty mud puddles. I can't stand ugliness. When I drink I don't see the garbage I just see the reflections in the water and things must be beautiful and she went out to drink and apparently to die and somehow that was more impressive to me than any lecture I ever saw I understood what she was saying but for the first time I could identify the feeling and I could see it objectively not as the one reacting but see oh that's what it is that's how I feel that's what I see and I walked out of there much strengthened I was pleased a year or two ago a guy in our group directed that Playhouse 90 and he gave me a kinescope of that show and it's all kind of gray and fluttery but it really is kind of touching because you know those were done live and it wasn't there were no rehearsals and there it was really you could see the thump of sets being changed and all but at that moment it was just as golden as it could be. But how do you get to the point of understanding that there's a name for this type of emotion? Nearly all of my life I have been finding a way, trying to find a way to redress the feelings I had that seemed to be different. And I've spent thousands of dollars in psychoanalysis, I've put a lot of money into metaphysics and I've read books had done a lot of things. But when I was a boy, 15 years old on a ship in Pearl Harbor early in the Second World War I made a discovery that was absolutely unusual and I didn't know it was unusual until after I saw that Playhouse 90 show many years later. What was unusual about it is that it did something for me I didn' t expect. At the time I didn''t know it as unusual because as you grow up You find out things. You discover things. You find things that are good, you find things that are bad. You've heard about things, you try them. That's part of growing up in your teens especially. You know, you find out eventually that your parents won't support you anymore. That's bad news. You find that there are days when people won't bail you out. That's sad news. You find sex. That's good news. That's a pleasant thing. You find out that sex brings babies. That's a bad thing. You find all sorts of things that come and go. You find that people are not the way they look. And you find that alcohol makes you feel better. There's nothing wrong with that, because you have no way of measuring it, nor does anybody in this room ever have any way of measuring it. You have to find out from others that alcohol should not make you feel that good. That is the unusual reaction. Alcohol should not make you feel that good, but who would ever know that? Now, as I've said, again, using this illustration, it's the best way now to put it. A couple of years ago, I was speaking at a meeting and a very beautiful, lovely, talented, gorgeous movie star getting her eighth birthday cake and she gets $100,000 a week in Vegas for a dance thing and she goes back here and she does dramatic roles it's just wonderful and she's so beautiful she's in her forties now but she looks like about twenty-two you wonder why would such a person drink and she was giving her little birthday talk and she is explaining that when she was younger people thought she was glamorous and lovely and wonderful and sexy but she felt awkward and clumsy and unattractive And she found out when she was a young woman that a few drinks made her feel the way people saw her. And it saved her career. And she drank, and she had to drink more in order not to lose control, and it almost cost her her life. It almost costed her her career, And she was saved from that veil, polished out of it. Now she's getting her eighth birthday cake. What she had received without her knowing it, she'd received an unusual reaction from alcohol. Alcohol shouldn't on a continuing basis make you feel more attractive and more lovely. It should just deaden conflict with a woman. Most of us know Keith See, who used to play center for the San Francisco 49ers. He talks about he and one of the guards out of the whole team would have to get back to the dressing room before the game and have a pint because until he had that, he didn't think he could block Joe Schmidt, that linebacker. But once he got that pint, he could knock them all on their tail. He didn't know that there was an unusual reaction. I didn't go on that ship that I had received an unusual react. the reason I took the drink because I was desperate to look like a man to these men on that ship they treated me like a punk and I thought if I could drink like a men I'd look like a mean and instead of making me look like a man it made me do something much more complex it made be feel the way men look now that sounds the same almost but its 180 degrees different and I had no idea that it was an unusual reaction. And it wasn't for years later I found out men don't feel as well as they look. So I was feeling better than they were. But who would know that? It was just like fighting and I didn't ever think much about it and drinking is drinking. And I drank and then I became a terrible