Step 9 and the Slight of Hand with ‘Wherever Possible’ – Bruce E.

Thank you, Al. My name is Bruce. I'm an alcoholic. And pleased to be with you guys today. We made one effort at this before and the Zoom thing was crazy or something. And so we got that fixed and it finally prodded me into buying a new laptop. So I'm fairly geared up here now, I think. We'll get through today for sure. and I enjoy the fact that I was invited to talk about sponsorship I kind of believe somewhere inside of me that of all the important things in Alcoholics Anonymous and they all seem to have some importance for sure that sponsorship is the most important thing because it's the human connection and I needed a human connection when I got here because I wasn't in very good shape I had only old ideas when I arrived that's pretty typical for everybody when they get to age time but was set in my ways I was stubborn I was arrogant I knew just about everything And it just, it was the humanness in those rooms that really got my attention. I drank for 18 years, which isn't a long time in some people's story. It's quite a bit longer than other people's stories. But I like drinking. I first drank underneath a bridge when I was, that's where you're supposed to end up. I started there. I should have known there was going to be trouble. But I snuck out of the house one night and I had a quart of whiskey that I bought from a doctor's son and he stole it from his dad's liquor cabinet and I bought it for a dollar. If I'd have known what I was getting that night, I'd bought 100 of them. but uh i really uh two two good friends one who's still alive not an alcoholic just manages drinking very well in fact he sold wine for 35 years and then retired the other one's dead from alcoholism but we were underneath that bridge and opened that jug of whiskey up and we all took a swig passed it around and lit up a cigarette i had camel straights and they had marlboro reds and god we we talked like we were experienced 50 year olds just all wanted to be grown up and we passed that bottle around again maybe in 10 minutes or so and you know it was that kind of drinking that you sometimes see if you're out to a dinner club or somebody's drinking shots. You throw that baby down, you take a bite off the end of that gooseneck and swallow it and then you go oh god that stuff's good and it never looks good and it never sounds good right in that part of the deal but so we smoked another cigarette and we were watching out for cops and people and under that bridge and got the bottle out again. And Dick said, I don't want it anymore. He said, I'm starting to feel it. I'll get drunk. And Jerry said, I don' t want it any more. I don''t want to get drunk and so I made a serious newcomer mistake there to drinking. I drank the rest of the cork and I did that over about three hours and to make a long story short, we went from there to the swimming hole which was in the plan we were going to go swimming in the dark of night and that was kind of cool and I fell down and rolled down a bank of rock and into the lake and if those two guys hadn't been there I'd have drowned for sure I was just totally incapacitated I was sick for at least and I mean terribly sick I vomited things that weren't even in me. And they washed me up in a bathtub with my clothes on because I missed a little bit while I was trying to get rid of that whiskey, I suppose. It was just, it was a terrible, well, a terribly good learning experience because I didn't drink again for three days. And I was chasing what we refer to as those feelings that happen the first time you drink for 45 minutes or an hour. It was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I just, I thought it was great. And after I got well again in a couple of days, I couldn't wait to do it again. And what I learned, don't drink that much. And of course, there's helpers around. If you drink with people that are a year or two older, they would teach you, don't drink whiskey like that. You should just drink beer or have something lighter, like vodka, drink vodka. You can't even smell that when you drink it, so the cops never get you and all kinds of weird information trying to teach me what I needed to know, but I learned pretty quick. And by six, seven months later, I realized that I could drink a lot more than most people could drink. And I really didn't know how I did that. I thought maybe it was some people are good at golf. I'm good at drinking. It was a gift from God. I don't know where that came from, but boy, I didn't even know anything about alcoholism or drinking. I didn't realize that you may develop a tolerance to alcohol, and it just kind of got worse from there. I had problems in high school, and I didn'T think I'd pass senior English, which you have to pass in order to get out of school. I remember standing in line with 466 other kids, and my English teacher happened to come walking in the back of the university field house and down the row and you could always hear her come. And she was about six foot three and she always wore some kind of spiked heel, not long ones, but every time she stepped, I knew it was her before I saw her come around the corner and I jumped out of line and I said, did I pass your class? And she said, well, no, you didn't. And my heart just sunk. I thought, God, I better go back to school, summer school or something. I can't do this she said but I gave you a red D