Thanksgiving 1997 My Sponsor Locked Me Up With Page 345 of Courage to Change – Ajit S.

I echo what Mark Twain said once.
He said, when people compliment me, I get embarrassed.
I feel they're not saying enough.
An arrogant prick, you can tell from that, right?
Now I'm teasing.
You know, I read some places that said the intelligence of a group is measured
by how easy it is for them to pronounce a foreign-sounding name.
My name is Ajit.
Got a Mensa crowd.
I love it.
I want to thank Carolyn and Liz for having the good judgment of inviting me
and for the committee for sanctioning it.
No, thank you.
This has been a wonderful trip.
I want to thank my host, Irma,
who drove all the way from,
Dallas to pick me up.
It's been rather interesting.
We were heading to Houston
instead of coming to this hotel from the Austin airport.
And she explained to me that everything in Texas is geometric in shape.
It's either circles or triangles.
So for some reason, going to Houston made sense.
Turn around, come back to Austin.
It's been a blast.
It's been a rather different kind of weekend for me.
I've been asked to make sounds like a duck.
And if you guys didn't go into that fun workshop, the play workshop,
you missed out on the terrific thing.
What a deal.
I never thought being corny was going to be that crazy.
I matched hands with another guy.
We had the same size hands.
I said, small hands, small feet.
One out of three ain't too bad.
I'm teasing.
This is not an AA pitch.
I'm teasing.
It took double winners to actually entertain us.
Eh?
Big mama and the furballs.
What a deal.
And I have to follow that.
I should call myself Big Daddy.
Where are my hairballs?
I'm the male version of that thing.
You know, it's the Rolling Stones tune, Emotional Rescue.
I'll be your knight in shining armor.
Come for your emotional rescue.
That's the thing, right?
You will be mine.
I say I've been blown away by the speakers.
God, the Alateens.
Eric, he said he got the program in his third meeting.
It took me 17 years to understand what this program is all about.
I mean, geez, fantastic.
And then this morning, Lee.
God, she was amazing.
Followed by Ivory, a.k.a. Peanut.
I mean, then Megan.
I mean, every single one of those Alateen speakers just touched me in a special way, I tell you.
I have kids, four of them, all immaculately conceived.
Because every time it happened, I looked at my now former spouse.
How did that happen?
We have 18-year-old, soon-to-be 18-year-old twins, a 16-year-old and a 12-year-old.
And I'm very, very grateful that they have not experienced some of the pain and suffering
that I hear some of these Alateen kids suffer.
I mean, kids are supposed to be self-centered.
And here you look at kids who have to literally take responsibility for their parents
and act so emotionally involved with them.
And I'm so glad to see them coming through it.
That's beautiful.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And the speakers, oh, God, starting with Mary last night and then following up with
Linda, what elegance, I tell you.
Tremendous.
And then Gay, she's my favorite AA speaker.
Touching.
And tomorrow you'll see Larcine.
She's got a marvelous story.
So I'm touched to be with you.
I'm feeling very, very privileged.
You guys are very loving.
And I do want to, first of all, greet every single one Al-Anon in here with our favorite
Al-Anon salute.
Welcome.
And those 23-odd AAs.
You've got to welcome me.
And you're double winners.
You're a double whammy, I tell you.
You obsess over yourself.
How neat.
How do you manage to sniff and kiss yourself?
That's got to be different.
That's what I did when I want to check up on a...
Have you been drinking?
No.
Let me see.
The name is different, obviously.
It's not from Scotland.
It's from India.
I was the turbaned Indian, not the feathered kind.
I'll tell you.
Never worn a turban.
Let me dispel all the stereotypes.
I've never slept in a bed of nails.
Never walked on hot coals.
Don't wear my spikes on the inside of my golf shoes.
I don't have pet snakes either.
And no tiger lurking around anywhere.
And I'm not a...
I'm a prince.
And I don't bob my head side to side.
So I'd take care of that.
I left...
I was born in a family that we did not have what we thought was...
What we thought was no alcoholism.
And this is really denial because we lost an uncle to this crazy disease of alcoholism.
He died with cirrhosis of the liver, blind in both eyes.
And I was told that my aunt literally dropped him off of an almost stopped car.
She dropped him off at an uncle's house.
I thought she was practicing the art of detachment.
It was geographic distancing.
Out of sight, out of mind.
And the poor man died.
We did not attribute what he had to a disease.
We thought he was morally decrepit, that he lacked in willpower because he did a few other things.
They said addictions come in clusters.
He smoked a lot.
He gambled a lot.
He lived in the wrong part of town.
I mean, we were snobs.
And he hung around with the wrong element of women.
What kind of a woman is the wrong element?
I think they're all the right element.
Who comes up with these stupid things?
But anyway, he died, poor man.
And no one knew that he had this disease.
And we went merrily along.
And I learned that in my sixth...
I learned my sixth grade, standard we call them there,
that my headmaster, we call them vice...
You call them vice principals here.
Had started the first chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous in Bombay, India.
And I asked a friend of mine, I said,
what the bloody hell is Alcoholics Anonymous?
He said, oh, they get drunks off the street and get them sober.
And little did I know that AA would at least figuratively come to my rescue many, many years later
and get my now former spouse sober.
She's been sober 19 plus years.
Now, this tells you my disease in a second here.
I can't recall exactly when I came into Al-Anon.
It was circa 1980.
But I know to the date when she walked in.
I was proud of Megan.
She couldn't recall 90 days.
I said, God, you should be saying 92, 93, 89 days your mother's been, you know, cleaning.
I could tell you May 25th, 1983, 8 or 2 p.m.
at the University of United Methodist Church,
she walked into her first AA meeting.
But it's a fog as far as I'm concerned.
I have no idea when I walked into Al-Anon,
except I know it was somewhere around 1980.
It's an amazing.
I have another disease and it's called image management.
I may feel like shit, but I got to look good.
And the sad part is how I look good is dictated by the person next to me also.
So I better hang around with the right person because you, who do not give a damn about me,
I'm thinking you're thinking about me.
I like what Dr. Paul had to say.
I'm not much, but that's all I think about.
In my case, I go one step beyond.
I think all of you are thinking about me.
You have no life of your own.
You're just wondering everything, you know, just being watched all the time.
This is how I thought.
Vanity to the extreme.
I'm responsible for everything and everyone's watching me and I better look right and talk right
and walk straight and dress right and all that other stuff.
And so when you have image management issues, you're really not emotionally developed.
You know, you don't have much of a personality, no depth to your existence because you're so focused
on the image.
You're focused on the outside.
So those are the diseases that are problems that I came to, came with in Al-Anon.
Little did I realize that Al-Anon would help me deal with that rather than the disease
of someone else's drinking.
Anyway, so here I go, I grow up in India.
I finish up at my school.
I climb the mountain to see my favorite guru and I said, oh, great one.
I seek serenity.
And he said, go to Detroit, Michigan and join Al-Anon.
I just say that for effect.
There's no guru.
The bastard neglected to tell me that I had to marry an alcoholic in the process.
So I left the shores of India in 1974, well-warned by friends and family.
They said, do not get involved with American women.