old drunkard. I learned to try to drink wisely and well and try to feel like a man and try to do what men do and try as I can do advertising in public relations to live many years better. I got myself to like martinis and like sophisticated things so I'd be slick. And I always drank, and drinking always helped me. And the only problem to me is, again, the best way to describe it, drinking, to me, was very similar to modern man's attempts to harness atomic energy. Nothing works better than atomic energy! Nothing works better than atomic energy. It's just every so often, something bad happens. Nothing in my life has ever worked better than alcohol. Ever had. It is just every so often something bad happened and you're always rechecking the gauges next time. Let's see now. When did that meltdown start? And just when you're doing good you look over and see a mushroom-shaped cloud, where it's a black and white. They're both the same. But alcohol is the best friend I ever had. I think about alcohol... I think about it tonight. Tonight we start by the mission. We have a little custom that I do down here at I'm sure there's no place in the world that does it better. It brings me a great deal of cheer. The people who sleep there at night, I'd go in there, usually it was on Christmas Eve when I knew she would have a little more time, but today I had to stop on my way out here and we... I get a list of their names as they sign in to go upstairs and they're all on the street cold and wet and we uh... I take an envelope and I put their name on it. We had some friends help me tonight and then put a card in there with a little note to them personally and stick in some dough and seal it so they get up in the morning and the only people getting up on Skid Row will tell you with a Christmas card with their name on it and a little dough. And we're watching the people in the doorway and there's a lot of people that can't get in and to tell you what it's like on Skidd Row this morning they were telling us the people were lining up at two o'clock this morning to get in tonight so they wouldn't have to be on the street on Christmas Eve but they're standing there drinking and raising hell and wondering why this doesn't go on I stopped briefly to talk to the guy he said you know this is the hell of a way to live I used to be out in the street we tried to try a different way and he just told me to get F'd and he was a tough cookie and somebody else in Washington you shouldn't say that to Bob man But I understand exactly how he felt. Because once that façade slips, you're helpless. You better have anything you've got going for you. The best example I know of that feeling is an old Cedro story about the guy sitting on a gutter in the night like this, cold and rainy in the life of the shambles that he's sick and come off a drunk and everything is gone his family's discouraged got a little sheet of paper i might as well be dead i should let my dad know i died because you always loved me he said this dear dad i am here in los angeles and he felt a little thump with his foot, and coming down the dirty gutter, floating along is a bottle that he picks it up. It's half full of wine. If there's anything you ever need, you let me know. As far as I know, that's as good a description of the disease of alcoholism as there is extant. Nothing, time has explained, nothing that I know in my life has ever brought me momentary omnipotence. Just boom. And when you spend all of your life sober, feeling strange and like a whip and put upon and being screwed around and feeling too emotional and feeling you got holes all over your emotions and you discover there's a few drinks makes them full and then sometimes you drink too much and get in trouble the natural corollary is I'm going to find a way so I don't do it too much I'm gonna do it as long and make it the way it should be because it never struck me what I drank it was making me feel different than other people felt I always thought all my life it was just bringing me up to where they'd been all along they've been here all along and I haven't been and I don't know why and my psychiatrist doesn't know why he blames it on my childhood and my metaphysician blames that on my relationship to the universe and my studies of Nietzsche blame it on my feelings of superiority inferiority that's complex and my readings tell me all sorts of things, but I don't care. When the time comes that old Frank Sinatra says, I just want to get through the night. I just want to go through the NIGHT and I'll watch it! And then life gets a shock when you feel good and things are different and you feel a little expansive and all of a sudden there's the black and white again. But I didn't mean it. I didn' t mean any trouble. I didn''t mean to get into a fight on the street corner with some I didn't mean to drive badly, I didn' t mean to do anything. All I meant to do was feel like I was ill. Then you're sorry, and I've been sorry a lot. Probably the sorriest, one of the sorrier feelings I've