and a red D is just fine with me that's as good as an A right after she told me I really didn't pass her test or pass senior English and she said I gave you that red D because we never ever want to see you at Memorial High School again and so that's how i was doing in high school and i tried a couple colleges i got kicked out of both of those for drinking and skipping classes and it's hard to go to class when you know you have a few drinks in the morning kind of get shaped up again you just don't make it to school later in life and sobriety i did finish some education but wasn't to be had then i met a girl who i fell in love with in about four seconds. You've all worked with newcomers about dating. I hate to even tell that story sometimes because if you got somebody that's seven months, well, you don't think I should date what you did? It's a really fine line to walk right about that time when you're working with somebody. I said, well, you can do whatever you want, but I would suggest to you not do that until you get your life organized a little bit. That girl and I got married in May, that'll be 54 years ago. And I have no idea how she ever managed to tolerate the first 12 years of her marriage to me because I was everything you would never look for in a husband. I was gone for days at a time, I was drunk a lot I was violent, if she didn't listen to me I'd start throwing lamps or furniture, just rotten, rotten and you can take rotten to whatever level in your mind you want to take it to but as high as you can get it I think I was that and as time went along um i began to try to just get a handle on on my drink didn't want to quit drinking i just wanted to find out what it was that other people did that would come in and have maybe two or three drinks and then they go well i gotta get home for supper well that was my plan when i stopped i might be in town by 3 30 in the afternoon some days when i was working and i would stop for a couple i don't know that i ever had a couple if i did that ever i was upset because i had to leave to go to someplace like the pta meeting or something and of course i went to more pta meetings half in the bag than i did sober ever um until i sobered up at least couldn't understand it. I thought, and what I couldn't understand is when you have a couple, three drinks, something happens to me that just is like letting the air out of a great big bag. It's just kind of just after a drink or two, maybe even after a sip or two. And I look forward to that every day. I just felt good. I relaxed and it took the pressure off things. I would there was a guy that came in he worked for the city and he came in every day at four o'clock into my tavern that I hung out at one of one of them um and he would have two glasses of beer he'd say well I better get home she's expecting me for supper and I was amazed at that guy. I thought, how does he do that? I just couldn't figure out not only how he did that, but why would you do that. I mean, this is more fun than people should be allowed to have. And so I began to explore in my own mind, I wouldn't tell you or anybody else I was thinking about my drinking because if you said to somebody, you know, sometimes I think I drink too much bad thing to tell anybody because they'll follow you around like a dog in heat trying to get you to stop drinking they're going to give you all kinds of advice and you're right you shouldn't be doing this so I did that all all myself I kept that to myself um and not it's like telling somebody you're going on a diet and they catch you eating pie and ice cream after a meeting sometime I thought you were on the diet I don't need to hear that stuff but I couldn't do it I couldn't do it. At the end, I know for the last three years, maybe close to four, I drank against my own will. I would promise myself I'm not going to drink anymore. And I would be on the way out of town and I'd stop for a couple of drinks so that I could make the drive to Green Bay, which is a couple hundred miles away. and uh it's the same town that the 49ers just beat the Packers in in the playoffs if you don't know where Green Bay is anyway um not resentful about that it's just the way it went um and finally what really happened to me um was I kind of caved in on myself I imploded i couldn't stand the guy and become i was a terrible father i was make promises i couldn'T keep you guys when saturday comes we're going to do this and there was it was partly cloudy i'd cancel the whole thing because you know she looks like rain you know maybe next weekend boys uh i couldn't be a player in my marriage um you weren't doing it my way the way i wanted it done in the color i wanted to have done it wasn't going to happen in my life and somewhere in there my wife called some hotline in the middle of the night and talked to some guy as I recall at that time there were 19 people that carried that pager and if you got paged whoever had it would call it back and this guy called my wife back in the middle of the night I was out of town working someplace 18 of those people were well-degreed well-educated people and the guy that happened to be on the he was a sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous for five years and he was an AODA counselor and he got my wife's ticket punched right away he knew who he was talking to he knew what it was about he didn't know me from Adam and I didn't Know him he said I'll give your husband