More About Alcoholism as a Physiological Craving – Don G.

Good evening everyone. My name is Don Gates, an alcoholic. If we can keep it kind of quiet, we should all be able to hear the midgets warming up over here. You know, I've been speaking in Alcoholics Anonymous now, drunk and sober, for 37 years. And I look forward to this evening's meeting for the first time with a certain amount of dread because of all of the activities that are going on down in Los Angeles where I reside. and it somehow seems a little awkward to be light-hearted at a time like that. I don't mind being light-hearted about my own tragedies, in fact quite the contrary. I was doing a question and answer shtick a little while ago and someone asked me how I dealt with tragedy and I told them that at my age I realized that it will soon be in the past as almost everything else is and in addition it will be the highlight the funny part of my most recent talk have you ever noticed that the truly tragic funny things we say were just horrible at the time they happened and we tell them now and the room is filled with innocent merriment that's why I guess AA has never been successfully translated to the screen And, you know, I've sometimes asked my friends in the industry, why don't you show AA meetings the way they really are? You know, why do you show those dreadful, gloomy, miserable, clenched-jawed meetings? You remember when Burt Lancaster got his first cake and come back little Sheba? You know. Oh! Oh! God Almighty! Hang on! You know, and the ones that Jack Lemmon was going to in Days of Wine and Roses when he was still pretending to be an alcoholic. You know I mean if the meetings were like the ones he was going to I'd have gone out and got drunk with his wife. But so we laugh at and you know they tell him I'll say why don't you show either way didn't they say we can't do it a man gets up or a woman and tells a story that would tear tears from the heart of a stone, and the audience rolls with laughter. Ha ha ha! But as I say, it seems a little more difficult to make sport of a city tearing itself to shreds as it's been for a couple of days. And besides, I'm too old. I thought about going out, but what the hell, I already have a TV set and I don't drink, so... So it seemed kind of pointless. So we came up here and instead took a hike up the top of one of your mountains, and I find much spirituality looking around at the nature and having a strain to achieve a view. Sometimes it's so spectacular I try to remind myself that as my body in time goes, I should remember things like that because it makes it that much more pleasant. And so we got here a little while ago your I guess is your chairperson Rick W said he was going to take us out to lunch but he hurt the dinner rather but he found it was inconvenient, so we didn't get that. And then your local AA historian, he was going to take us to dinner but instead he got hung up with Bob S. over here. I'll protect his anonymity and just call him Mike Marina, but he explained that he was going to try to help Bob understand how A began so he could work it into his talk tomorrow. That should be really quite a talk. The man's a two-time loser he isn't satisfied having a father as a drunk yes to marry one i you know i don't what has he got to say we really want to hear yeah i virtually never talk about my own family and background and history i don t give a biological talk as some people do you know under the guise of telling what they used to be like people get up and describe things that happened to them you know as if they did it on purpose and which wasn't true with me I never I never even planned to be an alcoholic I never walked into some consular's office and said I think I'd like to major in vomiting perhaps a minor in diarrhea would be nice You know, I never planned an evening the way it went. No, I've never said to myself, well, let's see, what do we do? It's Friday night, I got a pint here in the house, I think I'll kill that and then I'll go out and total a car. I have just canceled the insurance to save money. So that will get it off to a good start and perhaps on the way to the hospital, the ambulance attendant will roll me so I can spend 24 hours being humiliated down at General. But I'll be able to get out on Sunday morning and I can cuff another jug on the way home and I'm sure from the moment I arose that it was apparent to all that I'm far too sophisticated, gentle, and urbane a soul to do things like that, but they happen to me. so to describe those sort of things wouldn't tell you what I was like they were just things that happened to me I didn't wasn't like that in addition to describe my parentage would not tell you anything about my alcoholism my immediate parents were low-bottom social drinkers of the worst kind. And in fact, all of my immediate relatives were, well, it was hard to believe them. You know, they were the kind of people where you would go to their home and they would say, would you like a drink before dinner? And they literally meant it. They trapped me several times because I couldn't believe they were serious. I never wanted a drink before anything. Well, I mean, if somebody would just said, would YOU like a shot while mixing your drink. Yeah, yeah. But they're like that. They take a drink of liquor and then eat right on top of it. On truly festive occasions, they might take two, three even. You know, then their eyes would glow warmly, their toes would beat a tattoo on the carpet. But if you'd say, well, you have another, they'd say no, no, I'm beginning to feel it. When you think of the logic and reasoning that underlies a statement like that, I mean, you drink something that is so vile you can scarcely swallow it unless it's mixed beyond nausea and expensive, and then you quit the moment it begins to do that which God and man designed it to do. Those people are mentally ill. You know, if there's any cure for them, it lies outside AA. And that incident that I mentioned at the beginning, I never want to hear anybody in this room or anybody who ever lived in Los Angeles again refer to non-alcoholics as normal people. See, we imply that