ever had. The sorriests I've every been. It's a very good thing that happened right around Christmas too. for Christmas, 1950. And I was in jail after being drunk all night. We had to fight with the cops somewhere. They took me in. No big deal. But my father came down and saw me at six o'clock in the morning. He had never done that. He has always been so ashamed of me being in jail. And he came down. I thought, isn't that touching? For once maybe my dad is going to help me in a deal like this. He said, did you have a good time last night son? I said, no, I didn't, Dad. But I'm going to do better. He said, I hope you had a wonderful time. Because while you were drunk, you let your little son die at home. He says, I don't ever want to talk to you again. And I was so sorry I couldn't stand it. I almost went crazy. The judge let me out. He was a friend of my family. He let me up and I... It was terrible. I went to court that morning to talk to him. I said, oh judge, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry. He said something I didn't understand for years after that. And I went back and saw him 20 years ago and told him, I now understand. He says, I am sorry Clancy, you are too sorry. I said what do you mean? How can he be too sorry? He said, I have a feeling that you not only sorry for what's happened, but that you're sorry that it may very well happen again. Now, you're crazy. You're crazy! But later on, I looked at that. I'm sure that was part of it. Because when things just happen, you don't mean for them to happen. How can you control them? How can you do anything? And I went to alcoholics and others. They He said, stop drinking. There's no way to explain to him. When I stopped drinking, that's when I feel bad. That stuff helps me. And I don't know what to do. And I try to get a better job. And I tried to do more. And I'd try to do things. And the past haunts me. I lived in a different city where I got successful for a while. Then I did something so bad to my best friend that he went home and committed suicide. Probably not entirely my fault, but I thought it was. And I left. And I ran. All this terrible dichotomy. Some part of me who insists on being good and being something, and some part of you that you're a failure and you're a loser. And you see that pattern again and again in alcoholics. Maybe not quite so dramatic, but it's one of the fifth steps I've ever heard. It's almost always there. It's always that there's a low-lying sense of unworth, lack of self-worth, that makes it necessary, just as you start to succeed, to somehow screw them. Almost as though a little boy says, you don't deserve it, you rotten son of a bitch. You don't deserve it. And the party says I know it and away it goes. Now that's a continuing battle and you're never even more aware of it. It just seems like there's an endless series of bad breaks and misunderstandings till one day you get knocked down one more time and you can't get up. You can't get up because there's no sense getting up. Why get your hopes up again? Why hang around AA again? Oh, when you get sober, it's going to be wonderful. When I get sober I'm going to commit suicide. That's why I was in St. Salomon, Texas. I stayed sober too long in one of my fits of do-gooderism and one day I could not stand it. Because my wife was pregnant and I was trying to stay sober for the birth of that child so I wouldn't kill another one as I thought to myself. And I stayed over so long I couldn't stand it one day they were in church and I just pulled the car out of the garage and put a hose on I couldn't drink so I decided to die what do you do when you're like that work a few steps, go to some meetings that isn't that doesn't get it there's something terribly wrong that's why in a sense I probably was more comfortable Christmas 1958 sitting in canners than maybe I had been for 20 years I didn't have to be anything anymore I could just be what I was a nothing, a no good a phony, a liar and I didn' like that and the next morning when people treated me badly I felt resentful but somehow down deep in me there's almost a cosmic payoff you don't deserve it and I know and that's why it's amazing that somehow I was interested in staying sober at the Catholic delicatessen. And the next day I went to the noon meeting and the night meeting. And next day, I stayed sober. The next day I got... stayed sober, had a little job, finally lost it. And somehow thirty years have gone by. And, the only difference in my life, really, is that I have found over period of time a slow and sometimes frustrating way to deal with the very problems that only alcohol has ever touched in my life. In order to understand this, somewhere along the line two things had to be necessary. Vince talks about it sometime, he did the other night. You can be this way sleeping in an abandoned car, or you could be this way driving a Rolls Royce down the road. I've watched people that way the same way. You must achieve a state of desperation. You must get to the point that