Newcomers Aren’t Reading the Big Book — They’re Reading the Room – Frank W.

Okay, this reading is based on a passage from page 29 of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Each individual in our personal stories describes in their own language and from their own point of view the way they establish their relationship with God. These give a fair cross-section of our membership and clear-cut idea of what has happened in their lives. We hope no one will consider these self-revealing accounts in bad taste. Our hope is that many alcoholic men and women in our room tonight and listening later on ableachipspeakers.org desperately in need will hear our speaker and we believe that it is only by fully disclosing ourselves and our problems that any of us shall be persuaded to say, yes, I am one of them too. I must have this thing. Tonight's speaker is Frank Waters, a.k.a. Huggy Bear, a.k.a. Dad. I have known him for my entire sobriety and he has done a lot for me. Okay, minus 30 days, I guess. He's done a lot for me. I probably wouldn't be here today if it weren't for him. So people look at him and think that he's intimidating but he's nothing but a teddy bear. I'll tell you that right now. So anyway, I introduce Frank. Here you go. I'm Frank Waters and I'm a recovered alcoholic. Can you hear me? Okay. Except for the hearing impaired, yeah. My sobriety date is 10-31-89-27. Plus years of sobriety or time without a drink. I'm 59 years old or as Cat likes to say, 60 minus 1. I came in here when I was 31. I wasn't quite what they call a vision for you. I grew up in Atlanta. In case you're wondering what part of Atlanta that is, it's Atlanta, you know, inside the old city limits before they expanded. So I'm a... I'm a native. Stan would not appreciate this right here. I'm a native Atlantan. I have a grandmother that's a Cherokee, so I'm a native native. My father grew up in Atlanta. He was born over on English Avenue. My mother was born at Emory Hospital. Trying to think of all the things you get out of the way first. I'd love to tell that joke that Tinsley tells, you know, about the note throwing the knives, but I can't just quite get it like he does. Actually, I guess what I was doing was baiting y'all to get Tinsley to speak again. My father drank a lot. He, later in life, he came into the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. At 17, when he was... Right before he got sober, I got him to sign papers to allow... I mean, to go into the Marine Corps. And, of course, my grandmothers were ready to castrate him. But, you know, Vietnam was still going on a little bit. It was a whole... The whole country was, you know, torn apart back then. And so he signed the papers for me to go in the Marine Corps. And I guess about a week and a half to, you know, ten days, two weeks later, he came into the Rebus over in Cobb County. And for a while, before I went in the Marines, y'all was on the delay program, I would take my father's Cadillac and go over to Bronner's Hospital and bring drunks that needed a ride over to the meeting. I loved it. I loved it. I was 17, had my father's Cadillac, and I was shuttling drunks back and forth. Because sometimes they wouldn't all get there for that one ride, so I'd have to go back again. It was great. That part about AA, I loved. The other part is, you know, you guys, I had planned on doing a lot of drinking with my father. And AA kind of robbed me of that, you know, in my 17-year-old mind. I come from a broken home, and I've continued to break those homes ever since I've been living one way or the other. I mean, look how I turned out. I mean... I would go buy beer and things for my high school buddies because nobody questioned me when I was a big kid. At 13, I was six foot tall. And back then, it wasn't that common. And so I had a lot of friends when it came to getting beer. And by then, they had all these drive-through windows. You know, you could just drive up and give them some money, tell them what you wanted, and they'd just pass it through. And there wasn't a whole lot of ID checking and all that stuff. I mean, you know, hell, I had to be of age. Look how big he is. And so at 17, I went into service. And, you know, I learned a lot of things in the Marine Corps. Some of those I did not bring back to AA, like following instructions without question. That's one thing I left in the Marine Corps. All right. In the Marine Corps, they taught me a lot of things. But basically, you know what Marines do. They're trained and taught to kill people. So I'm not going to talk a whole lot about the Marine Corps. I got out of the Marine Corps at 21. I rotated early out of Bocanawa. And there were some drunk stories, you know, as far as being a Marine. I mean, I grew up thinking that's what men, if you were a man, you drank and you ran women and you fought. You know, I grew up watching, you know, Jack Balance and Charles Bronson and all these guys on TV. And they were always drinking and they were always fighting. And they were always had somebody with them. And my father was pretty much that way. So I figured that's what men did. And so I tried to emulate that the best I could. I was that didn't do a lot of drugs. I'm not a big drug addict. I mean, I am an addict. Big Book tells me I'm an addict. But I have the reverse effect of most narcotics. If you're taking something that took like a downer, it's like somebody injected me with with the lethal dose of speed. You know, give me some speed. I crash, you know, just give me a joint. Well, you better give me four or five, six joints by myself. You know, it just it just didn't work. And today I take more pills than I ever did in my first 30 years of life. I'm a diabetic. And they seem to work for the most part. I know some of you are wondering, you know, that, you know, that mine and Alice's relationship, it was just a one night thing. She was drunk and stoned and I was, you know, drunk. And then we have cats. So. