I Didn’t Reach Puberty Until I Was Forty and by Then I’d Been Sober Thirteen Years – Bob B.

It is my honor and privilege to introduce my sponsor and one of my heroes of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bob B. from St. Paul. Hi, I'm Bob Bazanz, and I'm an alcoholic. For the grace of God and the power of AA and sponsorship, I haven't had drinks since the 10th of December, 1967, and for that I'm very grateful. It's always enjoyable to be here around my birthday. This is something I look forward to. You know, tonight's a little bit different. I have most of my sponsees here, which is, you know, 16 or 17 of about 25 guys, or 19 of 25 or 27 guys that I sponsor, and that's a pretty hard group to talk in front of. You know, it's like talking to your home group, you know, people that know you well enough and your foibles, and thank you for introducing me, Rod. Rod is one of the better sponsors that I know. He's taken a lot of... He's taken a lot of time to help a lot of people, and that's a privilege and a nice thing to do. I started drinking when I was 13 years old, freshman in high school. I was a small kid. I was 4'11", 95 pounds, and all kids are insecure. I think alcoholics experience their insecurity in an exaggerated way, and one night a friend of mine got a fifth, and we went out and we split that fifth, and my life changed. I had watched my dad and other guys, you know. My father and his friends were the Second World War guys who, I think, made life look really attractive. I mean, they were just big people. They came back and started businesses and were active in the community and drank hard and played hard and, you know, knew how to have a hell of a lot of fun. You know, so we kind of copied them. I went to a high school, a military school on a college campus. We drank in high school like most people drink in college. I was almost died of alcohol poisoning in high school. We had false ID cards, you know. You could find the places. There were a lot of places in those days if you dressed up. I didn't reach puberty until I was 40. For Christ's sake. And I could go to, you know, but I could go to, if you had a suit and tie on, you could go to, you know, there were certain places that you found out that you could go, certain clubs, and we stole a lot of booze from our parents. But when I found alcohol, I felt on the inside like you looked on the outside. It just, I mean, it just put everything together. I just loved everything about it. I liked where we did it and who we did it with and what we did when we did it. And I chased it pretty hard in high school. I had car accidents and some arrests. And by the time I finished high school, you know, my drinking problem was pretty prominent. My family had already had me go into a psychiatrist to find out what was wrong with me. And I didn't think there was anything wrong with me other than being underage. And, you know, if you're underage, it doesn't matter if your father catches you or the police catch you, if you had one drink or 15. And I thought if I could get away from this, you know, authority sort of thing and my drinking would become normal if I could just, you know, become normal. I drank my way out of the University of Notre Dame in the middle of my senior year. Typical of the alcohol. In the yearbook with the class ring, you know. It's kind of tough to buff your way through a thermodynamics exam. And I was a class drunk. I had three guys petition to have me removed from engineering school. They used my room as a study hall because I was never in it. You know, we giggle about that. And I have, my wife and I are the father of three. We have three children. There's such a thing as karma. It gets revisited on you. So I had a couple of boys. My middle boy went to five colleges and never got the concept of attending until the third or fourth. So you get it back both ways. You know, we joke about that. I can remember my, just before I left, my senior year. And I'm down there and I go in and I talk to the rector. And I said, I am toast. He spent about an hour trying to talk me out of leaving. And he said, just go up to your room, grab a book, and just try. And he didn't get it. I mean, he didn't know how much trouble I was in, I didn't think. You know how we never think anybody really understands what's going on. And the next day I woke up and I did not know where my classes were. I was due to, I left Notre Dame. I got due to be commissioned as an officer in the Army. I had to get a medical release. A medical release I got was for alcoholism. I was diagnosed an alcoholic when I was 19. That seemed goofy to me. I never, I remember I went to the library and I got a book on alcoholism. It was Freudian based and it related alcoholism to latent homosexuality. And as unwilling as I was to look at my alcoholism, the combination of those two things was way too intimidating for me to examine, to fully examine. And I left school. I came home. I started, I got it finished at the University of St. Thomas. And when I finished school, my dad asked me to leave the house. He had a