Canadians are okay and Scottish women, of course, are fine.
And I said, why not?
And they said, oh, they drink and smoke in the open like men, meaning Indian, discreet
Indian women do it behind closed doors.
So I landed in the U.S.
I did not particularly care one way or the other if the American woman smoked, but I
loved the fact that she drank because they say, candy's dandy, but liquor's quicker.
And it made my progress in an evening extremely cost-effective and expedient.
I loved it.
I identified with Al-Anon's character in MASH that said, my kind of woman, drunk.
So that's what it needs.
You know, the whole story about what it takes to please a woman.
When you buy clothes, you buy da-da-da-da-da-da.
How do you please a man?
Show up drunk with a six-pack, and it's all fine.
You know, I told my wife when I met her, and she was drinking, I said, God, Sue, I used
to go out with these women, and I had so many relationships.
And my relationships really, I want to first of all make sort of a preface thing, I mean
say something up front, a qualifier.
I was a cad.
I'm less of a cad today, actually.
I'm not a cad.
I'm a very gentle, nice, spiritual man.
Thanks to Al-Anon.
I say that straight face.
I told Sue, I said, God, I had these relationships, you know, and my relationships, my longest
was about a month and a half.
So to use the word relationship is like exaggerating the statement, really, and putting a meaning
there that isn't really there.
And I said, we Al-Anons have a beam.
And alcoholic, no, move on.
Don't waste your time.
Alcoholic, no, don't waste your time.
She doesn't need taken care of.
She doesn't need to be watched over.
Blah, blah, blah.
And I said, the moment I met you, my beam took off and I married the alcoholic.
She said, nonsense.
If you had married one of them, you would have driven them to drink too, like you did me.
You see, you can never win with an alcoholic.
You always come out bruised and battered.
So I don't get into the ring anymore.
Anyway, I really had no intentions of meeting an alcoholic or marrying one.
You know, I was serene to begin with.
I didn't need any more serenity in my life.
I didn't know.
I was in denial.
No, actually, not denial.
I was clueless.
I'm embarrassed to even tell you my story because I really was clueless.
And you're so focused on the outside, you don't develop any sense of yourself.
So you're really clueless.
There's not much going on around that you know.
So you can't get to denial.
Denial for me is progression.
You get to denial.
Cluelessness, then awareness, then denial, then more awareness, then acceptance,
then you go on from there.
So it tells you how sick I was and still can be.
The light, the alcohol part.
Because that's the way I would lure the women from the suburbs of Detroit,
specifically Southfield, Troy, that area, if you've been to the Detroit area.
I'd lure them to come with me to Greektown.
And the reason I used to take the women to Greektown,
and this I'm dating myself back to the 70s,
that in Greektown you could buy a four-course meal for 25 bucks for two,
and it included something called Rhoditas wine.
Now Rhoditas wine had this wonderful quality of transforming
and absolute strength.
And I was a stranger over the course of a meal into the best friend for the evening
because that person was going to go home with you.
And that's why I loved Rhoditas wine.
Little did I know that Rhoditas wine would get me into trouble one of these days.
Now what happened is that image management is what caused the problem.
I had met a woman like that in one of these establishments,
these meat markets in the suburbs of Detroit.
And I was seeing her, except my boss, and I was working for Xerox at the time,
and my boss invited me to a party to his home.
This woman did not have the image I wanted to project at the party.
So I'm now looking for the right image,
and I end up at this student hangout in downtown Detroit.
I was a part-time lecturer, and I used to take my students to a bar called TJ's.
And here's this woman who's working her way through nursing school,
and she's waitressing here, and she comes and waits at our table,
and my beam takes off and her beam takes off.
And I ask her out, and she accepts,
and my ego tells me to,
believe it when she said,
oh, you're the very first person I've gone out with in this establishment.
So I ask her out to dinner and to this party,
and she agrees.
Now my God's a God of irony,
and he sent me a lot of warning signs along the way,
but I was going to find serenity even if it killed me.
So I take this woman, and it almost did a few times,
and I go to this dinner with this woman,
and normally when I dine with a woman,
I listen with an open mind, in one ear, out the other.
Like most men, we're strategized, we just go nod, yes, yes, yes.
But this was scary.
I'm giving away some secrets, guys, I know, I apologize.
When this case was actually sitting and talking to this woman,
I was actually indulging in intellectual intercourse.
We're having a conversation, and I'm listening,
and I'm actually communicating with her,
and it scared the heejeebees out of me.
I should have left at the restaurant, gotten my car, driven away,
but no, I took her to this party.
And warning number two came in the form of this guy named George,
who showed up, and he said,
Oh, you and Sue look so comfortable together.
How long have you been going out?
Seven, eight years?
I said, George, I just met this woman last week.
This is our first date.
He said, Oh, man, this must be a past life thing.
You look very comfortable together.
I should have left her at the party, driven away,
but no, I was going to get serene.
And this happened about four months later in our relationship.
There was a knock on the door at about 10 o'clock in the evening
at dinner.
Thereabouts.
And I opened the door, and out stands this woman with a lump on her head.
And I said, What happened?
She said, My mother struck me in an alcoholic rage.
Now, the father in me, the knight in shining armor,
I mean, prince, valiant personalities that Roseanne and Sybil would have fought over,
came gushing forth, and I said,
You will not move in back with that woman.
You will move in with me.
Now, a Hindu from Bombay, India, does not ask a Polish Catholic girl.
Oh, man.
You see, that wasn't the scary part.
The scary part was watching her God-fearing Catholic mother,
who disavowed sinful living,
actually helping her daughter move in with me.
To watch these two women carry furniture up to my apartment was a very scary sight.
I should have given them the keys to my apartment,
gotten in my car, and driven away.
But no, I was going to find serenity.
And there's a price to pay.
You've got to walk through hell to get there.
That was fun.
We moved in together in sinful arrangement.
Everything is going hunky-dory, but there are some strange things going on.
But I don't know anything because I'm clueless.
I have no dimension to my personality, so I really don't care.
And I'm slightly sociopathic.
I found out later on.
This is retrospective thought.
You're in my life only if you have a certain place in terms of functionality.
You're in my life only if you have a certain function to serve me in some way, fashion, or form.
Otherwise, your existence with me is meaningless.
And I didn't realize all this until I started to do my thoughts.
How could you not know what was going on around you?
Well, I didn't know because I hadn't learned to sniff and kiss yet.
So anyway, things are going out to helter-skelter.
Things are falling apart.
So we did the next natural thing that most people do.
We got married.
I bought this lovely little condo in a town called Warren, Michigan.
If you're from Michigan, you'll know what I mean.
If you're from Warren, Michigan, be grateful you're from Warren, Michigan and not in Warren, Michigan.
And there was this little half-bathroom that played a pivotal role in my coming to a sense of awareness
that my wife had a drinking problem.
And this is how clueless I am.
I go to the bathroom, this little half-bathroom.
I open up the cabinet.
Six or seven empty cans of beer would topple out.
You know what upset me?
Not the fact that there were six empty cans of beer there, but they were not in the trash can.
So I'd march out of the bathroom.
Go up to my wife.