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I guess that was my joke for the evening. Before Matt comes up here and punches me. Yeah. So, you know, I was a hell raiser. You know, everybody said, oh, I'll raise some hell. No, I was a hell raiser. There was a lot of blood in my story. There's a lot of stitches and broken things and broken people. And, you know, I was just one of those guys that, you know, if you said something I didn't like, I couldn't think fast enough. So if it made me mad, you know, it was on. I would just try to kill you. And I brought that in here. When I disagreed with something or they disagreed with me and they said something that hurt my feelings, I wanted to kill you. And it wouldn't be set right until you were actually dead or you moved away to California or somewhere where I'd never see you again. It was just that insanity. I'm not like that today so much. Just on occasion, you know, things creep back in. And, of course, I have the tools today to dispel that. I had a lot of anger issues when I got here. One of my sponsors said when I walked into the rooms of, you know, Biscayne that a dark cloud filled the room and you just tell everyone to kill people. And he said that and I was like, you know, how did he know? How did he know that? When I was, I had two boys by the time I was 31, 30. I had two sons. And I got evicted because the people that had the property wanted to renovate the property. And I'd been there for a good while and all the neighbors, they were wanting to keep me, but they wanted to renovate the property. So they were evicting the people that were in there so they could basically go in there and gut it and redo it. So I moved in with my mother-in-law. Never got along with her, ever, ever. She finally passed away last year. I didn't think she would ever die because, you know, I got some amends to make to her. And I wanted to be graveside amends. I don't want to be face to face. And that's just as honest as I can get. So, I mean, I'm not going to sit up here and do my fifth step with you guys. We don't have time for that. But so I was living with her and they're big on gossip. And that's one of the things I realized is why I hate people that gossip so much is that my wife, my first plaintiff, had to go in to see what her mother was talking about because one of my brother-in-law was getting a divorce. And so she had to go hear the gossip. And so while she's in there with the gossip, my oldest son, which is a daddy's boy, fell into the pool and drowned. And it just killed me. It turned it just turned me inside out. And I wanted to hurt somebody. But at the same time, I don't want anybody. I didn't want anybody to feel what I was feeling. And I had to wonder if things I've done in my past made people feel the way I was feeling right then. And I just. I had cousins, friends, everybody giving me Quaaludes, acid. Nothing was working. I couldn't get drunk enough. I couldn't get drunk drunk. Nothing was touching me. And I got pulled over one night by the city zoo. There's an APD precinct down there. And when they found out what was going on with my son, they tried to get me off the DUI list. But they'd already been called in, and even back then they recorded things on reel-to-reel. And I was smoking two joints. I had an open beer, and I had all the weapons I owned in the back seat so my wife would not blow her head off. And so I went to court. I was going to prison because I had an HB probationary license. In case any of y'all don't know what that is, it's a habitual violation. It's a violation of the law. It's a violation of the law. And I could drive as long as I was working when I was self-employed. And I set my own schedule, so wherever I went, I was working. And I used to tell cashiers that, you know, they said, what's this HB? Because it was stamped across the license back then. It was like a banner. Like Miss America. And I said, that means I'm a highway volunteer for the Georgia State Patrol. You know, back then, tilly carts, what we used to call them, we had in Atlanta, it was First Atlanta, and it had a tilly cart. It was an ATM cart. And not many people had an ATM cart because they didn't trust them yet. And now we do everything with debit cards. Back then, it was like, I'm not so sure about this shit. So we had checks. We wrote a checkout. You had to give IDs. When they saw that, that I was a highway volunteer, they said, what did you do? I said, you know, if there's a wreck somewhere or something, I'll pull over. I'll, you know, get first aid. I'll block traffic. I'll look for body parts. I'll look for body parts. You know, if I need to. Just, you know, just whatever they need me to do. One of these days, you know, I