Internals Cannot Be Healed by Externals – Dick H.

I've shown that I have one, and I actually have more than one. This is a part of a three-for-one at K&G that I did a couple years ago when I had a niece get married up in Illinois. Well, my name's Dick Hall and I'm an alcoholic. I guess I started at the very beginning. I was born in the model year 1946. I represent pretty much the leading edge of the baby boom. My dad got home from Europe and September of 1945 he and mother were married in October 1945 July 31st of 1946 here was Junior. My parents were decent, kind people who did well as much as they could. My father was a machinist. My mother was a teacher. My mother got a master's degree from Duke in the early 1930s when women were not doing that sort of thing. She did the initial studies on the effect of thyroid removal in white rats which led to the development of thyroxine which has been a miracle drug for people with low thyroid. so i can't blame anything on them i am a self-made man so i went to school in montgomery alabama where i grew up i was a 1964 graduate of robert e lee high school in Montgomery Alabama and i was my class was the last segregated class i was in montgomery as a kid through all of the civil rights stuff from rosa parks on the bus through you know, through the martial law and all the rest of that stuff with the Freedom Riders. I have seen armed soldiers at my junior high school with machine guns mounted on Jeeps as part and parcel of all that. That was what Montgomery was like for a good bit of my growing up. People who had not hated each other before hated each another now, and it was really different, but it was what it was. I had my first opportunity to get drunk when I was 17 years old. I was a senior in high school. It was probably March of 1964, and I was part of an all-star boys' club basketball team for Montgomery. We went to Jackson, Mississippi for a tournament, and we won our first game by 40 points, our second game by 30 points. The next day we were to play the finals of the tournament, And three of us went out and found it in Jackson, Mississippi, which was technically dry. If you could reach the counter, you could buy beer. So three of Us bought a six-pack of beer. They had one apiece, and I drank four. And I did not even like the taste of it. Matter of fact, I really didn't like the tastes of it, but I drank 4 because I liked the way it made me feel. it obviously affected me differently than it did my two teammates right after graduation we all went down to the redneck riviera panama city beach florida and we got kicked out of our motel room the first night because these dum-dums i was with couldn't handle their beer they were throwing beer cans against the walls in the house and the police came and said here's your choices boys go to jail or just disappear. We disappeared, so we bombed or you know slept in cars for the next three nights. Kept buying beer though. And that was just, that was the story of the next 40 years of my life. When I could, I did. I went to school at a small boys' school at the foot of the Rockies in Colorado. It's now became coed after I was called the Air Force Academy and I was pretty sure that was gonna fix me see there's gonna be a whole fresh start nobody would know me nobody would no all the issues I had with being incredibly shy I didn't I didn't date until I was a junior in high school I did the notion of my mother driving me and a girl around and besides what if what did you call the girl to go somewhere she said no what would you do how could how could this ego biggest Texas and fragile as a soap bubble stand that I wouldn't ask either one of you to dance if I hadn't been drinking for a good bit of my life just wouldn't do it that was I couldn't stand the notion of somebody saying well who are you you But if I was drinking, I had the answer. Well, I'm sorry, but I was going to the John anyway. See ya, you know. And that's the difference between me sober or without anything in me and when I would get a belly full of liquid courage. I graduated from the Air Force Academy. I'm good at school. I was a merit finalist in high school and blessed with far more academic talent than academic inclination. I got to the Air Force Academy, I got through the first couple of years, and then I went down to Wichita, Kansas in the summer of 1966, not quite 20 years old. and ran I got to meet the very first guys that had flown a hundred missions in the f-105 over North Vietnam they drank a lot by anything I'd ever seen so we were there the first day a guy picked us up at the airport and took us in checked in there were four of us two I don't know where they went but the other guy and myself went to the bar and we're standing there at this big long bar about as long as from here to the other end of the room. And all these fire pilots around there in their flying suits and this one guy that has a hundred missions patch over North Vietnam on his arm walks up and says