we are somehow disturbed and emotionally distraught, distraught, and we imply that the non-alcoholic has lived lives where they have taken careful empirical observations, applied logic and reasoning, and then set out to live in accordance with their own best interests. If you think that's what the nonalcoholics do, the nonaccoholic world is like, you haven't seen a newspaper, watched television, or been outdoors in quite a long time. The non-alcoholic world is stark, raving, lunatic mad. You know, even when we were drinking, we didn't endanger Western civilization. We're not that well organized. It's the non-alkoholics that are crazy. I watch them downtown where I work. they walk around knuckles white jaws tense gonna get even gonna pay them back gotta look out for number one i'm gonna get that bitch on the stand make her admit she's an unfit mother right in front of the children that crazy no they all want peace as long as they can get the biggest piece and they never have to do anything about it nothing ever happens to them oh i mean you get lockjaw ulcers and live lives of desperation but nothing significant occurs no one's ever been arrested for driving while pissed off you don't get booked for being a common mope whining and disorderly see we have to change and god knows we don't want to i mean we're just like the non-alcoholic we're not going to give up a lifetime of failure without of struggle. I mean, most of us wouldn't cross the street if we thought it would make us feel better. I'm going to stay right here and hurt you. I'll take as long as you can. By God, I'll just stay here and HURT! But frightening as it seems, we have to live a life that's been recommended by every saint, sage, elder of the village who who ever reflected on the subject, a life that is guaranteed to bring you a large share of contentment and happiness, which I know terrifies the newcomer. But happiness isn't as horrible as it may seem in the beginning. Even contentment in time can be endured. You know, but talking about What I used to be like, insofar as describing my drunks, really wouldn't tell what I was like. Because I was a gentle, reasonable man. Like one of our ex-presidents, he used to say, come, let us reason together. Let us do it my way. And they wouldn't do it. Smite us in ninety and nine blows. And if we retaliated once, you know, we end up having to make amends to them. I just mentioned watching television thinking, gosh, think of the amends those people are going to have to make when they get on the program. But there was nothing in my family to account for alcoholism because that's a physiological condition. Our book says, in the doctor's opinion, and the longer I'm around, the more I concur in it, that the only thing that distinguishes us from the non-alcoholic is the phenomenon of craving that results from taking the first drink. Other than that, we're no different than they are. We haven't had any new emotions invented in the last ten millennia. There's nothing that seven deadly sins weren't written about alcoholics. They're written about human beings. You don't have to be crazy. By the way, a book says that we have people ranging from psychotics through sociopathic inferiors through neurotics and every hue on the emotional spectrum down to people that are normal, happy, contented people in every respect except the effect alcohol has on them. Now I've never met any of those people. I assume they were probably back in Akron when they were writing the book. You sober up in California you wouldn't expect to meet them but it's true. You don't have to be at all crazy to make this program. By the way, there's no handicap if you are. In fact, assuming that you're capable of enough honesty to stay sober, the chances are, if you're truly mentally ill, you're going to become a guru. Start meetings. People will march in your backyard on Saturday morning. You may not find your ass with either hand, but you can bring the multitudes. because, of course, there's psychotics on the program. Why should they get off any easier than the rest of us? A one in ten who drink roughly are going to be an alcoholic. It has nothing to do with their race, creed, color, sex, or sexual preference. You know, we haven't had—well, I guess we have had ten people walk on the moon now. And they check those guys pretty good. They're not wired right. They don't shoot them up there. One of them is already on the programme. I don't know if you ever heard him speak. He gives a, you know, it's an interesting talk, obviously a little different. He says, well, actually he may not say it because generally speaking, you hear what you need to hear rather than what the speaker says. I mean, well you hear what he would say if he were articulate and had enough imagination to put it correctly. But as I heard him, which you may not know what he said, but he talked about stepping off into the dust of the moon, looking back at that blue-white globe we call the Earth. And for the first moment, panic hit him. He realized he was 180,000 miles from the nearest liquor store. As far as I know, there is nothing about my family background that would possibly have made me an alcoholic with the exception that apparently somewhere in the bloodline there was whatever it is that makes us physiologically different from other people. That instills that phenomenon of craving that results in taking the first drink. I have several uncles they tell me who were alcoholic. And so that's what I owe it to. i mean i i hear people describe their parents and their childhood and so on and in fact i heard a person a while back say i didn't enjoy a happy childhood you know wiping away a tear and i thought my god that's my story i had a happy child but I didn't enjoy it either now there was nothing unique about my family I mean my my father was a communist and my mother was a Pentecost and you know and it in fact I were one early memory I don't know why I'm in this memory lane stuff tonight except it can't seem to get focused but I remember driving down the street one of my earliest memories driving down the street highway in the backwoods there and an old Model