The Traditions and the Business of Staying Sober – Sandy B.

well good evening everybody my name is sandy beach and i'm an alcoholic how y'all doing i got a little bit of laryngitis so i'm gonna that's the terror of a speaker if i didn't have my voice i'd be unarmed but i'll tell you i'm really happy to be up here um i travel around the united states quite a bit and when especially when i'm in california i love to remind them that aa started with two guys from vermont and everything else seems to start in califonia move across from the west coast you know what i'm talking about and so here we have the greatest uh social movement fellowship that has ever been on the face of this earth and we're right at its origins where the philosophies and the foundation and the ideals of its two co-founders were hammered in. And it's just nice to be around here, it's just a good feeling because AA is remarkable, I mean it's just absolutely remarkable what this fellowship is miracles occur so routinely in alcoholics anonymous we forget what we're seeing sometimes you know what i mean somebody comes in their life's a total disaster they've tried psychiatrists doctors been arrested uh everything under the sun they come in here and somebody says okay don't drink go to meetings around you know get the mean sponsor and uh two or three months later their whole life has turned around and their family is starting to blossom and the sparkle returns to their eyes and there's this wonderful energy that is released and flows through them and we all just go that's right that's what happens when you come around here you know but it's a miracle I mean that's what miracles are and they're so commonplace here that I think sometimes we forget what we're seeing because we're so close to it we're just around we almost expect sobriety because we know how powerful AA is and we know what the unlimited power we have access to here. But it is a remarkable, fun thing and I was listening to the report about the delegates meeting and it shows how human we are and how lucky we got those traditions or we would have been out of business a long time ago. You know there was and I'm sure a lot of people know but maybe some of the new people don't There was an organization over 100 years ago in this country that in its first three years had over 100,000 sober members. It's called the Washingtonian Society. It started in Baltimore. And it was similar to AA and it got involved in politics. There were some very worthwhile issues that they felt that they had to take a position on slavery and we had to take a position on whether booze should be legal or not. And that organization disappeared so fast it would make your head spin as soon as it started getting involved in other than its primary purpose. And so we really are lucky to have these traditions and that somehow Bill Wilson had this insight. He really was a man of vision to see ahead that in spite of his background, And when you think about that, the wheeler-dealer, Wall Street, you know, just hit it big and they end up with AA taking a vow of corporate poverty. I mean, it's just remarkable. Well, don't accept outside contributions. Millionaires die. They want to leave their money to AA. He says no. And AA was broke. And they're still saying no. Absolutely wonderful that all of these pieces somehow fit together. because if they didn't, I don't know where you and I would be today. I wasn't about to get out of my prison on my own. Maybe you think you could have made it on your own, but I couldn't have. I tried everything and ended up in a nut ward and I got locked up in there for six months and after I'd been there about four months, I started liking it. It was real safe in there. It was very simple, you know? My big project for the day was making a cup of tea. And if you didn't want to see anybody, you just told them you didn' t want to se them. And you got your meals and you were safe and protected. I thought it was a real threat to leave there. But that's where I ended up, under my own steam, and I had a good upbringing, nice family down in Connecticut, and I was from New Haven so I went to Yale there and got a good education I got in the Marine Corps became a fighter pilot got married had six kids you would have said this guy's doing good but if you could see inside you could be you could say the process of self-destruction from this disease was just going a mile a minute and inside this person was a very frightened confused man boy whatever you want to call it who didn't have the foggiest idea what was going on and who desperately um was seeking answers but didn't know how to ask for help like most of us i was a lone ranger type guy you know i'll handle this stuff alone somewhere i learned that probably watching the lone rager i don't know those of you that grew up with the Lone Ranger you remember he was sort of a hero figure whenever the town had trouble remember that they'd just let's get the masked man if we could just get him to show up then he'd come into town wearing a mask find out where the troublemakers were tighten his gloves up walk up say a few things and make him draw on them. Blow him away and get on his horse and go back out in the desert where he lived with an Indian. And townspeople would say, what a man, what a hero. And I'd be thinking, you know, now there's a role model. It wasn't until I got sober that I suddenly realized that's a bizarre way of life to live like that. live alone in the desert with an Indian and just go to town to kill people once in a while so we collect a lot of ideas growing up and they get us in trouble later on because a lot of them aren't shared you ever notice the difference with the ideas you get in sobriety they seem to be much more solid and produce better results because we have sponsors and home groups and they temper those ideas and when we come in there we go just had an idea what's that i'm gonna quit my job and leave my wife and go to california i think i could get better sobriety out there the group gathers around and pretty soon that idea has been modified slightly into I'm not gonna leave my wife and quit my job and go to California and everybody goes there's now you came up with a good idea the first one was so it's sharing just the opposite of what I was doing sober