The Insecurity of the High Achiever – Buzz A.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Hal Marley. I'm a very grateful alcoholic. And as some of you may know, I try to practice an attitude of gratitude because I have a lot to be grateful for. I pray every morning that wonderful little prayer from the 24-hour book. I pray that I may be grateful to the things I have received and do not deserve. I pray that this gratitude will make me truly humbled. And tonight, I have another good example of why I'm grateful for the wonderful dividends this Holy One has given me. So to be honest with you, back in my boozy days, I normally wouldn't have associated with a man who'd walked on the moon. I just had been traveling in those circles. But by the grace of God and AA, I've been a friend of Brother's for a number of years. And we often celebrate, and I think continue. We chose to celebrate it with fifth anniversary, five years of continuous sobriety and AA, so we'll continue that tonight. It's a pleasure to introduce the man who needs some introduction, Buzz Schimup. My name is Buzz Aldrin, and I'm an alcoholic. Hi, Buzz. And I'm nervous, too. I don't do this all that often and I just hope that somehow we can get a nice informal rapport going and that's kind of what I'm going to do I quit smoking two days ago three days ago but I also need to tell you that I quit smoking four years ago this hasn't been the easiest endeavor in my life I first came into treatment about eight and a half years ago And I have had a variety of different recovery assistors and institutions, people, friends, wives. And one thing is crystal clear. I'm a far better man today than I was eight and a half years ago. And if there's anything that you carry away from our bearing witness to Vickie over our difficulties, it's that this program works. I grew up in New Jersey, a rather upper-class family. uh my father's swedish and uh my mother was sort of half scotch and uh half welch believe it or not my grandfather's name on my mother's side was say arnold's moon Uh, it was a well-to-do family. My father had been an early aviation pioneer. He learned to fly in 1917, and he was General Billy Mitchell's aide in the Philippines where he met my mother, who was the daughter of an Army chaplain over there. and my father went on in his air corps assignments to command the or to be in charge of the engineering school at Lakefield and he was a commandant there for about four, five six years and since he had a doctorate degree from MIT he observed and instructed most of the leaders that eventually became the major generals or the leading generals during World War II He went into the reserve in 1928 and went to work for Standard Oil Company And shortly before I was born they moved into a house and he sold a lot of stock in 1929 and bought a house so that when the crash came in the market way We came out of that situation pretty good. I had two older sisters, one of them about a year and a half older and the other three years older than that. And until I made a legal change in my name this last week, my name was Edwin Eugene Aldrin, Jr. And everybody wonders where in the world Buzz came from. Well, the Air Corps people called my father Eddie for the first name Edwin And my mother called him Gene for Eugene. So when I came along, there wasn't any really appropriate name. So they didn't want to call me Junior. So to my sisters, why that creature crawling around the floor was Baby Brother. And she couldn't pronounce that and it was Baby Buzzer. And that changed throughout the years. And it used to make me embarrassed to think about that story. And let's see, I was 24 years old and at the Air Force Academy when I finally got grounded for flying low over the beach in New Jersey and finally was able to live up to that name. My family was involved in social situations that required them to, or at least I was exposed to the fact that highball was an item of social, lubrication or at least that that seemed to be something that kept things going and uh my father was a very hard-driving person and there's little doubt that uh that influence on my life of wanting me to follow somewhat in his footsteps tended to mold my early life i was put into kindergarten at the earliest age possible four and a half, something like that. And even though I was really immature for first grade, they lobbied with the principal and kept me there. And that was great because when I got out of high school at just a little over 17, I was near the top of my class academically. But I didn't really fit in. I was very good in athletics. I was on the football team on the first team and a pole vaulter. i sure wouldn't want that to happen to my children and the reason i'm giving you that background is because that plus an ethnic background of scandinavian plus a lot of environmental situations i think brought on the alcoholism that and saw its maturity a bit later in life than perhaps many of you might have seen. My mother was a very depressive person. I can remember when we were children that they would have their drink at the dining room table. My grandmother was living with us at the time, and it was just constant bickering, and it just wasn't really