meeting with me. He said, look, I love you, but you're a pain in the ass. And, you know, there's six other kids in the family. You don't follow the rules. You've got to go. So I got a job at a liquor store. And you have to use your gifts. And I was a whore. This is the last year of my drinking. I'm drinking a fifth a day. I'm, again, when I'm driving the truck, you know, I'm back over a child and a bicycle driving out of a driveway one day drunk. I could have came within inches of hurting that child. I mean, it just. It's stupid and, you know, as things as you could. I lost that job going 80 miles an hour with a delivery truck. I got fired. I stole booze. I was, you know, just the worst employee in the world. I took a job as a waiter. I had the job for about six months. I'm living not on Skid Row, but close, $10 a night rooms. I'm shacked up with waiters and waitresses and different, live in different places. You know Dr. Seuss, that child author? Those are actual photographs of people I lived with for the last year of my. I get up in the morning, drink two or three beers. I go to work 10 to 2. I work as a waiter. Two to five, I drink beer. Five, I go buy a pint and that's my day. That's my day, day in and day out and then figure out where I'm going to spend the night. And then sometimes toward the end of that, I got into, I went to a party and I was in a blackout, but I apparently was very much out of line. I got my face kicked in and I got fired as a waiter and I was tapped. I had no place to go and I went home and I asked my family if I could move back in the house and they allowed me to in the condition that I wouldn't drink. I lied, but I told them I wouldn't drink. Moved back in the house, I'm 23 years old. I got an enlarged liver. I went to the doctor. My liver's enlarged. I quit drinking. I'm drinking a fifth a day for almost a year. I quit drinking. I start to hallucinate. So I'm now, you know, now I'm back drinking. And when I moved back in the house, I tried to change my life. I did not like being the family problem. I did not like being the horse's ass of people who I loved. It's bad enough to get the look from one person, but when you get the look from six brothers and sisters and your mom and dad, that's a bad combination. When I moved back in the house, I was in the hospital. I was in the hospital. I went back in the house. I went and I went to Linda and I asked, Linda and I had gone together for two years or something like that and broke up for a year. And I went to her and I said, could we try again? I said, let's, and the only reason I want to get back together is to see if we can make this work for marriage. I said, I don't want to date you. I want to, my face is kicked in. I'm going through withdrawal. The night I reintroduced myself, I had drunk a quart of alcohol and she said yes. And so I got back together with Linda. I got a job. I got a job with a Donaldson air filter manufacturer and I got my first car and I thought, hey, maybe this will work. Only I couldn't shut my drinking down. I'm a bar drinker and I, after work, I'm just going to go in and I'm only going to have two and I'm there until 8, 10, 11, 2 o'clock in the morning and I'm falling asleep at my desk. I'm not the corporate, you know, corporations are tough places. They like to have you come in on Mondays and stay on Fridays and they get lunch hours and that's where I met Kurt. A friend of mine and Steve's who's very ill. Kurt was a photographer at the Donaldson company and he would allow me to sleep my hangovers off in the dark room. He would hide me and if they were paging me, Kurt would come get me. And I was really a bastard. I quit that job about the time I was going to be fired. I remember I went to make amends with the man who hired me afterwards and offered to pay back some of the salary that I did. And he said, I can't. I can't. He said, I couldn't believe it. He said, you interviewed so well, which is our story, isn't it? And I left that job, I got a sales job. I had the sales job about four weeks and a buddy of mine gets married. I go out on a three or four day drunk. I wake up Thursday afternoon, don't know if I have a job, a fiancé or a place to live until I'm married. I'm, you know, just like the, they put the jumpers on your heart, you know, how you wake up in those days. And that day it didn't seem so impossible to call AA. And I, my father had been recommending it and my psychiatrist had been recommending it for some time. So I called AA and I got an old timer down at Intergroup and he had me meet a couple of guys at the St. Clair Broiler in St. Paul. And I went over there about 5.30 and met two men. One man had six years and one man had six months. They were about, about five and 15 years older than I was. I thought they were going to ask me a bunch of questions, which is, you know, when you're in trouble and you're young, you get taken to a lot of people for help. So you, you're usually, you get asked a lot of questions. I thought they were going to ask me a bunch of questions, which is, you know, when you're in trouble and you're