what will you boys be having tonight? My friend was a wuss. He said I'll have a slow gin fizz. We were 19 years old. I was better. I said I will have a bourbon and coke he looked at the bartender said they'll be having a double beef eaters on the rock with a twist with me my tab I thought I was gonna die choking down a whole old-fashioned glass full of 94 proof oily beef eatters gin with nothing but a run a twist around the edge and throw it in, you know, straight gin. Two weeks later, I love the stuff. It's like mainline and alcohol. You know, I mean, I get that. I get why people that do other substances would look for ways to get there quicker. Beefy or gin, better get Bombay Sapphire. We'll get you there in a hurry, and it'll keep getting you there for two or three hours after you've had your last drink I figured all that out too you know and so at that point I was definitely off and running every chance I had to get out of the place up there see even even before Colorado was yeah they had 3-2 beer when you're 18 back in those days and the drinking age was still 21 nationally but there were places in Kansas also it was 18 for 3- 2 which is about what regular beer is anyway it's three two to four percent anyway for the most part very little while this is actually six or higher but I was off and running you know that's what I did when I had a chance to get out I got drunk graduated from the Academy went to pilot training got stopped by the police my first night on base there's a brand new pilot training student he wrote me a ticket for rolling through the stop sign, which I didn't really do because the car had low MGGT and it did not have a synchromesh on first gear. And you couldn't get it in first gear unless you double clutched without being at a full stop. It just wouldn't go in. But I was glad they didn't write me up for DUI and take me off to the brig, you know. But sure enough, I was standing at attention. And my second day at my duty station, for the very first duty station as an active duty second lieutenant there I was, standing in attention in front of some captain who was reading me the Rod Act about my behavior. That continued by the time I retired from the Air Force in 1989. I had accumulated the letter of reprimand with two Oakleaf clusters, that's a total of three, and in Article 15, which is the highest level of non-judicial punishment, all related to my alcoholism and my drinking. I met a lot of full colonels who wanted to know why on earth would I be behaving the way I was behaving. But I did well in pilot training despite that. I drank a lot. Even if you looked at my pilot training yearbook, it talks about how much I drank. You know, just right there it says, you know, that I could out-sweat anybody, and for some reason it smells a little like juniper bushes, you know. But I did well enough in pilot training. We picked according to how well you did, and there were like three or four guys ahead of me out of 51 or 52. I got an OB-10 and went to Southeast Asia. And I flew mostly in Laos, and about half of my missions were in support of U.S. Army Special Forces long-range reconnaissance missions. We did not have Americans in Laus. They declassified that in the 1980s. Yes, we did have Americans on the ground in Laas. We had them there all the time. And that's what we did is we supervised insertions and extractions of reconnaissance teams, and we drank, and we drunk. And I ran with a bunch of Special Forces troopers who were mostly 6 to 15 years older than I, some of them more than that. One of the guys I flew with and drank with had actually jumped in at Normandy. That was his first ever parachute jump. Yeah, but I mean these were hard men and I was a 23 year old first lieutenant doing my thing you know. I got one of my letters of reprimand there for an incident in the officers club where I used some very ugly language to a guy who was much senior to me and again spent the entire next day at attention until I was told go home, go have dinner, go back, go to bed be at the ops center next morning at 3 in the morning. We never did that. Got in there and it was the night if you're familiar with the Sante raid when the Special Forces guys landed in the prison compound in Hanoi. And the guys that were flying would have been flying to rescue if we'd had to do it wanted me to be the guy to go to Hanoi at 150 miles an hour, no thank you. But we didn't go. I'm grateful. I am grateful for that. That could have been really ugly. But, you know, I handle it that way. I handle everything else. I came back and got drunk that night with the guys that had been to Hannoi the night before. Flying A1s, bunch of guys that I knew. We all got drunk the next night. It continued, I'll just say that right on through, you know, there was really no break. I was laughing with my friend Amber and Jerry here before that. My 20s is a lot of things are a little blurry about my 20s. I was single for a good bit of my 20's. I drank a