The Craving – Big Book Study – Part 5 of 8 – Scott L and Matt C

Thanks Bob. I love that rat story. I used to drink with that rat and I sponsor him today. Don't you? Yeah, my own experience with the craving, I had the privilege of flying for the United States Air Force for five years and for a six month run I flew the T-38 which was the movie, in the movie Top Gun, they said it was the MiG. They had the fight with the MiGs. And I want to just tell you a little piece of that because I think you'll get the craving idea from it. This is a high performance plane. That means it has after-burning jet engines. It will fly faster than the speed of sound. The Thunderbirds flew this plane for seven years and we did almost everything that they did on a daily basis. We did it every day and I would take the runway in this thing and lock the canopy lock the brakes and release them and light those burners and a mile later at about 170 miles an hour you sort of think back on the stick you know better not move it you just think because it's very sensitive and man here we go this thing this thing has a roll rate of 720 degrees a second yeah twice around around every second. And I like to say your eyeballs won't track that if you're sober. I mean it's just, it is a blur. It's beautiful but it's a blur and a loop in this plane, a loop is defined as a 360 degree turn through the vertical plane pulling positive Gs. At 10,000 feet you enter a loop at 500 knots, you pull up at 5 Gs, now you're pulling 1 right now, it's the force of gravity. At 1g a 200-pound man weighs 200 pounds. At 5g's a 200 pound man weighs 1000 pounds. That is exactly what that means. Doesn't have to do with the speed, it has to do with the rate of change of direction. And so everything on you now weighs times five. That includes by the way your upper eyelids. You'll notice that. And so here we are at 10,000 feet, 500 knots, 5Gs where wings level inverted at 20,000 feet. And it was a bubble canopy looking at the world like this. You lose 8,000 feet coming down the backside. The total elapsed time is under 25 seconds. So I like to say they don't have that right at the fair. They don't have that one and uh i tell you all of that about about the airplane for for two obvious reasons the first one of course is to impress you right i'm impressed and the second one is because it tells a story i think so well come down from a day i'm flying an airplane all day 5 30 we're done i head over to the officers club and i do not intend to get drunk tonight i have a flight tomorrow morning in that airplane in formation. There are going to be two of us doing that together, tomorrow morning at 730. Clearly not going to get drunk today. Nobody with a brain would get drunk the night before going to do that. I mean, a roller coaster, guys like me doze off on roller coasters. It's that much of a ride. But I do want to socialize the other pilots in my squadron so I think I'll drop by the club and we'll do this together. You guys know all the answers. All right? When I cue you, just fill in the blanks. All right. Don't drop by the club and have one beer, no more than ... Two. Right. Sure. Now, I noticed that the Al-Anons didn't play. I'd like to encourage the Al Anons. This is what you heard on the phone. Right? And you believed it again. That's why you have to come to Al-A-Non. The ones that ran screaming from people like me, they don't have to come to your thing. So play along. All right, one beer no more then ... Two. 6.30, no later than? 7. Sure. It's good to have a plan. But by the time I get to the bottom of the second beer, I got this craving that Bob was talking about so beautifully. I don't get home at 7. I leave the officer club at exactly 1 o'clock in the morning because they close. Quite a few pilots here tonight, Bob. And drive home with a hand over one eye, right? Who knows why? Who knows why? Come on. Who did that? Let's see them. Had a guy a couple of months ago at one of these tell me that he carried duct tape under his seat and he would get duct tape out and he would duct tape over one eye because he was afraid a cop would see him with his hand up. I'm not making this up. Walk into the house, my first wife tears into me. There's a lot of information in that sentence. And go into the bathroom for my after-drinking chores. Let's see the hands of the pukers. Come on, nice and high. Where are you, puker? Pukers? Okay, that's great. Thank you. How about nose pukes? Ever come out your nose even once? Nose puking? Okay. Thank You. Yeah. Who quits solemn oath on the Bible in front of witnesses at least once. These are my people, yeah. Who peed in the closet? Did you really? I never did that. I'm so embarrassed for you. That's awful. That is terrible. I don't believe I would have told that myself. You know there is a big difference between a fist step and sharing at a meeting, you might want to talk to your sponsor about it. I will admit that my first wife is still angry about that antique coffee table that used to be in the living room. All right, I'll give you that. Who's taken meetings into jails and prisons? Keep them up for a minute. Wow. For anybody else, if you're suffering from depression, get with one of these people and take a couple of meetings into the jail. It'll break that depression for you i guarantee it will there's magic and going out of your way to be a tool in the master's hand and it's not about the door slamming you get to go home that's not what it's about but i ad-libbed that little thing i just did about who peed in the closet in depot in the county lockup about two years ago one night 25 guys sitting there they don't laugh much in the jail by the way but they did that