a call what's his number where he's at and so God the guy called me up he called me out four days in the row. And he asked how I was doing, and he told me things like my kids have more on the ball than I do, and your wife's really worried about you, and some of your other friends are really worried about you. And finally, on the fourth day, I'd put him off, and I'd bark back at him a little bit, and he said, listen, I'm not going to call you anymore. He said, I're not going waste my time on a worthless loser. But he said I'll tell you where my office is, and if you ever want to do something about your life and drinking and your rotten marriage that you've screwed up and the kids you've injured, you can stop by. You don't need an appointment. Just tell the secretary that I said you should be let right in, and I'll come out and meet with you, and we'll talk. I was over in Green Bay again that week, and at home from Green Bay, my wife told me that i had called two or three nights in the middle of the night of course drunk and i was crying and i just kept saying i don't know what's the matter and i don' t know what' s the matter she would try to call me back and i guess i'd pass out i couldn't answer the phone i'm surprised it didn't do a wellness check with the police department but it that wasn't so common back in those days I guess and I thought she was just trying to scare me out of drinking and it turns out when the phone bill came I saw all those telephone calls I made on that phone bell and that got my attention a little bit and then this character called me up and hung up on me finally on the fourth day and so I went and got drunk Friday night and Saturday night Sunday and then I was off and on the road again for the day but back in that night I was on the way to my watering hole to try to get well again and that car I was driving pulled into the parking lot of that building that guy said he was in and I went in and told that lady this guy here's his name he told me I didn't need an appointment just stop and tell him I'm here and he'd come out and say well just a minute I'll go get him and he did And he talked to me about his drinking for an hour. It seemed like a lifetime. I actually started feeling bad for the guy. He'd really made a mess out of his life. And then he started talking to me about a lot of things that I was doing. And I thought my wife had put him up to all that. She didn't know. She didn' t know all the stuff I was doin' in life. And I thought, how does he know this about me? How can he tell? How does he know? But he suggested that I go get detoxed because he said you don't want to just stop drinking cold turkey. That probably wouldn't be a very good idea for you and I wouldn't do that. I didn't do it either. Of course, don't tell me what to do because I'm going to do whatever it is opposite that. pretty recommended i go to a meeting of aa alcoholics anonymous jesus i'm not that bad and uh and then over the weekend or friday night i guess that week a guy who i drank with for 10 years had been sent to a treatment center by his employer and they told him if you don't go you don'T work here anymore and so he went he wasn't at the age in life where you could just go out and grab another job. And he invited me out for breakfast tonight. So I met him for breakfast, and I really did it because I didn't have any money. I had $11 in my pocket that day. I remember it well, because after he and I had breakfast, and we talked a while, and he said, you know, maybe you should give this AA thing a try. I didn' t think it was the right thing either, but he said no. I've been going there a couple months and i'm starting to see that it's really helpful and a lot of good people there and yada yada pom-poms out and cheered for aa and so i agreed that i would go there with him on monday night and i remember i was living with a liquor salesman at his apartment the guy had gone to school with him i thought i better stop and get some groceries to eat i went into this big supermarket in town there and i you know you got 11 bucks to buy groceries you gotta be pretty careful but i walking in and i went down the aisle and i noticed that chicken pot pies were on sale three for a dollar so i bought 33 of those and it was years before i ate another one of those i'm gonna tell you but i met i met jim this guy i drank with for 10 years i met him that Monday night at the meeting. And I went around the block. I'd looked at it earlier in the day. I wanted to see where I was going and what it looked like. And I didn't know if it had bars on the window or what the place was all about. Once you got in there, if they would actually let you back out, I knew nothing about AA or just about anything else as it turned out. And I could see those guys over by that building. They were waving their arms and doing this. Finally, the fifth or sixth time I went around the block, they were standing in the middle of the street going like this. Get in there and park your car. And so I did that. I was looking all over. I never saw you guys here. You know, I saw them every time I walked by, and I just couldn't turn in there. and so i went there to that meeting and the sobriety in the room was two guys with seven months and me with zero and everybody else had 12 and a half to 30 years of sobriery so i fell right into a group of old-timers that knew how to handle people like me just total dummies arrogant