I said, what were those empty cans of beer doing just lying around?
She said, oh, Aunt Bunny came over and had a few beers.
It never occurred to me to call Aunt Bunny and find out why she took a six-pack into my bathroom.
What was the necessity?
You know, was she eliminating the middleman?
I don't know.
Or, you know, I got this friend coming over.
I said, Tom, would you like a glass of wine?
He said, sure.
I reached into the...
And I want some AA person to tell me how this works.
I take this bottle of wine.
It's got the cap.
It's got the cork.
It's...
I mean, the cork.
The cork, the wrapping, and the little red tag with the bottles empty.
Are there specialty stores where they sell long syringes to alcoholics to mess up with the Al-Anon?
I don't know.
And I'm totally amazed.
How is this thing empty?
Do the stores sell me an empty bottle?
I don't know.
Image management came to my rescue one more time to bring me to the fact that my wife had a drinking problem.
This is what happened.
I had family visiting, and she happened to be the white sheep of the family,
so she had to look just right to go introduce her to them.
So I'm driving over to meet my family, and we get into a rip-roaring royal spat,
and I smell something that I'm not entirely sure.
It was a mixture of mouthwash and something else.
So I looked at her and said, you know what?
I'm not going to take you in this condition.
We're going to drop you back home.
So I take her home, and as she runs into this half-bathroom,
as I walk past the half-bathroom, I see her trying to jam shut that cabinet door,
and inside I thought,
this is a disease of perception.
My perceptions are all all right.
I look, and I thought I saw a 55-gallon drum of gallow wine.
It was a half-a-gallon jug, and she's trying to shut it,
and I stood still, and time stood still.
I mean, for eternity, it seemed like I'm just stunned,
and a little voice comes into my head and says,
your wife's an alcoholic, your wife's an alcoholic, your wife's an alcoholic, your wife's an alcoholic.
And I tell you what, if God had sort of morphed somehow into human form in one way
and looked at me and said, Ajit, we don't need one of you,
one of you is going to think the other person's thoughts, feel their feelings,
experience their emotions, have conversations with them,
they're going to respond except they don't need to be there.
I said, God, you're crazy, that can't happen.
But that's exactly what happened for the next three and a half years.
A friend of mine put it rather succinctly.
He said, if you want to know how I feel, stick a thermometer at my wife's you-know-what,
and you'll know exactly how I feel.
I mean, I could tell from inflections.
I'd call on the phone, I'd say, hello, just the way she responded,
I knew that she was going to drink that day.
She was a periodic drunk.
She'd walk past me just the way I felt the wisp of the wind going by,
I knew she was going to drink.
How can you get so, to use a psychobabble term, enmeshed with someone
that you can almost pick up everything that's going on with them
to the point that you stop existing?
And I'd get in the car and have these wonderful conversations with her,
and turn around, and she's responding, and it's all happening in my head.
So I used this thing.
I'd been watching television, and I'd seen this commercial
called Schick's Shadle commercials.
Have you ever seen those?
Where the wife traipses over to her husband, she said,
sweetheart, you have a drinking problem.
He says, darling, you're so right.
And they head on to Schick's Shadle.
Who writes these commercials?
I don't know.
But I thought truth in advertising, maybe it works.
So I walk up to my wife and say, sweetheart, you have a drinking problem.
She said, you're an idiot.
I don't.
I had no plan B.
Now, plan B works for men mostly.
Who think they're logical, because you women make us believe we're logical.
So I use the next thing.
I said, I'll be logical.
I'll catch her in the act.
Therefore, when I catch her, she'll know she's got a problem, and she'll stop.
And this is strictly for those newcomers who have a lot of time on their hands,
not much of a life, and you want to just pass your time doing things,
because it doesn't work, but what the hey.
I figured I'd catch her in the act.
So I sit on the couch, pretending to do the crossword puzzle,
watching a blank television set, because it reflected what was going on in the kitchen.
I had lots of time, no life.
I'm watching her pour her booze, and I make this Archimedean exclamation,
like I've discovered a new law in physics.
I'd go, aha!
She's having a drink.
That's what alcoholics do, at least the practicing ones.
What do we call them practicing for?
Mine could have been drinking Carnegie Hall.
She perfected the art of drinking.
What's this thing, practicing alcoholic?
There's no practice, they don't know exactly what they're doing and how they're doing it.
And I'd go, aha!
And I'd watch, and then she'd crawl her way with some semblance of dignity.
She'd lift her head high a little bit as she crawled by,
and she'd go up to her bed, and I'd move the bottles around,
thinking when she'll get up for two o'clock feed time,
she'll know I know, because I move the bottles around.
At two o'clock come feed time, I'm up,
but the baby's crying, wants to go have a drink.
And she's crawling down to get her booze,
and I'm going, aha!
Now she knows, because she hears this clinging.
I didn't realize that an alcoholic in good standing
has a stash in about 19,000 places.
If they can't find stash, I didn't know that.
And what's this aha?
That's what they do, they drink.
She'd come up and she'd pummel the crap out of me,
because she knew I'd moved the bottles.
I'm pretending to be asleep.
What a wonderful life.
So that didn't work, so I walked up to her and said,
you know, you seriously have a drinking problem.
And she said, no we don't, we have a marriage problem.
I'm Polish Catholic, and you're not.
I said, that's it.
Rather profound observation, never thought about it.
So I did the next thing.
I said, I'll take care of it.
I'll find a marriage counselor.
See, that's where we say, I'll take care of it.
So I called this marriage counselor, I prepped him.
He was actually an alcoholic recovery center guy,
and I prepped the bastard.
It took half an hour telling him what's going on.
I said, I'm going to walk in with this woman,
you take one look at her and say you're an alcoholic,
and you strap her to the bed
and pour whatever stuff you've done down her throat.
See, I didn't know the meaning of the word sobriety.
I just wanted her to drink exactly two glasses of white wine,
specifically Chardonnay.
If she just did that, everything would be okay.
She wouldn't make an ass of herself,
and people would not think poorly about me.
That was the issue.
See, that's the crazy part.
You know, I didn't realize, drink, but drink quietly,
and don't make an ass of yourself,
and that means two glasses of white wine, Chardonnay,
that way you are within your limits.
So we walk up to this counselor guy,
and he looks at us, so,
what's the problem?
I said, what's the problem?
My wife drinks too much, you idiot.
I didn't say that to him.
In my head, you idiot, I told you this half an hour.
And he says, what's the problem?
I says, my wife drinks too much.
She's crying, he's making notes.
To make a long story short,
he lets us go on an outpatient basis.
Never to be seen again.
And she said, I'll find a marriage counselor.
So she found one, we go to see the second guy,
who'd been to school with the first guy, apparently,
because he looked at us and said,
so, what's the problem?
I said, my wife drinks too much.
He says, so, what's the problem?
I thought he had a problem with my accent,
so I spoke louder and slower.
Why do we think that someone does not understand
her accent, they're deaf and stupid.
So I'm shouting and doing charades.
My wife drinks too, too.
So he looks at me and says, so, what's the problem?
Meaning, what's the problem with that?