young, you get taken to a lot of people for help. And I thought that's what these men would do for me. It was very different than I expected. They sat me down and they said, we're from AA. We had a drinking problem. We found an answer in AA. We want to tell you what happened to us. And for some reason, it helps us to do that for you. You know, they weren't getting a toaster for signing me up. It wasn't a multi-level marketing deal. It was just a 12 step call. And they told me their story. And that night my life changed. We have a lot of traditions in Alcoholics Anonymous. Alcoholics Anonymous. Most of which is that we share our experience, strength, and hope, but not our ideology, not our philosophy. We share our lives. And there's something about sharing your life with another person. Those two men changed my life. I drank twice after that night, but it was never the same. It was never, once you get a peek at the truth, you know, they say the truth will set you free. Well, first it will irritate you. And the, that night I went to my first meeting of alcoholics. I drank twice after walking in AA, once on a business trip to the west coast. I was told to call AA and I didn't. And I got drunk and got in some trouble. And then we got married and we went on our honeymoon and I drank in Mexico on our honeymoon. And I dove off those cliffs where the divers dive off the cliffs at La Cabana. And I climbed up to a height of about 90 feet and I got stuck. I split my swimsuit, cut my leg, and I'm standing up there like this horse's ass looking at the waves. And I'm trying to figure out what is a jump or dive. And I finally dove. And made it. And if I would have jumped, I would have died. You have to get out about 30 feet to hit the channel. I didn't know that. If I knew it intuitively, maybe, but I didn't know it didactically. Ten years later, my wife gave me a picture of that chasm when we were down in Mexico with the kids. And it said, there but for the grace of God. It was on my 10th anniversary. And I said, boy, that's the dumbest thing I've ever done. And she said, honey, it's not even in the top 10. So, I mean, you can share a life and see it very differently. She's looking at it from an adult perspective. Which slants it a little bit. And I came home and I was reluctant to go back to the group. And she said, oh, for God's sake, call Warren. And I called Warren. I have the same sponsor that I got when I came into Alkali Synonymous. I'm just turned 38 years sober and my sponsor has 51 and a half years of sobriety. And actually, I have the same two sponsors. I was assigned a sponsor when I came in by the name of Bill B. But I got Warren about a month after. And I got Warren about a month after. I got him and he's been my main man ever since. Warren was an extraordinary guy. Warren was a mailman. And had I thought about it, I think I would have liked an attorney or a doctor or something fancier. Warren was the 12-step champion of the uptown group of Alkali Synonymous. We had about 400 members. And Warren went to Thursday night. Here's a man that went to one meeting a week. That was his home group. Now, in those days, people didn't go to as many meetings as we go to today. But he would take people. He would go to meetings. And he would do 12-step work like you've never seen, lots of 12-step work. I mean, I think he did 25% of whatever 12-step work was done in the Thursday night group. He just, you know, I don't know how many men that man has touched. But it's in the hundreds, you know, easily in the hundreds. And that man is not as fancy as some people would have a sponsor be today. You might not have Warren stand up and do a weekend seminar on the 12 steps. But he was the 12 steps. His wife sponsored my wife. In 38 years, I've never, when I said, Warren, can I come over? Yeah. I mean, he has never said no. I mean, the coffee pot was always on. And it was, you know, the man knew how to live life. He knew how to be married. He was, you know, when Linda and I took our broken toys over there about our children and about our relationship and about our finances and stuff like that. This man was a font that was there. He was a great man. He was a great person. I've had the privilege of doing lots of fancy things in Alcoholics Anonymous. Every one of the things that I have done in Alcoholics Anonymous, I started by copying Warren, whether it's giving a talk, whether it's sponsoring someone, whether it's getting active in service, whether it's being a delegate, whether it's the perfect guy for me. And so I get back in AA. And my attitude was, okay, I'm an alcoholic. They sat me down the first night or the first week when I came in. Sometime in the first month or so when I came in, Warren sat me down in a chair and he said, look, isn't it funny that people have been telling me for two or three years I'm an alcoholic and I don't believe it? Then I get into Alcoholics Anonymous and I'm worried I'm not bad enough. I mean, isn't that how the mind works? You know, maybe I'm too young. You know, give me a rain check. I'll be back. But you do. You