know all everything I knew everything I had answers I could lie without conscious processes of thought I could just they just fell out of my eye light about things I didn't even have to lie about and they seemed to be able to understand that looking back at it because they didn't react to anything I did they just they juste gave me a lot of encouragement said you know yeah I've been there and done that they shared a little first step stuff in there there was a lot of stuff that sounded familiar, but I'm not admitting to that yet because I see how it works now. If you admit to a couple things you're in and you don't even want to be in, and I didn't want to drink anymore, but i didn't want to do it that way. And I've been about every other place you could go. And, uh, you know, I'd been to counseling, marital therapy. I've been in the psych ward, um, been picked up by the cops and all kinds of things and ministers about four or five different ministers. And they would pray for me. And I knew that wasn't going to work at all because my mother had been doing that for years. And uh, but I, but i asked Jim, you know I heard I heard about sponsors in that meeting and I didn't quite know what that was but I asked Jim if he'd sponsor me and Jim had two months of sobriety and he said that he would and we didn't spend a lot of time talking but I remember why I asked him to be my sponsors because I knew that I couldn't lie to him and they talked about honesty and you got to get honest with yourself and got to get honest with this and honesty, honesty, honesty. So I knew if it was going to work, I'd better get Jim because I couldn't BS him at all. And it did work and how it worked for two months. And then Jim got transferred in his job to another part of the state. And that was the end of, I only saw him in one other AA meeting. I knew about him I heard about him I tried to stay in touch with him I believe he died sober he stayed sober on his granddaughter is what I think because he didn't care for her when he was in town because his son was drinking like I was drinking but call a couple of those old guys during the week and say, well, here's what he said to me. Here's what he told me. What do I do about that? What should I tell him? What should I say? And they would tell him what to say. So my first sponsor sponsored me through the voice of five or six other old timers. And then he moved away. And dann I sponsored myself for a little while, which, as you know, not a very good plan at all. Being sponsored by an idiot has never worked good for anybody and Alcoholics Anonymous, to my knowledge. But that's kind of what I was doing. And then somebody said, well, who's your sponsor now that Jim is gone? And I said, Well, I've just kind of been looking around to see if there's somebody here that fits the bill. Anybody with more time would have fit the bill as far as I can tell now. But I got this guy named Tim. He was an older fellow. He was 28 years sober or something. me reminded me of a grandpa type I felt safer on him he was he always talked in a low voice he was very assuring guy I didn't feel threatened by him so and he was developing a nerve disorder at that time that I didn'T know anything about it was a few months later he couldn'T get to the meetings anymore he'd fall asleep in the chair at home and then you know he was taking medication for this nerve thing, and he was on a death track, and I didn't know that either. So I would stop and see him at his house 12 miles away as I was coming back in from wherever I'd been working. I'd go by his house and knock on the door, and his wife would say, well, he's sleeping right now. He's pretty heavily medicated. I said, oh, no, don't wake him up. Don't bother him. I'll stop next week. I'm going to be through here in a few more days, and i did that for about four or five weeks, And one day she said, no, come on in. He said to wake him up. He wants to talk to you. And so I did. And we had a talk, mostly him, I guess. And I was listening. But he said, I love you, kid. But I can't help you anymore. I can' t stay awake anymore. I'm medicated. I can'T think very clearly. You need to move on. You needto get another sponsor. I loveyou. I'll loveyou till I die. But you've got to get a different sponsor that's active and somebody that's in the group. And so that was kind of it with him. And then I went on my own for quite a while until I was 19 months sober. Again, I was in Green Bay. I was not sleeping for three days. I was anxious. I was just coming apart at the seams. I hadn't taken a drink. And I could think of three options that night. I'm going to go over to the Holiday Inn across the pool in the center area. There was a swimming pool, and across from my room there was the bar. I thought, I'm gonna go over there, and I'm gonna find some woman that wants to go party, and then her and I are gonna talk her into taking off with me, and we're gonna take off out west someplace. Montana, I like the mountains, so We'll go there. And I'm just going to start over. I'm not going to get drunk. Or, as I had done about three runs in the afternoon across the Fox River Bridge, planned my own suicide. And I was going to drive through. I actually pulled the car over and made sure there was room between the end of the bridge rail and the guardrail to get the car through there. I was going to go 100 feet down below and land nose first in the railroad tracks. And