will be a, you know, a volunteer. I'll actually beat, you know, somebody. Oh, that's cool. Wow. You know, I'm sure there's some alcoholic somewhere in line going, but nobody ever pushed me on it. So I had an HB, a probationary license. That meant I was going to prison for five years because I had, you know, run all my chances up. So on that, you know, the sentence was five years in prison. And since my son had died, they waived that. Gave me two more years without the license, no chance of a license whatsoever, and sent me home. Well, they sent me downstairs to work off a day's, what do you call it, community service. And I went downstairs at the Capitol and filed speaking tickets. And then at lunch, they sent me to underground. And I was prepared to go to prison. I was just like, you know, there's somebody watching me. Somebody's going to snatch me up. Something's going to do something. Nothing happened. So prior to that, you know, my lawyer wanted me to go to AA meetings because it would look good to the judge. I said, well, I'm not an alcoholic. I'm not an alcoholic. Sorry, I was around alcoholics for, you know, a good while with my father. There was a religious cult. You know, my father got off into that shit and a bunch of them went up to Virginia to start a church. You know, I know about these AA things. So I had to, you know, go to AA meetings. So I went over to Biscayne because I knew where that was at because I'd bought a book for somebody once. One of my wives had a friend that was an alcoholic. So I bought them a 12 and 12. That's the only thing I knew about. So I went over to Biscayne and I sat down back in the corner where some lockers are now. And people got up and moved. And not that I stank or anything. I mean, I was, you know, well-groomed for... I looked like a dock worker, you know. And I just sat down and I just got up and moved and nobody ever came back and sat down next to me. And this was on the couch. This wasn't in a chair. And the place was full. It was a night owl's meeting. And after the meeting, some skinny little woman came up to me and started running her mouth and would not leave me alone, asking me questions. And I couldn't tell you half of what she... you know, anything about what she asked me. I just knew she was very irritating. And I didn't want to be there. And, you know, everybody was laughing and joking and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, you know, I'm, you know, I just lost my son. I'm not into this shit. You know, they're all about God. And right now, if God was in front of me, I'd shoot him. You know, I just hated God. And so after the meeting was over and that lady left me alone, her name was Mary Ann Kay. You know, she's about this big around. I said, skinny little woman. I don't think she's getting weight. Probably 40 years. But she is skinny. I went home after my wife came and picked me up. And I got to thinking, I didn't want to lie to that judge that I'd been to AA meetings. So I had to go back Saturday because I figured y'all were at church. You were closed on Sunday. Y'all were, you know, having church services wherever y'all do that. You know how y'all are. You're all about God. You're all about God. You're all about God. You had the church and my father went to start a church and I was like, okay. So I better go to the Saturday meeting. Went to the Saturday meeting. Same thing. Sat down. People moved. I said, the room filled up. So they left a space about this. About this much between me and the next person. Somebody, you could have sat down there. But, you know, nobody would sit there. And when I went to get coffee, this aisle fills up with like ungodly amounts of people. And you can't hardly snake your way through there. I got up to walk to go get some coffee at the front of the room. And it was like Jesus had parted the waters. Everybody got out of my way. I got my coffee. I wasn't being mean. And I sang when I came back. Just to sit down. They all got out of my way again. And after, I guess, a week, ten days. Because after that meeting, that same skinny little woman came up and started badgering me again. Turns out she was a drug and alcohol, an evaluator for an insurance company. But she's the only one that would speak to me. And I sure wasn't speaking to anybody. So, after about ten days, I got to wondering what that skinny little woman was doing. She's the only person in years that had talked to me that didn't have to. You know, like a cashier or somebody that had to talk to you. But, you know, not everybody just runs up and says, Hey, I want to talk to you. That didn't happen to me. I was a drug dealer. I was an alcoholic. I made a good drug dealer. Because I didn't do the drugs. I was just that kind of person. I carried two pistols, a blackjack and seven knives. Wherever I went. And I didn't realize it, but I had to get a sponsor. I had to find me a sponsor. And when I got my white chip, this big guy grabbed me and hugged me. I had no clue you guys did that. And I'm about as homophobic as they come back then. I was having my arms down like this. I was grabbing a chip. I wasn't expecting this guy to hug me. He's like a huge guy. And his name is Terry A. And so I sat down red faced and went back and sat down. But he was too damn big to hit. You know, it's one of those guys, if you hit him, you