Why the 12 and 12 is Better Than the Big Book – Sandy B.

And although Bill didn't tell me to shut up, I know a lot of you are getting ready to dance. I thought I was dancing a while ago until I realized I was just shaking. Our speaker tonight is a man who hasn't been down in these parts before, to my knowledge. I've never heard him. But somebody told me that he's from Alexandria. And when this illness first struck him, he thought he had the Potomac fever. Now, some of you know what that is. There's no cure for it. You can't be arrested. And he was relieved when he found out that he could join AA and be relieved of a lot of his troubles. It is a great deal of pleasure that I ask you to help me welcome Sandy Bee from Alexandria, Virginia. All right. Thank you very much. My name is Sandy Beach and I'm an alcoholic. How are you doing? And it's delightful to be here tonight. And you don't know what a feeling it is to stand up here and look at all of you and to be part of this weekend. And I want to thank everybody who had anything to do with inviting us down here. We've had a marvelous time and I agree that this is one of the prettiest places that I've been in many, many years. I think it's just beautiful, and so are you all. And I want to start out by saying hello to each and every one of you. Hello, hello, hello. Hello, hi. And everybody has been interesting listening to the speakers. Everybody's sort of shared a little bit of where they're at today. And I think I'll do that. I, for the past three years or so, have had the most interesting and wonderful job. I'm the legislative liaison for a little regulatory agency in Washington, so I get to work between there and the banking committees up on the hill. Very fortunate to get it, and I love it, and they promoted me, and amazing what's going on in that area of my life. A few years, and I finally got off of cigarettes, and, you know, so I'm doing all right there. And about a year or so ago, we got to tell you how happy I am with that situation. I have to tell You that through this program, You let me out of that prison of self-centeredness where you can't receive or give love. And I don't know if I've ever stood up, been able to honestly stand up in front of a group of people and say with complete honesty and completely unashamed, I am so in love you wouldn't believe it. I am just so happy and it's just so nice to be that free to be able to do that. And I know that it never would have happened without these principles, without your example, without many, many people over the years that I've been in AA showing me what's possible. I just love that. I love to see the great folks in AA who've been around a while and show what is humanly possible. I learn so much from that, so much, from example. I know whenever I think on this subject, I think of someone recently outside the program that had this same effect on me, and that was to watch Hubert Humphrey in his last days. I had no idea that that was possible human behavior. I had set my limits much lower than that until I saw what he did and how he lived his life and what is humanly possible. My limits were much lower Than that, And I feel so much bigger for having shared in that experience. And it was just remarkable to see what is really possible. So, I am most happy these days. I have a comfortable life. Just, you know, it's kind of funny. My life consists of getting up in the morning, going to work, doing the best I can on my job, showing up every day, coming home at night, eating a supper, going out to a meeting or something, going to a movie, coming home. In other words, I'm behaving like a normal person. You know, we come into AA and we start talking about, hey, I go to work all the time like that, you know, and I wonder what some of the folks must think. They go, you know we've been doing that all our lives, going to work and showing up and doing all these strange things. And we come in here and it's just so astounding to be doing those things that we celebrate in it. And it's great, it's a marvelous feeling to be doing normal things. Because I think I always wanted to do normal things, that was my problem. I wasn't doing them. For some reason the year 1950 jumps into my head and I think I'm here and I'm thinking about the fellowship and the history of the fellowship. And if I'm not mistaken, in 1950, that was CAA's first international convention. And the real old-timers were there in Cleveland and they were putting together traditions, getting ready to write the 12 and 12, which came out according to the book in 1952. and the fellowship was under a full head of steam and there were groups being developed everywhere and I was getting into blackouts at that moment in time. And so you all that preceded us newcomers here were sort of getting the place ready and I Was Getting Ready to Get Here And it's interesting to watch, you know, and realize what was going on during the same period of time that something else was going on. And it was marvelous that the, you see, my favorite book is the 12 and 12. I'm one of everybody's sort of got a thing they get attached to. And I'm sort of a 12 and twelve freak. I get that thing and I just read it and read it and read it. And my sponsor is a big book man. He kind of looks at me like, wait a minute, you're not supposed to like the 12 and 12 better than the big book. And my response to him is, well, just look at it now. Bill had 12 or 13 years more sobriety when he wrote that. And maybe there's extra words in there and extra thoughts that are helpful. Anyway, I just enjoy that book. And I realized that it was being written as I was working my way through college. And when I say working my way, I'm talking about the efforts that are involved in vomiting, in getting into jail and