T Ford I think and up ahead we saw a rabbit that had been hit by a preceding car lying there little bundle of white fluff with entrails strewn about the street and my mother looked at it and said Oh oh donald see the poor bunny rabbit and my father apparently seeing perhaps the beginning of a tear forming in my childlike eye said all right donald sing along with me see the dead rabbit clap hands clap hands see the date rabbit clap hand clap hands so i i clapped and cried for a while and which has absolutely nothing to do with my alcoholism it may explain why I sometimes don't know how to react to given stimulus I'm somewhat ambivalent but I had none to do with alcoholism in the end on the beginning days of course and that's another odd thing I I happened to come across, with the death of my mother here recently, I came across some old photographs. And in one of them, I'm seated on a motorcycle, young, black-haired. In fact, it reminded me when I was up speaking someplace in Oregon a while back, they had a great contingent of motorcycle riders who were on the program and they were all parked out in front of this convention hall on their bikes and naturally I wanted to, you know, socialize and be one with the crowd. And so I walked up to them and I looked at their bikes and said, you're right, you know the last touring bike I had was an Indian. I used to ride that pretty heavy and a woman, I think she was a woman she didn't have a beard but she said I didn't think they would allow that to be done to a Native American. i'm getting old that the i noticed that there's a very young group here tonight and that is occurring with greater frequency in fact i said to a friend of mine a while back at a meeting i said you know this is the youngest group of alcoholics i've ever seen and they responded accurately if unkindly that isn't the problem you just have never been this old before and that's true because if you don't drink you're going to get older now you can avoid that of course by continuing to drink and use but assuming that you stay sober you will get older it's just one of the inevitable handicaps of our program like I was speaking at a meeting a while back and a young thing who had just gotten a two-year cake or something asked me how long I'd been sober, and I mentioned it. And she said, oh, what I wouldn't give to have even 25 years of sobriety. And I said, do you realize how old you're going to be when you have 25 years of sobrietty? You know, she did a little mathematical calculation and turned pale. She had never realized there was such an age. It's no big deal. Sometimes it does hit home a little. See, I enjoy being old the present stage, because when you're young, it's so miserable. You've got to be proving yourself all the time. You got to challenge. Somebody says, I can whip your ass and I have to yank off my coat and let them do it, you know, when you are young. You know, adolescence is a form of insanity. It's much more comfortable now, but as I say, it does have its slight handicaps. One night I was speaking down at The Nest in the San Fernando Valley. If any of you don't know it, that's a place where you can go to associate with lower companions and still stay sober if you want. I got on a spiritual flight and soared about the room and afterwards they swarmed forward to touch the hem of my garment except for one young maiden who held back and I could tell that she obviously felt the need of individual healing, quite possibly the laying on of hands. And it proved to be true when the multitudes had dissipated she came forward her eyes warm with admiration adoration what I took to be naked lust and she spake unto me saying that was so beautiful, and you remind me so much of my grandfather. You know, you can fight father, but grandfather, you know, forget it. That's a long story. But when I was young, as I say in this picture that I had, I'm seated on an old Indian scout. This is probably 1943 or 4, somewhere in there. And in the background, when my wife blew it up, the picture in the background, I recognized a guy that I hadn't seen in a long time. And he was, there was about five or six of us. He used to run together. This is up in Oakland. We were sort of what in those days passed for a rough crowd. Wouldn't be much today, I guess. But I recognized who he was and what had happened to him because a few years back in the mail, I hope we all hear that. It isn't just me. In the mail I had gotten a little note enclosed with which was a five dollar bill and the note said don here's the five dollars i borrowed from you when we were in the air corps together in 1942 now who in god's name would send you a five dollar bill after almost a half a century he obviously had to have come on the program he was making amends allows i had i could hardly remember him let alone that i lent him five dollars but it was important he had to make amends and i knew he was of course relatively new and on the program he wouldn't have done that also also he didn't add any interest to it after 40 years it could have been quite a lick but uh but i i contacted him and sure enough he was in aa and he told me about the other gang members of our little group, and I thought I was the only real alcoholic in the bunch. In that group of, let's say, six, two of them were already dead, including the one who was behind me there. They both died of alcoholism. This other guy and I are on the program, and this other one, the missing one, we didn't know what happened to him. But isn't that astonishing? You know, we always tend to think, well, we're just drinking like everyone else, but that's because we associate only with those people who drink like we do, excessively. And therefore, as a result, we don't really know that our drinking is that much different. In the early years, somebody asked me to make sure I told this little shtick. I swore already I wasn't going to get into drunk-a-logs, but I'll tell this one because they asked me too. Something about if I didn't tell it, they wouldn't pay for my room. But in the early years of my drinking, whenever I got into conflict with society, I could always blame