sober you know you're just it's you there's a whole world and scares the hell out of you when just try and be alone it's just you and your brain your mind and telling us all these things and it was a very frightening world to be in and if you don't share you just don't get any perspective on your own ideas and they can intimidate the hell out of you and you walk around with all kinds of misinformation other people are better than you are you were born rotten and you're going to die rotten you know some of those great feelings that help you just go along through life And everybody else looks like they understand what's going on because they're not sharing either. So we have a very big perception problem, and that's exactly where I was as a teenager growing up and just wondering what was going on, what was life. life to me seemed like I was one of the balls in a pinball machine you know five balls sit down there it's almost like they're sitting at a bar lights real low down there peace and quiet just sitting there drinking then the alarm goes off in the morning somebody puts a quarter in the machine and you go god damn another day and you don't want to go out another one of those days out in that damn world but somebody puts their foot behind you and that's when that flipper goes bam and you're up there and you just oh geez and then here it is vroom another day and you know and you are just looking around and there is these bumpers bam bam bam over here and all you are looking for is that little hole man to get back in that bar at the end of the day you know what I mean and you come in there after some days you know and you just go woo what a day and then other days somehow miraculous the ball goes up and it doesn't hit a thing you ever see one of those balls in the machine that comes down and goes right directly in the hole that's when you come into a bar and you go well hey if every day was like that it wouldn't be so bad out there but it was like you never knew what was going to happen Some days you're out there eight, ten hours, bam, bam, just coming in the hole. Somebody hits a flipper, you go back and start the whole day over again. Like you're just going home and the boss said, hey, we've got to get some overtime, we need you to stay. And you go, you don't understand, if I don't get a drink in the next 20 minutes I'm probably going to explode and they don't know what's going on. They don't want to understand and you do stay there. And so I never saw any perspective on the world I was just out there bouncing around and it never made sense but I liked it when I got back in the bar I liked sitting there with the other guys because they were having the same problem you know oh what a day what a way what a thing what a big day remember that what a great day wow wow give me a drink give me an idea then now this is more like it remember that everything looked okay wasn't so bad alcohol this incredible power to change the world that i lived in and the world made sense when i had three drinks in me i could feel some of the things that people talked about you know we're no most of us is practicing alcoholics you have no connection with our emotions i mean they're almost out of sync with what's really going on and i hear people talk about such things as brotherly love and i go are they making it up or do they really see it because i never saw it i mean i just had this real intimidating world that i lived in with these bumpers and all of that urgency out there and i just didn't see brotherly loved and i didn't see this great spirituality and this just this whole beauty of the world that poets had written about and you go to movies and there's people talking about this beautiful world isn't life wonderful and sitting out there going man i don't see it you know but i'm gonna take their word for it that it's there but i never personally remember just saying to myself boy what a year what a year you know because we were going downhill it's hard to say what a year when you're getting closer to the nut ward or the gutter or the bottom of alcoholism but it was there you know and it was very confusing to explain this to yourself but are all these other people making it up or i mean what is going on out there but when alcohol came in to my system it just changed all of that so i could see it i was like alice in wonderland i went through the looking glass and now when i looked at the world i liked it i loved it three drinks in me and i would talk tell you what a world we lived in i remember in strange towns sometimes you know how you go to a strange town you get intimidated by the people that are there and nobody knows you you don't know anything about the routine. Going to a bar, bartender, can I have a drink? You know, yeah, Matt. One, two. A third drink one time, bartend comes over and tears are coming down my eyes. And he's going, what's the matter? What's the matter? Nothing's the mater. I've just been overcome by the magnificence of people in this bar. I just looked around and I said, I've never been in the presence of more loving and wonderful people that are in this bar and I can't stop sobbing over the beauty of this situation and I'd like to buy everybody in here a round of drinks it's just six more drinks, I'm beating the crap out of somebody it produced through the power of vodka a view of the world that wasn't there when I was sober i go along with with clancy you know that our real problem was not alcohol it was sobriety every time i was sober it was awful that was my problem i just was sober all the time and it was awful and i wanted to do something to fix that problem and the fix was alcohol alcohol took care of sobriete you know what i mean i know you know what i mean i mean i always say to new people that if your problem your only problem is whenever you drink and you get all screwed up you don't need us you got no problem at all if that's your only problem you're very much like somebody who's allergic to strawberries you know we had strawberry shortcake tonight there are some people who when they eat those strawberries they get serious problems their body gets all screwed up and they're sick and they're passing out and everything happens when you go to the doctor and the doctor says your problem is strawberries it's like