what I would call a happy home environment. and my two older sisters got married and they left and I went to West Point and I just don't think my mother enjoyed things they moved from a house into an apartment and she would associate with some of the shore New Jersey shore ladies who would get together and they'd have their drinking sessions and that was her circle And she didn't go socially where my father went. He'd go into New York and be in the wing scrub or he got into Rotary. And that was the kind of environment that I grew up in, but I grew up as an achiever, an achievers who knew by the measure of my standing relative to those around me that somehow I had what it took in the particular past, however narrow it really was, but I really didn't deserve it because I didn't feel like I deserved it. And when I got to West Point young, I just didn't feel comfortable there. There were the older people and the people that socially got together, and there were some people who had had a couple of years in the Army before. You know, the first Christmas picture at West Point, at least it was that way then. You don't get to go home at Christmas. And of course, I lived in New Jersey and it was just a short ways up the river. During part of that Christmas vacation, the fleas are there and a few upperclassmen are staying there with them. And I can remember getting a Coca-Cola and putting some aspirin in it because things were just not that comfortable. And i don't think there was one smidgen of an effect that it ever had on me, but that's the frame of mind of what I mean. Obviously, I wasn't about to have someone bring in a bottle of whiskey. I wasn'T that mature, and yet on graduation, of course, we're mature enough to command flights in combat, and we're mature enough to command platoons. You know, a lot of times I look back on those days in my youth, and I just shiver to think how ill-prepared I really was. And a lot of it was in my mind. Frankly, a good bit of my life aren't up until glimpses of peace and comfort in the last, I've got to say, about four or five years. Maybe two years. That's pretty good last week, as a matter of fact. It really is getting better. Two months ago I was in the pit, so. I really don't think there were – well, when I was in high school, being on the high school football team and the track team, there were fraternities and sororities, and for the initiation, you know, people would do a big thing of pouring all sorts jazz mustard and ketchup and this kind of sauce and that kind of onion stuff and a little bit of beer and one kind of liqueur and another. Those were big things as a freshman. And New Year's Eve at French 75, man, that was really bold. You know what? I just don't think we grew up in the same era or the same times. And I know that that isn't true for people my own age that grew up. I may be flavoring things a little bit, as I view the past, as it being kind of an immature recollection. I graduated third in my class at West Point, and of course with the background of my father being in the Air Corps, I wanted all my life to get into airplanes to fly. I had my first flight, I vaguely remember this by people telling me and then my visualizing things. I really think I can remember a flight when I was about a year and a half or two years old we flew down to Florida. And that's it. And about a, a year or two later I got a chance as a veteran now to take off in an amphibian in Newark Bay when my sister had her first flight, and she got sick. You know, I felt pretty good about that. And incidentally, that plane was... There's a picture in our basement where that plane was christened by Amelia Earhart. And General Mitchell, Billy Mitchell, came to our place in New Jersey on his way to New York in the early 30s, associated with his court-martial appearances. Jimmy Doolittle has been a friend of my folks for a good long while. So you see, I grew up with a certain amount of achievement, a certain amount of associating with the achievers, with the winners, and that sort of thing was expected of me. Well, I certainly expected it myself, and on the record, it certainly looked as if I was doing that. After going through pilot training, I went over to my first assignment was over to Korea and obviously something had slowly been happening because somewhere between Camp Stoneman in California and Tokyo where I visited some friends on my way to Korea, I had made a resolution that I wasn't going to drink. now not every second lieutenant makes that resolution obviously that's not average reaction to uh to the kind of childhood i'm talking about there was something that was going on there and it was an insecurity it was a feeling ill at ease not deserving the sort of things that were coming my way and obviously an awareness that alcohol though it was making what i did a bit more comfortable at the time because that's what the other people did and they seemed to enjoy it and it did make things a little bit easier for me to do. But clearly, at the mature age of 22, going over to fight in the Korean War, not drinking alcohol was important enough for me to make a resolution. And I got over there and I saw some of my friends. The reason I didn't go over