lot, and I wasn't good at asking names or telling my name. It saves a lot on the men's when you just, you honestly, I just have no idea who a lot of those girls particularly, I have no ideia who they were, none whatsoever, or where they would be. Even ones that I might have seen for a while, it all would be very, very vague at best. And that's just what I did until I got married at age 28. I know this is going to shock you, but I was drinking when I met her. I was drinking at our wedding, and for 27 years I sat in a totally dysfunctional marriage, a drunk married to a lady with her own issues, let us say. Until finally she just said, that's it, we're getting a divorce. And the quicker we can get it, the better, which is a tremendous negotiating advantage when the other party's in a hurry and you're not. There are no attorneys in the room, I was told so. You know, I don't practice law, but I've watched enough of it to understand, you know. And sure enough, we got divorced, and four days later she remarried. It was not a surprise to me. And honest to goodness, even then still drinking, I couldn't blame her. You know? I was not committed. I was committed to not having things changed because I was used to it. Even when it wasn't functional, I was use to it and I was afraid of what life would look like if it were different. More on that when I get to talking about a fourth step and a fifth step, you know? But I got divorced and then spent another couple of years before I got sober. just before I got sober my decision-making powers had become so crippled that I was doing my best to get into a relationship with a woman who was a County Commissioner up in Cherokee County and was doing cocaine and probably meth and I thought I could help her i couldn't help me i couldn'T help anybody but she was much younger than i am and rather pretty that may have had something to do with the clouded judgment I'm not sure but it might have you know fortunately even hacked into way she was acting she was smarter than i was about all that. And then one night after a political event early in the morning and about close that up about 11, 1130 and several of us much about half a dozen or so of us went to Hooters for lunch. They used to have one up above Canton on the north side of Canton. So we had lunch sort of. One or two of us stayed and drank beer the rest of the afternoon watching ball games on TV and such. Then ended up at a pretty nice restaurant just southeast of Canton on Highway 140. Had two more beers there and then headed home. I made it about a mile and looked down inside, and when I looked up I was starting to drift and I overcorrected. I was drinking, driving a Lincoln Mark 8 which had really wide tires. Thing was Misty, rainy, wet, went out from under me right across. And one end was on the ditch on this side and the other end was on the other side of the car and it sagged in the middle. So I got out and stood there called Malden and daughter to come get the car. My friend Debbie Malden wasn't working that night but they said well you know we've got to call the police. I said, well, my guess is with a number of cars that have slowed down staring at me standing here beside my car in the ditch, they've already been called. They said, Well, we got a call anyway. I said That's fine. Just come get the car and take it away. So I'll deal. Well, sure enough, there are about another four or five minutes of taxis, a Cherokee deputy. You know, and in that time, standing there in the misty rain, looking at my car on the ditch And I was given a moment of clarity where I understood somehow that I had to quit lying to myself that somehow I could drink, but I just wouldn't drive. That's wonderful alcoholic kind of thinking there, you know? But then I had another little bit of clarity that took me just a little bit further. And it says, but Dick, you have no history of that. You've never called a cab one time in 40 years yourself. You've had a cab call for you a couple of times, but I had never called the cab not one time. I just got in the car and drove no matter how much I had had to drink. And I'd had an arrow of space before. I'd been later that same year in pilot training after the off base. The Selma, Alabama police drove me home one night. I had to be on the edge, said go to bed, don't come out tonight no more, you're in big trouble, boy. And I didn't that night, but none of it ever stopped me until this time. You know, and the truth was I was not that drunk. I only blew a .128. I remember getting a resentment when they dropped it from .15 to .12. I said, you've got to be kidding me, .15, I can talk like I'm talking now. 0.12, well, you kind of forgive them that, but 0.08? You can't, you know, how can anybody have any fun if you can't drink more than that and you've got to get home, you can'T walk, you knOw, says I. So I stood there, and sure enough, he came, and he searched my car, and he search me, and I took my pocket knife away from me