night because this one poor guy put his hand up and i worked him over like I did you. And when the laughter finally died down, the guy says, hey man, no big deal. It wasn't my closet. It's a perspective thing. Don't go home, because that's really funny, but don't go Home and tell your neighbors because they're not going to get it. All right? That's how we spot them in our meetings is they don't know when to laugh. You'll notice that about him. All right, so I've been there puking my guts up, quitting forever. I'm convinced that the two most important and creative inventions of the 20th century, both created by alcoholics, one was that little half-moon shape of carpet that they put around a commode for you to kneel on. Is she great? Do you love this laugh? That was invented by one of our people. You know, his knees were all torn up from that hard bathroom floor he said we ought to put and uh and that soft commode seat you could rest your head on you got in between heaves there you know right so i'm in there puking my guts up quitting forever right and then i would pray i uh i'm just playing with you now but see if it fits I claim that there are three pre-AA prayers. One of them is, God help me pass this test I didn't study for. Recognize that one? Please don't let her be pregnant. Can also be prayed in the first person. And we're going to do the third one together. I'm going to go ahead and do it. I'm not going to say the first line. You're going do the second. I'm there on the prayer rug in the bathroom. Yeah, puking them up. and then I pray the pre-AA prayer, God get me out of this. Never do it again. Blech! Which is alcoholic for amen. That's right. And brush my teeth and go to bed and it's got to be 2.30, 3 o'clock in the morning. I get up at 6. I'm not even hungover yet. Right? You remember that wonderland between drunk and hungover? I've come to miss that so much. And 7.30 in the morning, I'm in that airplane, baby, and we are releasing brakes, right? And at about 180 miles an hour as we're coming off of the ground and the wheels are coming up, I've tucked up under the leader's tail, and I'm going to tell you right now that his afterburner is closer to where I'm pointing right here. My instructor will be screaming at me if I was this far away from that plane. We are up snug, and weird pulling 5Gs going over the top, and I'm dying in this plane. Oh, you remember the hangover? Remember the one where the butcher knife went in at an angle and came out the back? Do you remember that one? I got that one today. The eyelids are made out of sandpaper, right? I've got a tremor in my hands, my throat, and nasal passages are raw. I've selected 100% on the oxygen lever. It will not cure a hangover. I've tried it hundreds of times. I've talked to Sandy and Lyle and a bunch of other pilots, and they'll tell you they tried it too and never cured a hang over. I'm trying it one more time, and I'm hanging in there. I'm also tight on the leader, flying the mission. And what I just described to you, if you didn't recognize it, is willpower. I believe alcoholics have a tremendous amount of willpower It will not defend against this disease, but we got it. We got a friend that says he believes that's the reason non-alcoholics don't become alcoholic is they ain't got the willpower for it. Well, the guy goes out on prom night. He drinks a pint and a half of Jack Daniels. He pukes on his date's dress. He wrecks his truck. He wakes up in the drunk tank. He says, I'm never doing that again. He never does. Obvious lack of willpower. Just couldn't hang like you could. I'm so proud of you. And I'm dying. And the only thing that keeps me going all that day is knowing for sure that I'll never feel this way in a plane again because last night I quit forever and it meant it with all my heart. Didn't you? I quit forever a good 2,000 times, maybe three, and meant it. And meant it every time. By 530 that afternoon, I'm not well yet. Pretty close, though. I was only 22, 23 years old. My body's resilient. And I got a flight tomorrow morning at 815 in a four-ship. There are going to be four of us doing this wing to wing. Nobody with a brain would get drunk the night before going four-shift formation, right? You can see that. but I do want to socialize the other parts of my squad I think I'll drop by the club and have one beer no more than two I should be home by 630 no later than seven but I leave the club at exactly one because they close I drive home drunk I listen to her I puke my guts out God get me out of this but never do it again blah just a little amen come on blah yeah and I'm doing that over and over again and I can't look into the past all the way to yesterday all the ways yeah all the away to yesterday and say, man, weren't you dying to have a hangover yesterday when we did this and every day last week and every night last month? Powerless over alcohol and ignorant of the fact that I was powerless over alcohol. That's a bad combination, ignorant and powerless. Tough combination. I can't find in our literature a definition of alcoholism or alcoholic, but we've bounced off of a couple of the descriptions, And I'm going to touch on just a couple more of them. Page 21, let's see if we didn't already do this one. First full paragraph, what about the real alcoholic? He may start off as a moderate drinker. He may or may not become a continuous hard drinker You do not have to be a continuous hard drink for being an alcoholic. But at some stage of his drinking career he begins to lose all control of his liquor consumption once he starts to drink. That's the one we've been talking about. Page 30, five or six lines down. The idea that somehow, someday, he will