you cannot think of what would appear to be a viable solution. You know, that's what saved the man who kind of helped start AA. He didn't he started to eat. But Roland, the guy they talk about in the book, who went to send a doctor to you and then he treated him for a year and he got out and he got drunk and he went back. The doctor said I can't treat you anymore. You're an alcoholic. I just discovered that. I thought you were emotionally sick but you're an alcoholic. And to the best of my knowledge there is no treatment that will work for you in the world today. That was in 1932. The best doctor in the world had never heard of a treatment. But Roland thought, what does this mean? What does this have to do, doctor? The doctor said, I'll tell you what it means. You must keep yourself voluntarily or involuntarily confined as long as you live, for certainly you will intermittently drink alcohol until you die or go mad. And Roland said, that's the only alternative? He said, that's all I've ever heard of. He said once in five million maybe someone will have an intense emotional relocation they call it a spiritual experience. He says but your chances of being hit by lightning are better than the spiritual experience. Now that saved Rowland. You know what saved Rowlan? This time he didn't get drunk. He got on the ship when he came home and he believed the doctor. On that ship he surrendered to the fact he had no alternative and he stayed sober. As we know, he went to the Oxford Group and finally befriended a man in Vermont named Ebby Thatcher, born in New York. Ebby Thacher remembered his old pal in Brooklyn, the drunken bum Bill Wilson, and so the change started that brought us here tonight. But remember the funny thing about Ebby, he never went to AA. He went to the ashtray movement. And as the years went by, Bill was kind of frustrated about it. I'll tell you an interesting fact that maybe you've never heard. Very few people have ever heard this touching little anecdote. By 1940, Roland had become kind of a cross patch that people didn't like much. In 1943 Roland died. To this day his family has always refused to give the cause of death, which led nearly everyone to believe he wouldn't like the drinking and dyed milk. He didn't think it was how delicate you were, how surrendered you were if you don't do something to maintain it. But nobody I'm not saying Roland died drunk. It's a very very strange thing that his family would categorically refuse to give the cause of death. You and I struggle for a dire need of aid. But what does Alcoholics Anonymous do? It gets you to stop drinking. And you've got to surrender and you've gotta be desperate and accept the fact I don't know what the hell to do. In fact, one of the greatest enemies of sobriety is when you're sober and short-tired and things start to work out a little bit and the feeling of desperation goes away. More people have been lost in than by anything else. They have to come back again usually. But feeling a little touch of comfort, feeling a Little Touch of the heat is off takes away one element that is very helpful. And that is I don't know what to do therefore I will let them tell me what to go on or what to say even though if I knew what to do I would not let them tell me what to do. Desperation. It has been said many, many times. That's what Alcoholics Anonymous is predicated on. It isn't predicated on meetings. It isn'T predicated on reading the book. All these are nice things but there was AlcoholicsAnonymous long before any of these things ever took place. There were day meetings for several years. There was books for over three years. In fact, as some of you know, this year is the 50th anniversary of the writing of this book. It wasn't published until 1939. So, for three and a half or four years, there wasn't any book. There weren't any meetings as such. Off-hand meetings. There wasn't any conventions. There weren' t any GSRs. There weren''t any secretaries. There weren'T any parties. There weren´t any anything. What they had was the very thing we have today which gets lost in all the panoply that surrounds us. AA has become a wonderful place. A couple of weeks ago it was at Newsweek, some jerk wrote an essay about how the thing in Hollywood is called a star story because it's so much fun. Great. If they'd come around the Pacific group they wouldn't think it was much fun Oddly enough, we have one of those guys in the Pacific Group and he's been he hasn't been told yet that he has to be treated like a star so it would be fun to see him out with his shovel this morning, following that horse knowing that someday his agent would get 10% of all that but what is it AA is? It happened to me in 1958 happens to you, happens to all of us little by little, somewhere along the line and sometimes it gets lost in all the obfuscation that makes AA a more attractive place do you know what it is? you, Bill Wilson, and Dr. Bob had that you and I have in common? It is this message of Alcoholics Anonymous. One alcoholic talking