And I swear to you, if you shut the lights off in that room,
his nose shone so red,
he could have served as a beacon on a dark ocean,
guiding ships.
I looked at my wife and said, oh, my God, he's one of you.
And she said, no, no, he understands.
Of course he understands.
So that did not work.
So I, you know, thought, geez, I can't stay.
She's not going to marriage counseling.
You know, I'm going to leave.
I have a choice.
So I wrapped up all my goodies in this little polka dotted thing
and put it on a stick.
And like porky pig, I'm heading out the door.
And she said, if you leave, I will commit suicide.
I said, that I want to watch because I don't want you to botch it up.
So I don't know what happened.
I follow her from the exit, from the door to the kitchen,
which is not too long a distance, about, you know, five nanoseconds.
And her intentions changed from suicide to homicide.
And I have these dishes flying at me at 90 miles.
She could have been a major league pitcher, for God's sake.
She missed her calling.
Knives and dishes flying at me.
And this image management conscious guy is dodging these dishes
because I don't want to go running out thinking the neighbors will find out.
That brings me to my next point.
Why do alcoholics become anonymous after they get sober?
You know, if you stay anonymous while you're drinking,
Al-Anon would not need to exist.
Because very few of us love you enough to want you to stop drinking.
I think most of us want you to stop drinking because you make a mess
and you're very loud about it.
And it's embarrassing because our family looks at us strangely.
Our friends look at us askance and we wonder what's going on.
So if you were anonymous while you were drinking, no problem.
Operation successful, patient died peacefully.
So I figured, geez, I can't leave now because this woman is fatal.
She's a distraction to me.
She wants to kill me rather than let me leave.
So I guess the next alternative is to commit homicide myself.
I'm going to kill her.
This is a kid from the land of Gandhi, right?
Non-violence.
We're supposed to starve ourselves to death so the other person will leave.
They said if Gandhi had been in Italy,
India would still be under the influence of the British
because Italian food is hard to give up.
Indian food may.
You know, eggplant parmesan.
Forget it.
Let the British stay.
So I'm reading this magazine.
This is really sick thinking.
This is happening in nanoseconds.
I'm reading this magazine called Argosy.
It's an English magazine.
It's got a story by Alfred Hitchcock
and he describes the perfect murder weapon.
I see two people kind of sitting up to listen to this very clearly.
And he describes this murder weapon as one that cannot be drowned
in the deepest of oceans or lost any...
I mean, you cannot lose it.
It just disappears.
And it's an...
It's an icicle that's dangling on February outside my window.
He says, take the icicle.
I said, I'm going to kill her and I'm going to dig up the basement
and I'm going to pour her, you know, put fresh cement over her body.
Everything is fine.
I know nothing about masonry but who cares details.
As I'm contemplating this,
it occurred to me that my mother-in-law lives about two and a half miles away.
She'd come over, find dust on my wife's car and she'd call the police.
And it then occurred to me that I did not come all the way from Bombay, India
to befriend some guy named Bubba in a Michigan prison.
So...
Being traded for cigarettes was not an option.
This guy killed his wife because she drank too much.
Here, a couple of cigarette packs for you.
So that went out the window.
You know, I shared this story at my meeting in Irvine once
and a lady came up to me and she said,
oh my God, I felt so guilty about the same thing.
I'm so glad you shared this story.
And I said, what happened?
And she said, my husband was sleeping on the couch, passed out.
I was going to take a pillow.
I'm going to snuff him out.
And I said, why did you not do it?
Thinking she'll say, God, that's a heinous thing to do.
Killing someone is wrong.
It's immoral, blah, blah, blah.
Instead, she said, oh, they would have found cotton in his nose
and they would have known I've done it.
So this disease can kill.
So nothing was working.
No marriage counseling, homicide, suicide did not come to my rescue.
Finally, the twins came to my rescue.
And I'm not talking about the Norwegian ski team.
It was Ann Landers and Dear Abby.
Here, I'm a man of the 70s, 80s, 90s, in the 2000s.
I read the ladies.
Even after they've been dead and gone, I occasionally read them.
Oh, one of them is dead and gone, I think.
And it was a big banner in the Detroit Free Press.
And it said, if you're mother or father of child of husband
or whatever of an alcoholic, go to Al-Anon.
I said, finally, finally, finally,
someone's going to show me how to get this woman sober.
So I strode into my first Al-Anon meeting.
And it says the disease of perceptions again,
because all the lights were about as bright as this,
beautiful people in there,
except I saw six women in there, average age, deceased.
That's with my perception.
They're about as old as I am now, but I was, you know, 20-some-odd years old.
And I'm looking at this, and I'm saying, oh, my God.
And I walk up to the deadest of them all.
And I said, how does this bloody thing work?
And she could not even stand up to greet me.
She was really afraid, or she didn't want to even come close to me.
She pointed me to the table there, and she said, go to that table.
There's a pamphlet there.
It's called The Twelve Steps.
Pick it up and read it, and that's how it works here.
So I walk up to the pamphlet table, and I pick it up.
I said, oh, this is easy.
Twelve Steps, Step 13, she gets sober.
Click, click, click, computer thing.
So I said, I'll just take these steps right now.
So I read the escape clause at the beginning of the thing.
This is really sick, right?
I'm reading.
It says, these steps are taken from Alcoholics Anonymous.
We change one word in the twelfth step.
We use the word others instead of alcoholics.
I said, okay, it's been borrowed from someplace else,
so some steps apply to me, some don't.
Let's see what's happening.
First step, admitted I was powerless over alcohol that my life,
had become unmatched.
No, it doesn't apply to me.
I'm not powerless over alcohol, and she is.
So this must apply to her.
It doesn't apply to me.
Move on.
Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
It does not mean that.
I'm the sane one.
She's the insane one.
See, I'm in total denial.
Sane people do not come home and see their spouse passed out on the floor,
their stuff coming out of their mouths.
They don't then go up to the garbage can to determine what they've been drinking.
They don't go and critique it on top of that.
This is what I did.
I would step over and say, let me see what she's been drinking.
I'd go through the garbage can.
Oh, my God.
She had wine with a screw on top, not even a cork to let it breathe.
And then she had Kmart champagne.
How gauche.
I'm being a snob.
This woman's drunk.
This is what insanity is all about.
I moved to step three, made a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God.
I said I went to 12 years of Catholic school, and they said God helps those who help themselves.
Why give to him back that which he has given to me?
That was the first step.
I said I would make God an Indian giver.
I can say that.
I made a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself, and I qualified myself for sainthood.
I was living in that slop, for God's sake.
I couldn't leave.
I moved on to step five.
Admitted to myself another human being, and I said to myself, first of all,
that step goes against the credo of image management.
First of all, there are no defects of character, because I don't know of any.
And if there were, I'm not going to tell you about it.
You're nuts.
Why should I?
Why should I?
And if God didn't know?
What kind of a God was that?
But there were no defects of character to know, so move on.
Six and seven.
Talk about humility.
I was so humble, I was proud of it.
So that did not cover the fly.
This is really a sick man in this room.
I moved on to step eight.
Made a list of persons I had harmed.
I said they deserved it.