control and enjoy his drinking. There's one or the other. If I'm controlling it, I am not enjoying it. If I am enjoying it, it is out of control. I cannot do both. Can't do both page 44. This is the one where he got me. four or five lines down, if when you honestly want to, you find you cannot quit entirely, or not and, or if when drinking you have little control over the amount you take, you are probably alcoholic. I am probably alcoholic because that's my story, and yet I got here on a winning streak. I was living in a fancy house, driving a fancy car, making too much money, and dying inside. And I was just convinced I couldn't be one. And when I did get to you, this is what I started doing. We in Tennessee, they read the nine-step promises at a lot of meetings. And so I started working the promises and hoping the steps would come true. Because my M.O. is that I figure out who I think you want me to be and then I be that. That's what I've been doing all my life. So I hear you're reading that, so I'm trying to be that. So I'm pretending I'm that, and I'm trying to convince myself I'm not. I'm showing you that. And I'm going crazy. I got untreated alcoholism until I fell into the hands of that book thumper. I think maybe my favorite description of the alcoholic is on page 23. This is the one that wraps it up for me. center of the page once in a while he may tell the truth yeah i didn't spread it around too thick i i'm saving the truth for emergencies i uh jack nicholson had a great line in the movie as good as it gets he said i'll always give you some version of the truth you tell me one of our people didn't write that See, we understand that completely. Page 59. Some things here you may think I'm playing where I'm really not because this may strike you as kind of strange. I refer to the short form of the steps of these here on page 59 and the one on page 60 with numbers by them. To me, the long form is the book where it really expands on how to do those things. In the short form of Step 1, I originally read and understood it to say we admitted we were powerless over alcohol therefore our lives had become unmanageable. On close examination I've discovered that the word therefore does not appear in the first step strangely enough. I looked up in a dictionary under punctuation hyphen and hyphen is not shorthand for therefore. actually separates, or connects rather, two separate thoughts. The reason I was confused by all of that is on June the 27th, 1984, the date of my most recent drink, the fact that I was powerless over alcohol and that my life was crashing down around my ears were related. On August the 31st, 2007, I am powerless over alcohol. My life is unmanageable. Those things don't change for me, and I'm not playing with you. Stay with me for a second. If that's rubbing your fur the wrong way, stay with me for just a second and let me show you where I'm going with this. I have fired me as general manager of my own life based on my performance. A good manager would have fired be several decades ago. And one of the first things I did when I woke up this morning was I invited God in to run my life literally as general manager. I do that every morning. It's one of the very first things I do when I wake up is I literally invite him in. I surrendered for a long time in AA, first couple years I did a lot of surrendering. I haven't surrendered in a long time. This morning I volunteered. Similar result but it comes from a very different place. I volunteered for service this morning and whatever he's got in mind for me suits me. There's serious doubt as to how much more I could survive of what I would like to have. My will didn't work for me, just really didn't. If you're new and the steps look to you like they're designed to punish you, welcome to AA because that's how they look to us, and we were wrong about that, and by the way, you are too. They're not that hard. It's astonishing to me how hard some of that looks and how easy it actually turned out to be. And we're going to cover that in depth over tomorrow and on Sunday morning. I'm going to give you a couple of quick things that I heard in my home group. This lady friend of mine one time was having some problems, and she said, I'm having trouble getting a grip on letting go. and i think she was right about that it's this idea of unmanageability is difficult for us i've read the book actually a couple of times and i can't find a place in the text that says congratulations having now achieved this spiritual level your life is now manageable the tank's full the keys are in it load up go get them. Somebody shout out the page number. Well, call me collect if you find it. I'm still looking for it. But I do find some places that promise me sanity. My life's no longer insane. Sanity's been restored and we're going to talk about that in depth. So I don't want to run my own life anymore because I've seen what happens when I run it and I believe it remains unmanageable by me. It doesn't become more or less unmanangeable. For me, it becomes more or less sane. And if that doesn't work for you, that's just my own perspective. This is a telephone conversation I had with a young man. By the way, Bob and I have talked about this. We have permission to tell you every story we tell. When you hear us talking about people and telling stories from other people, we have their permission. As a young male, I sponsor, and I finally said, look, I don't want to hear anymore. You're obsessing about her. He said, I'm not obsessing about her. I just think about her all the time. It's that kind of alcoholic that I was suffering under when I got here. It was making me absolutely crazy all day, every day. And