Queens Big Book Study – Part 1 – Gary B. – 2008

I'm Gary. I'm an alcoholic.
My dry day is the third day of December, 1964.
That makes me old.
You can't do that without putting on some age. It just doesn't work.
And I got sober in a nut house in a place called Evanston, Wyoming.
Okay? That's the date, the third of December, 1964.
I found myself there about as surprised as anybody, and they said it was voluntary that I walked in there on my own.
Now, we all know that may be physically true, but in fact, that's not what happened, is it?
Some way, somehow, something got in the way, and I ended up in there to get sober.
And...
I was, I was, what the hell was I?
I was 24 years old, a month before my 25th belly button birthday.
And my wife and I had been married for a while.
We had three little girls.
And, in fact, the last little girl was, I can remember her birthday, because she was born in August of 1964.
I got it, Julie, thanks.
And, so I can remember hers real well.
So, but the interesting thing about that, when I came home from the nut house four months later and saw her,
that's the first memory I have of what she looked like.
I understood that we had a baby girl, but that's all I knew.
I couldn't picture her.
I didn't know her and all that until I was four months sober and fresh out of the...
out of the nut house, and at that time she'd have been about, what, seven months old, I guess.
And our time on from then, if you will, has been one in AA.
My first three or four years in AA were in Wyoming.
And not a hell of a lot in AA in Wyoming.
There's not a lot of anybody in Wyoming.
There are more people that live on Staten Island than the entire state of Wyoming.
Dead serious.
Absolutely true.
Wyoming might have a half a million people.
There's a half a million people in the whole state, and it's, let me see, it's a square state.
It's 400 miles to the side, and I think that's 16,000 square miles, if I can do any math.
And so there's a little space between people, and the AA there was pretty limited.
I didn't know what it was, but somewhere in there my first four months of sobriety,
I had discovered that for me to survive, it meant I had to hang in an alkaline synonymous,
like it or not.
And that was something I seemed to accept, and I'm not sure why,
because I hadn't really believed in anything I'd been told up until that time.
But I just bought it, and I said, okay.
I understood I was a real alcoholic.
I learned that with the old Gelinek charts.
Any treatment center people here, they had a U-shaped chart,
all the various stages of alcoholism as you go down and you hit the bottom at the mess with the DTs,
and the convulsions and all that stuff.
And I just remember checking it off, and I'm down there in the bottom, and I equated to it.
And I didn't know that, I kind of think you could look at that and still not be a real alcoholic.
I think it's possible for a heavy drinker to get to that point and not be the kind of drinker that I was,
and I'll talk a little bit about that more later.
But that's how I learned, and it had a great deal to convince me.
So anyway, I came home to my bride and our children, and we ended up, you know,
we ended up going to school in Laramie, to University of Wyoming, and finished school.
And then I ended up in Denver with, where I came in contact with a bunch of young people in AA.
And many of you know some of that bunch, and we met them, and many of you are descendants
of the sponsorship line that has come down out of there, and I'll touch on some of them as it goes on.
But anyway, at this point, at 44 years old, I was a young man.
I was a young man.
At 44 years of sobriety, I effectively had 40 years of working in the big book and doing what it says.
First four years was trying everything I could try that would have been easier
and seemed to be more compatible with my extremely high intellect.
And every time I did it, I got worse.
I just got worse.
And so the time came where I had to say,
I had to set aside all my books, my 12 and 12s, my Hazelton garbage, and those things,
and I had to spend good money for some of that crap.
And some of us found a way to get started in the big book,
and that's what we'll be sharing with you more now.
Had the good fortune later on, after we moved to Denver and that, to meet Mickey and Marie.
And just so you understand,
I knew them long before they were superstars.
I knew them back where they were a complete lunatic.
Yesterday.
Yeah, the day before yesterday, yeah.
But I think Julie would agree with me from the time we first met them and watched them
and that we were in love with them.
We weren't allowed to be real close to them for a number of years,
but maybe that will come up in our conversation.
This weekend.
But all we got is our experience to share with you.
It's with the book Alcoholics Anonymous,
and it's with our experiences trying to do what the book says,
whether we did it well or not.
And for me, you're going to hear both sides of that story.
And with that, I'm going to hand it to you, young lady.
It doesn't matter.
No, this one's fine.
Stereo.
Stereo.
Whoa.
I love it.
Hi, my name is Marie,
and I'm a grateful member of the Al-Anon Family Groups.
Hi, Marie.
And I am married to Mickey, and I love Gary and Julie.
Most boring story I ever heard about somebody drinking, all right?
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
Okay, now we can roll our sleeves up and get into this.
God bless you.
I grew up in Indiana,
and I did not grow up in an alleyway.
I grew up in an alcoholic home.
I grew up in what most people would consider a normal home.
And, you know, I didn't have all the stuff going on that a lot of people did
until I was a real follower.
I went off to college and decided to spread my wings.
And in doing so,
I experimented with all the things that you probably have experimented with,
pot, alcohol, acid,
and you'll probably hear a little bit more about that later,
but none of it really worked.
And so my history of alcoholism starts when I met Mickey in college.
Alcoholism, the family disease, I'm not an alcoholic.
But I met Mickey, and I met Mickey, and I met Mickey, and I met Mickey, and I met Mickey.
I met Mickey, and he chased me, and he caught me,
and I was not thinking of marriage or, you know, getting hitched or anything.
But there was something really compelling me,
and there was a fit between the personalities, his personality and my personality.
And, of course, you'll hear more about that also later.
But, yeah.
I married Mickey just as I had graduated from University of Denver, in Denver.
And we had three years of marriage before he got sober.
And so I got to experience active alcoholism.
And I can tell you that sobriety was harder.
Initial sobriety was much harder.
And so, you know, it's not, it's never been about,
you know, oh, we hope that this person just cleans up, you know,
stops drinking and everything will be okay.
And you know that from your own lives.
You know, it's, it's, this is a, this is not just a simple matter of putting the booze down.
And for the family, it's not just a matter of having the alcoholic in the home put the booze down.
So it's been, the adventure started when he got sober.
And I began going to Al-Anon in, on February 22nd, 1974.
And, and have been going ever since.
Never really took a break, maybe two weeks at a time when we were traveling.
But it's a part of our life.
It's the only, it's, it's the unifying part of, of our marriage and of our family.
We do have an alcoholic daughter,
who got sober.