to another alcoholic to help him reduce his feelings of being different enough so that he will begin to take actions he does not yet believe in. That's all it is. and those actions may vary eventually the actions get to be the steps the actions gets to be involvement but it's always the same we come here sharing something terrible feelings of difference sometimes superiority to those people sometimes inferiority to those people, but certainly always apart from and knowing that my difference is predicated on the fact that my problem really is an alcohol if these emotional problems and these wants and these needs and these yearnings of mine could be satisfied and they're not too much. Just let me feel like other people for Christ's sake. But you don't understand. You see, there's... My piece is different. You hear people get up and say at meetings we all laugh. They think they really are different because we don't know and we don' t understand that they are different. They don' T understand that we're laughing because we know that feeling so well identification and we stay here long enough and we take actions little by little we sometimes if we're lucky we have sponsors who intimidate us a little bit so we don't overrule them as soon as they're out of sight that the fear of their wrath is more sensitive than the fear of drinking I'd like to drink but that sound makes me go crazy and then I have them get a little bit better as they say you can't hurt me anymore and go off and become sponsors of their own and intimidate their baby and the purpose of this is so we can get together and learn to understand that what we have is a two-fold illness just as they said in all these meetings but it's not the two- fold I would have thought it turns out I have a mental obsession they call it obsession may not be a word you like but obsession is basically what it is little by little we take human emotions and blow them out of perspective until they become obsessions what obsessions are is emotions that have been inflated a lot so they put out there's a phrase in chapter 3 that certainly describes one of the great obsessions you and I will ever have if you're new to that you may wonder what do you have in common with all these people certainly not your age all ages here not your size not your color not your religion not how much you drank you discover everybody drinks differently everybody just does different things the only thing I haven't found is I believe everyone in AA has had when they came in the door or before they came in the doorway. That one little sentence mentioned in chapter 3 we have all at one time or another without being aware of it been forced into an obsession that somehow someday I will control and enjoy my drinking and it says in our book the persistence of this illusion is astonishing and to all non-alcoholics in the world. It is absolutely inexplicable why anyone would have such a stinking obsession. Why do you have such an obsession to drink when it's killing you, for Christ's sake? Set it down! You're ruining your children, you're ruining your family, you'RE ruining your life. Why do YOU have to find it necessary to find a way to drink? There's like a hideous illustration in the book. I guess it's accurate, but it's hideous about that Jay Walker. Oh, he's just... now if I'd have written that book I would have said but that really is true and that's we don't understand it ourselves you understand it while you do but you don't I'll tell you why you have that obsession because one of the problems one of two one of a two-fold problem if you say a spiritual problem that may be true but as far as the getting sober it's a bifold problem one of the problems is an obsession an obsession of the mind an obsession that you can control and enjoy your drinking obsessions that deal with all sorts of emotions resentments loves hatreds failures everything is out of whack everything is not a perspective it's like looking taking a color TV set turning the color knob all the way over the colors just are not real anymore. They're just so intense, so vivid. Now how do you beat that? Well, you tone it down. There's no knob to tone it down. You live in a world of obsessive reactions. That's one of the folds. The second fold is that the man that named it years and years ago called it an allergy of the body. And we hear that. What's an allergy of the body? Every time you drink, you get drunk? Every time your drink, do you go crazy? That doesn't happen to me. He sometime later wrote an edition and he said, if I were to describe, but when I gathered in alcohol, watching alcoholics, he was not an alcoholic, but listening to Bill Wilson and the fellows, he said I would now, I would not call it an allergy. I would call it, it's closer to a sensitivity of the body, but I don't know how to explain it. But we know how To explain it, because we've had years of further knowledge in hindsight. Alcohol has an unusual reaction on my body. It makes an unbalanced emotional life balanced. The thing