and putting me in cuffs, and the one that was really cutting me. And I asked very nicely if he could loosen them just a little, and he did. But you ain't ever seen nice like me talking to cops, though. I mean, I am good at that. Even with a lot more to drink than that, you show me somebody's got a gun and a badge, I am the nicest guy. Sugar will not melt in my mouth. I am so nice to people when they have a gun and a badge. He took me to jail, took me into the Cherokee County Adult Detention Center. We got to go in through the back where they've got two sets of gates and razor wire and all that stuff and cameras and lights. You go in there and you stand here and you do this and you doing that and you're doing all that, you know. and so then I figured that I called a bonding company and I had my visa card with me and so I just bonded out with Visa they let me go yeah I wasn't there two hours they let go and the lady that brought the cash bond over to the jail drove me home totally against rules so I'll not say which company it was I'm sure she didn't work there after that much time anyway. She said, you don't look like you'll hurt me. Just don't say anything for a couple of years, you know, because it'll get me in trouble at work. So she drove me home. Took care of my dogs. They were glad to see me there, because I was by now about five hours, eight hours late or something, you know. But it's not like they had never seen that out of me before, so they were not overly surprised. And then I tried to go to sleep and I might have gotten an hour and a half kind of you know drunk sleep doesn't really catch bodies fight so hard stay alive and all that that kind of sleep doesn' t really count anyway hour-and-a-half maybe then I woke up at midnight like that I didn't sleep the rest of the night and then you had to do something I didn' t know what I had no idea what AA was about. None. Zero. Zilch. The only thing I knew about AA was hanging out at the pew and brew down on the Franklin Road in Marietta back in the bad old days. Every now and then somebody get a DUI and he'd have to go to these meetings and we'd all laugh. We ain't alcoholics, we're just drunks. Alcoholics got to go all those damn meetings you know and we have another drink and we'd all drive home and all of them but two one of whom I don't think I need the one that did for DUI both went but one because he was just about to die of liver failure and yeah they just thought it's a good idea that he probably get it sober and I suspect both of them still are lost track of one I still see the other one occasionally. He's got, oh I don't know, four or five years more than I have maybe. He still goes to the same meeting at the Howe Place on Monday nights that he's been going to forever. As long as I've been there, he's been there. So anyway I got to DUI on a Saturday night which was the 7th of February 2004. All I could do was sitting cry the next day about 2004 I had had an active email address for 14 years and I could not operate Google to find out anything about a I was looking in the phone book for a in the Cherokee County phone book phone number said to how place was on highway 92 above bugbusters who were clients of mine I I said no it's not I didn't know much it's just not there so I just kept calling that number and nobody ever answered because they don't have as many meetings on Sunday finally it got dark and I took care of my dogs and I went to lie down to get some sleep did not sleep a minute all night Sunday night crying scared to death scared to death got up Monday morning I had to go south to cab to a client down there to work on some things for them driving back a guy named Mark H answered the phone he said yeah it's about 12, 15 we got one starting at 1 o'clock if you want to come on by I said well where are you really he told me we're behind a little firehouse on Bells Ferry you know where that is I knew where there was. I'd been on the Planning and Zoning Commission for several years, and so my knowledge of Cherokee County and all the back roads and everything else was really pretty good. And so I rolled on up to the Howe Place on the 9th of February 2004, which is where I count my sobriety from, which is exactly 15 1⁄2 years ago today, the 9ths of August. It's exactly six months beyond. So I went to my first meeting There were about ten people in there, maybe a couple more. I looked at her and said these are not my kind of people And sure enough a whole bunch of them had other issues like it talks about how it works other issues Lived in a house down in Cobb County that Sims Maddox ran for people who had other issues besides alcoholism addiction And then a couple of other folks, you know, but I could tell they'd all slept the night before. So I knew they knew something I didn't know. And I stood there with them crying and sobbing. And I said, think I'm an alcoholic. They said, well, then you're in the right place, they told me. And then they said these