Somewhere around 10 years ago, I don't, I don't keep track, but, and she went back out and drank to find out if she was alcoholic.
And she did that, again, another story you'll hear more about, but just to give you kind of a little bit of a history.
So we have a daughter who is now about seven years sober, and a son-in-law who's seven years sober, and two other children, and they're not alcoholic.
And I have, from the very beginning in 1974, there wasn't a whole lot of literature.
So from the very beginning, I was raised on the big book as my literature, as my way of working the steps.
In our traditions, it says we practice the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, which the original directions were the big book.
So, you know, I always took it as that was appropriate.
And I'm really not here to do a lot of.
You know, bad-mouthing about Al-Anon not accepting the big book
as a piece of literature, it's only frowned on in the meetings.
And everybody that I know and that I work with,
we work it through the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And it is easily adapted to the family disease.
So it has always been my way of dealing with this program
and putting the spiritual principles into practice in my own life.
So I am a big book Al-Anon.
And I have done a lot of work with Alateens.
I'm privileged to sponsor Gary and Julie's daughter,
who was one of my first Alateens back a long time ago, 33 years ago.
And I now get...
I get to sponsor her in Al-Anon.
It's just...
It's an amazing circle of love that's just wonderful.
And so a lot of the other stories that I have, you'll hear.
But Al-Anon is the basic principles upon which I base my life
and upon which we base our marriage and we base our parenthood.
And so, more later.
Hi, everybody.
My name is Mickey.
I'm an alcoholic.
Hi, Mickey.
I'm Mickey.
I'm an alcoholic.
And it's so nice to be with you.
It's such a privilege.
The tears come already.
To be invited into someone's life.
To be welcomed.
To come because of your experience.
By dint of not dying.
And by working this program, it's like...
There's a...
I won't go into that.
But this is an example of what can happen to our lives
as they get crafted by the program, the practices and principles
and the higher power that we follow.
And this program, we don't know where he's going to lead us.
We don't know who we're going to be with or what we're going to learn
or get to exchange.
I'll tell you that my sobriety date is February 12th, 1974.
And so, I beat Marie into this deal by 10 days.
I'm just saying.
But I love the program of Alcoholics Anonymous.
But I love the program of Al-Anon equally.
Without Al-Anon, we would have no marriage.
Al-Anon saved my social life.
Alcoholics Anonymous saved my ass.
And so, coming to you tonight, it's like...
I heard this one time.
Beware the man whose knowledge comes from one book.
But I have to tell you, my knowledge comes from one book.
But it's a book that goes...
It goes like this.
I mean, there's nothing new in Alcoholics Anonymous.
What's new in Alcoholics Anonymous is that it's applied to this disease.
How did they ever figure out that when the spiritual maladies overcome,
we straighten out mentally and physically and sexually and socially and financially and, and, and?
I mean, what a gift, right?
So, in the terrible world of alcoholism, this dark world, this ray of light,
and so, I don't apologize, truly, for being a man whose knowledge comes from one book.
And I, at the end of the day, I love to laugh,
but I have no sense of humor about screwing around with this program.
I'm sorry.
Because it saved my life.
It doesn't mean that...
God bless you.
It doesn't mean that you can't have, like, a different understanding of how this...
or nuance or whatever.
That's not the issue.
To me, the issue is, is that if I follow this,
I get to live.
I drank from the time I was four years old
until I was 27.
I spent my life in a bottle.
I was hospitalized at 26 years old with a suspected heart attack.
It's hard, actually, to be a practicing alcoholic.
It's hard on the machinery.
You know what I mean?
You do know what I mean.
And so, I...
And so, what happened is the idea...
I got this break.
I got this moment in my life where it's like...
I woke up every day for what I say is two weeks.
My wife says a month.
So, we're going to believe her on that one.
Thank you.
I woke up every morning and I said,
today I'm not going to drink again.
And that afternoon or that evening, I was drunk again.
And this thing was going on.
And mind you, I just told you that I drank my whole life.
But this gift was given to me where all of a sudden,
I noticed this simple thing.
I cannot stop drinking.
I cannot stop drinking.
There's no compelling thing that you can throw at me
that will cause me to stop drinking
and no compelling thing that I can throw at me
that will cause me to stop drinking.
I got this.
And I went for...
At the end of whatever period of time that was,
I went for a week without a drink.
I don't know how this happened.
And we went...
We were invited to some friend's home for dinner.
And he poured out a beer.
And, you know, there was this light coming through the window
and it hit that glass of beer.
You know what I mean?
It looked like a beer commercial.
And it was almost like angels were singing as well.
You know what I'm saying?
And it was...
I mean, I can describe it to this moment.
And I looked at that beer and I said,
God, that is the best looking beer.
Maybe in the universe.
And so I turned to my wife and I said,
I'm going to have just one.
And that's all I had.
Now, and a week later, I came into Alcoholics Anonymous
and I knew nothing about you.
I came to you because you had alcohol in your name.
Go figure, right?
And that's it.
But it's like I tell people that we live in miracle country.
We live in miracle country.
And when I had nothing, no defense against the drink, nothing,
God stopped me.
He stopped me.
And so this becomes a push me, pull you.
You know, like Dr. Whatever-It-Was,
who wrote about, talked with the animals.
You say potato.
It's Dr. Doolittle.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Anyway, it's a push me, pull you.
But it's this cooperative venture.
It's not like God turns on all the power and I've got no part in this.
I have a part in this.
And without that cooperative venture, I get to become a statistic.
And it offends my ego.
Really, I don't want to die a statistic.
I'd like to die as Mickey.
So what we came is we've shared so far is we came to,
to share the exact thing that you're doing.
We're all doing this, hopefully.
But what we can do is really by way of being here this weekend,
is maybe we can encourage each other to keep doing it.
Maybe there's a little insight that might open some window and say,
wow, maybe that has some bearing on what's going on in my life.
And I will give you a preview right now that I made a man a promise.
That if God would give me the power,
I would never shut up about the second half of the first step as long as I live.
So please understand that if you're looking for the lengthiest drunkologue you ever heard,
you will not get it from me.
But I came here to talk and to share about the disease of alcoholism,
not alcohol-wasm.
And it has such tremendous bearing.
If you have this disease,
at least I can share what's happened.
And with me, living in this disease and trying to apply these principles.
So what an exciting opportunity for all of us.
This isn't a biblical presentation,
but I would like to share the most,
the line out of the New Testament that has the most resonance with me.