wonderful news they diagnose the allergy and they give this wonderful news and the person is very happy because they know with that knowledge that they will now be able to live a life problem free from that but that analogy doesn't hold with the alcoholic you got all these problems and you go to the doctor and he says I've diagnosed you you're an alcoholic just don't drink everything will be fine and you walk out and you know don't do anything and everything will be fine he doesn't understand what he's talking about so those people that are allergic to strawberries they don't get together in little groups trying to find out what their mother did to them when they were little how come I have to have ice cream and everybody else have a strawberry shortcake they just take the knowledge and run with it but that doesn't do us any good we could study alcoholism until it's coming out of our ears and it does not help the problem we can send you down to Rutgers University where they get the advanced degrees and studies on alcoholism you can send an alcoholic down there you know, alcoholics are funny you probably go through there and be the top in his class when we got all through the leading expert in the country on alcoholismo you'll go over there and you say, well, maybe I'll go ask that guy about this illness. Well, you can't ask him right now. He's passed out on the floor. But when he comes to... When he comes too, he can give you all kinds of insight into the problem. The point of all this is, it's in our literature in many, many places, is that knowledge doesn't help with this situation. That's not our problem. We weren't ignorant about alcohol. some of us were but that wasn't it learning things doesn't help at all problem was whenever I was sober I didn't like it and I wanted to change it and I didn t know how to change so people talked about such things as values principles gotta have principles gotta have values I'm gonna get some I'd get some you know I'd set goals and I'd set standards for myself then I'd fail I'm probably you all did the same thing and that's why we feel so bad about ourselves we just can't be a good father I can't see a good employee I could be a good pilot I couldn't be anything that I wanted to strive for I mean I could make certain achievements but it was consistency that was lacking because there were these little interruptions. Where is he? He's in jail. You know. I would have been consistent if I had been there, but I wasn't there that day. So, you know, I just couldn't live up to values and standards. So what do we do? Lower the standards. Hey, that's the only way to solve that problem. Try to live up the lower standards. Some of us went around drinking in ever lower class bars so that we could still look down on people. You remember that? So it's a process of just extreme rationalization as the disease progressed as to what became acceptable. And in the end, everything was acceptable. Throwing up in the morning, puking blood, lying, stealing money, just like Bill took the money from Lois. Everything was acceptable that compromised every value there was. No wonder we feel like committing suicide. It really is such a devastating illness when it strips the dignity of human beings while they pretend that it isn't happening. You know, that's the hardest part of the disease is you have to pretend that you don't have it. Some of us were messing around at lunch about 15 years ago and we came up with the idea for a game a Parker Brothers game because see a lot of people who aren't alcoholics don't understand alcoholics and so we came up with this game it's called So You Want to Be an Alcoholic and it's kind of like Monopoly you know you roll the dice around and you land in this bar and then you go to jail there's more jails on this board than than on a regular board but the big one is when you take a chance, do you remember to take a chance there and you get a card? And very often these cards will read, there's a gentleman coming into the room right now and you will do everything that he says. And so this one was the guy walks in and blindfolds you, takes you off, down to an airplane, flies you to a city you have no idea what city you're in, takes you up to a hotel into a hotel room. We've run up about eleven hundred dollars on the room it's in your name and we leave you there with just your underwear and four dollars and you have to get out of that hotel room and be in new york city in 12 hours for the most important job interview of your life and you have to take these two thumbtacks and jam them into the palm of your hand and pretend they don't hurt the whole time. Now, you tell that to non-alcoholics and they just go, God, that's impossible. No, it isn't. that's not impossible matter of fact we made it easy we left them four dollars to get a drink because what is step one in solving that problem get a dream because with the drink comes the intuitive knowledge of how to solve this problem the twelve promises of vodka just like the twelve promises in the big book we will intuitively know how to handle situations and I'll tell you that guy will con his way out of there and take some money from the bellhop and borrow his uniform and he'll have a suit and he's going to he'll be there it's amazing some of the adventures that we all have but those adventures we tell and we make them exciting and so on now but you know deep down we're ashamed of it all it's fun you know talk about all this kind of stuff but then later on it's um it was okay when you were 16 but now you're 43 and it just looks funny but you're still doing that stuff you know and you just aren't moving on we just don't have a different perspective on life and then um the family you can just see it um how you're really not a member of it he was like the extra child i was the seventh child in the family um total disruption you know i'll be at the school play and then you're not there or you you come in drunk at halftime and screw the whole thing up, and Christmas and New Year's and the family reunions and all of the things that just get ruined by our presence. We just seem to have a way of, if there's one time during the year to not screw up, boy, we'll make that the big one, when the boss and everybody is there. And we learn how to hit people's hot