worry. I mean, it isn't only the psychiatrists that think alcoholism is symptomatic. I thought alcoholism was symptomatic. I thought if I cleared up the circumstances of my life, I would be fine. Those things wanted me to think that way. But with the circumstances of my life, my drinking wouldn't be the way it was, that as soon as I cleaned my act up, my drinking would be okay. He said no. He said, did you ever quit? And I said, yeah. He said, did it work? I said, no. He said it doesn't work for us. He said, well, you know, we have the disease of alcoholism, physical, mental, spiritual. The physical part, in his mind, was 10 or 15 percent of the deal. I thought the physical part would be like 90 percent of the deal. I thought we'd spend a lot of time talking about how not to drink. He said, no. We talk about how to live. to drinking. All of us know how to quit. We don't know how not to start again. What we do in Alcoholics Anonymous is we use the steps to change. Alter the way we live so that we can find the sobriety we're looking for in a bottle. If you don't change, you're not going to be able to quit because you don't know how to live without drinking. Gettysburg Address of Alcoholics Anonymous. I mean, that was, I can remember the chair I was sitting in when he made that talk with me. But like a lot of us, abstinence was not, and they explained to me very clearly that sobriety was not abstinence. You know, I didn't get it when they first told it to me. They said, but there's a quality to sobriety, there's not a quality to abstinence. You know, that's why quitting doesn't work. You know, what we do is we work on the steps to change the mental and spiritual aspects of our lives. That heals the entire thing. You're going to find out, you hang in here, you do the steps, you're going to find the sobriety. What you were looking for in a bottle, and your life's going to be okay. There's two ways to be happy. One is get everything you want, and we found by experience that doesn't usually happen to us. The other was to change the way you react to whatever happens around you, and through the steps, we're able to do that. We're able to meet life on life's terms, and we were never able to live life on life's terms when we were out there drinking. Well, I had a bunch of issues in my life that were kind of ordinary but horrible. I had trouble getting up in the morning. I later found out that had something to do with when I went to bed, but I did not know it at that time. I had work issues. I had trouble going to work. I had a little trouble staying at work, and I had some trouble working at work. Other than that, I was a good worker. We started to have kids, and my parents, great parents, great parents, made a few mistakes, but I wasn't going to make the mistakes they made, and I didn't. I made all the mistakes they made, and a bunch they never thought of. I was loud, impatient, angry, immature, and sometimes violent with my children. I'm not proud of that fact, but that was the way it was. And I used to say I didn't have marital problems. Linda said, yes, you did. You just didn't know it. Not always as insightful as I'd like to be, and I had some financial trouble because I spent more money than I made. And if you do that over a long period of time, you end up in debt. I just want to report that to you in case you're doing that one. And I had a gambling problem. More of a hobby, four or five hours a day, four or five days a week. It wasn't, you know, but I was making five to ten grand a day. I was making five to ten grand a day. I was making five to ten grand a day. I was making five grand a year playing backgammon. It was kind of like a second job. I had all those problems in my first year of sobriety when I did my inventory, and none of those things I just mentioned to you were on my first inventory. My first inventory was a recitation of the worst things I'd done in my life, the things I felt most guilty about, the things that I felt separated me from you. I didn't have much insight into the causes and conditions of my alcoholism, and I don't think that's unusual for those of us that are taking our first whack at the fourth and fifth step. I didn't have much insight into the causes and conditions of my alcoholism, and I don't think that's unusual for those of us that are taking our first whack at the fourth and fifth step. So I didn't have a very good sense. I was on a honeymoon for almost my entire first year of AA. The gift for me is I loved AA from the moment I walked in. It's been hard for me to do the work, but it's been easy for me to stay, because I love you, I love the meetings, I love our place. This is my place. I know more about who I am when I'm here than any place else. I feel more comfortable here than I do in business. I often feel more comfortable here than I do in my own home. You know, this is my home. I feel more comfortable here than I do in business. This has been my place. We're a heel. And that's a gift. I used to work with a lot of young people. I'd take them to a hell of a lot of meetings. They didn't identify. They