another member of society. In fact, when you think about it, it's virtually impossible to come into conflict with society without the participation of another member. And so I could justify what happened by looking to their conduct. In other words, I could say, if he hadn't have made a left turn, I wouldn't have hit him, which is true. But if I hadn't been an unguided missile coming down the street, I might've seen he was making the left turn about half a block earlier. But you can always justify every single incident that occurred to me. I could blame on someone else. If he hadn'T have said what he said about our beloved president, I wouldn'T have a broken nose, which IS true. See, but if I HADN'T been drunk, he might not have made his point so tellingly. and then one time occurred an incident that I couldn't find anybody to blame. This particular one occurred, well, let me first say, I drank almost exclusively to relax. Now, I had been relaxed on this occasion maybe four or five days. and i awakened from a fitful sleep a horrible nightmarish sleep in which i had had nightmares of dante's inferno imps of the perverse i could smell a sulfur you know and i staggered to my feet and i was actually drenched with perspiration i and i thought what's wrong you know i mean it even fleetingly passed through my mind that drink might have something to do with it and then I realized where I was and what had happened I was out in the front room on a couch my family having retired wherever it was they used to go in the evening and I apparently had passed, I had nodded off with a cigarette either in my fingers or mouth and it had fallen onto the covering of this couch that kind of plastic sheeting they have over the inner tacking and it had burnt through and gotten down into the matting where lacking oxygen to take flame the embers had just slowly spread during the course of the evening and so I realized there was nothing wrong with my drinking I'd just been barbecued and I commended myself for my perspicacity and went into the kitchen got a pitcher of water and came back and tried to pour it into that little hole producing a rather spectacular cascade on the carpet but little else and so I knew that more dramatic measures were called for and I went into the kitchen. I got a butcher knife. I came back and I slashed the couch open from one end to the other and then I spread it out and then could subdue the embers with the cooling balm of this water. The only thing is it produced acrid black smoke. You know, it had been almost half a century ago, and yet I can still remember standing there looking down at that slashed and sodden mass and realizing that almost to a certainty my wife was going to notice it. She was a very keen-eyed woman. There was little that passed her kin around that house, but she was a good woman if alanon had existed she i'm sure would have been a member she would never have said anything to attack her husband to emasculate the head of the household but there were times in moments of stress when she was known to say things which were unkind cruel even things for which later she would feel deep remorse she might say you drunken son of a bitch you did it again didn't you which would naturally cause her great suffering later and I wanted to spare her this but the only thing I could think to do was to get the couch out of the house I mean she might vaguely remember there had been something on that side of the room but out of sight out of mind the only thing is it isn't really easy to be moving furniture when you should be teching into a sanitarium and a bed couch in particular but with that herculean strength that comes only to the panic-stricken youthful alcoholic i somehow managed to heft that brute onto my shoulders and lurch out the front door at that time we were living on the second floor apartment that had a very small little balcony with columns i remember almost beat myself to death caroming off those posts trying to make the turn you know but finally i got down into the patio there, and I realized that foresight had not been my long suit. There is virtually no place to conceal a bed couch in the typical apartment patio. So I'm standing there, legs trembling. You know, I should be in a hospital, but as I say, I'm moving furniture, and I remembered a creek about five miles away, so I staggered to my car and I heaved that monstrosity on top of it, and then got in and proceeded to drive to my selected place of repose. Now, all I have ever wanted in life was dignity. I have not cavilled that disaster when I could face it with dignity. But as I was driving down the street, at this time it was daylight. You know, I don't know what time it is, six, seven, sometime in the morning, but there are people at the bus stops with briefcases, lunch pails and things. I have no idea how they can stay up that late, but you get out there, they're there. And as I went down the street, I noticed that all of their heads turned and followed me. Eyes wide, jaws agape. i thought my golly it doesn't take much to draw a crowd in california i'll say that until i chanced to pass in front of a auto dealership that had a very dusty window out in front that acted as a mirror and i got a picture in reflection of what these people we're looking at here comes a guy down the street with about a week's growth of beard natalie attired in a bathrobe and on top of his car rests a couch which previously had lacked oxygen enough to take flame but going down the Street the wind was going through it like a the billows and the flames were 30, 40 feet in the air. But as I say, that's enough of that. Suffice it to say that subsequently, I was to move beyond social drinking. In fact, the terminal stages of my drinking, I wasn't getting into any trouble at all. See, when I got back to the house that morning, I found no way to blame my sleeping wife and children for imperiling their lives as they had. But in the lighter stages of me, I wasn'T even getting into trouble. I mean, how much trouble can you have in a hotel room with a bottle of wine and a copy of Playboy? If the maid doesn't step on you, you're reasonably safe. But