buttons. And I didn't notice this in myself. I thought I was the exception to this. Because the best defense is a good offense, and when you think somebody's zeroing in on your drinking, you throw hand grenades all over the place to create a diversion and cause so much disruption and keep them off balance that they never can hit you as a moving target and come in, and we're great at shifting conversations. People try to zero in and talk about our drinking, and we get them off on other things. You know, your car just was stolen, and they're over here and they'RE over there. and bill writes about this in our literature says we learn how to bring out the very worst in other people and that's the world we live in so we go around bringing out the worst in people and that is all we see and we think that is how they are all the time and so the world that we live is part of our own creation number one we are so frightened inside ourselves and number two we're getting a very different reaction from the world around us one of sort of you know it's like being around an alcoholic like being around a crazy person you get edgy you don't know what they're going to do they're having a nice conversation then they puke all over you you know what i mean so you're you're sort of listening but you're you know you're on the guard you just don't know what's going to happen and we see that in people and they go geez they don't trust me they're not i'm not in the circle you know that's right my sister came into aaa she's got 15 years now down in connecticut and uh my parents were having a 50th wedding anniversary some years back and all the whole family was coming including an uncle don and i remember saying to my sister damn i wish he wasn't coming you know he gets so rude he's the guy kind of screws up these reunions whenever we have me just gets real hostile and tense and curt and she looked at me and said oh he only does that when you're around huh it was astounding i couldn't believe it could not believe it and she convinced me that when i wasn't there that there was something in the air and so i took her word for it and i just came in like he was my best friend you know when we came there and it was changed instantly we just disappeared this whole behavior so it was must have been me that i had learned how to do something and thought that it was being created by somebody else in any event um i don't have any great drinking story i just drank a lot got drunk lot screwed up in the marine corps flying airplanes and ended up in a network i was a primary alcoholic i don't relate because people get up here and say well i drank 10 years or so no particular problem and then the filter broke and things started getting out of control well that's not me i drank socially about 10 minutes and then blah and it was just like that to the end there was never any time that alcohol came into me that there wasn't for me getting a bottle of alcohol is like checking a book out of the library you know what I mean you get an adventure book and you go boy I wonder what this book's about looks exciting and the jacket tells you it's a real exciting travel book or love story or whatever but you really don't experience the book until you read it that's the way it was with a bottle of vodka you could hold it up and look at it shake it smell it but you didn't know what was in store for you so you drank it you know and I wish you could there was some control over these bottles I go in there and I tell the guys you know my last bottle I got in here I got a big fight and got arrested you remember what case that one came out of a couple of weeks before I got a hold of one and I ended up with this big blonde and it was great so which box did that one coming you know I don't want this one and the guy said I hey we don't have them categorized that way you just got to take your chances and you never knew what you were going to get you know you just but you always got something I mean you did not get no story I never related to you know these lines two guys are in a bar and say hey let's get out of here nothing's happening you never heard me say that if nothing's happening you're not drinking fast enough you just stay here keep pouring it in later there's the cops now look at that something will happen it's just you don't just and I've had that traveling whiskey you know you just you sitting in your basement just having a couple of drinks and then all sudden you're in Wiggins, Mississippi, you know. With your new partner in the chicken feed business. Jesus Christ. And your family thinks you're still in the basement. so we do have adventures that's for sure and they're fun to laugh at and they really are you know the stories are there's a lot of laughter in aa now i mean now that we're sober we can hear this laughter because we're laughing because we're not doing it anymore that's what's so damn funny about it all so anyway i got um into that nut ward and i was there i was 33 years old my parents didn't want to come down and see me nobody knew how to say anything to me what do you say to a guy you know who's in there i'd had a convulsion the dts and all those kind of things they just put me in a straitjacket and the navy who does all the medicine for the marine corps doesn't have didn't have a diagnosis of alcoholism in 1964 so you had to be something else so I was diagnosed as I forget what the hell it was whatever you have convulsions and DTs over that isn't alcoholism and so they just kept me in there with the rest of the people who were crazies and there's about three drunks and every so often the psychiatrist would we were in group classes all the time talking about manic depressions and suicides and neurotics and this and that and funny thing about those people that were locked up in there they didn't think that drunks belonged there we were like the low people in the nut ward it was uh we didn't have a real illness as far as they were concerned. But every so often, the psychiatrist would have the group discuss alcoholics. There was three of us. And you know what these people would say? This is why they were locked up in there. They would say, you guys ought to stop drinking. That's what they would say. And I remember looking at them going, this problem that I have is so complex