I'm not selling Bibles.
But here's what the line is.
So what happens is Jesus and his God,
they were working hard.
They're carrying the message and they're out there working hard.
And he looks at his apostles and he sees that they're smoked.
These guys are tired.
And he goes down to whatever it is,
the Sea of Galilee,
and he gets some boats.
And he says this to his apostles.
He said,
come aside and rest a while.
And when I heard that line,
it just resonated in my soul.
Come aside and rest a while.
We work so hard.
We get so busy.
You know, we're cooking over time.
We're just moving.
You know, it's almost becomes life is moving target theory.
You know, if you stay in motion, you don't get it.
But anyway,
to come aside and rest a while is two things for me.
One, it's this weekend.
So we try to leave our lives out there for a minute
and just come and be with the power that saved us.
And secondly,
it is any time for me that I go through the 12 steps of alcoholics,
anonymous,
which I do formally at least once a year
to come aside and rest a while
because we're offered in Alcoholics Anonymous
an opportunity to take our hands off of our lives for a minute.
Stop trying to go and do a frontal assault
on every problem that comes to us
and just go and do what they ask us to do.
Consider these things,
do these things,
and that is come aside and rest a while.
And the result is that my life improves.
So,
um,
now we've done the only thing that we've coordinated.
And the rest of what's going to happen here is truly in God's hands.
So,
um,
and I have to say
what a delight it is for me to be with my wife,
with you.
We've been married for 38 years on December 31st on New Year's Eve.
And,
um,
we chose that.
I actually selected our wedding date
so I couldn't forget it.
Now that's a drunk,
yeah,
that's a drunken action.
Yeah.
Um,
and to be with Gary and Julie,
especially because Gary is my sponsor.
And I asked Gary a question,
I mean,
to show you how far back we go,
I asked Gary a question when I was brand new sober.
I asked him this.
I said,
Gary,
I said,
do you do something if it's hard?
And he said,
yeah.
And I said,
I don't do anything if it's hard.
You know,
so I came to Alcoholics Anonymous for remedial life.
I didn't do anything that was hard.
I was frustrated and daunted by everything.
And to get a chance to have a life,
I mean,
it's the best,
right?
It's the best.
So,
what,
what do we do now?
Because you're my sponsor.
Do I turn this off?
Oh,
I like this.
It's a damn kind of a coordinated assault here.
I think,
um,
when I,
um,
well,
when I was first around AA in Wyoming,
I was by far the youngest member in any of the AA groups I was in,
even in the Nuthouse.
Uh,
there was,
there was,
I was in with a group of guys that,
uh,
I understood to be and still do as,
as alcoholics.
But,
um,
I felt so different because I was so much younger than most of them.
And it was,
uh,
still,
it wasn't much of an issue though.
I don't know how to phrase that.
There was a day when we were sitting,
me and a few of the others were sitting around a round table that maybe had eight chairs on it.
And they'd been talking about their alcoholism.
And the biggest thing they said that I related to was they just had to find a way to stop because every time they drank,
they never stopped until they got stopped.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I could relate to that because I got stopped in a number of ways.
A couple of times a cop helped me get stopped.
I got stopped because I ran out of money.
I got stopped because the bar wasn't going to take any more of my checks.
You know,
I got stopped because I actually felt like I had to go to work.
And those occasions got further and further apart.
And those guys were talking about their experience.
And I picked up on that.
And then later on, I learned that was the most important thing that happens in Alcoholics
Anonymous because the new alcoholic hears what the old alcoholic was like from the
alcoholic's own mouth.
And that was my case.
I heard it from those other guys.
And they didn't know they were carrying me a message because they were in there for the
same reason I was.
They were just older and some of them were a little more beat up.
I don't know how you could have got a hell of a lot more beat up than I was.
I was six foot two inches tall and at that point in time, when I hit that nut house,
I weighed something less than 130 pounds and had taken a couple of pretty good beatings
and ran our little, I think it was blue Plymouth up the back end of a cement truck.
And that didn't help me or the truck, or the car.
And so, when I came back, I didn't know what to do.
I didn't know what to do.
So, I came out of there and they locked me up in a room for a week.
And I knew there were other people out there because every once in a while they'd come
in and look through that little window in my door that was kind of like that.
And you'd look up and there'd be a nose flashed up against the glass.
And when I was let out of there, they gave me some stuff so I wouldn't feel so bad.
And I can't tell you much about it.
It's nothing that they use today.
They're just so kind to help people through withdrawal.
And they put me in with the other alcoholics.
And that probably saved my life.
And it probably did.
I was around alcoholics in AA, in Wyoming, for a little over, not quite four years.
I got, I had the 16 weeks in a nut house.
And then we moved to Laramie.
And I got a free ride to college.
And attended AA.
And I, other than one person that I went, I went with my wife.
I was with my wife.
I was with my wife.
I was with my wife.
We 12-stepped him in jail.
They said, we just don't know what to do with this guy.
Maybe you can help him.
And we went and got him out of the jail, and he was a heroin addict, a smack addict,
and they hadn't seen many of those in Cheyenne.
So we took him to an AA meeting.
We didn't know that was a problem then and that it wasn't cool.
But he was the only person there that was close to my age.
And so we kind of protected each other a little bit.
He and his wife came over to Laramie and went to college also, and they're kids,
and they lived a few doors from us.
And we would go to the AA meetings, and we would listen to that,
but we were kids compared to this other old guy.
And all I can tell you is what I never heard in there.
I heard a lot of goofy stuff, and I'm not even going to bother sharing some of that with you,
but I never heard anybody in there except one time about taking,
in the 12 steps, an order.
They all had some wonderful theories, and a couple of other people had stayed sober for a while.
And the only talk I heard about the steps was from an old boy named Frank,
who had been in and out of AA many times.
But this time he'd had a few months of sobriety,
and he was sharing one day that he was convinced that it had to do with the third step.
He said, I'd never done that before.
And I took the third step.
I took the third step this time, and I've been sober this long.
And, you know, the following Saturday, old Frank came down drunk,
and I thought, I'm not messing with that third step.
And I didn't for a long time.
But I continued to go to the AA, and then we broadened our horizons
and attended AA and some of the surrounding towns.
And surrounding towns there would mean 50, 60 miles.
And it would meet more people.
But I never once heard anybody talk about anything other than alcohol.
It was never confusing to me.
They talked about the effect the alcohol had on them, how they behaved when they had it.