Nine, amends.
I said I'm still waiting for her to do that, but she's not sober enough.
Ten, now my halo is really fitting me tight, and my head is hurting.
I moved on to eleven.
Saw through prayer and meditation.
I said I do that all the time.
God get her killed.
Six Hail Marys.
God make sure no one else is hurt.
Twelve Hail Marys.
You know, I'd go home every evening praying,
Oh God, I hope she's passed out.
Oh God, I hope she's passed out.
Oh God, I hope she's passed out.
I get home, she's passed out.
Damn it, she's passed out.
Then I'd get into my car and drive where?
To a single's bar.
I got her drunk at home.
Why am I going shopping for another one?
I'm not a Mormon either.
I mean, it's crazy.
I get to this bar and I pull out a cigar
that no woman in a 30-mile radius would even come close to me,
smoking a stinky cigar, angry at the people in there,
angry at myself, driving home, saying,
Oh God, she's passed out.
Oh God, I hope she's passed out.
That's no way to live.
Not a way to live.
And I didn't know any better.
Because I thought my sanity and my sobriety
and my reason for living was in that woman.
See, I had nothing to do for myself.
If only she would, everything would be okay.
And little did I realize,
that if only she would have no bearing on where I was.
See, my perceptions, my worldview was so victim-oriented
that I had no idea because my arrogance came in the way.
My entire life was fixated on someone else getting me straight
and I thought I was the okay one.
And I wasn't imbibing any of that stuff.
So I spiritually awakened in this meeting in three and a half minutes
and I looked at this woman.
I said, Now what?
And she looked at me like I'm from another planet.
She said, Keep coming back.
I said, Why?
She said, Because you're sick.
And it almost sounded like she was spitting on me.
She said, Sick.
I said, I'm not sick.
I've got a sick one at home.
She said, No, you're sick.
You come back.
And I did.
Every six weeks I'd go back.
Now it's so strange.
You're embarking on a program that literally gets to the core of your psyche.
It takes that little screw and it just turns around
so it changes your worldview.
It changes the way you perceive life.
It changes the way you now have a sense of yourself.
It alters your attitudes.
It changes the way you start acting and behaving.
And it changes.
It changes the person you've become.
And you're going to change this whole thing by going to class every six weeks.
It's like working on your thesis in, say, some crazy neuroscience or what have you
and expecting to go to class once a quarter and writing a thesis in a year and a half.
It just doesn't do it, does it?
And here I'm embarking on this life-changing program
by going to class every six weeks
and telling them how miserable my life is because my wife's drinking.
And they mess me up.
Like Megan said, they said disease.
She has a disease like cancer.
And it's like diabetes.
You don't do that to a moron like me.
Why?
Because I'm pseudo-intellectual.
And pseudo-intellectuals have brains that kind of break up into 19 different brains.
Eric talked about getting the program in three weeks.
I'm sitting in the meeting, my first, second, third, fifth, eighth, ninth meeting.
I've got thoughts happening in my head.
I'm not listening to what's going on.
And one thought is talking to another thought.
And the third thought is trying to interfere with what's going on.
There's a big conversation going on in my head.
But I'm not listening to anything that's being said because I know it.
And you guys are not smart enough to tell me how to get this woman sober.
Then I don't want to listen to you.
But I'm going to pretend something's going to happen in here.
So I'm going to sit and judge you.
And my mind is saying, she's got cancer.
If she had cancer, you couldn't leave her, could you?
I said, no.
Then the second part jumps up and says, wait a minute.
If it's like cancer, why isn't she seeking chemotherapy?
And then it says, it's like diabetes, damn it.
Oh, if it's like diabetes, why isn't she seeking insulin therapy?
And I've got this thing about disease and I'm stuck in this physiological and physical definitions of disease.
I had no idea that this disease transcended all that and into the spiritual and mental realms of disease.
Now, if you ask me today, is alcoholism a disease?
I'll tell you, I really don't know and I don't care.
Because that's not my problem.
My problem is my obsession with your behavior.
My disease is I want to drive four cars on the freeway at the same time.
I want to drive faster than the idiot in front of me who's only doing 95.
I want to drive faster than the idiot behind me who wants to ride in my backseat.
And I want to cut across the guy in my blind spot.
Because he won't let me pass the moron in the front of me.
So four cars I want to drive, then I wonder why my life is unmanageable.
That's my problem.
Not the fact that you drink.
And they say you can spot an alcoholic from the behavior of an al-anon.
We'd go out to dinner with friends.
My friend Bob would say, what's your problem, Ajit?
I said, my problem?
She's got mozzarella dripping down her chin.
She's got pepperoni stuck on her eyebrows.
And you're asking me what's my problem?
I said, she's having a fun time.
And she was.
I was the idiot who's so fixated on this.
She wasn't harming me.
So I'm going to these meetings, pretending like I'm understanding what's going on.
Nothing's clicking.
She decides to go into a treatment center.
And I said, I did it.
I finally sent her.
And I'm not casting aspersions at treatment centers.
They have their place.
They plant the seed.
But you know what?
When you force someone in, chances are it's not going to work.
But I was on cloud 19 because she was now sober.
And I'd done it.
My company had sent her there.
Three weeks after she got out, she drank harder than she'd ever had.
You know, any speaker said the Pacific Ocean with alcohol,
he was afraid it was going to evaporate and that's how she drank.
But see, I crashed from cloud 19 to subground zero.
But fortunately, by this time, I'd been transferred to Chicago.
I'd been to my first Al-Anon meeting in Schaumburg.
And they did something for me.
And please, I'm not suggesting you do this in your meetings.
I was chastised at a conference for even saying this from the podium.
But this is my story.
This is what helped me.
I brought up this disease thing.
And a member of my Al-Anon group pointed to the literature table.
He said, there's a book called The Big Book sitting on the literature table.
Pick it up.
It's yours.
And read it.
Then you'll understand what this disease is all about.
And I tell you, if you're a newcomer and you have not read The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous,
you may be doing yourself a disservice.
Because that's the basic text that tells you what it's all about.
See, I don't want to proselytize.
That's not my...
I just tell you my story.
Because, you know, it's taken me...
I started Al-Anon in 1980.
It finally clicked for me in 1997.
And I'll tell you how that happened.
But here I'm going to my Schaumburg meetings.
And they handed me The Big Book of AA.
And I was like, oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
I wish I had met the speaker from Los Angeles.
He's dead now.
Hugh D.
He defined it beautifully.
He said, alcoholism is like making love to a gorilla.
You ain't done with it till the gorilla's done with it.
It's a very stark representation of alcoholism.
And I'm going to my meetings.
I'm going to three meetings now.
I'm reading the literature.
But see, I have a problem.
I'm a pseudo-intellectual.
And what a pseudo-intellectual does when they read something, they think they know it.
And if they know it, they believe.
They've experienced it.
And they start talking the talk.
But that's not necessarily backed up with the walk.
So the program is now happening here in about these 60-odd inches.
I'm exaggerating.
Only about 8, 10 inches.
It's stuck in my head.
And I'm thinking of working it.
I now can rewrite the steps if you want me to.
I can change the syntax.