that there is no one little sentence answer like you're given there guess where the next place where i kept hearing little one-sentence answers real simple stuff you know like grammar school like easy does it and you know right here um AA was not in that hospital then. It had been in in the early 60s, and then the head psychiatrist determined that it wasn't doing any good. And so when I first went in, there was no AA, and I guess I'd been there about three or four months, and the local AA group talked their way back in. They got a new Navy captain and psychiatrist, and he said, all right, we'll let you guys have a meeting in here. So they led a meeting on Tuesday nights. and it's still going on. And so I got to AEA because a corpsman came into the nut ward one night and said, all drunks fall in. Down the elevator and we're in this room and these three guys from the Bethesda, Maryland area were giving a pitch and in spite of myself I liked it. I said, these guys, you know, that's all right. Just the way they were talking you know it was kind of funny and they were refreshing and everything I went up to this little redheaded guy afterwards and I said yeah really? I think you guys got something super going here. If I ever run into a guy with a drinking problem, I'm gonna send him over here. And that's when I got the first of A.A.'s hard love, you know, he just started poking me in the chest and he said, let me ask you one question. Which one of us is gonna go out and get in his car and drive on home to his family? And which one of US is gonna put his little blue bathrobe on, go in that elevator and go upstairs and get locked up like an animal. And I remember just going, Jesus, I just met this guy. He's talking this way to me. But boy, it stuck. You know what I mean? It was like... There was only one instance where something like that stuck in my mind. It was probably about eight years earlier. I was in a fighter squadron and we were getting ready for some carrier work and we're out on the end of the runway and guys... I was with our maintenance guy who I drank with a lot. and then we were watching the landings and kibitzing and all this and that and he was saying boy i can hardly wait till i'm a lieutenant colonel and get my own squadron and i remember saying oh man that'll be a great squadron you'd be a great ceo i'd really love to be in there he said i'd love to have you in my squadron i like guys that can fly like you but i wouldn't let you drink and i remembered just i never asked him what he meant by that because we drank together all the time but it just must have taken one to see once the only guy who ever said that in all the years i was drinking and it scares me to this day i can still remember what that felt like it was like somebody really knows somebody saw right in there that uh what was going on so anyway i went to that meeting and eventually got out of there as soon as i got out i started drinking that lasted for two or three days and i called inner group and a great big guy came over another marine and he walked into my front door and he said hi my name is bill this is a 12-step call i talk you listen and um i remember saying uh couldn't you just leave some literature i mean i knew this uh it was like this big you know what i mean it was if you drank you would get hurt that was the feeling that i had and i really needed a drink but it was the choice of what kind of pain so anyway that guy is still my sponsor we went to meetings all the time and now it's a long time ago and um i'll tell you one story about service work and then i want to talk a little bit about the program but i was reminded of it when i was listening to the report we had a very small group down near the quantico marine base called With Dumfries Triangle Group, we had about four members who were sober and then we had About Four that were drinking all the time. And they would be in and out. One of them was a jockey named Dave, a little guy. He'd be in, and then he'd be off drinking in the woods, and then it'd be back, and this and that. And there was a speaker's meeting. And we're about 30 miles from anybody. So when they would see us show up looking for speakers, you know what I mean? Would you bring a meeting down to the end? Boy, people were ducking and turning because they didn't want to drive 30 miles to talk to two sober people maybe even though we'd have a nice cake for them but anyway um my sponsor was the whole group i mean he was the program chairman the coffee maker the general service rep the grapevine rep the treasurer the secretary the whole thing and we had a big podium and with a padlock on it and inside the podium was the full group whole meeting the coffee pot the sugar the signs on the wall you know what i mean paper plates forks napkins everything was in there so this is like an instant aa meeting with this podium that you just swung around he had the combination to it so he says to me one night come to the meeting tonight 15 minutes early we're going to have a business meeting i should have suspected something right there, right? I come over there. He's got the podium set up and we got maybe 20 chairs out there and he's the only one there. And he said, sit down here and we'll start the meeting. I've been the program for the past two years. I don't know. It's customary to rotate these jobs. So tonight we're going to rotate. And I wonder if we have any volunteers who would like to be the program chairman, the secretary, the treasurer, the coffee maker and all that. So I'm looking around, there's nobody there. So it gives me the combination. I learn how to make the coffee and I'm doing all that and you know a lot of that was just really fun. I hated to, you know, you get a coffee maker sometimes you can't get rid of them. They really, you don't know the other guy won't know how to do it. He doesn't know to make it right. um and he had booked the speakers for the next three weeks so i had a month to get somebody but you know when you're new you're afraid to ask because somebody's going to say no anybody ever had that problem you are well that's that guy over there no he's gonna say no well that this guy over here no he can't take two nos at one night could threaten my sobriety you know so on i'm not asking anybody you know like two