actually with the same time as some of our flying classes is because I'd taken a slight delay competing for a Rhodes Scholarship. And don't you think the fighter pilots at the gunnery school at Nellis had a time kidding me about, you know, the commies were going to have me in their guns like, I got a Rhodes Scholar. That's okay. I didn't get that anyway, and I can rationalize my way around that. There were occasions, well, let me just carry it through. A short, it didn't take two or three days for me to realize that there was no way that I was going to handle this situation with my friends over there and by not drinking while everybody was in the club drinking. So that resolution went by the board. Now, let me backtrack a little bit. When I was competing for a congressional appointment to either West Point or Annapolis, it was my junior year in high school. I went to a prep school to try and teach us how to pass that exam that people over there on the Hill would give us. And it was what you'd call a real general well-rounded education, And especially in vocabulary, we'd get the dictionary out and we went from A's and we learned the words down through the M's by the time the course was over. So if we had vocabulary questions on the latter part, why, that was just a break. While I was there, it was a group of about 10 or 15 of us. And naturally, for a little excitement, we decided to skip out one night. And there were going to be four of us, and we got this janitor to get us a bottle of whiskey. The only trouble is he brought back kin. And instead of four of us getting out, there were only two of us, me and this other guy. Yeah, he was obviously a bit more savvy and aware, and I recognized it, but I was damned if he was going to drink any of my share of that. And I was a stumbling, blubbering, incoherent, puking 16-year-old example of American youth that night. And that stuck in my mind for quite a while, but it didn't stop me from drinking because, as I mentioned, several years later I made the resolution not to drink at all. There were several occasions when I was in Korea when one in particular that I remember, it was on a training mission before we were qualified for combat, and something went a little wrong with the emergency fuel control and I had to hold a switch in a spring-loaded position in order for the engine to operate normally. The fuel control had failed in a way that it was full on 100%, and the only way that you could get anything other than full power in this F-86 was to throw the switch. And, of course, that was the same hand that you had to push the mic button on. So the whole operation was really not what you'd call smooth. I was trying to maintain formation with the guy, and I kept climbing high, and I lost him. And it was just a bad scene, and I didn't feel good about it, and I was obviously a little hungover. And when I got on the ground, I wasn't going to drink anymore. And that lasted three or four days. And there's always a reason why, you know, that's not important anymore. I don't want you to get the impression I was the cream of American youth about this time. My military... Well, I got married shortly after I came back from Korea at age 24. Slightly on the rebound from a turn down. That marriage eventually lasted 19, 20 years. And we were assigned to the Air Force Academy. I was aide to the dean of faculty. Again, you know, up on the pedestal. So that was when I got caught for buzzing the beach and when a guy was walking his dog along the coast of New Jersey at 5.30 in the morning. Now, nobody's supposed to do that. My God. That wasn't so bad, but the next day, Sunday morning as I was leaving, I went up and down the beach, out over the shore, or over the ocean this time. Put the gear down, of course, so I could demonstrate to everybody that the airplane would fly slow. The same doctor had a pair of binoculars out of it, didn't he? I had an efficiency report that was endorsed for the short period I was there as they used the term self-effacing. And, you know, that made me feel bad. You know, I thought I was a forceful, aggressive person, maybe a little on the shy side. I certainly wasn't the tiger of the life of the party of the captain who was the other general's aide. But that was a very accurate appraisal of my state at that time. I was a Very Competent Young Officer. I was A Good Pilot, Outstanding Pilot in some ways. But I was Self-Effacing. That means I didn't project the best of me forward. There was always greater potential if you'd only do it right, you know. And I think there are a good number of us who have experienced living under maybe conditions similar to that. There's another breed of cat, and that's the very exuberant one, and he's the insecure one, who's maybe using the outward exuberance and joke-telling to maybe cover up some of the insecurity. We're all insecure, and we just manifest it in different ways. I'm not sure that it's particularly pertinent to all the lucky breaks that came my way after being a fighter pilot in Germany. This particular wing we were in was F-100s, because I got to pick my assignment when I left the Air Force Academy in, let's see, 1956. I pretty much had to pick the cream of assignments, and