And I was fully convinced because everything they said I related to, it seemed like.
I didn't relate to the older men and everything they'd had and maybe lost and that sort of thing.
But I recognized what happened when they drank.
And occasionally, one of them would get honest enough to talk about their failure sober.
How some things that weren't working out, but not very often.
And finished high school, finished high school, finished college and ended up in Denver
and ended up attending the Denver Young People's Group, and that was different.
Because here were people attending AA meetings who had used about every drug in the world.
And I had no experience.
I never, to this date, I've never smoked a joint.
I've never done any, never stuck anything in my arm or anywhere else.
And I heard things like, the cool language at the time was, I'm a drug abuser and an alcoholic.
And it didn't make sense to me, but they seemed happy with it.
And, you know, that kind of language still doesn't make any sense to me.
I remember that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm a real alcoholic.
And at that point in time, you had the same arguments you have today.
A drug is a drug is a drug and all that stuff.
But I don't relate to any of it, unless they're talking about being an alcoholic.
I just don't.
It's not that.
And then a fellow came along, and many of you know who he was,
but he started talking a little differently.
And he had some very believable.
He had some very believable charisma around him.
And he started talking, the lingo then, like it is now, it's their drug of choice.
And they'd say, well, I was using all these other drugs, but our drug of choice was alcohol.
And he'd sit there and scratch his head.
And he says, I don't understand that.
He said, I loved peyote.
He said, I really liked meth.
God, those were my choices, but I had to drink.
I couldn't drink.
I couldn't stop drinking.
He says, I'm an alcoholic.
I'm not a drug addict.
And so I watched that.
Now, that's a harder sell today because the treatment centers are pushing that a drug is a drug is a drug,
and it's all the same thing because it makes it easier for them to do what they do.
But it makes it harder with us to try to work and help an alcoholic find his way
or to help the drug addict to find their way, if you will.
Because if we're working with them and we discover we're not helping them,
it's up to us to get them where they can get help and to do it.
It's not up to us to kick them out of the closed meeting.
That's not it.
In fact, we opened our home group so they could stay for the meeting and we'd have a chance to talk to them.
They don't participate in our meeting, though.
Alcoholics Anonymous meetings are for alcoholics to participate in.
So back to that.
I was sober five years about when we decided that we were going to try something.
We had heard.
We knew the answer was in the steps.
One of us had picked up an experience with the big book in prison,
and the rest of us hadn't done that.
And so he was the only one there that really understood doing what we talk about here with that at the time.
But I was trying everything I could find.
I picked up the Hazelden Guide to Inventory one time,
and I'm reading.
I'm reading through it thinking that's probably what I'm going to do.
And about six pages into it, it tells me to take a break,
that you've probably been going through this too quickly.
You need to set the book down and take a break.
And I set that book down about 40, 39 years ago, I guess, as far as I got.
But that was as far as I got with anything in my efforts at that to take steps.
Yet I knew it.
And I was trying to do them through the 12 and 12.
Many years later.
And it's right on the inside cover of your big book.
If you want to look at it, Bill describes the 12 and 12 as an intellectual commentary of the AA program.
It was never meant to be a text.
And I was trying to get intellectually.
That's why I made my crack about my intellectual supremacy there.
Because that's what I thought.
And it didn't work.
I kept up.
I was still out there.
I hadn't drank.
I'm going to a meeting.
I'm going to a meeting.
I'm going to a meeting.
I'm going to a meeting.
I'm going to a meeting.
I'm going to a meeting.
I couldn't understand my life as Mary.
She's active in Al-Anon.
And we've got these little girls growing up.
And I can't stand to be home with them.
I couldn't stand it.
It would just get awful.
And I have to run to a meeting.
And I thought I'd run to meetings instead of trying to be home and be a.
And it wasn't because I didn't love them.
I couldn't do it.
I just couldn't get the first step the way that it should have been happening.
I couldn't understand that I couldn't manage any of that.
As much as I know.
I knew I was supposed to.
So my first step came to me over a little period of time there.
I know with that.
But it came through me trying everything else first.
And I'm asking each of you to please not do that.
Your answers you need are here in the book.
And if you find somebody to take you through it, your life will change.
And that's effectively what happened with me.
I think today that I had a lot more trouble understanding what the second half of the first step, like Marie talked about, than I did anything else.
And that was long after I'd been through the first three chapters of The Doctor's Opinion and the first three chapters.
And I'm getting into the fourth chapter when the bedevilments come up.
And interestingly, one of our gang.
I was reading that one day.
And he said, you know, it's surprising.
I just figured out that these bedevilments were supposed to be read when we're sober.
This is what's going on with me today, if you will.
And on any given day, one or all of them can be going on with me, can't they?
And so that was part of the process to find out, aha, that's what the unmanageable life is.
I can no more change myself from doing what I do.
I can't do what I was doing other than the man on the moon.
I couldn't do it.
I had to have some power, and there was only one way to get it.
So I guess what I'm just trying to convey to you is I had all these mixed messages about what the first step was about.
But somehow or another, there was a core of first step coming through it to me that I couldn't seem to get too far away from.
That I am indeed powerless over alcohol.
My life is indeed unmanageable.
Nowhere is there a promise that one day I will be able to manage my life.
But there are several promises on how my life will run if I take on a manager.
Capital M.
And I can tell you my first four or five years of sobriety were miserable.
I woke up many, many mornings and I had a hole in my belly with the wind blowing through it like as bad as any day I'd ever had when I was drinking.
And I sat through more meetings where people would talk about how wonderful it was and how things were going.
And my first thought was just like the fellow that walked out of the room.
That's so much crap.
It can't be true.
Say a prayer for him tonight, will you?
Because that was me all those years ago.
It just wasn't any picnic.
But we kept going back.
And somehow or another, God had instilled this thing in us that the answer is here.
And we kept doing it.
And it kept happening for us.
I heard some wonderful stories from the old cowboys in towns like Greeley and Alton and places out there.
And they had some great things that kept helping me stay sober and do it.
But the thing that lasted the longest and works the most is my experience in the book and the steps.
So.
Anybody need a cigarette?
Anybody looking for a break?
We'll try to keep that in mind.
We've been going for an hour since the father started us off.
Just about.
It's 10 to late.
I'm going to take a break for 10 or 15 minutes.
And you guys can run down to the gazebo or wherever the hell that is.
Oh, one thing before you go.