and a half weeks ago if i haven't asked one person you know and what do we know how to make problems huge you know they're like asking somebody to come down bring a meeting so finally i ran into this guy he was an army major and he was the club officer at fort belvoir there's a true story and his name was jack and i said jack would you like to come down speak and yeah wow that's wonderful so i never even got a second speaker i just had jack coming and little did i know my sponsors hyping this meeting up my first meeting he's getting the people from manassas and people from fredericksburg some special event to come to this meeting and dave the jockey came he came in off of a drunk he's sitting in the front row and his bottle is outside in the bushes and he's back and forth and back and fourth and my sponsor introduces me our new program so i come up and read the preamble and i'm real shaky i could speak but i couldn't read things god just my voice would quaver when i had to read things and uh so i finally said now jack jack comes up i thought he looked funny when he was walking up there he gets up his name is jack and i'm an alcoholic hi jack and and I'm here tonight to resign from Alcoholics Anonymous. Oh, shit! And he was drunk. And so I'm looking at my sponsor, you know, like, and he's just going, you got it, you now. So I could just see, you kno, I figured somebody from general service would be in, I'll be in handcuffs and they're taking me off. so he goes on to explain this talk went on for like 15 minutes and he said when I came here I would drink and get all screwed up and you lovely folks have taught me how to drink and now I drink a fifth a day and I have no problems whatsoever I just want to express my gratitude to this wonderful I mean we're talking about pure blasphemy here you know and the jockey is going out and back and out and back because he can't believe this story either you know and finally i'm saved by the jockeys i didn't know what to do i'm sitting there just frozen with fear you know maybe you all would have handled it better but i just was totally red-faced and embarrassed and the jockey stands up and just middle his talks and just walks up into him says you're a goddamn liar i drink a fifth every day and i get drunk if you're drinking a fifth you're going to be drunk no i'm not drunk all of a sudden they're outside so my sponsor comes up to the podium and invites everyone to come back next week you see if we could top this you know we said the Lord's prayer and that was it so that was my start in service work but spent a lot of out of years since then and a lot wonderful things have happened and if something's different now you know life makes sense I didn't get the answers They never got one answer. You know that? Isn't that funny? Got rid of a lot of things, didn't get any answers. I find sobriety is like a balloon ride. You want a better view, you throw away things. Then you go up higher where the view is better. You get tired of that view, you look around, find something else to get rid of. You get ridof that, then the view gets better. Never get anything, just get rid off things. Remarkable. If you're new, you've got to understand this is a spiritual program and it doesn't work like the regular world where we figure out things. You don't figure anything out. You don'T even figure out why you're an alcoholic. When you first come in here, you're obsessed with why you'RE an alcoholic, why am I an alcoholic? You're reading books and you're doing all that. I think we're obsessed mit that because we think if we could ever figure it out, we'd be able to drink again. That's what we were trying to figure out. But think about this now, because our alcoholism gives us the greatest insight. Our alcohol problem, alcohol itself, gives the greatest oversight into how this program works. You go to these meetings, and I agree with what Clancy says, we end up taking a series of actions we don't believe in. That's why AA works. You don't get convinced ahead of time these steps will do anything. I studied those steps for about four years before I really started doing anything with them, trying to figure them out ahead of time. And none of them looked like they applied. I remember especially in the beginning, I was reading those steps and people were saying, take these steps and your life will be transformed. And I'm looking at them and I remember going, there's nothing on these steps about a $2,000 loan. And that's what I felt was the most pressing thing that I needed before I could do anything else because then I could get some pressure off. I could stop these phone calls and these bill collectors and sheriffs and all of that. And there wasn't anything in there about that. It was all esoteric, it seemed to me. It just didn't seem to apply. Moral inventory, character building, prayer and meditation. I said, man, I've got a bunch of hounds biting me in the butt here. If I sit down for prayer and medication, it's over. That's the way it looked to me, see what I mean? So it didn't look like they would work. AA doesn't look Like It Would Work, does it? Do you ever try to explain AA to your friends? You come back from a meeting, you're happy, and they say it's funny, you know, you work around there and they saw you before and now they see you now and you're happy and whistling. They go what is this damn AA anyway, you know, and so you tell them about it. Oh Jesus, I just had a meeting last night with my home group, wonderful meeting. Well what happens? Well we all go down to church basement about 8 30 get a cup of coffee and get on over to the table. We get a leader comes in and talks a little bit about himself and we get like topic, you know, like resentment. So we just go around the room. You know, Joe talks about resentment and then Mary and then boom, boom, boop. We get to the end and we say the Lord's prayer and go home. And that makes you feel great? Doesn't look like it should work, does it does not look like it should work so in our wildest dreams if we were given the power to have come true anything that we could conceptualize we never could have conceptualized of Alcoholics Anonymous we never would have thought that up never never never we would have thought up a yacht and a blonde right or something like that and