didn't like it. They were smarter than I was. Lots of them, they needed it more than I was. They had more to lose than I lose. They didn't stay. And I, you know, for me, staying was easy, okay, for a while. Later it got tough. So I didn't, my first year, I didn't have much insight into the causes and conditions. The second year, I started to get my list of defects of character. One by one, these issues in my life would come up. I'd start to write them down. I'd try to deal with them. Do you know what I thought recovery was? I thought recovery was the absence of problems. Now, I made that up. No one told that to me. But I thought if you were a good Christian, you didn't sin. You know, there aren't many people who don't do that, but that's what I thought. And I thought if you were a good AA, you didn't have problems. Your life worked. Now, I'm in my sponsor's house two or three days a week. I mean, it isn't like I don't see the man. It isn't like I don't see him once in a while, you know, mouth off and have a fight with his wife or, you know, it isn't like it. But I so admired the people that I hung with in Alcoholics Anonymous. It's kind of like I excused whatever faults they had and I looked at all my faults. You know, I expected perfection from me. Now, when I sponsor young guys, you know, I'm not surprised at their lives that they have problems at work and at home with money and sex and the sorts of things. And I probably wasn't surprised that I had them. So one by one, I would take these issues on. My idea was, okay, you get me sober, I'll learn how to be a father. You get me sober, I'll work. You get me sober and I'm not able to do these things. So I've got little pockets of stuff. When I came in AA, the first major event that happened to me is I tore the wall down that I had built around me so that you couldn't see the things that didn't work in my life. If you don't tear that wall down, you have a pretty good chance of dying of alcoholism because you're going to have such strong feelings of uniqueness you will not be able to identify and think that what worked for me would work for you. You're going to look at the differences. When I tore that wall down, I made a discovery. I'm not different. I'm not unique. My personality may be unique, but not my illness, not my behavior, not my experience, not my feelings. When I tore the wall down, my ego collapsed enough that I looked at you and I identified and I started to have a sense of hope that what worked for you would work for me. Now, that lasted, as I told you, for almost a year. Now I'm in AA and I'm going forward. I get this list of defects of character. I start working on them, make a little progress, but by and large, my list of defects of character is going to be the same as my list of defects of character. My list of defects of character was the same in my third year as it was in my second, the same in my fourth as it was in my third, same in my sixth as it was in my fifth, same in my seventh as it was in my eighth. And I'm telling you, when I get up to the seventh year, I'm in trouble. I'm a good starter. I just don't finish anything. And it looks to me like I'm in Alcoholics Anonymous and it works for you and it's not working for me, which is not a new story. I'm in the Catholic Church and, you know, I love the Catholic Church, but as soon as I found booze and masturbation, you know, I was in trouble. Somehow I didn't fit in. And, you know, kind of a conflict. And, you know, I'm at Notre Dame. I test better than, you know, the 14 guys from my high school went down there. I had the best test scores. I'm the only guy that didn't finish. Story of my life. You know, good starter. I interview well. I just don't work well. They should have prizes for interviewing. But they actually expect you to perform in life. I don't know what that is. And so I'm, you know, I'm having these defects of character and they're... They're really bothering me. The two things that have saved my bacon in Alcoholics Anonymous is I love the old timer and I've had good teachers and good examples. The other thing is I can't keep my mouth shut and I usually talk about what's going on in my life. I knew enough by the time I'm six or seven years sober, I've now gone through the steps twice, that what I really needed was a deeper spiritual connection. The problem I had is if I go to get that deeper spiritual connection and ask God specifically for help, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out how to do it. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out how to do it. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out how to do it. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what God's going to want me to do. Quit gambling. Get up in the morning. Go to work. Stay at work. Work at work. Be kind and loving to your wife and be gentle with your children. And don't spend more money than you make. You know, I mean, I knew what I think my higher power wanted of me. I just... My idea was as soon as I clean my act up, I'm going to sign up. But there's not much sense in signing up for a relationship if you can't fulfill the conditions of the relationship. I was stuck in that place for three years. And finally, out of desperation, I went back to the steps. And at almost, I don't know, seven and a half years of sobriety, I retook step one pretty easy. My life was unmanageable, and I was in a lot of pain. I was powerless. The step that surprised me was step two. You know, I had lost step two. I believed it for you. I didn't believe it for me. I mean, I absolutely believed it for you. I could go to the meeting, take a new guy, get him a cup of coffee, sit him down, tell him he's in the right place, tell him that if he hangs in there, does the steps, even if he doesn't do them, he's in the right place. And I was in a lot of pain. I was in a lot of pain. I was in a lot of pain. I was in a lot of pain. I was in a lot of pain. I was in a lot of pain. I was in a lot of pain. I was in a lot of pain. I was in a lot of pain. I was in a lot of pain. I was in a lot of pain. I was in a lot of pain. I was in a lot of pain. I was perfectly, gets in the book, gets a sponsor, his life's going to be okay. See that guy over there? Two years ago, his life was a mess. Today, it's just fine. Hang in there, you're going to be okay. But I get in the car at 11 o'clock at night driving home and say, when's it going to be okay for you? You're eight years sober. You just bought a $400 sports coat at a store you had a $600 bill at. When are you going to learn how to work? Everybody knows how to work. You don't know how to work. And I didn't know. I really did not know. Don't hear this lightly. I'm at eight years. I am not thinking about drinking. I'm thinking about suicide. Not casually. This is, you know, not the end. I don't have a gun, but I am desperate. You know, when you're in trouble, you get more active. I got more active. I started to go to meetings. I started to see people with bigger problems that were walking through them with dignity, walking through them rather than avoiding them, which is what I was doing. And I came to believe that God could restore me to sanity. I took step three with my sponsor on my knees. We didn't do that much in those days, but I had started to go to conferences, and I heard some of these Californians talk about doing that. I thought, what the hell? I'm going to try that. It was a little bit awkward, but I did it. I didn't want to miss anything. I did a fourth step, and I did my third, fifth step with my sponsor. When we were done, I... It was recommended to me that I go to a psychologist. He said, Bob, you have a lot of issues with money. You have issues with failure. I had a pretty successful father. My idea was I'd never be as good as my old man. He said, you have issues with failure. You have issues with money. You have issues with work. I think you should go talk to someone who works with people in business. So I did that. And I got a psychiatrist or psychologist who wanted me to get my parents involved. I said, I won't do that. I said, my parents have been over-involved. I said, you know, I'm 30. You're as old. If you can't help me without getting my mother and father involved, please refer me to someone who can. He said, well, get your wife involved. I said, oh, crap. Well, they see it so differently. It may be more accurately. And he wanted my children involved. I did not want my children involved because I was embarrassed about how I frequently was with my children. But I got them both involved. That process turned out to be an enormously important process for me. I don't have enough time to explain the whole thing. What happened to me is in that process, I found out how afraid I was. I had done three inventories. My fear list had to do with dogs, snakes, and tall buildings. I had little insight into what was going on in my life. And what I discovered in the meeting with that, he looked at me and he said, why are you so afraid of failing? I'm in a business and it's going broke. I don't know why. I'm busting my ass two or three hours a day and it's going downhill. And it is. And it's, I wanted to punch him out. I mean, that's what I wanted. And I discovered in that process that I was afraid of being a husband. I was afraid of the responsibility. I was afraid of being a father. I was afraid of failure. And interestingly, I was afraid of success. And I didn't know any of that. I was swimming in fear, surrounded by it, and did not have any insight into it. Shortly after that meeting, after a few months with that psychologist, I had a second spiritual surrender. I had just the worst day I've had in a long time. And I said, gee, it happened again. It happened again. Weren't you there? I said, yeah, I was there. But it's so habitual. It's almost like I'm in a blackout. It's almost like these things happened to me. Your life's that way because you designed it that way. You sound like you want to quit gambling. You want to gamble whenever you want to gamble. For as much money as you want to gamble and not have problems because of gambling. You want your wife's love and affection without spending