Just real quick before you go.
I didn't discuss this with Mickey and Marie, but I know them well enough.
I don't think I'm out of line.
You have permission to ask me anything you want to.
And I promise you I'll give you the most honest answer I can at a time.
My wife is here, and I forgot anything I've kept from her gets said.
That won't be the first time that's happened to us.
With that, you have permission.
But however, the flip side of that is that gives me permission to ask you a question.
Okay?
But I think that would be well.
Are you guys in agreement with that?
We're not above any conversation going back and forth here.
We're all for it.
And the last one of these we did, I think that was two years ago, wasn't it, Jenny?
With Jerry.
That happened.
We had some wonderful dialogue going.
So feel free to bring it up if something's on your mind.
If we're touching on it.
Okay.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
All we got is our experience, and hopefully that's all we'll answer with.
Now you can take your break.
And Al-Anon explaining her first step can be varied.
There are a lot of angles from which we can come.
And in my program, I've come from a million different angles.
but the way that I can describe my first step is that when I was growing up,
I believed that powerlessness is really an okay place to be if your needs are taken care of
and you're not allowed or you don't allow yourself to have wants.
And I never had any wants because I didn't feel that I had the right to have wants.
And so if I didn't have a want, I was not frustrated with the powerlessness of being able to supply those wants for myself.
And so I was very timid.
I was very shy and I was very isolated.
And so I came out to Denver from Indiana to, as I said, spread my wings
and I wanted to maybe see if I had some life to live
and maybe there was a possibility of something more than this zombie-like existence that I had.
And in the process of exploring, I explored drugs, typically not heavy drugs.
I did a lot of pot.
I was talking to a few people beforehand about my pot experience
and the fact of the matter was is that it was not very enjoyable.
You know, I ate too much and I got paranoid and it wasn't that much fun, but I kept trying, you know.
And, you know, it's not a great drug, okay?
It's not a great drug.
I did try acid once.
I'm going to tell you the story later in the spiritual experience section.
But the point was is that I, you know, I was trying to find out who I was.
And, you know, I was trying to find out who I was.
And, you know, I was trying to find out who I was.
And there was, I was floundering around, you know.
I didn't have a whole lot of power, but I didn't have, I didn't, you know, I wasn't settling on anything.
And nothing really helped.
The alcohol, again, for me, alcohol just made me paranoid and wanted to eat too much, kind of like pot, you know.
It just was, it was not a satisfying drug for me.
It was not, it didn't.
It didn't fill that hole.
So, I met Mickey.
And probably for the first time, I allowed myself to want something.
Because it was what, it was what I didn't have, you know.
I had no passion in my life.
I had no choices in my life.
I had no excitement in my life.
You know, nothing was, was fitting into that.
That hole in my gut.
And then I met Mickey.
And, and he had passion.
And he had excitement.
And he had this life that he was devoted to, even though, you know, yeah, it was booze.
But it was still, you know, really in there.
But, but actually, you know, our relationship really didn't revolve around alcohol.
It, it revolved around dreams and hopes and things that I had never, ever touched.
On with anybody in my life.
And I began to want something.
And for a while, I got it.
Maybe it was kind of like, you know, when you first start drinking.
You know, you get that feeling.
You get that high.
And, and I got him.
And, and the story is very short.
Because we only knew each other three months before we were married.
And so here I had what I wanted.
What was, you know.
You know, really making me feel like I was fulfilled.
And the sad part for the family of an alcoholic is that one day you will be standing there.
And the alcoholic will be standing there.
And, and you know that you love them.
You know that they're, they're, you know, so much a part of you.
And they have now put on the mask of alcoholism.
Or the, the, the, you know, what, what would I call it?
The costume.
It's like they have now put on their disease.
And it's a different person.
And you want desperately to get them to take that off.
And to go back to who they are.
You know, because you know it's there.
You know that, that, that that person is there.
And there is not a damn thing.
There is nothing you can do to get them to drop the mask.
And what keeps you going is that every once in a while the mask drops.
And oh my God, you see them again.
And you're going, yeah, that's him.
That's him.
And, and the satisfaction comes back.
And then they put the mask on again.
And so all of a sudden, you know, you begin to experience.
At least in my life.
Now, like I say.
I did not grow up with alcoholism.
So I didn't have some of the trauma and some of the real frustrations that,
that people do when they get into these rooms.
Whether you're alcoholic or non-alcoholic.
You know, many, many of you all grew up with alcoholic homes, in alcoholic homes.
I didn't.
So my frustration started when he started disappearing into his alcohol.
And there was nothing I could do to.
Pull him out of it.
You can do all the different things.
You know, you can try in every single way.
And you cannot pull an alcoholic out of his, out of his alcoholism.
And, and, and then my first step really took place after I got into the program.
And the way in which it began to happen was.
Was.
That what I started wanting was to get him back.
And what I realized was that I had as heavy a mask on.
And I couldn't even get my own mask off.
I could not lay the persona down.
And, you know, it's kind of like I was thinking about what is it like.
It's like the three-year-old who decides that he's a dog.
And he goes around and he barks.
And he gets on all fours.
And you go, oh, isn't that cute?
That's really cute.
Now it's lunchtime.
You know, sit at the table.
And they go.
And they're not going to get out of their persona.
Right?
You can do anything and everything.
And that kid will stay a dog.
As long as he wants to stay a dog.
I'm not saying that Mickey wanted to stay in his, his, his pain.
But.
But it's like that's what it's like inside the family member who is going,
please, put it down.
You know, let's, let's be real right now.
So my powerlessness, I was, I was truly not uncomfortable with my powerlessness
until I wanted him back.
And he's the only one that I ever really,
wanted to be, to spend my life with.
You know, I had had lots of boyfriends and I had dropped lots of boyfriends.
And, you know, they were just kind of a pain and I just walked away.
But somehow his disease matched my disease.
And we fit together so that the satisfaction of, of what he made me feel like.
And how he filled out the empty places in me was unique.
And so when he disappeared, it was like my whole life.
I had, I had given my life to him.
Now he's disappeared.
And, and then I start to try to relate and, and, and he had gotten into AA
and maybe his mask dropped a little bit, but the really startling, horrible knowledge,
that I had lived with my own mask and that it was so thick that,
that there was no getting rid of that on my own.
So now I'm not just powerless over his alcoholism,
I'm powerless over my defects and my, my mask.