that makes an alcoholic are not those emotions, although they come with alcoholism they are not what cause an alcoholic because there are millions of people who have all the emotions you and I have who are not alcoholics they are known medically as intense or acute neurotics they live in reality, they see reality but they react obsessively badly, emotionally, intensely those are the people for whom Valium was invented and that's no joke no joke, that's what it's for where people who have no relief and as if they can slow down they snap and become psychotic and once you become psychotic you stay that way that's what all of these downers are for that's why the doctors deal with them take this better than to shake yourself to pieces but people like you and me can't even do that why? because we have a system that is ultra responsive to chemical correction what makes an alcoholic alcohol has to make you feel alright it must make you feel it must fill holes that by nature cannot be filled chemically alcohol has to do something for me it doesn't do for 95% of the people who drink and I never knew it but I'm sure you never knew because you have no way of knowing standing in a bar drinking with a couple guys having a drink talking over a football game wasn't that something about the Browns block the screw out of touchdown today terrible you just have to feel that one with them and they say well Betty's got dinner on see you later it's just like what's your piece of your life going was he give us another one I'll wait for the night problem. I've done it a thousand times. Go down to the bar on Saturday morning, be with my friends and all of a sudden find myself drunk and I better go home now than go to bed in a month. It's one o'clock in the afternoon and the sun's up there. Oh Jesus. All you can do then is go vomit somewhere so you can have some fun later. All I want to do is feel good. Just feel like this. And it's out of control. And they want me to stop. And when I stop, I feel bad. And I get crazy and the emotions come back to the field. I can sit in a big office, supposed to be hot shot, and just think I want to jump right out the window. And when I have a few drinks, I feel good. My drink is out of hand. So bright it's untenable. I would be the last one in the world to understand the name for that condition is alcoholism. and it means it doesn't mean how often you get drunk or you've been in jail nothing to do with it what it means is this sobriety has become untenable drinking has become untenable and you must you have fallen into a little category now that about 95 to 5 your chances are that you will die from it like Roland died from it either insane or just die. It's hard to think. You know, I'm a very good communicator. I go all over the world and talk this year. I've been talking to all over New Zealand and England and Scotland and Ireland and a lot of places. In fact, one of the towns I was in was this little locker room where this plane crashed. But I have been like, you know, I'm not communicating. You'd think I could stand in front of the midnight mission to a guy dying in the cold and communicate there's a way to get better come on with us to the meeting but there's no communication there because the answer is always the same I know you mean well baby, but my case is different and that's what's got to be smashed and people die before they get desperate enough you and I somewhere along the line have become desperate enough, we've been driven here now after we get here we have to learn that there's nothing you or I will ever do about drinking to make it tolerable again. If drinking could become tolerable again, that's why they say in this book, science may one day find an answer but it has not done so yet. The only answer alcohol could do, I mean science could do if they could make you take a pill or something that would not make alcohol do what it's supposed to to do what does for other people. who the hell would want to drink it then? I drink it because it goes, You with anyone, Granny? It turns out what happens to an alcoholic, alcohol has the power to alter my perception of reality. And you never know it and you have to work on it, You have to be desperate and take steps and allow yourself to be bully-ragged and hurt and seduced and lonely and sad and put upon for a long time. And one day you can look back and think, that's what I had. And go out and talk about it. And when you're going through it, you don't know it. All you know is I've got to keep going somehow. But sobriety can get very bad. Sometimes people say, hey, it doesn't work. I have terrible emotional problems. But you've got to remember, pal, that's the natural state of sober alcoholics. The natural state of sober alcoholic is depression, growing anxiety, and tension. When you have a terrible depression, that's just a preview of coming attractions of how your life is going to be forever. That should give you a little hope. I had a wonderful sneak preview this morning. That's what it is about. A is