then we would be if we'd read about Fred commit suicide on a lot of the yacht it wouldn't work because we are unable to see this until we try it so it's a whole different thing so when we come in day a we go these stupid meetings we do these stupid things that people are talking about and you've been coming around the program about three months, sometimes you'll notice, here's what happened. Here's this incredible miracle, and you're going to miss it. You sit around your house one day and you say, Jesus, just to curse you, and you go, wow, I forgot to worry about drinking last week. I forgot to worry about drinking last week Wow! An alcoholic that's totally obsessed with drinking for the last 21 years conveniently forgot to worry about drinking last week? How could that happen? It startled me so much I almost felt like leaving myself a note. Don't forget to worry about drinking. It had been such a constant companion. Worry about where that drink or I might need one or I may need that. The thought never came in here to torture me for a whole week. that is a spiritual solution i don't know anything about alcoholism i don' t know anything why i'm an alcoholic but it doesn't bother me anymore so the problem never got figured out it got removed that's the difference we come in here and we follow actions that we don't believe and problems get removed they just get taken to another place now they're not gone permanently that's what this day at a time exactly what we're talking about this is a day at the time and our big book talks about that what we really have is a spiritual reprieve a daily reprieved contingent on our spiritual condition so we have a set of steps we have little game plan I call it 12 That's a game plan for living. And I remember going, Game plan for life? I already got my own plan. Somebody would say, Yeah, but you're wearing a wristband. I don't think it's the best plan we've ever heard of. You are not the best walking advertisement for your plan. Let me put it that way. And we take these actions and we get access to a power that changes the world we live in. And when we live in that changed world, there's no requirement for a drink. No requirement whatsoever because it's a wonderful world. It's a comfortable world. And the only method of accessing this world is through this power. It's the same as entering the drunk world. The only way to get there is by drinking. And when you think about it, drinking doesn't look like it should work. You know what I'm talking about? Like your first drink, you've never had a drink, you're 15 years old and your buddies are drinking. You drink this and you feel wonderful. You'll know how to dance. You'll Know All These Things and you smell it. Maybe it was cheap blended whiskey and it smells like kerosene. You go, Jesus Christ, drink that and you're going to feel wonderful? Trust us! Whoa! I don't know if I can get that down. I mean, does it look like that was just going to be the most wonderful thing in the world? It doesn't look like it should work because we don't now that there's a power in that alcohol And that power comes in and from the inside out it changes the world, changes our perception of the world. And it does work. It's very powerful. So just like alcohol didn't look like it would work, these steps didn't look like they would work. This program didn't work. This didn't look like it would. So I had to take the word of other people. And besides, I ran out of ideas. This is not an intellectual process. It's like a dead end. You just fell out of an airplane without a parachute and somebody says, why don't you try prayer? And you say, why not? it's time to become a former agnostic. Otherwise, you're going to be a dead agnóstic. It is not that you saw the light, you were feeling the heat. So the whole deal, the whole spiritual program, it's really funny, it used to be such a mystery to me, this whole thing, and then I realized that it is so incredibly simple and yet it remains a mystery why I refuse to do more and Bill writes a little bit about that in the six and seven steps why having been granted a perfect release from alcoholism we don't apply the same willingness to our other character defects and it's because they aren't as life-threatening as alcohol was so it's a little harder to develop that quality of willingness. And we like to hold on to character defects. We kind of enjoy them, you know what I mean? Like to get rid of gossiping? Yeah, after I tell this story. And what would it be like to have no lust whatsoever? Hmm. Sounds dangerous. Would you like to become Mother Teresa? I'm going, well, this race doesn't have any fun as far as I'm concerned. You know what I mean? So we limit the goal that we're shooting for. And that's the human part of us. And we've got to let ourselves off the hook for that. We really do. We've got try as hard as we can. We've gotta recognize that we've gotta spiritual entity that's walking around in a human body and the human park is gonna stay human. Clancy talks about that no matter how hard we try we're never going to rise above human beings but we just keep trying and we're always trying for progress try to get rid of one more thing this Chuck C talks about that uncovered discover discard in the new pair of glasses and that's all sobriety considers but one more I can get rid of in order to have a better view now why do I get a better view why do we get a bitter view because I'm powerless and that so that's how this whole program fits together for me is to go into the first step in the word powerless and that's where the spiritual program comes from as soon as you understand that you're powerless you understand that your problem cannot be solved with education or anything you must get access to a power to take care of powerless in the beginning can be your sponsor and your home group and all of that but it isn't you you on your own will always take that first drink Always you will go back to that first drink. On your own resources, you have no defense against the first drink because you know what's going to happen. You walk into a bar and you say to the bartender, you know I'm an alcoholic. I'm a hopeless alcoholic. I've got about two weeks sobriety. And I know if I drink again, I'll lose my job, I'll go to jail. Doctor says I might