And some of the masks, you know, I would, I'd be June Cleaver one day.
It was a great mask because everybody loves June Cleaver, you know.
And, and, and .
.
But he got great.
.
.
great meals, you know, all the stuff that June Cleaver goes through.
And then I'm Dr. Phil.
And then, you know, and I could give you all the different masks that I put on.
But I was only comfortable with some other persona.
And getting down to my own persona has taken a lot of years.
It is the most, you know, Mickey told me one time, he said, I just want you.
And I was so scared with that sentence that I said, you know, I think you have the wrong person.
I am truly incapable of being me because I don't know me.
I don't know.
What that even looks like.
And the intimidation of thinking that that's where I had to go was that I had to go into a genuine me just about killed me.
And I was ready to walk away from the relationship because that's what he wanted.
That was horrible to me.
So my powerlessness.
Has to do with.
My wants.
Some of my wants are really good.
I want to be a good mother.
I want to be a good wife.
I want to be a good friend.
To him and to others.
And the truth is, is that if I don't have God's power, I am truly powerless to drop my mask.
And that mask is is thick.
And.
You can.
Ask Mickey.
It's a it's a frustrating thing to try to get through my mask.
It's really so it's very frustrating to get through an alcoholic's mask to truly it is.
And so when I think of I am powerless over alcohol, I think of that alcohol as the the the coating that comes over the person that I love and I have and our daughter also.
But, you know, and it it cuts.
Us off from each other and it cuts us off entirely.
So.
If I don't have God's power.
There's no place to go with that at all.
So.
With that, I'm going to turn it over to Mickey.
Thank you, Marie.
I.
I.
You know, we're so lucky the price of admission into this club is fierce, but once you get in, we're like in this living lab, you know, we can say to each other, you know, it hurts when I do this, you know, I know it stopped doing it, but I'm saying it hurts when I do this.
It's somebody said, well, yeah, it hurts when I do that, too.
And here's what I did about it.
And I talked to this person and they shared that.
And here's something that worked for me.
And we're not alone.
And we were given an instruction manual for operating an alcoholic.
Oh, my God.
You know what I mean?
How many people would like give anything to go into life and have an instruction manual?
The discovery process is what's tricky in here, though.
I wanted to be a man.
I grew up in an all warrior family, all warriors.
My father was a graduate of West Point.
My brothers, one of my brothers was a Navy pilot.
The other was a Marine officer in special operations.
I mean, I grew up.
I grew up in an all warrior family.
And I was like wrong way Hannigan.
I was not like a successful person.
And this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thing, I would love to tell you the only time that happened to me was when I drank.
I could do Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde like, here's the easiest way I can tell you.
I was an altar boy and a vandal.
I wanted to be a Catholic priest and I was a menace.
I was kicked out of every school I went to.
But it wasn't like a parent teacher conference, you know.
What's happening with Mickey was like, get the hints and don't come back.
And they like did it with a clear conscience.
It was like over.
You're not here anymore.
So that's the way it was for me.
And there's.
But, you know, by the grace of God.
And Alcoholics Anonymous, there's explanations.
I can tell you.
There was this book.
I have like a couple of books that I never read.
I have a million books I never read.
But I have a couple of books that I heard about that I didn't need to read.
And here's one of them.
The title was, it's out of the 50s.
What makes Sammy run?
What makes Sammy run?
And I found out.
I got to find out what makes Mickey run.
And I got a chance to stop running because there's tremendous, tremendous help for us.
Now, alcoholism is this very complex Medusa like disease.
And I want to read some stuff out of the book about the first half of step one and then go into the second half of step one.
But it's like Medusa like.
And incidentally, when I read, I'm going to be jumping like fast through the things.
But.
We have a.
Disease that society wants to treat this way.
The MD wants to treat that way.
The psychologist wants to treat this way.
The social worker wants to treat that way.
The priest wants to treat this way.
The rabbi.
It goes on and on and on.
But it's all part of one disease.
So I'd like to just start out.
And let's talk about.
We admitted we were powerless over alcohol.
And and what the book has to say.
And I mean, this is not the definitive jump through this thing.
But.
How did he do?
In the forward to the first edition on page 13, Roman numeral 13, it says, we have alcoholics anonymous or more than 100 men and women who have recovered from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body to show other alcoholics precisely how we have recovered is the main purpose of this book for them.
We hope these pages will prove so convincing that no further authentication will be necessary.
We think this account of our experiences will help.
Everyone to better understand the alcoholic.
Listen to this sentence.
Many do not comprehend that the alcoholic is a very sick person.
Now, I would submit that applies to the alcoholic right now in the rooms right now in this room.
What happens is we want to put our our hands on our hips with ourselves, give ourselves a good lecture and say, straighten up.
And plus, you know, it's very embarrassing to be an alcoholic.
It is embarrassing to be an alcoholic.
Alcoholic.
Alcoholic.
Alcoholic.
We got to drag us into the room, drunk or sober.
And we don't know how we're going to behave.
We don't know when that attitude is going to come, when the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thing is going to happen.
And like one minute, we're all good.
And the next minute, you know, we could take somebody apart just because it's now.
It's embarrassing to be an alcoholic.
All right.
And besides, we are sure that our way of living has its advantages for all.
On the doctor's opinion on 24, that Roman numeral 24, the physician, Dr. Silkworth, who at our request gave us this letter has been kind enough to enlarge upon his views in another statement, which follows in this statement.
He confirms that we who have suffered alcoholic torture is what we who have suffered alcoholic torture must believe that the body of the alcoholic is quite as abnormal as his mind.
It did not satisfy us to be told that we could not control our drinking just because we were maladjusted to life.
That we were in full flight from reality.
This is a checklist.
Or we were outright mental defectives.
It's a great club.
These things were true to some extent.
In fact, to a considerable extent with some of us.
But we are sure that our bodies were sickened as well.
In our belief, any picture of the alcoholic which leaves out this physical factor is incomplete.
The doctor's theory that we have an allergy to alcohol interests us.
Incidentally, we're going into the heresy zone soon, so just stay with me.
As laymen, our opinion as to its soundness may, of course, mean little.
But as ex-problem drinkers, we can say that his explanation makes good sense.
It explains many things for which we cannot otherwise account.
Now that I say heresy.
It's just a hot potato, and here we go.
So it's like we say a drug is a drug is a drug.
And we have alcoholics who have, as Gary mentioned earlier,
have gone way down the road of cocaine abuse and whatever and da-da-da-da.