getting punched in fights and getting lost and being afraid and being angry and all of that. And so I was putting in my time. I was doing my share in getting ready to get into this fellowship. and it's important that you get ready, or you won't stay. You know, you just can't. So anyway, I would say while this wonderful convention was going on, this international convention, I was getting ready for a big deal. I don't know if it was the same month, but I was getting ready for the junior prom at Yale. And I had tails. I had just dressed up something beautiful. I had a date with a girl whose family runs the Anheuser-Busch Company. And I already had my life planned out. I said, boy, she's going to love me and I'll marry her and I will never have to work and I'll just have all that beer. And that was about as far as my planning ever went on anything. And the more I think about it, well, that's not too bad a plan if you're not an alcoholic. And I was very nervous about this evening. I always was nervous about evenings. But I used to fix myself differently than I do now. I used gin. In my early days, somehow I got into gin. And I Was Using Gin To Get Ready For This Evening. and I got ready all afternoon. And when the evening came around, I was ready. And they were carrying me around and dragging me into the dinner and we were at some home for dinner. And I was sitting at the table and I knew what was about to happen. You remember in the early days of your drinking when you were about to pass out? I used to get a large warning buzzer that went off in my head. It was sort of a boom And I knew that when that buzzing sounded, I only had three, four minutes left. And what happened was, I don't know if you remember, and it was sort of filtering in and I'm trying to make it through this meal and I've got a lot of work to do and I decided to hang in as long as you could. Now, when I passed out in those days, I can remember I'd passed out about three times before I'd go all the way. I think the brain just shut off for a second and then it would come back on. And you'd still be there. And it would go, oh, I'm still going here. And I made it through the dinner and I got to the coffee. And I can remember the coffee cup was in my hand and I went. And of course, it went down like that. And then I came back. And I was sitting there and I still had the cup, only it had spun around on my finger. and the coffee was in my lap and I was just sitting there in tails with a cup and no one else saw it and I very gently put the cup down and then fell off the chair and passed out. So some of the guys carry me out, you know And they're dragging me away And this guy, he always does this And it's too bad he doesn't get to these social events But he tries There were various comments made Later on I heard the people said Yes, isn't it awful And he wet his pants too So, that's what I was doing while you all were at the international convention in Cleveland. it. I had a plan for living at that time, and you all were really organizing one for me to adopt later on when I was shown under no certain conditions that my plan was getting bad results. Now, my plan, like anybody else's, is put together out of my past. Every one of us gets our plan for living, our philosophy for life, whatever you call it, those of our past. I mean that's where all of our knowledge came from and I got mine in New England. I'm from Connecticut, I'm a Connecticut Yankee or whatever you called it and I'm very grateful to be here. I'm amazed that you're listening to anything that I'm saying but I was brought up there by the very stoical parents who I now can walk in the house and say, I love you. You know, you weren't supposed to do that or I didn't think you were and it's so nice to be able to do this and my sister has almost two years in AA now. I thought I'd mention that. I forget how happy I am about her sobriety also. She's up in Connecticut. But anyway, we're brought up in this little family, fairly well-to-do, nice little home And somewhere along the line growing up, I had the same feeling Bob was talking about. The feeling of just not being adequate. I had some little secret, I don't know where I got it, that other people knew more about life than I did. And they were, you know, more comfortable with themselves. And I didn't know quite what it was, I just knew what the feeling was of being not quite the same, not quite up to speed. And when I got to age six or seven, I found out what the whole deal was about because I was marched into the Catholic Church. And there the nuns greeted us in the way they always greeted little kids in those days. And my memory of what took place was this. We're going to tell you all about what the rules of the universe are. And we're goingto tell you several places you're liable to end up. And most of them were very unpleasant. Mine that I picked out early on was purgatory. It was a very bad spot, and I knew that no matter what happened, I was going to end up there. So I secretly hoped to live several hundred years. I did not want to meet my maker as the years went on because I knew he was just waiting for me, going, you're finally here, and okay, and we're going to settle the scorecard. Every day I was keeping score, and I new that he was keeping a score. I mean, there was no doubt about that. So, I found this wonderful relationship with guilt. A lot of us alcoholics bring that in. I used to drink, you know, gin and guilt. Give me a little gin and gilt. You sort of get that really going because, you now, if you're guilty, you really are self-centered. God, are you self- centered when you're guilty. Take on all the responsibility for tornadoes, hurricanes, blackouts, wars. A real guilty person just is responsible for all of those things. And that's