this was the hottest airplane that we had in the Air Forces at that time, and it was in Germany, and it looked like a really good assignment. We were in day fighters, and we, about halfway through that tour, converted over to tactical weapons delivery, nuclear weapons. That's a humbling experience, transitioning from where you hassle the guy in the air to when you're on a 5- or 10-minute or 15-minute alert. And it's, you know, that happens to be the day while you're On Your Way, and it's a lonely feeling to be shooting at low altitude, 360 knots each tick on the map you have marked off, and it wasn't very sophisticated in those days. It was so many minutes you were supposed to go so far. but it was a very imposing mission and yet one of the first times I was on alert I had one tremendous hangover now most everyone else did the same sort of thing it didn't show quite so much perhaps when I left that assignment I went back to MIT and had decided that fast reactions and fighter pilot business was great. And, you know, I felt I could do that and was on the squadron gunnery team representing our squadron in NATO. But somehow I just didn't want to be destined for that for the rest of my career, so I wanted to, I guess, take the same route that my father had, so I went back to school, to MIT. Because of drinking wine out of dirty wine glasses in Naples on the last vacation that we had over in Germany, I was in the hospital for hepatitis for about nine months. It was really quite a case. Right at the beginning of my MIT, I was just a captain just promoted to major. No, I promoted to mayor a year or two after I was there. When you have that severe case of hepatitis You're not supposed to drink And people say Maybe you haven't had a drink for the rest of your life Not me After, you know, five or six months I'd have a drink And it would be the right thing I was at MIT a year and a half And I decided to extend for another year A year and half to work on a doctor's degree rather than go through, I was really following very closely the path of Ed White. He and I were at one point together. He was a class behind me, and we were in the same fighter unit over in Germany. And he came back about a year or so earlier than I did. And we corresponded, and he had applied for the, he said he was going to apply for the second group of astronauts, and he'd gone through the test pilot school, I had elected to put that off sometime into the future and to stay at MIT and worked on a doctorate degree. And I went through a process of reasoning that, as I look back on it, it sounds very mature reasoning for somebody at that point, but I took a course of study in manned orbital rendezvous. I wanted to use an experience that I had as a fighter pilot and the sophistication of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in order to ensure guidance in orbits and trajectories and do something that would be useful to the service or to NASA within 15 years. When I applied for that second selection group of astronauts, I wasn't qualified because I hadn't been through the test pilot school. But I had a rather envious record at that point that I'd accumulated at one point. Combat in Korea, shot down two MiGs over there. And here I was working on a doctor's degree at MIT in rather good physical shape, but I wasn't qualified. So Ed was picked in the second group along with eight other people. That was in 1962. And they changed the rules in 1963, and you didn't need to be a graduate of test pilot school. So I put a little bit more emphasis on education. So I was picked to get into our astronaut program in 1963, and I didn't feel like I belonged there either because I wasn't one of the boys. I wasn'T one of test pilots. I had other credentials, of course, that in many ways supplemented what I had lacked in experience. Those were rather productive years as I look back on what I was able to do in terms of having a small influence from what I studied at MIT, having an influence on the directions and sort of the methods in which we carried out our program. And by this time I had three children quite close together, two years about separated the first two and 10 months separated the second to lower oh well right now they're 28 26 and 25 so that was like 15 16 17 years ago. The influence of the state program on me was rather awesome. There are a lot of details that could explain why I happened to end up where I did, but a lot of it really was being in the right place at the right time. It was a productive period, I thought I contributed significantly. We played relatively hard. I don't look back on those years and say that there was much of a progression of alcoholism from the active participating standpoint. From the emotional build-up to a crisis or crescendo that was going on and I didn't know that it was going on. I had my first flight in 1966 in November and the impact of public appearances and in a sense the loss of direction being in within my grasp and my influence at first that was the first I really began to see someone else telling me to go do something that i didn't feel comfortable doing and i knew i had to do it in one fashion or another and and i did it but looking back on it i can remember