they'd pick up that company car, and of course they would drag it back to a flare in my mind's eye and then park it in the backyard until somebody could pick it up or scrap it out, and then she could see what she'd done to me because by then it was my wife's fault. It was always somebody else's fault, my life was somebody else'S fault. And instead that night I called a guy named Jerry who was, I referred to him as Mr. AA. He was about 6'4", always had his glasses down on the end of his nose. He was always looking down his nose and poking at my chest. He said, well, how are you doing today, Brucie? He called me Brucie. I didn't like that either. I wanted to take him out is what I wanted him to do. But in the middle of the night, I made the plan that I was going to go get drunk and be done with this BS, or I could at least feel good again. And he said, well, I'm glad you called. I said, Well, what were you doing when I called? He said, I was sleeping, you dumbass. He said, I got to be to work at seven o'clock in the morning. But he said, I want you at my house tomorrow afternoon at three 30 in the afternoon. And I knew where he lived because he lived on the end of the parking lot where the AA club was, where I went to meetings at that time. And I said, here's how fast you can heal up alcoholic egos. One minute I'm saying, Jerry, I need help. I've just called the Hitler of Alcoholics Anonymous the best I could tell. I mean, this guy was serious. He was in your mug. He really was a dynamic guy. He really wasn't, but I couldn't see him that way at that time. But I said, Jerry, I can't be there at 3.30. I have to work till 5 o'clock. He said, shut up. He said you haven't worked till 5.00 for that company from the day you started. You're not going to start tomorrow. You'll be at my house at 3 30. Well, it's a four-hour drive from Green Bay. So I took off with sweaty hands and drove 200 miles. I was there at 3.30 in the afternoon. He took me in the back room in his study, and he told his wife, Carol, don't bother us. We're going to be busy for quite a while here. And he read the first 164 pages of the big book to me. And every once in a while, he'd stop, and he'd say, you know what that means? Yeah. He said, well, tell me what it means. Well, I couldn't tell him. big words like phenomenon was the one i remember the best because he said well you know what a phenomenon is don't you i said yeah i said it's like a flying saucer that that'd be a phenomenon he said you're right it would be but he said that doesn't define the word he said what's definition of the word i couldn't come up with and he said Well, listen, let's take your definition and put it in this doctor's opinion. And then he said, and the flying saucer of craving. And I got it. I thought, Jesus, I don't know what that word is. He said, I'll tell you what, I want you to carry a dictionary. And I said, you want me to bring a dictionary? Yeah, he said get one of them little pocket-sized ones they're usually good enough. He said if you need a real full-size version we'll get that for you. And he said every time you come to word that you don't think you know the meaning of or you sort of think you do, but maybe not, look it up. And he wound up teaching me the steps in that book and exactly what it said. He said, we were talking about the ninth step And God, I said, I looked at the step and I was reading. He said, read that step to me. And I said whenever possible. Just a slight of hand there. And I didn't mean to do it, but he said, you still can't read good. He said that is not what that says. Read it again. And I read it again the same way. I didn t notice that it said wherever possible. Things like that he taught me. And he just grilled things into my head. he said you get the saturday night meeting you work out die i went to the satursday night meeting for him uh he said do you got a little job here he said that's placed on and run by itself and he said i i got a job suggest for you he said we're gonna get you in the kitchen and he said i'm gonna wash those black bakelite ashtrays there was about 250 dirty ones every night after That meeting was done and a lady named Dolly got to wash and I wanted to wash. She had more time, so she got to watch. And I dried those things. And if they're not piping hot, you wipe them with that rag forever to get them dry, but I did that. And maybe a month later, he said, we got a different job for you. And I said, good, because I don't like drying ashtrays. um he said we need a chairman and and i thought you know i'm in business i work for a big company in new york i do marketing things for them um kind of been promoted about four or five times had a nice job paid pretty well and i taught something i can finally something that is a little more in line with my caliber a guy i could do that and i watched him on saturday night this chairman to get up there and he'd tell them about the announcements and all the stuff they do in meetings. So he said, you've got to come early though. I said, yeah, 630 at least. So I can do that. So I'm over there in my suit and tie and I still set up the best chairs in Eau Claire as a result of that experience. Again, I just missed something in there. I thought he meant chairman of like the whole AA place, but they meant set up the chairs and then you know i just learned things that way in alcoholics anonymous and then one morning i don't know i think it