I can philosophize with you about the program.
I can tell you things that did not even happen in the program, but I'll make them sound very real.
And I'm going to read it.
I'm talking the talk.
And I'm not realizing I'm dying in this damn thing.
My wife is still drinking.
We now get moved to California.
And it was May of 1983.
And for some reason, she decided she wanted AA.
And she walked into her first AA meeting.
And I said, ah, this is wonderful.
I'm now in Al-Anon.
She's in AA.
We're a wonderful program couple.
Our neighbors thought we were swingers because she's hugging the guys.
I'm hugging the gals.
And everything is hunky-dory.
Wrong.
Because I started to obsess on other parts of her life.
I didn't realize that.
I started to suddenly obsess on what she wore.
I never, ever looked at what my wife wore.
I was obsessed with her food intake.
Well, she had food addiction, too.
And so listening for the sound of opening cans, I was listening to the sound of flushing cans.
There goes a $100 dinner.
Oh, my God.
One of those.
Bulimia.
And I was very obsessed with her spending.
She thought shopping was a religious experience.
And I didn't necessarily.
Believe in that.
I walked up to my sponsor.
I said, what gives?
She stopped drinking.
I'm still obsessed.
What's going on?
He said, don't you understand?
We have the same disease in one sense.
They have addiction to substance.
We are addicted with behavior.
You take one substance away.
You know, I actually looked at my wife one day.
I said, you alcoholics, you give up booze, then it's cigarettes.
You give up cigarettes, then it's sugar.
Then you give up sugar, and you obsess over exercise.
Your obsessions just go from substance to substance to substance.
She said, isn't that funny?
Your obsession.
It's moved right along, and you've noticed it all.
That's true.
A friend of mine came into my Al-Anon meeting.
He says, I'm not sure if I belong in Al-Anon.
I said, go outside on the street.
The next person that walks by, if you don't feel some reason to obsess over that person,
some behavior, don't come back.
He showed up the next week.
That's how we are.
We just don't recognize it until we recognize that we have obsession.
That's the thing I fought.
I fought the word disease for the longest time.
I did not like.
I didn't like the word disease ascribed to an Al-Anon to me
until I heard in my Al-Anon meeting, one lady said, disease is dis-ease.
The inside's not matching the outsides.
That I understand because the image management, everything's on the outside.
The insides are not in parallax with what's on the outside.
The talk is there, but the walk is not there.
But this time, she was sober two and a half years.
We now have twins showing up.
Eighteen months later, Corey shows up.
We have triplets happening.
I've started a new business.
And, of course, my partner has this fondness for alcohol and women that don't happen to be his wife.
And things are going to hell in the handbasket.
Business has done very well the first year, and it's dying the second year.
I find myself paying my mortgage occasionally with my credit card, and I'm in desperate straits
because I'm talking the talk.
I'm not walking the walk.
And I get on my knees, and I say, God help.
And I close my eyes, and I reach into my wife's bookshelf, and I just reach for any book
because she had about 80, 90 books on spirituality.
And jumps in my hand again is a big book of Alcoholics Anonymous.
I open it up, and page on step three opens up.
And a voice that sounded a little bit like Mike Tyson's because I felt a hit in my head said,
You have not surrendered.
You haven't let go.
You're still trying to run the damn show.
You know, you're not honest in your relationships.
You're not loyal to your relationships.
You're not faithful.
The fidelity is missing.
There's a lot of things that were lacking in my life that I pretended that I was Mr. Allen on.
And I was sponsored.
I was mentoring people.
I was articulating the concepts quite well.
People thought just because I had the command of the language,
you're like, you know, watch out for people who can speak very clearly and fluently
and articulate themselves very well.
They're probably not working the program too well.
If then you just say, hey, that's image management stuff.
I was one of those guys.
So I can spot them in my meetings when they start spouting philosophy quite well.
I said, uh-oh, here comes one of me.
I know them.
Because our lips are moving.
It's a lie because it's not coming from the heart.
It's coming from the head.
And I'm sitting there.
I walk up to my sponsor.
I said, I'm dead.
I am walking out.
I feel like a liar.
I feel like a cheat.
I feel like a fraud.
I'm getting out of this program.
I don't know where my sponsor got this, and I'm so glad he did.
I don't understand the logic behind the statement.
He said, if you had not been working the program, you would not have come to this conclusion.
Huh?
And for the first time, I said, Dean, help me.
What do I do?
And he said, I want you to go back and understand this concept of powerlessness.
And I said, how do I do that?
And he's rather pedagogical in his approach.
You know, every pedagogist reads.
I said, what?
He said, go to every source you can find and read the first step, the powerlessness thing,
the big book, little book, green book, blue book, whatever,
and then apply it to the situations in your life over which you truly are powerless.
Don't stand up there and say, I'm powerless over people, places, and institutions
because you honestly don't believe that.
You sit and write it down.
Look at how you're powerless over this.
And I've come to recognize when I started to do that, I said, okay, this is what I do.
And he said, then what?
What the first step does is identifies the problem for you.
Now it brings it in clear focus.
And I like the Zen statement for the first step.
It says, it is thus.
There's no adjectives to it.
It's not bad.
It's not good.
It just is.
And like what Gay was talking about this morning, it's okay.
Just the way it is.
That's it is.
And then I said, what about step two?
He said, step two is a step of hope.
It's wonderful because now you've identified the problem.
You identified your powerlessness.
Now step two gives you options.
What are my options?
What's the solution?
So you're responding rather than reacting.
And I see, I'm the kind of guy, this is what my thinking is.
I'm riding my car and a thought comes into my head that step one is admitting the existence of a perceived reality.
Okay?
And a little voice said, but what if your perceptions are off?
Then is your reality really your reality?
And now you're getting into some real weird thinking.
Because now all of a sudden nothing is real because you're not sure if you're seeing real or not real.
So I've got to pick up the phone and call my sponsors.
I'm going nuts.
It's an LSD moment and I've never done LSD.
So he says, so I'm looking at step one.
I'm writing on the powerlessness stuff and I get to step two.
I'm looking on what my options are because I tend to react rather than respond.
And I found that step two is really rife with options.
See, I'm the kind of guy, I'm standing in my shower and I tell you, this is a true story.
I'm standing and showering and I look and I have this big white tiled wall staring at me.
And on that tiled wall.
And on that wall is this tiny ant that's been splattered somehow onto the little tile.
And I'm looking at the ant and all of a sudden the entire wall disappears.
And all I'm looking at is this ant wondering what happened to that ant?
How did it get stuck?
I'm tossing water at it and it won't go away.
And I'm focused on this problem.
And the problem is looming larger and larger and larger to the point there is no solution in view.
And what my sponsor showed me in step two is that once you start focusing on the solution,
the problem starts to dissipate and disappear.
And I moved on to step three.
I said, turning my will and my life over to something outside of me scares the heejeebees out of me.
How am I going to do that?
See, I didn't realize that I was not surrendering to some power or wonderful thing outside of me.
I was really tuning in to what was already inside of me.
Finally, I was beginning to understand that I'm already in this thing called the stream of consciousness.