some periods of rather immobilizing concern anxiety and fear obviously not looking good of not doing what i thought i ought to be able to and not living up to their expectations. After Apollo, this came in spades, really. The carrying out of the mission itself was unencumbered. It was just a beautiful experience to be a part of. But there was always that uneasiness about what this was going to mean to my life afterwards. And I began to feel the effects of this immediately on return in terms of the concern for looking good. I was under medication for antidepressants when we were on our around-the-world trip, and I drank considerably for comfort along with that. I stayed in Houston with NASA for about a year, year and a half. After that, working on the very preliminary parts of the space shuttle program and kind of wandering around to the degree that I didn't have public appearances anymore, kind of wondering around with the freedom to direct and misdirect and waste some of my time while I was waiting for an assignment back to the Air Force. I was given an assignment to command the test pilot school at Edwards. I didn't think that that was too good an assignment for somebody that had never been through school, the first time anyone's commanded it who's never been to it. And at a time when they get, you know, a space hero into governing the test pilot school at a time that they were de-emphasizing space at the test-pilot school. I thought that what I could do while I was there while I was there, was go through the school with the students and still administer. But Jesus, I'd been away from the service for 11 1⁄2 years, 3 1⁰ at MIT and 7 1⁴ in the NASA program. Not a lot of leadership or management in either of those situations. And I wanted to compare myself with what I ought to be able to do under those conditions and what my other classmates who had been going to command and staff school and air war college and all that. I was a set-up for a crash, and I kind of crashed and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital with a cover-up of having a neck problem, which I had. My fingers were getting a little numb. While I was there, I made decisions to make big changes in my life. I was through competing in the Air Force, and this marriage that I had wasn't all that satisfactory. And here I was with a red badge of courage having seeked help, And, man, I was confident I was going to do it all together. So why not write a book about this glorious story where I'm going to marry this divorcee from New York? And that really sounded good at that time. Of course, most of the time I was in this hospital in San Antonio, on the weekends, every weekend I was off somewhere visiting, hunting with somebody or visiting somebody else and drinking considerably. I remember one time coming back into the hospital carrying a bottle of scotch in my navigator's clip bag. And when you're in a hospital trying to get yourself put together, and people are paying a lot of attention to you. You're sitting in the office with a guy who's got a picture of Freud on the wall with scars on his shoulder. anyway uh you just don't uh sneak in scotch into the hospital room while you're doing that that's not quite normal behavior uh eventually i wrote a book about my experiences called return to earth which had to do with seeking psychiatric help for my fear and anxiety emotional problems I remember a number of years after that meeting, a guy by the name of Abbott Mills somewhere, and he said, I read your book when it came out, and I said to someone, God, I wish somebody would tell this guy that he's purely an alcoholic. This was in 1973 that I wrote the book. And big deal. I mean, the emotionally wounded guy, what happened? The National Mental Health Association nominates him as National Chairman of the Year. And guess what he gets to do? He gets to go around the country making public appearances. Well, it was about me this time. You know, for a while that was an interesting story to talk about, my recovery from depression. Except I didn't quite make all of the appearances. I'd gone through a separation at the time and had the freedom to be in my own place. And so there were times when I just wanted to stay home and drink. The last flight, let me see. While I was going through this business, I went through F training. Right before that, the shrink I was seeing put me in the VA in 1974 for eight days. and he was the shrink who had retired as a colonel in the Air Force. He was also the same guy that was at Brooks Air Force Base when they ran our qualification physicals for the NASA astronaut program. He didn't know too much about alcoholism in those days, obviously, but he's learned a lot, and he's now a certifying pilot for recovery from alcoholism for the FAA. And I'm sure he's learnt a lot. And we've all learned a lot, but we didn't all get the kind of help that we needed back in those days. So in 74, in February, I guess this was actually 75, yeah, I was hospitalized for eight days in February and I went to my first AA meeting and I saw Master Sergeants there and I thought other people who were sloshing around the hospital in bathrobes. It didn't make any difference. I happened to be sloshing