was a saturday morning another guy that he sponsored called me up at six o'clock in the morning and he said jerry got killed in a car accident last night and my heart just sunk because as much as i hated him some days i loved him some days he was the right guy for me he wouldn't put up with my bs he'd work with stupid guys like me before and he knew how to work people like a cheap watch and he was a good man and i was back on my own again and really it was only about a month after that my oldest son is sober trying to be sober at least took him quite a while after that to get there i think it took eight years but he kept trying but he was sober for about two hours at that time and he told me Clancy was coming to town and talk at the club 12 banquet and I should ask him to be my sponsor and I said just wait a minute I said I know I need a sponsor but I said I've seen this guy Clancy in action I know how he is you don't know what he's going to do next You don't know what he's going to say. I mean, he could just do things like, whoa, I'm glad that wasn't me. And so I said, I'll figure out my own sponsor. He said, well, you've got to get somebody you've got to be accountable to because you can fool anybody and you just run over people and they listen to you and they don't listen to them. And I said I'll take care of this myself. So that banquet happened and Sunday morning I was taking coffee pots back up to the Eleanor Club for the storeroom, and just as I happened to walk in the door for a cup of coffee after that job was done, Clancy came up the stairway on the other end of that hallway. It was just him and I. We met right in the middle, and he said, how are you doing today, kid? I said, good. It Was a great talk last night. I really enjoyed your story, and it's so funny, and da-da-da. He said, well, you're doing okay, and I said well no not really I said I need a sponsor and I don't have one right now and my sponsor just got killed in a car accident and I said would you be my sponsor and as he always said to people that I heard him ask for sponsorship he said we'll give that a try and then the question I didn't want to ask what do you want me to do I didn'T want to asking that because I thought the assignment would be something that would require eight people and two attorneys and maybe a priest. And I just thought, I'm not going to be able to do what this guy wants me to do. And he told me, he said, I want you to write a letter to me on Friday. Get it in the mail on Friday, and I want you to call me on Wednesday and give me two time periods to call in, LA time, a couple hours different than us. In fact, I remember he said listen, you dumb Norwegian. And he said, it's not Wisconsin time where I live. It's California time. So you've got to figure the two hours in. But he said I'll read that letter. And he says we can talk about that a little bit. And he say I'll get to know you. And he said then you'll get to know me a little better. And so I did that. I wrote that letter and called him every Wednesday when I was supposed to call him. There was a stretch of about a year and a half or two years in there after he sponsored me for a long time, I looked at the phone bill when it would come. And at that time, the cell phone people would send you a complete listing on paper of your bill. Maybe it was before paperless billing. I don't know. But my average phone call every Wednesday to him was two minutes and 38 seconds. He's moving on Wednesdays. There are a lot of phone calls. And by then, I'd kind of seen how that works when he's at the mission. I'd been to California a couple times for birthday parties or other things, and I was just amazed by that. And then, you know, talking about sponsorship years ago, I would talk about sending this letter on Friday, and I'd be at a Saturday night meeting someplace giving a talk, and i'd be telling that story. And a guy I sponsored actually for about six years by then come up to me and said, do you still send that letter? He said, what the hell do you send that ladder for? And I said, he never told me to stop. That's the way I think sponsorship has worked the best for me. I had no idea. And I learned in Alcoholics Anonymous that I had No Idea. that is where i learned all the things i knew to survive myself and i and i learned it from other people i'm i'm a people guy don't get me wrong i you know i have a god in my own understanding i believe in god god has put me in places i'm sure that i wouldn't have been otherwise god has done things that i couldn't do for myself i i believe those to be facts in my sobriety. I love God, and I know my God loves me. But my sobrietty, my recovery has come from the voice of some other human being in recovery. I go to speaker meetings a lot. I love speaker meetings. I'd rather do that three times a week than almost anything. um i know you guys got that history group out there and it got changed around and but i think now yeah i can maybe get to that i'm going to try anyway because the book you're reading in that meeting that it comes of age is probably one of the best books in the whole library of alcoholics anonymous i think because it really tunes me into what really was happening it's not just folklore and things you hear in meetings. Here is a written account of what was going on, and I love that. Clancy's sponsorship changed my direction in Alcoholics Anonymous to a large degree. I don't really