time with her. And to have problems. And that night, out of fear of getting drunk, but mostly out of fear of being a sober ass, which is what I was, I got down on my knees and took the sixth and the seventh step of the program. The program says the sixth step says I'm entirely ready to have God removed. It affects the character of the seventh step. Simply, humbly, ask him to remove our shortcomings. I had spent eight years trying to get rid of them. Major problems in my life disappeared. Now, I had to put a structure in. I'm the kind of guy who made lots of promises and wasn't able to keep them. And I had a sense that this was an important, important event for me. When I came in AA and took the first step, I stood naked in front of my alcoholism. And that standing in front of the truth changed me. That night in my living room, I knelt in front of my life. She may not interview as well as I do, but I tell you. But she's on it. And so I turned the money over to Linda. I made an appointment. I went to Warren and I made an appointment about when I'd go to work, when I'd leave work, and what I'd do at work. I stopped gambling that night. I spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars learning how to be a better parent. I think being a parent takes 125% of whatever you got. I think it's a great privilege. But having children is like having a bowling alley installed in your head. It is a demanding, difficult process. You are going to be out of your element. It's one of the great privileges of life, but it's a stretching experience. I'd started dating my wife. I dated my wife every Friday night for about 25 or 30 years. We stopped doing that, and I think we have to get back to it. We travel a lot together. And I've kind of used that as an excuse not to do that. And I think we, because I was an overly active member of Alcoholics Anonymous. My children suffered my absence because of my activity in AA. Now I can tell you that I have a great relationship with my children today. But I was an unbalanced person, have been most of my life. And that's what I did. I loved AA, and I did AA possibly to excess, if you can do that. And if you can do that, I think I did it. And having a night that we know that we're going to have, knowing that we have a night that is dedicated to one another during the week, took a lot of pressure off. And it was a date night. It was our sex night. It was just, it was a very nice, no one, it was a real live dangerous date. No one went out on it but us. We got dressed up. We went out, and it was cool. My life took off like a rocket ship. And had the big house and the big cars. And then 1986, they passed the tax. And I'll tell you. There are problems with failure. There's problems with success. Arrogance creeped in. It was invisible to me. I was the guy in the expensive suit with the expensive tie driving up in the Mercedes going to the meeting thinking God had blessed me because I was such a wonderful member of AA. How would you like to have been in my group? But there just is. I mean, all of a sudden, when you start having that level of success and you can buy what you want, your life starts to become what you, this is my deeply shallow period. You know, my life became about what I wanted. And all of a sudden, you want the people in your life to be a certain way. In 1986, they passed the tax act. I started to go broke. In the next three years, from 1986 to 1991, I lost everything I had. Losing the money was not like changing my clothes. It was like tearing the skin off my body. If any of you are out there praying to become millionaires, I would encourage you to add keeping it. Once again, I got more active in AA. I had to learn who I was with money and who I was without money. And I don't think God had the real estate collapse to teach me that lesson, but I think my lesson inside the real estate collapse was to learn. I joke with my spiritual advisor today. I said I would not trade the money for the lesson. I'd take the money and the lesson, but I wouldn't trade the lesson. The biggest thing I'd like to share before I close my talk is I think most of us, if I asked this in the group, people here would like to get rid of the things in their life that don't work and hurt the people they love. I think all of us would raise our hands and say, put me in. I'd like to do that. I think we are more afraid of change than we know we are. I think there are things in our lives that we so identify with, we think it is who we are, not what we do. We think they are characteristics and part of us. We so identify with our personality and patterns of thinking that that's me. That's me. No, it's not you. It's your behavior. You can do whatever you want. You can do whatever you want. You can change your political party. It doesn't change who you are. You can change your automobile. It doesn't change who you are. You can change how you are with anger. It doesn't change who you are. It just changes what you do. You can change how you are with money. You can change how you are with sex. It doesn't change who you are. It