know, your hands are going to break and he's going to get mad. He was a big dude. And, you know, he was a big dude. He was a big dude. He was a big dude. He was a big dude. He was a big dude. He was a big dude. He was a big dude. He was a big dude. He was a big dude. And so as things went on, there was a woman there named Judy P. And she would sit in the middle of the room before and after the meetings. And all these people would gather around her and they would all always like kiss her ass. And, of course, in my alcoholic mind, I was just like, she's got something on these people. You know, they're just, you know, that's the way things ran in my world. And so I asked her about the sponsorship thing. And she goes, she goes, if you're going to stay around here and get sober, you're going to need a sponsor. But don't worry about it, baby. You ain't going to be around here that long anyway. And she just pissed me off. I wanted her to die. And I was opposed to killing women, really. And so I asked another guy and he said the same thing. And so I asked this guy that was this big guy, sat over there. He weighed about 320 pounds, had tattoos all over him. But he was always happy. I'm like, this is the guy. He's always happy. He's like, he's not mean like these other people. His name was Carl S. Be careful how you choose your sponsors. I still think that, you know, your sponsor ought to be chosen for you. Because he was, you know, he wasn't what I had planned on. And I told him one day, I said, you guys are hypocrites and all this stuff. You keep saying, keep coming back. We love you. You know, all the little things that AA say to people. You know, all this bullshit. Good God. And now I say it, you know. But it was 27 years ago. So he said, well, what do you mean? I said, well, you know, nobody tells me to keep coming back. They get up and move when I sit down. So I started sitting in the chair instead of sitting next to me. And he said, well, you got to quit walking into meetings like Rambo. And I said, what do you mean? He goes, when you carry guns and knives to the meetings. I said, how do you know that? And as tentative as I am about most things, I didn't realize that, you know, in my blue jean pocket back here, there was an outline of a 25 automatic. Kind of like, you know, you'd have a can of Skoll or a big wallet. I never realized that until he pointed it out. And then he made me, when I talked to him, he made me go down the hall in his apartment. And it was a little mirror on the wall. And I had to turn to this mirror. And Carl's down there in the living room and talk to him and look at my face while I'm talking. That's an exercise you ought to try. Sometimes he's like, you drove me nuts. But he wanted to see what I look like when I talk to people. I kind of thought it was a charming face, you know, for the lot of work I had been in. But anyway, you know, my son died. You know, I went before he died. I had gone to Ohio to collect some money. Some money for a computer company, another company that wasn't paying their bill. And my son had passed while I was up there. Said to come right back down. That's just, you know, how my friendly face would be, you know. You need to pay your money, you know. I'm here to collect. Anyway, I dug your ass. So I got Carl. Carl was my Keep It Simple sponsor. You see these little signs on the walls we have. It says, keep it simple, you know, blah, blah, blah. Back when I got sober, it said, keep it simple, stupid. And everything was capitalized. The first letter was capitalized. It was KISS. And I get irritated when I hear these mamby-pamby things going on in the meeting. It's like, you know, my world had changed. My world had changed from being, you know, a hell-raising Marine to, you know, being, somebody that would ask you for money when you don't want to pay and things like that. Or a drug dealer. And now I was supposed to try to blend into this happy, you know, well, you know, fairly well-dressed and smiling little group of people. And nobody wanted to be my friend. So he said I had to quit carrying guns I could carry in my pocket to meetings. I said, well, okay, y'all. I still got this one in my jacket. He goes, that's okay. Summer's coming. I wanted him dead right then. Quit carrying so many knives. Take that blackjack out of your back pocket. It kind of hangs out. You're hard to approach. So the night owls let me stay. And then after a while, I came over here to Nava. I found out about Nava on New Year's Eve over at Denny's down the street. Then there was a group in here from Nava from the dance. And there was a group of us came in from Biscayne from the dance. And I knew a guy at the Nava table. He had worked for me and he was a frickin' drunk from hell. I used to hate working that man. You know, getting around him, he always stank, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I was like, oh, my God. And he was sober and he was happy. He was telling me about Nava. So I came to Nava. And I started running my mouth over here. And I got back to my sponsor at Biscayne, you know. And basically, he told me, you know, we're here to, you know, we're going to do this. We're going to do this. We're going to do this. You know, we're here to express, not impress. You know, to keep my mouth shut and my ears open. I didn't know all there was to know