there's one of the reasons that I needed a sponsor is I needed somebody to help me work through that unbelievable stuff that was going on inside my mind. Let's do that page 35 thing. I think there's a fabulous question that's asked here on page 35 in the first full paragraph. What sort of thinking dominates an alcoholic who repeats time after time the desperate experiment of the first drink? That's the question that we're asking here. There's a long setup. The balance of this page sets it up, and then we come to the answer on the next page. It says, "...yet he got drunk again." We ask him to tell us exactly how it happened. This is his story. I'd like to make an observation here. What we asked for was exactly how it happened, what we got was his story, got it? Some version of the truth. All right. Bob's going to take the other part. I came to work on Tuesday morning. What happened to Monday? Do you cut hair for a living? A lot of people go to work Monday. What do you mean you came to work on Thursday? Let's take a whole look at the entire picture. A lot of people work Monday, but please continue. I remember I felt irritated to be a salesman for a concern I once owned. Irritated? How about bent? How about your undies are in a permanent wad? How about the veins on your neck are throbbing? You are so angry. Your face is red. Your blood pressure is through the roof. Irritated. Please continue. I had a few words with the boss, but nothing serious. No, you had a fight with your boss and you don't think it's serious. Boy, we're not anywhere near reality here. Fights with the Boss end in being fired, demoted, not getting the raise. there are zero fights with the boss that are not serious but please continue with your story then i decided to drive into the country and see a prospect for a car yeah that's where they all are boy they never show up at the lot do they all right and and if you would skip with us down to the italics at the bottom of the page Suddenly the thought crossed my mind that if I were to put an ounce of whiskey in my milk it couldn't hurt me on a full stomach That is the exact same kind of thinking That is exactly the same kind of thinking and I think maybe if a sponsor had been involved and been able to argue with this insanity of my story that maybe we wouldn't get to that last thought down there. A friend of mine says he's only got two brain cells left one of them creates BS and the other one buys it and that I think that's one of the most important pieces about a sponsor and and I know there's some new folks here and I want to tell you this I wish I'd known when I was new that somebody needed to sponsor me when I asked Sonny to sponsor me I thought I was saying to him I'm a dead weight would you drag me you're going to hate this there's nothing in it for you excuse me I'm gonna take you off the golf course and the tennis courts and away from your wife and mowing your lawn and your job and your family and all the stuff you'd like to do. But I'm begging you, I'm giving up my manhood to ask for help because I've got this crazy John Wayne thing. And it's a zero for you. Would you do it anyway? And I was just so wrong about all that. When I asked someone to sponsor me, what I'm really saying is, I believe you're on the path. May I walk beside you? We will help each other. and boy I don't care how new you are that is the package. How many times has a man I sponsor asked me a question that I needed to hear? For those of you who are new all the lessons aren't for you. You will touch a sponsor at death time after time after Time. I'll tell you one of the great joys of sponsorship is for me to tell someone I sponsored to do something that I'm not currently doing. Boy, very few things feel better than that. I'll absolutely keep you on the path here. One of the problems I had when I got here was I was terrified that there might be a God because I'm guilty as charged. In addition to which, well, Mama, why did Grandma die? Well, it was God's will. Well, that sounds dangerous to me and I don't have any interest in God's will. And I had to take the term, God's Will, as I understood it – this is just me – and break it into two separate pieces. The first one is, what am I going to be when I grow up? Where am I gonna live? How much money am I make? What's going to happen to my children? And all that stuff. Every bit of that violates one day at a time. It's all in the future. I now think of that package as God's plan. Step 1, Section B says I'm not in management. I don't need to know what the plan is. Put that down leaves me very simply with God's will. That's what would he have me do? I got some kids. I'm trying to be a good dad. I gotsome grandkids. I am trying to bea good granddad. I married to a fabulous woman. I act like it all the time. Iam a citizen, I vote. I tell you how I vote too. I vote by secret ballot. I hope you do too and we better not cross that line around here election year coming up we got to keep that stuff out of here somebody's going to die i drive a car put your blinker on near me i will let you in in traffic it's one of the most spiritual things that i do uh i'm an alcoholic i have a home group i sponsor some guys i got a sponsor i got some commitments i'm a child of god i pray i meditate and i try to treat his kids like brothers and sisters i know what god's will is for me is to act like one of his kids today Today is the magic word. Bring it down to the today thing. It gets pretty easy. But I got here scared, just scared that there was a God. I am so guilty. And one of the things I had to do was to let go of some old ideas. You usually do this part. Do you want to pick it up for a couple of minutes? Okay.