I just have to come to that place and say,
yes, it is, and acknowledge it and see if it works.
I like a George in Seinfeld who would say,
I don't like that little guy in there.
I don't know what it's saying.
I don't want to listen to it.
Ninety-nine times out of ten, a hundred, I don't want to listen to it
because it's wanting me to do something I in my ego self don't want to do
because it scared the hell out of me to venture out and trust this thing inside of me.
And so it takes a lot of practice.
I still have a hard time with step three in terms of saying,
okay, you know what?
I'm just going to see how it goes.
Live in the moment, live in the day, and let it happen.
I am totally confused.
I am totally confused.
I am totally confused.
I am totally confused.
Then do I set goals setting or no goals setting?
You're right, business plans don't work.
And I recognize that's all irrelevant.
And maybe God's plan for me to set goals and to write plans.
How do I know?
So I go about doing that.
I moved on to step four.
Step four was scary for me because I'd done the three column,
the four column thing, and I looked at my defects of character
and I was hunky-dory.
But this is what, this step four really worked for me.
I was married at 79, 90 we had our last child, Nathan.
After that I realized how it was happening.
It wasn't immaculate.
It wasn't immaculate, I was responsible, and I had to go get fixed.
And my wife thereafter informed me that she had memories of certain things
happening to her in her childhood by people that she trusted.
And for some reason it affected our marriage.
And we were, we stopped being physically intimate and now we were developing
what is called intellectual intimacy and spiritual intimacy.
And over a period of time that started to dissipate and die, and my wife finally had
the courage.
She finally had the courage to say, it's over, I want you to leave.
And I was so distraught, I channeled a 70-year-old Jewish guy when she told me that,
oy vey, I put up with you for 17 years and now, and I'm kicking in the kitchen drawer
and I'm pulling O.J. at the cleaver and I'm beating the crap out of the kitchen table.
I'm threatening her for God's sake.
And I decided I'm going to sue the crap out of this woman.
I'm going to show the world she's neurotic.
I'm going to show the world she's a neurotic.
Psychotic, crazy, incapable of running a house, having children, blah, blah, blah.
And I'm sitting across this attorney, we're strategizing.
I've paid him a lump sum of money and he's charging me 250 bucks an hour and wagging
his finger at me for being a bad boy, for doing something I shouldn't have done.
And I'm doing all this and suddenly my sponsor's voice shows up on my shoulder.
He'd been to school with the first two therapists, I guess.
He said, so what's the problem?
Step one.
Why are you doing this?
I said, I don't want to lose my kids.
I don't care about the stuff I can rebuild, but I don't want to lose my kids.
And the voice said, have you asked her?
No.
I know it.
Everything happens in my head.
I don't need to ask you.
I walk into a room, I look around, I know exactly what's going to happen because I know it.
That's insane.
That's insane.
And I said, no, I haven't.
His voice said, why don't you go ask her?
So I told the attorney, stop.
I walked out.
I called my wife.
I said, I'm not going to take you to court on one condition.
She said, what?
I said, I don't want to lose the kids.
She said, you're a great dad.
You're a lousy husband.
I'm not stupid.
We have four children.
I don't want them to myself.
So there you go.
So I moved out of the house with two suitcases, left all the stuff behind six blocks away
so she would have her privacy and I could see my kids as often as I could.
We had joint parenting.
I don't like calling it custody.
They were not in prison.
They were joint parenting.
They would come and go.
But something happened.
We tried marriage therapy and now this woman became my divorce therapist for a few weeks.
And she said something to me.
She said, do not get involved in another relationship for a year because you're going through a period of transition.
And I said, I've transitioned.
Seven years my marriage was dying.
Two years it's been dead.
And I stumbled across this woman in my Al-Anon meeting.
July 4th, it's ironic, 1996, I moved out.
In late August, early September, I meet my wife.
Early September, I meet this woman who happened to be Canadian, by the way.
And this woman fulfilled everything that was lacking in my life, spiritually, mentally, physically, emotionally.
Every level, every note in my life was being struck at the right chord.
I mean, just everything was clicking.
I was in love.
It was just absolutely phenomenal.
And as the therapist predicted, exactly one year later, the relationship ended almost to the day.
And that ending was more devastating than my marriage because I had been prepared for the end of my marriage.
And I walked up to my sponsor and asked him if he had a gun.
And he said, no.
I said, why do you want a gun?
I said, shoot me.
I'm in so much pain.
Instead, he said, when was the last time you've been alone?
I said, I can't recall.
He said, I recommend you lock yourself up for a couple of days.
This is a nice way to tell someone, hey, you're insane.
You're a danger to society and yourself.
And he said, I want you to do a fourth step.
I said, you tell me.
I said, you tell me what fourth step.
And he said, I want you to go through page 345 in Courage to Change.
And I said, I want you to do that.
And my sponsor usually never gives me direct direction.
He normally makes suggestions.
So it was Thanksgiving of 97 that I locked myself up for two days.
I shut the radio, TV, cell phone, pager, everything off.
I told my ex-spouse, I said, please don't send the kids over.
I'm not going to be available.
I have stuff to do.
I'm going to lock myself up.
See, I'd prepped myself.
I'd read a few books.
If you haven't read this one, I normally don't recommend.
But the new pair of glasses, Chuck C.
And I'd read another book called Conversations with God.
And I'd read another book called Zen and the Birds of Appetite.
And I'd read another book called How to Be an Adult.
All these things are coming at me.
And now I look at page 345 and the first question is, who are you?
I have no frickin' idea.
Because I am whatever you want me to be.
I'm like Zelig in the movie Woody Allen starred in.
I'm with black artists, jazz artists.
I'm a jazz musician.
I'm with doctors.
I pretend I'm a doctor.
I'm exaggerating, but you know what I'm talking about.
No sense of self.
And I'm supposed to write, who am I?
And I'm starting to write.
And I'm raging.
And I'm screaming at my dead father for not playing cricket with me as a kid.
My father couldn't hold a bloody bat.
Or for not hugging me and telling me he loved me.
And I'm shouting and I'm screaming and I'm writing, who am I?
And what happened?
And all the discrimination and the pain that I had experienced as a child.
All this victimization.
The victimization that I had perceived in my life to be.
I don't think my parents ever sat up at four in the morning and said,
hmm, let's think of how we're going to screw up Ajit's life today.
You know, my father did not have to hug me or play cricket with me.
His way of showing love for me is to make sure that I had a roof over my head,
had clothes on my back, food in my belly, and I was going to school.
And that's the way his father raised him.
And that's the way his father's father raised him.
They were not the kind of people who went around hugging and kissing.
Like I tell my kids, I love you.
That's not the way they demonstrate their love.
They demonstrate saying, I'm your father.
You've got to know that I love you.
I don't have to tell you.
That's expected.
And I'm writing this.
The next question was, what are your values?
Oh, my God.
I talked about honesty, but I hadn't practiced it.
I talked about loyalty, and I hadn't practiced it.
I talked about fidelity, and I wasn't strong in that arena.
I talked about faithfulness, and I wasn't there.
I mean, all these values that I had espoused verbally that I had not practiced.