stupid things like, well, don't drink and come to another meeting. That's all there is. I mean, I'm trying to figure out how to not drink and not feel like I feel, and you just tell me don't Drink and Come to Another Meeting, which is just as well I couldn't have heard anything. I didn't hear much else at the whole meeting anyway. But I was not used to people wanting me to come back. I don't know about everybody else in here, but I've been invited to leave quite a few places and please don't ever come back. I'm familiar with what that sounds like falling upon my tender ears. I was 57 years old. I'd never been so scared in my life as when I got to AA. I've had shot at a lot. big bullets that blow up when they get by you, you know, get to you. Big bullets. 37 millimeter, 57 millimeter, 85 millimeter anti-aircraft weapons. Had my personal airplane hit twice. Sent tracers all around the cockpit. None of that was as scary as knowing that I had to quit drinking and realizing that I had absolutely no idea how to. See, over the course of 40 years as a drunk, I'd quit drinking a lot of times, 30 days, 60 days, pass a flight physical, do something. Nearly five years of controlled drinking in the late 90s trying to save a totally dysfunctional marriage. but every time I went back to it just like our book says it came quickly and it was worse every time that's why I tell people when you come in here and you just hang around the fellowship you ain't around the program you're just around the scholarship we're the fellowship the program is the 12 steps when you do the 12 steps and then if after that you go back out for some reason you can say you relapsed. If you hadn't done the steps, you'd just stop drinking or using for a while and went back to drinking and using just like I did all those times over those 40 years. Just quit drinking for a little bit for a long time and went right back and started drinking again because I didn't change anything. I didn' t change anything. Somehow I just knew this time it had to be different. I was 57 years old, and I started to run out the string. I couldn't live like that a lot longer. See, my liver numbers had been out of whack when I was 22. When I started pilot training, I flunked the initial physical after I got to pilot training because my liver members were out of wack, and they had to go spend three days in the hospital up in Montgomery, and they did a liver biopsy and all that stuff and diagnose me with something else or other. It doesn't matter, but I'm 73 now, not 22, and my liver numbers are dead in the middle, something about 15 1⁄2 years of not drinking. Just like they say, liver regenerates. If you leave it alone, don't punish it with a bunch of poison all the time. It doesn'T have to filter all those poisons out every day. it gets better and it gets smaller your kidneys work better all of the stuff all in all my health is very good I don't think y'all are going to worry about me falling over unless I just get so sleepy here in the next we're in my bedtime now guys I said I was 73 I think I mentioned that this is my bedtime and I still got to get back to Holly Springs but you know this I would wish that everybody who came to his or her first meeting is as scared as I was. I think we'd lose fewer people if they were, rather than if they just kind of went off to rehab for a while and lied and lied through that and stood on the back porch smoking cigarettes and making noise and pissing off the neighbors and all that sort of thing. You know, if you're scared enough, if you've hit something that really does constitute a frightening bottom for you and i know that that falls i don't say this in front of people who are not in the program because they think well that's really harsh to wish that kind of thing on somebody i said i get that i get there but there's a there's quote that says why is it necessary every alcoholic hit bottom and the reason is because if we keep drinking there's absolutely I mean, no chance we'll do the rest of the steps. Zero chance we will do the rest of steps. If it was just a matter of quitting drinking and getting alcohol out of me, first half of the first step takes care of that, don't it? Powerless over alcohol? Okay, I got that then I won't drink anymore. I'm good to go. No, I'm not. I'm Not. I have not remotely addressed why my mind kept telling me it was a good idea for me to behave the way I behaved not even close to that let alone finding out what could be done about that because if I could have done something about it and I was not insane well that's a second step in certainly I would have done something about nobody would live the way i was living it was the same person And it's not that my life was a life without accomplishment. My Air Force career was truncated. I retired as a lieutenant colonel. Many of my friends retired as three- and four-star generals. The Air Force didn't trust me, and I understand why after I got sober. And I looked back on how I