But an alcoholic is addicted to a non-addictive substance.
What?
An alcoholic is addicted to a non-addictive substance.
How do we know this?
Let's take the common.
Wisdom.
One out of ten people is alcoholic.
We hear this all the time.
One out of ten.
Which means that nine people can drink alcohol with more or less impunity.
Now we've got the hard drinker it describes in here who can really get tangled up behind it.
But the only person who's going to get hooked on alcohol is an alcoholic by physiology.
It turns out the disease doesn't live in the bottle.
It lives in the human.
And it doesn't happen to everyone.
Everybody.
So if we take a group of like ten people and we lock them in a room and we make them shoot heroin every day for two weeks,
every one of them is going to walk out of that room addicted to heroin.
Why?
Because heroin is an addictive substance.
It's an opiate.
It will do that to you.
And it doesn't matter what your physiology is.
You know, you have an accident or something.
You take enough morphine, you are going to get hooked up behind morphine.
It's the nature of the substance.
Okay.
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Okay.
How, please, by a show of hands, anybody who has this answer,
how many drinks does it take to catch this disease?
We got in the back.
Yes, one.
That's my man.
Why?
Because my physiology is waiting for that drink, which is why, P.S., I got wet down.
Gary referred to the Dr. Jelinek's chart earlier.
I got wet down at four years old.
I grew up in Europe.
And in Europe, they give children wine cut back with water for the evening meal, okay,
and aren't we European, and ain't I alcoholic?
You understand?
And my brothers, they got the same wine at the meal.
They didn't go anywhere.
But I went somewhere.
I started stealing it.
I started to take the ride.
Dr. Jelinek's chart is like a horseshoe.
You start at supposedly normal, whatever,
and then you take.
The alcohol, and you take the ride.
And when you get down to the bottom of the horseshoe, if you find help,
then you can recover and go back up to the other side.
Well, I took the ride when I was four years old.
It's a hard ride, yes?
It's a hard ride.
And I didn't know there was a disease called alcoholism,
and I certainly didn't know that I had it.
Why is this important?
Why is the relationship with alcohol important?
Well, for obvious reasons.
Because if you can't stop drinking, you can't function.
And you're going to kill somebody, God forbid, with your car.
Or you're going to kill this person that God created.
Okay?
So, I mean, and you can't work.
And all the gifts that you've been given,
all the treasures that God has given us to exercise for ourselves and for each other,
are they going to be wasted?
And I get to be a statistic.
But that's not the only reason this is important.
This is important because if I can hear from you,
and we together can identify that you have this special relationship with alcohol,
with ethyl alcohol,
then I know a world about you,
which is what the second half of the first step is about.
Do you understand what I'm saying?
This allows us to identify that this person has this whole topography of the soul
and of the mind,
and we can talk to each other.
And I can tell you about the mental twists.
And we can laugh.
And we can do in five minutes what it would take a psychiatrist or a psychologist,
maybe years, to not even get to.
I'm not saying that those professions are useless.
I'm not saying that.
But what I'm saying is that Medusa thing,
oh, we've got to tell me about your drinking.
How was it?
You tell me about your drinking,
and all of a sudden, man, I've got all the lights in the marquee coming on.
Does that make sense?
This is very, very important.
But it's interesting that in the big book,
what it says is,
because here's what we want to do.
We want to make the bottle a straw man.
And everything we're going to do in our program is,
why do you work a program is a pretty good question.
Why do you work a program?
I work a program to get and stay sober.
It's a right answer.
Now, is that what you're going to do for the next 40 years?
Is that what you're going to do for the next 40 years?
Is that why you're going to work a program?
There's a world of other things wrong with an alcoholic.
How do we know this?
Because the big book says our liquor was but a symptom.
Now, if you're making the bottle the straw man,
then, oh, I don't want to drink.
And it's like we say, there's something drooling under the bed.
And it's this terrible, you know.
And I'm not saying that the bottle won't kill me, but it will kill me.
But I can't, I don't work my program against that.
Because, you see, the bottle's not going to jump off the shelf into my mouth.
It has to have an invitation.
And the invitation comes from my defects of character.
And unless, if you're going to dry me out, you better help me out.
Right?
Because if you don't address the defects in my character,
if this program's not going to address that, I'm dead.
I'm another statistic.
And what about my gifts?
What about what I have to offer to the world?
What about a difference maybe I can make in a good way instead of a bad way?
So, I mean, this is immensely important.
So an alcoholic isn't just another drug addict.
An alcoholic is an alcoholic is an alcoholic is an alcoholic.
It's a closed system.
It doesn't mean we can't get screwed up on other things.
I can get, and did, get screwed up on sex.
I can get screwed up on popularity.
I can get screwed up on sex.
I can get, you know what I'm saying, we can get screwed up on a lot of things.
But where the levers and the pulleys are is if, by the grace of God, I can stop drinking,
somebody can actually talk to me and say,
Son, let's sit down and talk.
Let's talk about how the cow ate the cabbage inside of you.
And maybe there's a way you can suck some free air and have some happiness and make some connection.
Give and receive love, some of those things.
Hold a job.
Like that.
We admitted we were powerless over alcohol as the first half of the first step.
Admit it.
They told me it's like the old movie tickets.
They used to say on them, admit one, those paper tickets.
The guy said it means to let in.
It means to let it in.
Is this the way it is with you?
Can you drink successfully?
If when drinking, can you stop successfully?
Do you obsess on it when you're not drinking?
Is it?
It becomes your life.
And like that.
So, that's a lot, huh?
But the passion is, I want to stand up on my tiptoes,
and I'd like to scream about this if you want to know the truth.
Because we're, remember the line?
Few people realize that the alcoholic is a very sick person.
We're an endangered species.
We're lemmings.
You know what lemmings are?
Right?
Right?
They're these animals that, I don't know if it's annually or whatever,
they just all get together as a group and throw themselves off the cliff.
That's us.
I didn't need the group.
Yeah.
Gary says, I didn't need the group.
But it was forming, independent.
We were all heading.
Okay.
Why is this important?
Why it's important is it's like, please, for God's sake,
can we just like really start to deal with this as a very,
very serious illness that involves so much more than drinking.
Okay?
But if I have this unique relationship with alcohol,
I got my price of admission into Alcoholics Anonymous.
And in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, we get to come home.
We get to come home inside,
and we get to have things happen that are beyond belief.