yet. But granted, you know, I had like, you know, two and a half months by then. You know. I was, you know, moving right along. But they didn't run me off and they didn't run me off over here. And it didn't take – I had like three or four months. I became the treasurer of the Friday night frights. And in the next several years, I became everything for the Friday night frights. Yeah. because I think it was in 94. NAVA went non-smoking. At first it was a whole building except for downstairs in that room over there. They called it the smoking room. When NAVA was first built, that was called the men's group. It's on the blueprints. So I was over there. That's where the Friday night fights met until it got really big and we met here. And it was like 40-something home group members. There was 70-something people here every Friday night. NAVA went non-smoking. And we went from 40 home group members to 70-something people and then three home group members and hopefully they showed up. People went other places to smoke. Or they got their drawers in a knot and got a case of the red ass and said, we're leaving. Telling us what to do. So for a long time I ran that meeting by myself. And sometimes there wouldn't be people show up after like a quarter after 10. But it recovered for what it was. It recovered and stayed in that room for a good many, I don't know, probably 12 more years before it finally disbanded. And I've been a member at 81-11. I've been a member of Triangle. And I've been at service at NAVA. I've spent 13 years on the board of directors at NAVA. Because when I first got sober, I thought, I thought that the only way I could stay around was I had to do something. Because there was this caretaker over at Biscayne, a room manager, whatever you want to call him, named Bobby Raynard. And he told me if I was going to stay around there, because I wasn't driving, I had to have a ride. If I was going to stay around there, I needed to do something. So he let me mop the floors. Then the night owls put me to wash in the coffee cups and ashtrays. I thought, this just sucked. Because nobody, there wasn't obviously another Marine on duty over there because they suck at washing the ashtrays during the week. And when my time came, the damn things got clean. And back then, you know, Maybelline or whoever it was, Lady Clara, whatever it was, made that lipstick that wouldn't come off in a pool. That shit will come off on a coffee cup instead of house. It doesn't want to come off. I didn't understand how it could come off on a coffee cup. But it didn't make any sense. But there's something about lipstick and ceramic. I don't know. But I did that for a couple of months. And that was my end. That was the way I was a part of because I was still separate from all of you people. I was still an outsider. You know, you still weren't hugging me. You quit getting out of my way a lot, but you still weren't hugging me or saying, keep coming back. And then after a couple of months, there was some other new guy in there washing the coffee cups and ashtrays. And see, I just assumed I was Biscayne's bitch. You know, there he is. Whatever we need, just let him do it. And this guy was a newcomer and they had him washing the coffee cups and ashtrays. And I pitched a little fit. Just watched as I pitched a fit. And I said, that's my job. You know, that's the only way I can get to stay. And now he's a newcomer. It's his turn, you know. Spirit of rotation. Like, what the hell does that mean? You're talking some psychobabble bullshit. What the hell does spirit of rotation mean? I knew everything, but I didn't know anything. And so when I got over here to Nava, I would do little things here and there, little here and there. And I became Nava's bitch. And then somebody told me I should run for the board of directors. I said, no. I said, no, we need somebody. I think it was him. And I said, you know, the board of directors is kind of clicky. You know, I don't belong to any of these guys. He goes, yes, that's why we need you on the board of directors. And it was your fault. You, Terry. And he was a newcomer. Because everybody pissed him off all the time. And so I got on the board at Nava. I spent a couple years off the board, but in the time frame, I've been on 13 boards at Nava. I've been on everything there is to be. Except for sunshine. I was never on the sunshine director. I was never the sunshine director. That's the one that sends flowers or contacts people in the hospital or spreads good cheer or things like that. I did everything but the kitchen. I've been president five times. I've been vice president a couple times. You know, I've been the liaison for 11 of those years. The A.A. Larch. It wasn't until we had another female president sitting in the back of the room that she gave me kitchen. That's like, the woman just hates me. She just hates me. Debbie O. gave me the kitchen. Damn. My first two years, I was entertainment and house and grounds by myself. Anyway, I moved on. When Rusty and I went over to Biscayne, we got to talk one day at lunch and there's a lot of old night house people over there so I went over there on a Tuesday night and made that my home group and I've been there ever since. Since that time, I've spent the last six years on the board of directors at Biscayne. Service work is a very important