had acted, and I don't have to have alcohol in me to act that way. I just have to be thinking about getting that drink. That's a plenty. I am not one who agrees with this notion that if you're sober of a horse thief, you've got to sober horse thieves. If a horse chief gets sober, he'll quit stealing horses. If all we do is take the alcohol out of him, he will be a really good horse thief because he'll be a dry horse thief and he won't get caught as much. And that's the way I am. My character defects and my behaviors assume razor edges when I'm just dry. More than a few people through the years told me they liked me better when I was drinking than when I came somewhere and was all muscled up between my ears making sure I didn't drink. I can't take a drink. I hate all of you. What can I do to keep you away from me? Like many people, I gave up on church about the time I turned 19 years old. That's sophomore year. There's a reason they call the behavior sophomoric because almost all sophomores in college believe that at that point in time they have learned everything of importance there is to learn in the whole world and that in particular their parents don't know anything followed closely by their teachers and preachers and such. We had mandatory chapel at the Air Force Academy in those days. It was a show for the tourists. We all had to go out and stand in lines and go up to the big fancy chapel with all the pointy things, you know. The joke was there were 17 spires on the chapel for the 12 disciples and the five chiefs of staff. But it was a tourist show, and I resented it. I did not like having to spend my Sunday mornings up there. In the head, I don't know what the guy that was the preacher was, Episcopal or Lutheran or something. I grew up in a Baptist church. You sang songs you could sing anyway. They did these things that were obviously intended for the choir and the organist to show off for the tourists, not for regular podunks like me to sing. So I quit. Plus, I started playing football then, and it was a different kind of experience. I thought, you know, I don't know about if anybody else ever did this, but I always thought that when I changed things or moved from one place to another, I could reinvent myself and everything would be okay, or if I did some big deal, I'd be okay. You know,I started playing footbal, and I got my picture in the paper, and I was a hero the first time the Air Force beat Navy and I started dating a girl that had been the Sun Bowl Queen but I was still a drunk. It didn't fix anything. Neither did becoming a war hero. That didn't fixed anything. Neither did flying F-4s and F-15s fix anything None of that ever fixed anything Internals cannot be healed by externals tunnels. It's a spiritual axiom, I think right there along with that other one, you know, but I hate daring that 10 step stuff. But I got to AA. I spent a week or so just doing two or three meetings starting to feel better, starting to get some sleep, actually sleeping a little bit anyway, you know, three or four hours the first night, four or five. About a week and a half, two weeks in, I had to go to a couple events where people were going to be drinking. Had to go because of things that I did in the political realm there. And strangely, although I was acutely aware, I mean, somebody got some red wine poured from me to you, I could smell it. But I didn't want to drink it. I don't know why. You did not know why then. Same thing. Few days later, I was at another event and people were drinking and hollering. And I noticed though that despite all that time I've been telling me that everybody else drank like me. No, they didn't. They didn't drink like I did. You know, I ended up spending most of the evening with a couple of friends are deeply religious, standing around the kitchen talking about spiritual things. And for the first time in my life I had listened to some people talking about that kind of thing that made a certain amount of sense to me. And it all occurred over at the Howe Place, which at that time was a real pit of a clubhouse. The floors were about half-painted concrete. The tables were so swayback that if you put your coffee cup up here and turned loose off it, it would slide to the middle of the table. And if you're my size, you sat down very carefully because you were never sure when one of the little plastic chairs was just going right to the floor you'd go, you know. Walls and ceiling were still yellow from when they smoked. Just before I got there six or eight months before, they had in the big room, room. They said, okay that row of tables is smoking the rest of it is non-smoking. So now instead of cigarette smoke being just above the tables it would have been about eyeball on me you know and when I got there they limited the smoking to one room but little by little some things started to come into focus for me that had not been in focus for me for 40 years. 