And I'll share more about that with you.
And let me just do a, well, anyway,
the phenomenon of craving turns out to be this point.
Now, on page 26 in the doctor's opinion, and that's Roman numeral 26,
at the top of the page it says,
we believe, and so suggested a few years ago,
that the action of alcohol on these chronic alcoholics,
is a manifestation of an allergy.
See, this is unique to our class.
That the phenomenon of craving is limited to this class,
excuse me, and never occurs in the average temperate drinker.
So now we've got another way that we can look at it and say,
gee, is this me?
Do I have this phenomenon of craving?
Shorthand phenomenon of craving for me, I'm out drinking in a bar.
They do that terrible thing where they flick the lights.
And,
it's like,
you know,
and I'm too drunk to walk,
but I got to have six beers.
And now I've got six draws sitting in front of me on the table.
Why?
Because somebody is about to cut me off.
This is my medicine.
I am now,
you know,
the Chinese say the man takes a drink,
the drink takes a drink,
and the drink takes the man.
That's what I have.
That's what I have.
What's it mean?
Well,
it means I'm going to drink myself to death,
or put a bullet in my head,
or be locked up for the rest of my life.
In the jail or in the insane asylum.
Those are the destinations for people like me.
It also means that I have an instruction manual,
God bless us,
that somebody wrote that if I can get into,
and somebody will help me and walk with me,
and help me understand
that I can learn these practices and principles,
that I'm going to have a life.
Okay.
The next page, which is 27.
You know,
it goes,
it's talking about men and women drinking essentially
because they like the,
you know,
the sensation,
or what does it say?
The effect produced by alcohol.
Up at the top of 27,
it says this thing,
you know,
and it talks about insane and alcoholic drinking.
It says,
this experience,
this is repeated over and over,
and unless this person can experience an entire psychic change,
there is very little hope of his recovery.
Oh,
an entire psychic change.
There's nothing to it.
Holy smokes.
Now, this is a radical disease.
How do we know that?
Because the solution is radical.
This isn't about,
I'm going to go hang out with you in a meeting
and catch it by osmosis,
and we're going to do fellowship.
Like,
I came in here really seriously antisocial.
I didn't give a damn about volleyball.
Volleyball.
Or pot luck.
Leave me the hell alone was pretty much my motto.
So,
an entire psychic change is the remedy for this disease.
Now, if you can't whip one up tonight,
then you may find yourself in a position
where you're going to have to go to these extreme measures
of going into the woogie woogie zone
and reaching out like a blind man,
I mean,
like a man,
like a man going through a pitch dark room
fumbling for the light switch
to look for a higher power,
some kind of resource.
Einstein said,
to solve a problem,
you can't go to the same level of thinking that created it.
So, we're going to be reaching for something.
Why?
Because this is serious.
Somebody's going to lose their sister
or their mother
or their wife.
Somebody's going to lose their husband
or their best friend
or their best employee.
Somebody's going to lose their family.
Somebody's going to lose their son.
One of us is going to lose our lives.
I've been working with a man
since 1980
who can't get this.
This is serious.
This is a,
for what it means,
because we're in the East,
this is a graduate of Yale.
This is a graduate of Penn State.
You know, Penn State Law School.
This is a very gifted man
who's living in a very expensive apartment
like it's,
you know, Skid Row.
You can't get it.
This is serious.
So, while we're together tonight,
you know,
we only get,
I only get one shot at you.
And God's giving me one shot at me
at the same time.
You understand?
So, it's like I'd like to talk turkey
and I know I'm running on and on.
But,
this is why God sent me here.
You know, somebody in this room
may want to die
by their own hand tonight.
I'm not saying they're going to do it.
But I'm not saying they're not.
This is serious.
So, anyway,
we admitted we were powerless over alcohol.
So, if I've got that relationship with alcohol,
what else might I have?
Then,
we'll go to page 52.
So, I know that's very short,
but we don't have much time.
So, let's go to 52.
So, this is a partial laundry list
of some other symptoms of alcoholism.
Right?
The abuse of the special relationship with alcohol
is one symptom.
Let's read a few others.
And while we're doing this,
I'd like to invite you to do this
because, again,
I made reference earlier.
We've heard this in our meetings.
We always laugh,
but it's true.
This is alcoholism,
not alcohol-ism.
So, we want to all, like,
go back and go back to the,
you know,
I did this when I was really crazy.
Like, when?
Yesterday.
Okay.
Page 52.
We had to ask ourselves
why we shouldn't apply to our human problems
the same readiness to change our point of view.
Please, please,
for a moment,
think about your life.
We were having trouble with personal relationships.
And what happens in our meetings
is we set this standard.
And the standard is,
well,
I haven't had a drink in 34 years
and, you know, what?
I get dipped in chocolate?
I mean, what is this?
Now, like I'm the winner
or here's another one.
I mean, we got this massive spitting contest set.
This is a competition.
Oh, man, I was in the, you know,
and eating garbage.
And I peel myself off the steam pipe to join.
Now we make him president of it.
Right?
He's got the hardest 17 penitentiaries.
Okay, lead my life for me.
No.
How about I'm so,
how about this in a meeting?
I am so lonely today.
My teeth ache.
I just can't make any contact with anybody.
We're having problems with personal relationships.
We couldn't control our emotional natures.
I'm leading this, you know,
we're helping facilitate this weekend,
but don't cut me off in traffic.
Then the horror show starts.
Nobody graduates from this disease.
You know when I'm going to graduate from this disease
is when they pull the grass over my face.
I'm going to have this every day until I die.
But if I give you the impression
that I'm now over alcoholism,
and what the hell's wrong with you?
Oh boy, let's go to another meeting.
That'll be great.
We were a prey to misery and depression.
Was this when drinking?
Maybe it's today.
I'm depressed.
Well, maybe you need a whole lot of antidepressants.
Oh, we'll just erase your symptom.
You're not,
you're not going to get it.
You're not going to get it.
You're not going to get it.
to seek god now you're not going to reach out to deal with your life i'm not saying there aren't
people who seriously need the medicine i'm not a doctor but please don't treat my symptoms if you
treat my symptoms in this medusa disease you're going to lose me my goad my encouragement to walk
down this road to have an entire psychic change and i'm going to share with you i mean later in
this thing you wouldn't believe what i do for a living and people say you know i've been given a
life that's beyond my wildest imagination wait till you hear this one so who knows what's waiting