around a bathrobe too, but I was different. Anyway, I had no interest in that program at all. In April I went through F training and I drank considerably the night before and peed in my pants considerably the first day of F training. Drank in between the two sessions. You're not supposed to do that. And yet I thought I received a good bit out of the training. Now this was April, May, sometime around July of 1975, I got an invitation to fly down to the Cape in John Denver's airplane with one air heart to see Apollo 3S flight. The only trouble is I had to tell him two days before that I couldn't make it because I was in the middle of a binge in my apartment. And it was a couple of weeks later that I went into my first recovery with my fiancee by the name of Beverly taking me to a place in Orange County that was called Beverly Manor. It later became known as Care Manor about a year later. I've got to say that my recollections of how I was functioning then are just sort of hazy. I didn't feel comfortable, and at the same time, I fit into that recovery program and played volleyball with the rest of them. In a way, there was a sense of relief in going into that first program of recovery because I knew there was something wrong with me. Clearly, I'd been hospitalized for depression and anxiety. And having gone through several and going into that first program of recovery, because I knew there was something wrong with me. Clearly I'd been hospitalized for depression and anxiety, and having gone through several releases or surrenders, I guess, made my first entrance into O.A. a bit easier. Actually, it was a release to think that all I've got to do is bounce the input in that bottle, and that's a much nicer, cleaner thing to do to have wrong with you than this nebulous, cloudy thing of emotional depression. If I look back on it now, all that was going on was an alcoholic fear, fear of losing what I had or not getting what I want. And those things are common regardless of what the particular set of circumstances happen to be. My first five months in the program was really not in the program very well and it was because of being a stressful person. I don't think there is a soul who would have succeeded in convincing me that 90 meetings and 90 days is the thing to do. It was very uneasy and within about six or seven months I I was back in the hospital for depression and getting some medication prescribed by a physician who was in one of the recovery places. And it was an improper prescription for me at that time. Then I had a series of 20, 30 days of sobriety. and all during this time I've been introduced to the NOSI program and visited there off and on just to see what it was like down in Long Beach and I would met Dr. Post now and then about five, four or five months later I was doing recovery down there and for five weeks I went through the NOSE program and there were guys who really didn't think I was going to make it My roommate called me up a couple of weeks ago and said we just didn't think you were going to make it. And he called me from someplace in Florida, and he wasn't making it. My first sponsor really was not tough enough on me or I wasn't listening. I had another sponsor, and I sort of picked him out because he had a lot of experience in depression. And I was going through a good bit of it, and after five months, I had a six-pack or a pint or whatever it was. And this is now two years of recovery, and there's just not been any progress. So some of the people that I knew thought that maybe I ought to go through crisis. so I turned myself into the Pacific group and I had a year of sobriety that was fearful I can't say it was humiliating it was a reduction of ego during that time and it was a learning process of commitment and it was all a very good period for me I think Nancy would probably agree that we sort of wore each other out during that period I think you could see it coming, but at my first year of approach, I took my case and before I'd taken Keith's case, I was drunk again. And there was a relationship going on during the time. And that had a lot to do with it. I was trying to rescue and save somebody, and we detoxed, and you just can't do that. That was eight days of continuous drinking with a friend of mine and we went up into the desert and then he sort of went off and had to go to work and do his stuff and it was miserable. And I came back and I was rescued by the guy that was taking his girlfriend around and I really touched at my wrist that night. A feeble effort. I honestly wouldn't want to accomplish very much. I called her up on the phone, and she wouldn't answer. I went over and I broke in, and the neighbors called the cops, and they came and hauled me off for breaking an ambulance. I was three-and-a-half years under this program. Not too much progress. A couple weeks later, I had to appear in court to pay for the damage to her. And she didn't appear, but this guy did. He'd been 15 steps and all that. And now it's his wedding. And the anticipation of that got me drunk again. Back to that Thursday, I was in the hospital, miserable eight days trying to dry out in October. And I didn't want to do that again. And I couldn't do it that time. And