understand why that happened probably a little bit maybe more than I think but I had a sponsor that was 1500 miles away from me and my commitment to myself was what if he was talking somewhere within eight hours of Eau Claire I was going to be in my truck heading there as many people as we could stuff in there and we're going to go listen to this guy give another talk and his talk changed a lot and I said Clancy how do you how do I wish you'd talk about that invisible boat again I said I wore that out a while ago he said I got tired of listening to it myself so it's a pretty good story it's true kind of solid looks but it's perception deal and then he'd be talking about something else and then and so I finally said well how do you do that? He said, it's easy. He said you've got here's your experience. This is what you were like when you drank. Here's what happened to you and here's what you're like today. So you take those three things you'll get sick of talking about in your story and you pull those out of the story and plug in three different things that are equally as important to anybody that's listening to you. And certainly good for you to talk about. We can't afford to forget where we came from. Don't close the door on it. We leave it available for us because it becomes our superpower working with other people. Your baddest story is going to save somebody's life. Your little wiener dog, pukey little poodle story, that's going to Save Somebody Else's Life. You're never owned a Harley, he said. I said, you're right, I never have. He said, you're going to talk about motorcycles someday in an AA meeting or after a coffee, and some biker's going to hear you talking. And you're gonna save his life. You're going to be the thread as long as you show up. And as long as you do the things that you're supposed to do. I don't think I could have ever gotten that information from anybody else. Not the way he gave it to me. I just believe that and I I don't think that'll ever change in my belief system because he kept turning me and turning me and deeper into AA, deeper into AAA, more AA. I remember maybe two, three years into his sponsorship, I called him up one day. I had a problem. God, I could only remember what it was. And he said, I know what the problem is. and I said well why don't you fill me in because I can't seem to figure out what I can do about this and he said you're just not sponsoring enough people and then he hung up Jesus he has fallen on his head and injured himself and I haven't heard about it yet but he's talking goofy but I'll tell you next Wednesday I called him a week later I had two new guys and I just spent a lot of time in Alcoholics Anonymous, trying to do a lot of things that I knew would make him happy. That would please my sponsor. And I think that's important. He taught me, you know, picking sponsors. Somebody who is ahead of you. Somebody who has more time than you do. They're ahead of You. they obviously then have more experience probably than you do somebody that's as active or more active than you are and somebody who you respect he said if you keep those three ingredients going he said you have a sponsor till death do us part and that turned out to be absolutely right because if I don't respect somebody I'm gonna do what we do when we have disrespect for somebody. Eventually, I have to let somebody know how big a butthead that person is. I have to tell them after a while because it's obvious to me, I don't respect this person and I'm sitting in the room full of people that do and I think there's definitely something wrong with these people that they can't see this. I mean, this is so obvious. And then I remember my alcoholic life seemed like the only normal one. And I remember those things I learned in meetings and in that book. If I've got somebody who sponsored me and it may work out really good, I don't know. I've never tried it and I'm never going to try it. I got sober on the things the old timers said to me and talked about in front of me at those meetings. I heard how this goes and it was believable because they'd been doing it, some of them, for 30, 40 years. And I'll tell you, I began to realize that they don't have to make this up. They're not trying to win a new blender if they get more newcomers. They just tell it like it is, like it was. What happened to them? They share experiences. They got problem-solving skills that beyond my own recognition, I couldn't get there. So I'd listen to what they did, and then I'd try that. Of course, when I was new at that, a week later, I'd be pulling that one out of the hat and using it with somebody I sponsored like, this is what we do here, kid. Don't worry about it. I've been doing it for years. I'd been trying it for about a week. But at the end of the day, in in the realm of sponsorship for me particularly with Clancy who told me to do a lot of things that didn't make very much sense to me at the time that he told him because they didn't seem to be connected to what it was I was trying to convey to him and he could smell self-pity all the way to Los Angeles to Eau Claire he just knows and of course been at it a while now and I can I can tell those things when somebody's talking to me about their problem. I'm not, I'm listening to what they're telling me, but I'm going, all right, self-pity, resentment. We've got some problems going on here. And I say, you know, that self-pitie is going to get