as I say, that's enough of the drunk-a-log. And by the way, I don't talk about all the other better living through chemistry that's available today. I am absolutely delighted that the young people continue to come in and every one of them who comes in today naturally has a multiple problem. There's no such thing as a pure alcoholic under age 30, probably under age 40. I happen to be 41. But no, but no, I mean, naturally, I can't really imagine an alcoholic in full flower and flight and someone says to them, here, snort, hit, toke, pop some of this, you get there quicker and faster. No thank you, I'm killing myself with this. I mean if they'd been there, I'd have taken it. The trouble was that half of it hadn't been invented when I hit AA, and in the crowds that I circulated with, none was ever available. Sometimes I kind of regret that, actually. When I was younger, I was frequently being mistaken for the fuzz. And when I walked into a room where people were giggling, they would eat their cigarettes. I never knew why. and you know it's still like that to a degree even in my antiquity I was speaking at a meeting someplace down over here just beyond any lengths in Oxnard and I got mixed up I got lost wherever it was and I wandered into an area I think it's called Colonia or something like that you know it was a very friendly neighborhood but apparently there was some small party going on because when I would slow at the curb, people would rush out with little balloons and packets in their hands. And when I would ask them in my best Castilian where the AA meeting was, they'd eat them. So I don't know anything about that, and therefore I don'T talk about it, but I want to know everybody to know how welcome they are. In fact, you know, some people take offense because when they're new they have to go through a certain period of redundancy you know they get up and say my name is bob and i'm an alcoholic and an addict i mean that's like saying my name was bob i live in ventura and in california yeah I mean if you're an alcoholic of course you're an addict there may be addicts who aren't alcoholics scientifically that's debatable but it's entirely possible as far as I know but if you are an alcoholic of course your an addict I remember speaking in Texas where the guy in front of me was a chain smoker and as he butted his third cigarette and lit his fourth he said thing I hate about these new people they keep talking about addiction I want you to know I'm not an addict apparently thought alcohol and nicotine were vitamins or something but it works fine and it is no handicap although it does i told the story about one time i was speaking down a strange little meeting in hollywood a lot of strange little meetings in Hollywood. But this particular one was particularly wild. It was called Anything Goes or What Have You or Up Yours. I forgot which, but they got up and not only went through their redundant, I'm an alcoholic addict, they began to name their chemicals of preference. And it soon became a bragging contest. Because if we can't be the best at something, we're going to be the worst, the most loathsome. I mean, we play that game of, Can you bottom this? And finally, a very affluent young woman got up. You could tell she had money because she was dressed like a slut. I think it's funny about that. I mean, you wouldn't go out on the street dressed like she was unless you either had a lot of money or you intended to make some in the street. But she got up, and she said in a very haughty voice, I'm only into freebase cocaine. You know, and my heart just rushed out to her. I thought, the poor dear, she'll never know the joy of a week's run on muscatel. You know such specialization like a koala bear, they run out of eucalyptus, they're screwed. Now, the thing is that AA is the answer to a very simple problem. You know, when I first got here, I thought alcoholism was a strange, mysterious malady for which science not only had no cure, it had no adequate definition. And now it seems to me the simplest disorder ever to have afflicted mankind, the most easily recognizable, identifiable, and treatable. You know, the very name, alcoholism, gives you such a marked clue as to what the problem is. That assuming you weren't handicapped with a degree in psychology, if someone were to say to you, what do you think causes alcoholism? I would warrant you'd come up with the correct response instantly. Alcohol? That's right. No alcohol, no alcoholics. if alcohol hadn't been invented it wouldn't be one person on the face of the earth identified, classified, treatable as an alcoholic and it's very simple occasionally of course in a really new question and answer meeting a shaky hand will go up and some newcomer will say how do you really stop drinking you know as if there was some magic to it you know like oral or his brother anal heal, heal, out thou demon rum and you're never tempted again. Or as if some fairy was going to touch you with his wand, which actually happened to me in West L.A. one time. I mean, it was very pleasant, but it didn't have anything to do with my drinking. But the solution to alcohol is very simple. all you need is the ability to control the movement of your elbow. Nobody's going to put it in your mouth for you. In fact, it's a hell of a struggle at times to get it. There may be newcomers so far gone that spastic like their arm occasionally hurls things toward their face. But if you can fend it off, eternal sobriety is yours. The only thing is, of course, you're not going to want to fend It off unless you do something about the secondary aspect of it, which is the obsession. Again, that has nothing to do with mental illness. In most meetings, I can read here tonight, like the Chinese water torture, they tell us what the obsession is. What is the great obsession of the abnormal drinker? The persistence of the illusion that somehow, someday, you're going to control and enjoy your drinking. That's what drives us back to try the game anew, to take the first drink which triggers the allergy and renders us helpless. And so we have to live, as I mentioned earlier, the kind of a life that