not to get you sober. I found that out long after I was sober. It's not to make you sober, not to be holy, not to do you good. It's to make me wonderful. No matter how long you say you'll be flawed and make mistakes, hurt your friends, do all sorts of things, intentionally or unintentionally, there's no difference. Human beings are human beings. The point remains that alcoholic synonymous is designed to little by little fill holes in people like you and me that nothing else except alcohol has ever touched. And if you disbelieve that, you look around you. I can look from where I'm sitting now. I can see people off Skid Row. I can See people off Beverly Hills. I can Se people off Bel Air. I can Sea people all kinds of things. And everyone of them thought they were as different as you are. And the funny thing about alcoholism is this. If I don't take care of myself, if I allow myself to get thawed into those... For example, when you're sober a long time, that's what that's for. Hungry, angry, lonely and tired. They don't make me drunk. They make me feel different. They make be feel angry. They make I'm hungry. I don't know why I stay the same. People get stupid around me. Slow and stupid. I saw it in a restaurant on Lincoln Boulevard today. And I swear it's true. She was slow and stupid and I was hungry. I said I want some hot cake. I said, I don't want to hear that A.A. shit. See you slow! When I get angry people just people need to be disciplined. It's not easy being the group conscience for everybody. I sometimes just wish I had just a small Pershing tank on that Santa Monica freeway with a drive like that, son of a bitch. What do you think of that? I think God wants me to kill certain people. Thy will be done, Father. That's why I don't own a gun, because the day might come where I might hear the message. When I get lonely, I know that everybody's having a good time. Just like tonight, if I were lonely, if not if I was, I'd know that everyone that I didn't know, that I did not see, was sitting around a Christmas tree getting presents out of one another. Singing carols. And their grandmother and their Aunt Alma was there with them. When I'm lonely, I just feel so sad. When I am tired, when I am trying to just kind of want to die usually, you know, when I'm tired, I want to quit my job, when I have tired people in crisis. Hungry, angry, lonely, tired think good things and sleep for me. And it's almost embarrassing. I'd almost rather have the pain than have it corrected by such a simple manner as eating. Because that hurts my pride. But here we are, that's how we wind up. And the reason that's important to remember is this. It's Christmas Eve tonight. Christmas is a vast, wonderful, emotional binge. But you and I cannot afford emotional binges, even if they're wonderful. Christmas, I've said this many times, I still believe it. Christmas is the day I give to them. Today at my house tonight, I got all my grandchildren there little ones ones in college I have children sons-in-laws Christ if you want to see a mark of a hunted lion look for me home tonight looking for a place to lay down no beds no floors no nothing just going over to Karen and tell the contestant but I give them that day tomorrow morning we go out to work and I'm glad I got the midnight vision and I'll serve over 3,000 meals tomorrow and I'd be so busy I wouldn't think about it. And wish them all Merry Christmas. But in my mind Christmas is their day. I got 364 other days that I live for too. That's why we're running a little late tonight. I want to say I always say I didn't come out here on Christmas Eve to wish you Merry Christmas You can hear that anywhere. I didn'T come out herE to wishyou a Happy New Year You can here that anywhere I think we've got to tell each other and ourselves tonight again for the 29th year I wish you a very merry March 16th and a happy and prosperous June and I hope October will bring pleasant things to your house but most importantly remember this is not a game where we work ourselves in and out like Dr. Jung told Roland you have three chances you can either keep yourself voluntarily or involuntarily confined until you die as we go under there or you must certainly intermittently drink until you die or go mad and that's not much of an alternative but the third one turned out to be a winner we know now that with twelve steps and actions and involvements and people and listening and doing we can effect to all intents and purposes a spiritual experience not the way Bill Wilson got his but the way you and I get ours step by step by step something unheard of before any an incremental spiritual experience and that's what we have to maintain that's why we're here I'm glad to be here tonight safe and sane and sober I hope that you have all the pleasures of the season in May and November and all the days that we stand up and say my name is Clancy or whatever it might be I'm an alcoholic and through the grace of God and the power of 12 steps I need never be insane again have a good day