you. Well, what do you mean self- pity? I don't have self- pitie. I said, you were just telling me how bad they were to you. That's self- pity. Oh, yeah. Thank God I got a guy that would teach me those things. and sometimes haul me up short and just kind of tell me what I needed to hear that day. He didn't, it wasn't like he ever worried about if I get straight up with this guy, he's going to not, he's fine. You're not my sponsor anymore. Let him worry him. And it doesn't worry me much anymore either. I just have to be certain in sponsorship with other people that I'm being reasonable, sensible empathetic kind and stand on the track of our 12 principles of the steps at least when we'll work with somebody else and wonder they can bring resentments about them i went over to that meeting and there's a guy said i hate that meeting those people are crazy over there and we're going to work on those traditions a little bit we're gonna work on some more self-pity. We're going to work on some resentment. There's a combination of things. And then thousands and thousands and thousands of other people in Alcoholics Anonymous have put those pieces of information in my head. Some days I don't recognize or remember hearing that information go in, but as I was told way back in the beginning, at the moment you need that information it will pop in and it does and i thought i thought whoever told me that i thought well they need some help too but um that first bunch of new old timers when i was a newcomer uh if i would get mad at one two more of them would slide in alongside means he's trying to help you you know don't worry about that you got a problem call me if you're mad at him that's fine get over that we'll have to work through that but just for now just call me and then i'd talk to different old timer for a while and uh then i get mad at something he said and i go back to the other one who was mad at in the first place i said you know what that damn lyle told me the other day get on to that stuff finally finally some peace of mind finally I recognized how angry and cynical that was, finally. And I got to realize those things because of the efforts of other people, just like we've got a screen full of them tonight. Who knew when they came that it was going to be the conscience of a large group of people that were thinking alike, right-minded people, spiritually based people would be the people who would help a guy like me. I had trouble with God for a long time because I didn't think that God would helpa guy likeme. I knew he helped people but i didn't thought he could help me my track record wasn't good i figured at the end i was just going to be turned into a mcnugget But I have a loving relationship with the God of my own understanding today. I have, um, a loving friendship with dozens and dozens and thousands of people in Alcoholics Anonymous. Um, I've been, I've done so blessed and I know it's been a blessing and, and I try to be careful with that because if somebody else doesn't feel so blessed. It starts to look like I'm saying, God help me, but obviously he didn't help you very much. And that's not the God that I believe. The God I believe will help anybody who's willing to seek him just exactly as our book says. He doesn't make it too hard for those of us who are willing to seek Him. So willingness and open-mindedness and honesty are the essentials of recovery and slowly but surely some people quicker than others i wasn't on the rocket to stardom program at all i was a slow learner um who thought he was smarter than everybody in the room at first i mean you want to some guy across the room with one tooth and a belt bug they'll big enough to eat fish off him and he spits every time he talks and and everybody in the meeting likes him and i don't understand why and he's just a guy full of wisdom and wisdom you're not born with wisdom develops develops slower in some people and wisdom developed a little slower but it's because of Alcoholics Anonymous and because of people just like I'm looking at on the computer screen right now I wished I were in the same room with all of this so that we could talk after the meeting shake hands and drink some coffee we're starting to get a little more opened up and I'm grateful for that but it's the result of you guys Bill and Bob and how it all started but somebody has to keep Alcoholics Anonymous alive in the form which it was developed in I see that as my responsibility to do that and it pisses some people off but I can't be concerned about that if I present the information respectfully it's not my deal whether they like it or not some take it some don't ask God every day for help to be able to deliver that message correctly see you know one of my friends Steve Weber is on a meeting tonight and Steve's one of those guys that's a nuts and bolts AA guy. And I just love that because you just got working with people and I'm doing this, sponsoring people and that's what I do. That's what I like. If I started talking in depth about God, it would turn into a mess because you really can't conceive my God and I can't perceive yours. All I need to know is that you've got one and I got one, and when I listen to you talk about yours, that's all pretty straight up with me. So Al, thanks for the invite. I appreciated the time. I appreciate so many of you. I know so many on the screen tonight. And thanks again, and I'll end it with that tonight. Thank you.