not survive it. And my family has got the car packed and they're going to leave. If I could have a Budweiser and you know What else is going to Happen? And while he's telling this story, we're having the drink. To the outside world, it's in total insanity. There's no defense against it. When we're going to have it, we're going to do it. We're going to have it. So we need this wonderful power to free us from that so that thought of taking the drink doesn't even come in. That's what happens. And so all these steps are simply designed to get the things out of the way that block the entrance of this power. And these things are instinctual drives, character defects, whatever we want to call them. They're not bad or good or anything. Their main problem with character defects, whatever, maladjustments, any term you'd like to use, the worst feature of these things is they block the flow of this power. It doesn't have anything to do with good or bad or up or down or anything. They are your jail cell. Those things have cemented us in and this power can't flow through us. We as human beings have been given the ability through our free will to block anything. And we say that to new people. If you've just come to AA, you don't like it and you want to prove it can't work, you have the ability to block out the love in this room because that's what free will is all about. You can sit there and not let one word of this get into your head. And you can have people come up and hug you and you can just go, no, no. You're not getting me. You aren't brainwashing me. you're not getting this smart little guy and you're going to stay self-sufficient and you are going to commit suicide in a self- sufficient way and you will go down the tubes flush the toilet and jump in and you'll be gone and the last thing you're going to say before you go is at least I didn't check it out and ask for help and we're sure that the obituary column is going to praise us for not caving in like all the rest of the wimps in the world and instead they're going to say what an asshole pardon my language what a jerk I mean it's just not going to be the way we see it and so all of sobriety I'd like to wrap up the way I think about a day at a time it's like air in a tire you can get the most expensive tire on your car $250 tire but that tire will not be very useful until you put that free air in there. And it's the same air that goes into a $50 retread. You know what I mean? If they don't have that air in their, there's no cushion. And that $250 tire will get cut from the rim from the inside out, which is just what a slip looks like. Slips happen because there's nothing in there and there's just no cushion between us and life. We're going to be going along and we've cut back on the meetings cut back on the reading the 24-hour day book in the morning and we cut back on this just like you know when you get a slow leak in your tire it's I don't have time to really fix it up just put a little air in now keep checking and you're and you're driving around you know you're gonna get it one of those days right and you just and then just one of the most important thing you got to do is emergency BAM there it goes went over a pothole and the rim cut through the tire and it's gone and so what we'd have to do in sobriety a day at a time is never let that cushion get low. We can ask for this five, ten second cushion. Ten Step talks about this. Between us and the world. That's all we need. It's called self-restraint. You don't develop that. You pray for it. You just ask. Can I please have a cushion between me? My friend, Ed C., says that he likes to start each day by allowing five people to be wrong ahead of time. He's got cushion you see what I'm talking about it's just there's this cushion so that we don't react we have time to have something happen and then we can think about it and then talk about then we can decide what to do and so I'd like to think of sobriety that way that I need on a daily basis to get my quotient get that cushion and you know sometimes you look at an AA meeting and it looks to me like one big tire pump people are coming in at 8.30, you know, and they're dragging in from the meeting, you knows, and they're sitting around the tables, and people at work are getting all over my case, and this and that, and the speaker gets up and is talking, and it's almost like there's somebody pumping, because you can just watch it's about 9.15, you know like life is coming back into these bodies, and at the end of the meeting there they are all around the corner, hey how you doing? Have a good time, who wants to go get a hot fudge sundae? Is that the same crowd that was in here? No, they're pumped up a little bit. The cushion's been put back in and without it that's all it is. That's what sobriety is. It's always maintaining this spiritual cushion a day at a time. What a great way to live. Now we try and improve on that. Our egos want to improve on that. You know what I mean? We're manufacturers. We're businessmen. Well, that's wonderful. They've got a product that'll get you sober a day at a time. There ought to be one that gets you sober a year at a time. but it doesn't work that way this whole thing this wonderful miracle makes all of life condensed into now and as long as we have that power as long as we've been given this wonderful thing we've given the tools to get it the view of the world will be remarkable and those of you that are new the journey you're going on starting in this alcoholics anonymous is remarkable. The gift you're going to get, and you've been given it, and all your job is to unwrap it. And the gift is you. And you're gonna find these steps are gonna unwrap you. And you may think you arrived here a piece of garbage wrapped up in all kinds of old newspapers and this and that. And we're gonna make you unwrap It. We're gonna undo that thing so that you finally see the magnificent lovable, creative special person that you really are. and when that shines through a lot of times other people will see it first and they'll come up and tell you Mary you look wonderful you know what what it's starting to shine through and what a jackpot and for those of you that are new stick with these people right here you're going to have the greatest future you can imagine thanks a lot