will bring us happiness and contentment so we don't have that when our emotional barometer doesn't get to that spell of storm where we go out and say what the hell i'm going to try her one more time it won't be you know nothing and that's why we work the program there's nothing mysterious about the program in fact it's even in a chapter of the book with a subtle caption, how it works. And because what we have done, there's nothing new, as I said about AA's program, nothing I've ever, I've read books written two millennia over 2,000 years ago that absolutely plagiarized from AA. There's nothing knew about AA. What do we recommend. The sine qua non, the one thing that's demanded is honesty. That's the only thing you need to stay sober. And honesty, that doesn't come, you know, we say, well, we're a spiritual movement. We're not religious. Well, that's absolutely true. But sometimes we say it with the implication that religions are not spiritual, which comes as a shock to them since they were struggling for so many centuries before we got here. You know, but down at Chino Prison, there's a scroll ironwork across one of the gates. It says, the truth shall set you free. Whenever I am there, I point out that means ultimately, not immediately. But the idea of honesty is not new. The idea of taking inventory and making confession doesn't really come as a shock to the Pope, I don't think. By the way, they tell me he still goes to meetings, even though I understand he's had a spiritual experience. but there's nothing really unique about what we do except we have to do it they don't as i mentioned you know long before there were if you want to know about alcoholism read william james a is godfather and his variety is religious experience and he talks about people going clear back the twice born he calls them people alexander the great who died in drunkenness in his 20s goes down through mark anthony was always deep in the grape and ruined his life goes down through saint augustine oh boy those saints were a lot of them are really rips comes right down to john l sullivan who took a whiskey glass threw it in a mirror in a bar and said i'll never drink again and james was concerned what happened to these people what what occurred because whenever something came over them that changed their lives. It happened in isolation, and it was totally mysterious, overpowering, and so they described it in terms of whatever religion was prominent in their culture. In other words, if they were Jews, Jewish. Hebrew understanding. If they're Christians, Christians. Catholic, Catholic. Hindus, Hindu. They described it on their own because it was just too great to explain in ordinary terms. James was a pragmatist. He didn't care how they explained it. He was just curious what preceded it and what did you do to maintain it? And he set it out, and we have adopted it as our program. In other words, there were automobiles before Henry Ford came along, but they were handmade, very few and far between. We, like Henry, mass produce spiritual experiences. You know, Henry came along with the idea of a production line. You start off at the first stage, somebody adds something, it moves down the line with people ladding and out at the other end in less than an hour wrote it rolled the tin lizzy that everybody in the country virtually could afford a does the same thing it starts at step one and goes down by the way they're numbered to help the intellectual know the sequence one two three see you can avoid confusion that way and you get to step 12 which says having had a spiritual awakening a spiritual experience as a result of the steps no it doesn't not before it doesn'T say god could and would have caught, then you're going to stay sober. And you'll know a life that is as wild and exciting and enthusiastic as you want to make it. And it is wild and excited. Anybody who thinks life is boring tells you nothing about life. They just tell you something about themselves. They're very boring people. Stay away from them because it's exciting out there. You know, people ask me why sometimes you seem so ebullient and enthusiastic. Why is your program done better than mine? I tell them, I don't think it is. It's simply, I do more things. I asked him, you ever learned to fly since you sobered up? He said, no. I said, well, I did. Went out to the old Whiteman Airport, took three hours of training and soloed. Took the plane that weekend, flew to San Francisco. It didn't have any instruments. I didn't know anything about navigation. You know, I just flew over Highway 101. Ha ha ha! First took my first free fall parachute jump just before I became a grandfather about 20 some years ago. Got through the male menopause racing motorcycles with Steve McQueen out in the desert. Got trophies I won after I was 50 years old. Sometimes the only copy of the big book they used to see around Barstow on Sunday. By the way, I don't want to, in case there's any racers here, I don'T want you to think I'm boasting about the straight hair and hound type races. My specialty he was Enduros, you know, where they throw you into a creek bed and send you to Palm Springs to see how much pain you can suffer while remaining punctual. And alcoholics are just gifted at that. That was the story of my life. And that's the great thing is you can do everything you want. Remember, everybody in this room is under a sentence of death. And the question is, what are you going to do? Like Thoreau, do you want to, at the time of your death, find out you never lived? Now is the time to do it. Now isthe time to get out there. And the nice thing is you have such, once you realize you don't need chemical courage anymore, you have the greatest scapegoat ever invented, you can do anything you want. It's like some god set forth a feast of experience, sensual, emotional. He said, take what you want and then pay for it. you see sober you find out whether you want to repeat it or not and in decades i haven't made any mistakes no errors no deviations from the path of valor or rectitude have i been guilty of not even the slightest pawpaw on the other hand god has seen fit to do through