40 years, you know. And after a couple of weeks, I asked a guy to be my sponsor. He had a little over 15 years at the time, and I gave him his 30-year chip last year. I went to his home group and gave him this medallion for 30 years. He still has exactly the same number of days more than I have as he had the day I met him. which I believe is a really good way to get a sponsor or somebody that's got that kind of program. More importantly, he set a terrific example for me in the way of service work. He held every position in his home group. He'd held multiple positions, including twice being the DCM for our district up there. And he sponsors a ton of guys and we are as disparate a bunch as you could imagine that he sponsors them. But people that work with him have a tendency to get sober and stay sober, and he never told me I had to do a thing. He never made me call him. He never gave me giant sheafs of paper to fill out. i like to say he uses employs the socratic method of teaching he answers questions with questions answers questions i've been sober a couple of years and i'm on the airport authority up there in cherokee county still and we were getting into a big tussle with some guys and it was going to be a fairly nasty meeting coming up and i was spinning this thing around and around on the dryer up here, you know. Finally I call him and I said, so-and-so, so and so, so and so and he said, did you pray about it? I said well I'm going to but so and so and thus and so the other and so on and so. He said, well did you pray about that? I'm saying I'm GOING to. Did you ever consider praying first? I said well no Jim actually that never crossed my mind. I thought I needed to aggravate myself for at least a couple more days. Who knew? I said, thank you so much. I believe I have my answer. But I went through the steps with him and I suppose he took me through pretty much the way he was taking through himself or his way he took me through anyway. You know, it was pretty much big boy stuff. It wasn't a whole lot hand-holding and everybody on their knees now and all that stuff. That's just what the way it was for me. I don't sponsor people that way. I talk to them, I ask them questions, I look in their eyes when they're answering me and then I'll see if they'll actually sit and write because that's the acid test for whether or not someone's done the third step. I was scared to death of the fourth step. Fifth step didn't bother me, thought of that telling somebody. Night step didn't bother me much, but again, like I shared, there's a whole lot of stuff I just can't remember. And I'd already made some amends. I'd had to because I had to stop the bleeding in a couple of places. And I know at least they don't do that at all until one of them. You know, when your behavior is so bad that it puts other people's things at risk, you've got to tell them so that they have the opportunity to pitch me under the bus if they need to, to save themselves. It's not okay for me to do that. And I had a couple of those experiences that first week after I got the DUI. I was supposed to chair the Republican Party meeting for Cherokee County a month later. So I called the chairman and said, Jeff, here's what I've done. We need to sit for a bit and have a cup of coffee. So we did. We met at Starbucks up in North Canton. I explained to him what I'd done. I said now I know you have further ambitions than being the party chair and if your association with me you believe is going to hurt you in any way or tarnish your reputation no problem I will withdraw I don't have to do this and all he said to me I'm gonna try to say this without breaking up it was very emotion with the time remains that way he said to me do you mind if holly and i pray for you i said wow how does somebody who just listened to me say that crap that i said to him have a spirit of forgiveness kindness and love like that I had never experienced that kind of a moment in my whole life And that sustained me That what I was doing was the right path My fourth step was not breathtaking, it wasn't long Didn't take us, fifth step didn't take long to do either Because it was real easy to see the pattern See I'm not one that says well what's your part in it That's at least two levels too shallow to my way of thinking. Causes and conditions, it says, not what's my part in it. That's just behavior. Why did I act the way I acted? Well, it's that awful word that's in parenthesis on that table that's In the Big Book about Resentments. And it would make no difference whether I wrote a half a page or Moby Dick worth of four-step, it would always get back to fear. Fear drove me. And when I was very new in a meeting, I said, nah, everybody's got something they're not telling. Everybody's got some kind of fear. Something that's just so awful to them that they will never say it out loud. and I did the fifth step and Jim looked at me he said well Dick what are you really afraid of and I said the thing I thought I'd never say and I actually I only know two of