And I walked up to my sponsor like a little child, and I said,
what's a value?
What do I do?
He says, do you value your children?
I said, yes.
He said, how do you show it?
Do you value your business?
I said, yes.
How do you show it?
Action.
See, that's what I found out.
I can go to 19,000 meetings.
It's like you standing in your garage, and you expect yourself to become a car.
I don't care how much you honk and how much you blink your eyes.
You're not going to become a car unless you shove a transmission up your rear
and a radiator down your nose and someone find a way to put a steering wheel on you.
Until you take those steps, it ain't going to happen.
And I also learned one thing.
I read this someplace.
He said, you come to a banquet.
Great food.
People are sitting there eating, laughing, having a great time.
Waiters and waitresses bustling by.
You sit down, and you want to be served, and no one's serving you.
People are walking by.
No one's talking to you.
And you're just sitting there.
And all of a sudden, you realize it's a buffet.
You've got to get up and help yourself.
I mean, you've got to work the steps.
I'm sitting here saying, oh, my God.
I'm writing this stuff up.
And I'm saying, what are my values?
How do I do this?
What action am I taking to express my values?
How do I show my friends I like them?
How do I show my family I care about them?
How do I show my business I like them?
I'm writing all this stuff, and I'm just angry at him.
I'm writing this stuff.
Our next question was, what traits of character do you like about yourself?
Now, this is an image-conscious, arrogant little guy writing down what he likes about himself.
And I tell you, there's not much I could like about myself.
And the last question was, what traits of character do you wish to get rid of?
So he literally made me take steps four, six, and seven.
All in one two-day period.
And I'm spent.
Saturday morning, I get up.
I go up to him, and I say, I want you to do my fifth.
We did my fifth.
And that fourth was really the start, the doorway that opened up to me in Al-Anon.
Finally, the crap that was here is starting to sink into the soul.
And it's starting to make sense.
You know, I heard an air speaker say it beautifully.
He said, I felt like my feet were planted firmly in midair.
That's how I'd been feeling all this time.
And this is the first time after I took a breath.
I took that thing.
I hit the ground solid, and I felt it.
And I felt Darth Vader's voice come up and say, welcome to the dark side.
Because he had denied all the negative about me.
I denied the fact that I was an insecure, scared person who was afraid of a lot of stuff,
who was angry, who was jealous, who was insecure, who was envious.
All these traits of character, because I said, I'm in program.
I can't be angry.
And I'm angry because I'm feeling angry.
Now I've got to double whammy.
Because I'm not supposed to feel angry because I'm in program.
And I realize that's not the case at all.
So I'm working on this thing.
And I finish my fifth.
And I walk up to my sponsor.
And I give it away.
And it's wonderful.
And that's the healing that came from that fourth step.
And then moving into the fifth, and the sixth, and the seventh, eighth.
Eighth I love.
Because it says, and I'll end it here.
It's got a few minutes to go.
Okay, I'm sorry.
I keep a watch.
Because I have a lot to say, you know.
And we were talking this morning.
She said she stops when she's supposed to.
She stops when she's supposed to stop.
And she never happens to go over an hour.
And I love that.
I wish I could do that.
But then she said she can't see too well either.
So I don't.
She made it sound more spiritual than it was.
But she's talking to an Al-Anon.
I'm listening between the lines here.
She can't see the time.
So what the heck is she talking about when she carries a watch?
Step eight says, there are two types of guilt.
Neurotic guilt and real guilt.
And I said, God, I got a lot of neurotic guilt.
So neurotic guilt is when there's no amends to be made.
You just feel guilty.
Real guilt is when there's restitution, when you can make amends.
And I've been doing that.
I made amends to my ex-wife in the way I've been.
See, I, the weapon I used on my wife was not physical violence.
Because I had the command of the language, I had a weapon that I used very effectively.
And it's called sarcasm.
I could tear her up from one side to the next.
I read someplace that sarcasm is borrowed from the dream.
Sarcasm is borrowed from the Greek word sarcoza, which means to tear flesh.
And I was indulging in the worst kind of cannibalism.
I was literally destroying someone's spirit.
And by not taking my wife to court, by not making all that noise,
I really have, I believe, made amends to my ex-wife.
And I tell you, every crisis that has happened in my life has been a blessing.
The end of the divorce has made me a better father.
I was an involved father.
I played, you know, in the sports thing and what have you.
But literally taking four kids on a shopping spree for nine hours,
I loved it.
I couldn't believe it.
My son asked me, he says,
I've got one daughter, three boys.
How does this girl go from store to store and not buy anything?
I said, that's a woman gene, son.
Sit down.
So yeah, I smoke a cigar and he's drinking his soda
and we're watching my daughter go window shopping from store to store.
I've gotten closer to my kids as a result of that.
I never thought that I would really feel the emotion that I feel for my kids.
And my 18-year-olds, I think teenagers and alcoholics,
there's not much of a difference.
Self-centered people.
I love alcoholics.
Some of my best friends are alcoholics.
I'm teasing.
But it's been a trip.
This program has been a trip for me in that regard.
After the breakup with that woman, I thought it was the end of the world for me.
But what it had given me, it's given me back to me because I had lost myself.
I actually never had myself because, see, I was so focused on the outside.
Ever since I was a child, I was raised that way,
to be out of focus rather than be introspective and inner focused, if you will.
And what the gift came from that was I'm very comfortable with me today.
I like what I see in the mirror, not from an arrogant, vain standpoint,
but I like the fact that I'm tripping and falling, but I know the compass.
I got a sense of the compass.
I know what the direction is.
And I know when I do fall off the board, which I do quite often,
what amends and what restitution I have to make to get back into the groove.
So that's step 10, essentially, on a daily basis.
Meditation and prayer are part of the deal.
I don't sit and worry about whether one talks to God, one listens to God,
as long as one's communicating with God.
And today, my God's a God of love.
It's not a God that says, looking through a long lens at your jeet,
you're a bad boy, marry an alcoholic.
You're a good boy, we'll give you serenity.
None of that stuff.
He loves me regardless.
I loved one saying that Joseph Campbell quoted from the Bible.
He said, your capacity to sin cannot exceed God's capacity to love.
I like that kind of God.
Yeah.
And I just can't do anything to be in harm's way in that regard.
So I feel a gift of spirituality from this program that I never expected
because I grew up in a place where a God was a God of you do this
and I'll do that for you.
And the relationships were based on condition rather than unconditionality,
and you've given me that.
You people in Austin, Texas, really know how to practice your program.
I've received a lot of love this weekend.
It's just been tremendous, especially when you're asked to quack like a duck
and drive like a car.
I'll end on this note.
If you don't think you belong in Al-Anon,
and I saw there were some people who were very, very new,
I like what Dennis Miller had to say.
I'm going to put a little spin on what he said.
He said, if you go bathroom tile shopping with the alcoholic in your life
and you have this desire to pick up the tile and rest it against their face
to see how comfortable it feels for them,
you might just want to come to Al-Anon.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Dennis.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Dennis.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
I appreciate it.
Thank you, Dennis.
Thank you, Dennis.
Thank you.
Thank you, Dennis.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
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Thank you.
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