thing for me. I have a hard time sitting down. I have a hard time being still. I have a really hard time being still and not letting my mind work. Terry asked me one day, he says, why are you always mad? He asked me downstairs. I can tell you, I can show you right where he asked me. I said, what do you mean I'm always mad? He goes, why are you always mad? Why do you always look like that? I'm like, and it just dawned on me, I was thinking and usually when people ask me why I look so pissed off is when I'm thinking about something. Now, why do you think this is an unattractive face when I'm thinking when God put it on the face of the earth? I don't know. But he gave it to me to walk around with and I'm kind of okay with it. Now, you know, as Rusty would say, I'm at peace with my priorities. I'm at peace with what I got to look at. But, you know, sometimes I'm pretty damn attractive. But, not with just this damn suit on. Oh, you look good. You look good. It's just the same face. Okay. One of those things Carl had me do in early somebody was put on, was put right on my mirror. The first thing I see in the morning. You know, if it's the first thing you have to go do some things the first thing. It was right on there. You were looking at all the answers. No, that was Greg. Carl said, Frank, you're wrong. That was the first thing I put on my mirror. I put on lipstick because I knew that shit don't come off. Frank, you're wrong. And every day when I got up and went to the mirror in the bathroom, I saw that. Whatever I was thinking, I'm wrong. My second mail sponsor was a guy named Craig Pierce. And he had me put on that. You are looking at all the, you are looking at the answers to all your problems today. In the meantime, between Carl and Craig, I had this, still this hatred towards God in most of my fellow men. Because, you know, it was like, why not me? Why me? They gave me a, a grief sponsor. A woman named Mary Campbell. And Mary Campbell was, you know, everybody thought it was this sweet little old woman. She's about this tall, weighed about 300 pounds, you know. You know, but, but, if you get her, if you're sitting beside her or get her off by herself, she was not the sweet little, you know, grandma everybody thought she was. And I used to have to give her rides home for the meetings. And I had to get, had to get her up in my van. It wasn't pretty. And I'd spend Saturdays with her and listen to her talk and she would tell me about Bill and Lois and she knew all these people. And I'm like, you know, I'm dreading this all the time. Like, what good, what good is this? And today I wish I, you know, recorded her and see what she had to say. All the damn newcomers, they're all like, I don't want to do that. I don't want to do this. And it's like, if you just, you know, listen. Because we all come in here with a plan. Like, you know, we'll just skip along until whatever works and then we're out the door. And it kills us. It kills us. We don't take the steps. We don't take the suggestions. Of course, I wasn't given very many suggestions when I got sober. And we know better. We know our life experience. We know we can handle whatever. We know we can do that. And I see people all the time taking that next hit, taking that next drink because they know better they can handle it because they know the effect it will have and they have no idea what's going on inside their own body until it's too late. And then the famines have to take over to bury somebody else. Is that because I know too much? I know enough. I've lived this long. Hell, barely. I can't tell you how many times I've almost died or how many times I've had a gun in my face. Or how many times I've put a gun in somebody's face. I've put a gun in somebody's face. I've put a gun in somebody's face. I've put a gun in somebody else's face. I'm not going to tell you that. You know. There were things I came in here that I would never tell anybody. And I haven't. Except for my first two sponsors. My first two sponsors were God put them in my life for a reason. He never said what reason, but, you know, He didn't talk to me like that. But, um, they did what I did. They did the things I did. They did it better. They did it longer and they got paid more money for it. I may not have lived that long. I don't know. But they got out. And they got sober. It took me a long time to come to a place where I could have this higher power. This God of my understanding. Because, believe me, I know it's not, there's a few of you in here that understand a concept that I'm comfortable with. I call my, I call my higher power grandfather. There are some people in the room that call their higher power spirit. You know, not all, not all of us go with the, with the, I'm a recovering Baptist, by the way. I was raised up by, you know, a great grandmother that would beat these shit out of you in God's name. Um, but I found that, I found that, that place where I could have somebody to talk to. And, I don't know, nowhere in that book does it say we got on our knees and asked, what it says in the book is that we asked God. We asked God. Now, you know, for the sake of argument, there is, um, I think when Bill first wrote the How It Works or the Twelve Steps, he did, it was in there. Get on our knees and ask, you know, get on our knees. But, the first 100 took that out. There's