I left cold turkey, and that was October 24th, five years ago. I guess some of us have to go through what we need to go though. I was exposed to varieties of recovery people, recovery modes, hospitalizations. After five or six months of searching around, I found the sponsor that I have today, and we know together rather nicely he's an engineer he works with his helicopter and and we have a compatible views of spirituality i found out early in my recovery that i had to i felt it necessary for me to strip away the hypocrisy that i had grown up with even though things were very meaningful and it was important for me as a quiet astronaut participation participated in marching referred to Martin Luther King, and it was meaningful for me to take communion on the moon. But somehow being an elder in the Presbyterian Church even with White Chef John didn't feel quite right to me. So I had to strip away that and rebuild and I don't think I really have the time to go into my outlook on spirituality now but it's a much more comfortable one. i can say that in the last five years uh things have gradually gone up and down and what has been characteristic of my recovery is that all the ups and downs are uh they may last a little longer but they're not as deep they're neither threatening and in a sense i bounce off and i participate in life in an exuberant comfortable way uh and i have the peace and happiness and the self-worth i have a very unstructured life and i wouldn't really wish that on anybody you ought to get into a commitment where you need to be where it makes things much easier but the freedom of being able to choose what i want to get in to has had glimpses of working in the last couple of years and it is really beginning to work now and i feel that what i'm involved in reflects what uh joker told me in one of our debriefing sessions about uh oh a couple years ago he said your contemporaries went out and they did their thing and they're kind of living on whatever they did do and what they're doing now you have the potential because of what you've been through and what you what's your way through and what you have experienced and changed and grown to be a much more useful person, a much better person. A much more comfortable person. There are a lot of tales that I'd like to have told that I've heard from the podium before about cucumbers changing into pickles and they never go back again. There are things that I have heard my sponsor talk about that are very meaningful to me And you heard them from somebody else. If you are going to meetings and things just aren't working, and after a while you'll stop going to the meetings and you'll wander down and you sit in the bar for a while and you're not sure what you're going to do, but the bartender comes up to you and says, Hey, what's the matter? I thought you'd gone to AA. What are you doing in here? Doesn't AA work? Because you've got to be honest with the bartenders hopefully honest with yourself, is if you didn't work the steps and you didn' t go to meetings, you got to say to them, you don' t really know where they work because you never tried. And I've tried in the past five years to work this program and I can't say that I've got all A's for it, but I'm earning the benefits of it now and there's no doubt and I just know you gotto believe me because I do, but of all the great opportunities that have come along to me by talent, by birth, by upbringing, by being in the right place at the right time none is going to produce more meaningful results than a human being by this program this gradual growth and what I'm learning from sharing with people and that's where it all is I don't think very often before this but I feel that maybe if I was a little bit more in my preliminary life leading up to this it would maybe give you a glimpse of the person that would have been standing here eight years ago and the person that I know people have seen that remember me what I was like five years ago three years ago and it's getting better and better and I know it and I tell you there's nothing like knowing that you're getting weller and I wish that the blessings that I've received from the fellow and they're not all great I mean I've spent some days where I don't want to participate in life but then I'll eventually get back out of it and I lose a few things but I regain those opportunities again and I just hope that you can get as much out of this program than I have and it's all really here in this book and my sponsor gave me this cover and it means a lot to me and I just wanted to mention some things that are significant about the second edition the story about the paradoxes that touches on the essence of what I'm beginning to see is the spirituality that exists between human beings just as much as if I dropped it it's going to splash on the floor And as a physical law, the laws that govern the relationships between us are embodied in the spirituality of this program. And those are as much a law and such a power that's mighty great as me. And the findings of that are the essence of what makes me know that this program works and it keeps me coming back and I hope you keep coming back too, every one of you. Thank you. Thank you.