changes what you do. The program of Alcoholics Anonymous is a transformational program that has to do with an alteration of being, not doing. Most of us are concerned with doing. When we go to our sponsor, what we want to know is, what do I do? The steps. The steps are not mechanical. Sometimes we have to do them mechanically because that's all we have. If the steps were mechanical, every time we had a problem, we'd just say the third step prayer and click our heels. We'd be back in Kansas. You have to bring a way of being to the steps. What is that way of being? I don't know. You can't describe the conditions of heart and soul that comprise surrender. Because if we could comprise surrender and describe it in such a way that someone could mechanically do it, once again, we would have no issue. But because it's of God, there is a magic about it. There is a spirituality about it, and it is somewhat indescribable. You can point at it, you can surround it, you can talk about it, and you can share it in your life, and every once in a while, you can transfer it. And many of us who have had the privilege of sponsorship, once in a while have had some of those magical conversations where something has come through your mouth that had never been there before, and it was really the right thing to say, and you did not know it before you said it. But I think there has never been as much teaching as there is about the steps and as much activity in the book as there has. And the book is powerful, and the steps are the program. But they are the words of the program. They are the vehicle that brings us to God. The thing that alters our life is God. The steps are designed to give us a relationship with the power of God in ourselves. If all we're doing is developing a relationship with Alcoholics Anonymous and the activity and structure of Alcoholics Anonymous, the group is going to let you down. Something is going to happen to you. This is our vehicle. There is no other. For most cases, like 99% of us, the intended pattern for us to get well is to get inside of Alcoholics Anonymous, to participate in it, get a sponsor, do the steps, read the book, and put the principles in action in our lives. So that's the pattern. But the purpose of the vehicle is to bring you to a relationship with your higher power, to get you from being self-centered, to get you from being God-centered. When you're God-centered, you're at peace. When you're self-centered, you're in conflict and separate from everything around you. And some of us wonder why, from time to time, we dry out and feel like it doesn't work because we're looking for the answer outside of ourselves. We're looking for, I mean, many of us in Alcoholics Anonymous, we're looking for, you know, we're playing the game in AA like we play the game in ego out in the world. Who's the best AA? How many merit badges do you have? You know, how important are you in the group? Do you run the group, you know? I mean, we're in a bus on the way to paradise. We've got the windows pulled down, the shades pulled down on the bus arguing about who's the best dressed person, who's got the most money on the bus, who's the best looking, who's got the best body. You know, you can do, you can use the program of Alcoholics Anonymous to do the same thing that we do out in the world all the time. I mean, the wind's blowing, I mean, the message in the world is to make us feel bad about ourselves. We're in a capitalistic society. We are surrounded with advertising, television, movies, billboards, everything. Sorry, John. Everything that you could possibly have. And the purpose of it is, is you're not okay. Without this car, without this house, without this dress, without this suit, without these shoes, without this watch, without these sunglasses, you're not okay. We are surrounded with the message that you're inadequate and it's not okay and you need these things to be okay. If you think you're going to stand still, the wind's blowing 25 miles an hour. If you wonder why you're drifting, so we need a place to have a practice. The practice is the steps. But the purpose of the steps is to take us to a relationship with our higher power. When you have that, you have something that cannot be taken away from you. Most of us, if you ask someone what they want, I want to be happy. Happy is probably more conditioned on circumstances. But joy and peace are not conditioned on circumstances. You can have joy and peace. Tuesday night I gave a talk in Austin, Texas. A guy comes up to me, I've met a half a dozen times, big guy. He says, My son's, he's 11 years sober. There are people dealing with very difficult things that have a power and a connection and they're okay. And there are those of us on certain days when you get a flat tire or bounce a check or something gets in our way that we weren't, you know, we have trouble attending to life on life's terms. And as a result of, that our lives for most of us end up being better than they would have been had we never had the disease of alcoholism. God bless you. Merry Christmas. Thank you for having me.