me some of the dumbest most petty egomaniacal lewd lured lustful things you could imagine but if it gives him pleasure to make me look like a horse's ass who are you to criticize eyes. Take it up in your meditation. I mean, other speakers get up here and they say, what I tell you is only my own opinion. That's not true with me. I've taken the third step. What I tell you is the word of God, and you better listen up. The only thing is he keeps changing his message about once a month making me look like a boob for having misinterpreted it in my last talk. yeah but i'm i took up scuba diving now i know you're supposed to put on flippers and snorkels and tanks and practice you know the stuff but i i hum a couple of bars i pick it up i mean that's my personality and besides when i came into a they told me everything an alcoholic needs to know is in the big book anyhow you know why the hell yeah i put on the gear leaped off cat by Catalina Island, you know, so beautiful down in Seaweed City. I stayed down so long I ran out of air. I put my higher power to the test. But that is what life is about as far as I'm concerned. Live it enthusiastically. If you're not hurting anyone, for God's sakes, get out there and, I mean, moderation is a rumor to me. I don't want to know anything about it. As long as what I am doing isn't hurting anyone. I want it to be full bore and all out. I was talking, talking. I told him to put out his cigarette. I had to quit smoking some years back. I smoked two or three packs of camels for quite a long time until the doctor gave me a mantra to repeat emphysema. And wouldn't you know what? Isn't that weird? I was telling him coming from the backwoods of Oregon, we used to shoot deer and hang the venison in the smoke shed out behind a house. So I know what smoke does to raw meat, but for 35 years I made lung jerky. So I had to quit and they told me to get into some form of activity that might help your lungs a little bit, what's left of them. And they recommended running. Running. You know, of all the forms of locomotion man ever devised, that has to be the most loathsome. In all my life I've seen runners, usually old men with gnarled knobby knees like tree roots, you know, with sweatbands around their heads panting on the sides of sidewalks. And, you know, I think, oh, poor souls that it should come to that. Now I'm one of them. See, a fanatic is anybody who's doing something a week before I start. You know, I went out, I couldn't go 20 feet without, you know, but I kept it up. You I have a thing for pain, as I mentioned, and I kept it up, and pretty soon I got up to two miles without stopping. And I was leaving my house to go speak somewhere, I think, and I caught myself tripping as I was going down, skipping, I mean, as i was going on the side way. And I thought, oh good God, I hope the neighbors didn't see that. You know, I didn't skip as a boy. You know I've been called Mr. Gates since I was 13. you know i allow my real intimates to call me sir and i'm skipping i thought what is wrong then i realized nothing is wrong it's that something is right you have done something good for your body you went out and ran two miles and your body is rewarding you it is kicking forth endogenous morphine endorphins that's endogenous morphing your body's pumping it into your system That's what you get when you exercise. And I thought, good God, no one ever told me that. They told me running was good for me. They didn't, which I construed as a threat. They didn'T tell me it would make me feel good. They didn' t know how to communicate with me. You know what happened then. I mean, if two miles will make you high, how about four, eight, sixteen? I mean before the year was out, I was running half marathons. I had stress fractures both feet, bursitis hit, my back gave out. I didn't have a moment free from pain after I got healthy, but the body heals. Well not the lungs, the scar tissue can't heal, but for the rest of the body it heals and I've run five marathons now, 26 miles. That's a long ways and the strange thing is every race I've been in from 5k up to 26 mile marathon I've won. I don't mean to say I came in first. I haven't the faintest idea what those fools up in the front of the pack are doing. But back where the spiritual ones gather. We have categories, by age, by sex, by occupation. I have continued to refine my category till I'm the only one who's in it. So when I finish, I win. Which by the way is not quite as absurd as it might sound because in truth, not just in running but everything else, I am the only of my category. You're the only one in your category. you're not competing with me or anybody else. only yourself. You're the only one in your category. You play the game, you bear the pain, you finish, you're a winner. Quit, drop out, start using again, drinking again, youre a loser. I mean, it's very easy to tell. But the main thing to do is live. I know it's at age is what's doing it to me. You young people, you know you're immortal. In fact, one of my kids, when he was going through the testosterone rush, he said to me, you Know, Dad, if I should ever die, what the hell do you mean if punk, you know, it's not a hypothesis, it is reality. I'm staring at it. But what I want to do is enjoy life. As I mentioned before, you're going to have a lot of joy in this program. I don't want to scare the newcomer out by making him think it's all happy. There will be moments of pain, let me give you comfort in this. There are going to be moments of pain on this program so intense it'll be being on anything you can presently imagine. It's going to curl your hair because things are going to happen. Life, the world, it is the old world yet universe doesn't rise up on its tippy toes in order to avoid upsetting your tender psyche just because you stopped sucking on a jug. The things are gonna happen. No two-legged beast ever got out of the forest without tragedy. Why the hell should we be spared? And it'll seem sometimes like you're surrounded with a cylinder of pain for which there's no door nor seam and you forfeited your right to chemical peace of mind. And so you just stand there