a lot of things in the, in, depending on which volume of the book you have, which edition, things change a little bit. Um, of course, I naturally, grasp on to whatever I think I can use for me the best. And I suggest you do the same thing. Go through there. Find out what works for you the best. You know, I was told early on that all this shit works. All the tools that we offer you work until you try to use them as weapons. And then you can hurt yourself and other people. I'm sure there's a buttload I would love to say and some of it I wish I hadn't said. But, um, this is all, you know, this is me trying to share my experience, strength, and hope without cussing. And, uh, it is some, it's a little laborious for me sometimes. It used to be very hard. The first time I told my story I was at GMHI. And, for young people that was the Georgia Mental Health Center. They closed it. But, uh, I'm not that old. I'm just 27. Remember? Yeah. Um, I currently, you know, uh, do service work where I can. You're not supposed to let anybody know you're doing that service work. I'm like, bullshit. Carl was adamant. I had to do so-and-so, so-and-so and not tell anybody and let anybody see me do it. I had to call people that I didn't know and talk to them on the phone for at least five minutes. I'm like, these people want to hear from me. Hell, you don't even want to talk to me in a meeting. Had to do things like that. I had to, when I got sober I had to get a dictionary. Not because I'm stupid, it's because my sponsor made me do it. He didn't suggest I get a dictionary. It was part of the required reading was to look up the words I thought I knew because I would tell him what the big book was saying. He said, where'd you get that from? I said, I get it from the book because back then they wouldn't tell you where shit was in the book. You had to read the book to find it. So I'm reading this stuff and I said, well, it says this. He goes, no it doesn't. I said, yes it does and he goes, find it. And I'd read it to him and he goes, well, I said, it's implied. He goes, just read the black part. Everything you know about what's in that book is on the first page. And in case you don't know what's on the first page of the big book, I suggest you go get one and look in there. Because I'm not going to tell you. But that's basically what newcomers know is what's on the first page and what they hear in their first, you know, 90 meetings. Because they're not reading the book. They're not reading the literature. They're reading the room. You know, they're taking the steps off the wall. They told me if I took those steps off the wall when I got here I'd have an off the wall program. You know, just on and on are little things and Carl was, you know, keep it simple. He would just, he would blow me kisses across the room when somebody was saying something that irritated me because he could see I'd get red, I'd get mad and he just, and this guy weighed like 320 pounds covered in tattoos and he went, you know, I'm not dealing with this, you know, this men blowing me kisses thing. I didn't do too well either. And, you know, Craig was my God sponsor. I'd come to Craig with all this stuff and he'd say, where's God in all that, Frank? I'm like, what the hell does God got to do with this? This is my life problem here. This is what's going on today. What do you mean God? You know, I didn't get it for a long time. It took me four years. Four years for my fourth birthday I crammed and I finished reading the first 164, five pages of this book. It got around to my fifth birthday and I crammed and read all the stories. You know, some quickly, some slowly, some not at all. So, you know, I don't keep very many pigeons. I give them things to do and they can't do it. They want what I call fast food recovery. They want to drive through the line and say, oh, I want to get sober. Somebody give them a bag and they eat something and drive out. They don't want to do what they call the work. You know, I'm one of those guys, I don't work the steps. It says, we took the steps. You take the steps. You don't work the steps. The steps work for you. How arrogant is that? That you're going to work the steps. You're going to make it better. Just take the steps. Just read it and do it. That's all it's saying and we're going to make a big production out of it. That we're working. What alcoholic when they get here want to do any damn work? None that I've met. They want to quit shaking maybe but they don't want to go to work. So, your recovery is up to you. You have to take part in your own recovery. You have to do this stuff or you won't be here. You won't stay here. You're going to die. We're going to bury you. We might have a memorial for you if we like you. But if you die somewhere where we don't know about like if you go on one of these little excursions then you're going to get a tombstone with a tombstone with a John Doe on it maybe. If you want to have a party stay sober. If you want to party the rest of your life stay sober. It's a lot of fun until it's you know it's not. Then it's a lot of fun again. Thank you for not walking out on me. Thank you very much for your story dad. I appreciate it. Especially for not embarrassing me. Thank you one and all for joining the Blue Chip Speakers meeting tonight. When somewhere strange to me makes a it