you I said I'm afraid y'all will know I'm afraid and then you got me you make me do anything if you know how afraid I am inside all the time I am not who I appear to be I said, I have never been who I appeared to be. I spent all that time out here in this Texas-sized ego pretending it was as fragile as a soap bubble and I would do anything to protect it. Drinking or not drinking. I did not care what happened to the other person in the process of doing that. I just didn't care, you know? so we got through with it he said okay go home take an hour just read the book it's only two paragraphs do what it says say that prayer or some form of that prayer after the seventh step you'll feel better I said well what if I don't feel better he said say the prayer again keep saying it until you do feel better he said when you've done that let's get to work on your list so we did it took me three times through the prayer before I really felt better. But that's where I really felt relief. That's where I felt the shame lifted for who I had become. Not in the third step, not in the fourth or fifth step but at the end of the seventh step which is how it's designed to work. The fear was removed. That fear of being found out has gone. That does not drive me any longer. I made amends. I'd already made some amends. I made the ex-wife amends, those are not fun. But I did it just the way the book suggests, I cast no blame. I just said I will do the best I can and we owned a property together until last year. So I must have been doing a pretty good job of living through the amends and behaving in a different way. and as a matter of fact in December when she and her husband go to a big veterinary convention we'll keep their two poodles along with our three short-legged terriers which is always a hoot but it's part of the process. I live in 10, 11, 12 not perfectly but I do the best I can every day to do the best I can. When I approach my true best I can, I have a really gangbuster good day. Even if I fall short, I will have a better day than I had as a drunk. To me, the greatest promise in our program is contained in the first part of the 12th step where it says having had us pass through perfect micro-marion, friends tell me, a spiritual awakening as what the result of these steps not a result like about 85 percent of the people who read it say read it bill walton wrote very specifically and he used this specific article there for a reason he went to law school you know he learned to write very specifically sort of like the road of happy destiny not too happy destiny on page 164 this is not about when I die this is about how I live today and my today has been pretty good it's my second meeting I did an hour before the first meeting I went to at one o'clock which is now my home group and we had a very small crowd today we only had about 30 people sometimes we have 60 depending on how many druggy buggies they bring over you know it's uh but we see I'm a I have I got clubhouse sobriety great thing about clubhouses is this our group every day we're likely to have a lady there who has almost 45 years and we're going have a couple of them in the back that might be a day from their last drink might not you know and everything in between and we are solution oriented literature based as a group and we talk about solution and the people who chair are pretty much we have a talking with them that if the thing starts to drift to Depressives Anonymous or whatever else anonymous. We don't call people out, we don't demand the group conscience or whatever. We're open meeting. We just call on somebody that we know is going to share something from the book and as it relates to their experience. See? We share our experience, strength, and hope. We talk about what it was like, what happened and what it's like now. You notice none of that's except what we talked about. Nothing I've said tonight unless it was a quote is from the big book but it's not my opinion mostly. If it was my opinion I told you this is what I think or this is my opinion. This is my experience. This my reality. This what I saw. This is what I did this is what my life is like now I've remarried got a great marriage I think a little thing y'all sent me said dressed like I'm coming to an interview I told Jerry I have the only interview that matters every morning where I tell my wife I love her and if she buys it I'm good to go say I'm a kept man now my wife's a college professor she too has a PhD I don't you I'm a rum-dum ex-football player, fighter pilot. And she wrote her doctoral dissertation about AA. She's a communications scholar. Her specialty is organizational communications, particularly the area of identification and commitment. We identify with AA the first time we say honestly, my name's Dick Hall and I'm an alcoholic. I committed to AA when I did the 12th step. and tried to live this way every day. I appreciate y'all coming out on a Friday night and listening to me. Thank you so much.