and hurt. And then one day the walls fall away and you see the world as you never saw it again, where you don't feel guilty when good things happen because you've paid your way. I've had the last few years have been really rough in many ways. A couple of years ago, my beautiful wife here came home, interrupted a burglar. He smashed her in the face, broke bones on all the bones in her face. She had to have two plastic surgeries to put her back together he wasn't out to get me as some police first thought he was just some guy loaded with crack needed a fix and picked our house you know and someday he's i hope he makes the program god knows he needs it and someday is going to get up and he's going to tell his story and it's going be funny we'll let you know he'll say yes i needed a fixing line i just drove out in the valley i picked out a house and would you know with my luck i hit the house of a judge not only a judge but a justice of the court of appeal and his wife came over and pop i put to hospital. I don't know if I'm going to laugh, but I'm not going to sponsor them. About, oh, I guess two years, a couple of years or so ago, my 85-year-old stepmother lives up in San Luis Obispo, a nice quiet little town. Guy burglarized her house and raped her, 85 years old. She just had cataract surgery, grabbed her by the face, piled up her eyes. Just a few months ago when I was on vacation, somebody burglarize my mother's house. She lived a little further north in an even quieter town, murdered her. See, I mean this world is the old world yet. Vicious and rotten things happen but they don't happen to us because of our program. The rain falls on both sides of the road on the just and the unjust alike. And so what I recommend to people is get out and live each precious possible day that you can. It is so good that even, you know, some of you know my story, of course, probably many of you have been subjected to my monologues. You know that I now, they moved the new state building down into Skid Row, right between 3rd and 4th, Maine and Spring, if you happen to know the area. I can now throw a wine bottle out my chamber window and hit where I sold blood. Get a little loft on it, I can hit Clancy at the midnight mission. This sort of thing cannot happen to anyone. How do you go from the lockups to pits? Because I can remember when I first hit L.A. trying to get a job. I couldn't even get a Job. I remember I didn't know yet. I went in to apply at a law office trying to getsome kind of work, And I knew in AA now that our stories were, as I say, the source of innocent merriment. But I didn't yet know that the non-alcoholic doesn't see the humor in them. So I told this guy a couple icebreakers. You know, I wanted him to love me. Not for my own sake. I wrote The Need for Human Approval. No, I... I wanted Him to love Me to the glory of Your Name and so I could get a job. And so I told him about the time, a little icebreaker maybe, about when I got drunk and threw my mother-in-law down the steps or something like that. and, you know, I'm being intoxicated, fell after, got a hernia, you know, or some little thing. This guy didn't giggle a gig, titter a tit. He just kind of stared at me. And I thought, well, I guess I'm getting too subtle. So I told him about the time I was in four-point restraint and vomited straight up. And that did get a reaction. You know, and finally I said, look, I am not asking you to recommend me. And he said, recommend you? Recommend you? I wouldn't offer your name for consideration. No attorney in the history of this nation has ever done the things that you've done, had happened to him the things that have happened to you. I suggest you forget the law, go into the countryside, try to regain your health and simple labor. I was crushed. I was not ready for that. If I could have slithered like a serpent across the floor under the door and drowned the shame of that bottomless bottle like I always had, I'd have done it. But I thought, you know, if I do that he'll be right. He'll be Right. I can't take it. I won't give that fellow the satisfaction. I drank coffee at about 10 years later that guy flipped out cold sober took the check protector and one of the secretaries ran to paris disgraced his law firm disgraced the legal profession disgraced his family in the city of pasadena one of most pyrotechnic displays of misconduct ever saw he did a cold sober whereas a little over 10 years ago now 20 years or more from then of course but 10 years go now the governor of our state called me and told me he's appointed me to the appellate bench as far as I know the highest judicial office ever held by a sober alcoholic at least in California you know what happens now if I enter a courtroom members that law firm are there they stand up and they remain standing until I tell them they can be seated all power to the powerless and yet I haven't changed that much I don't drink of course which is the greatest change that can come into the life of an alcoholic I've learned to laugh at myself which by the way if don't learn to laugh at yourself you're going to miss the greatest joke in your generation but basically i'm still the same i said i've sat on our supreme court seven of us in our black robes six deadly serious outwardly and apparently inwardly one rather serious on the outside but inwardly thinking oh god if they could see me at the nest today. But this is what it is about. As I say, we're all condemned to death and I recommend you live before you die. If there's anything you want to do to improve society, to strike a blow for righteousness sake, you've got to do it now that nobody raises their hand for anything in the tomb. if you want to do something gentle loving tender lurid and lustful now is the time to do that too another poet said the grave it is a fine and private place but none i think do their embrace another poet says the bird of time is but a little way to flutter and the bird is on the wing i'm so old now that my bird's flight is very short i don't want to miss a single beat of those wings and i hope some of you will stick around and join me for the flight thank you Thank you.