kind of where I was at. And I couldn't stop a lot of these things. And I have mentioned this several times before, that by the time I was 15, I had around 160,000, 170,000 years to do in purgatory on stuff that I had just thought about doing. I hadn't even done any of this stuff yet. It was just... We got some of those Catholics out there. You remember impure thoughts at all? Okay, you know what I'm talking about. those obsessions are hard to get rid of aren't they um the other thing I had was a feeling that everybody else was all right and this made me want to be other people I always wanted you know I would meet a guy and I'd see somebody they had a little more money they dressed a little better they were the captain of the football team I had all always wanted to be someone else. And after being in AA for five years, I changed all of that and I decided I would rather be me than anyone else in the world. And that may sound a little self-centered, but it isn't because this is based on listening to you over the years. And I realized it's not safe to want to be anybody else after you really hear their stories. You see the speaker sitting there and she's a lovely woman all dressed up. So I might like to be that person. Then you hear a story, you go, boy, I'm a bad judge of people. I'm not sure I want to meet that person at all. So I would rather be me than anybody else out of default. I'm not totally satisfied with this package but I don't trust the rest of you guys so um I'll just take what I got I've been dealing with these problems for a long time I got some of them straightened out I've actually got a few of them pretty well working here growing up I also got some ideas about this country I got Some ideas about how this system worked uh I heard it was a free enterprise system um don't show anybody Any sign of weakness, because they'll use that to move ahead. It's very important to get to the top. Obviously, there's only room at the top for one. That means everybody else has to lose. And that was good. That makes it for a comfortable life. If that's the way you're riding on a bus with a crowd of people and you say, well, we're all here to get each other. It makes it comfortable in school. You're competing for the highest grade. And God, if you don't get it, then they'll know that. I had a wonderful little game going with myself. It was how to get as miserable and frightened as you could. And I hadn't even started drinking yet. A lot of people say, you know, their alcoholism took something away. Well, it didn't take anything away from me. I didn't have anything before I started drinking. I did not have anything going well. None of those ideas were valid. None of them were really true. But they were mine, and I assumed they were true. when I took my first drink I was in the university I naturally felt inadequate I walked into a room and the people there looked at me and I had the same feeling I always had when I saw a crowd of people and that was that they were looking at me saying who invited him in why is he here in with us did you ever have that feeling it was always place and I could just look around and they were looking at me and I was smiling there was that boom just that steely look and that's the way the world was you know and I'd try and get all the strength inside of me and look back just as hostile as I thought they were looking and I'm like and I don't know and I wasn't just as tough as this crowd was this is a social event not a football game and it was under those conditions that I had my first drink my roommates had told me drinking is great or it would make you feel good and everything. So I had my first drink at a rather late age of 19 and I drank it down and waited to see what it would do and I don't recall it doing anything to me. I was waiting for this feeling they talked about. I was waitng for all these marvelous stuff. Nothing, but I looked up and you should have seen what it did to all the people in the room. Now, I drank the whiskey and they started smiling. i drank the whiskey and that cold look went out of their eyes i drank the whiskey in a change from a hostile world into a beautiful world of brotherly love i drank the whiskey and i walked right through the looking glass into wonderland and here was a different set of rules king world we had a code of ethics we treated each other with respect we had that feeling of camaraderie there was there really was brotherly love there I was at peace with myself with other human beings with a higher power later on I got to think you know we could go to the men's room and leave your change on the bar now how much code of ethics do you want you leave your higher moral values than anyone else that was sort of the feeling I had it's all produced by drinking this alcohol. I went from a very frightening world into this nice place where everybody was decent to each other, and I loved it. I said, gee, this is a nice place to be. Why can't we all be like this all the time? Now, right about then is when I got into my first evening of throwing up and dry heaving and all the things that come with drinking because the world felt so good, I wanted to make it feel better. And so I had, you know, 10 or 12 extras just in case. It was a terrible evening. I recall, I think God gave me the whole test of alcoholism, a little bit of the chills, a little Bit of the skin crawling, a Little of the dry heaves, a little hot flash, cold flash, shaking, trembles, just a little tidbit of all the things that are off in the future so that I could, you Know, make a decision. And the next night when the crowd came around and said, you want to drink or not? We're going out and party. I can remember saying to myself, well, I've got to think this over. And my body said no, specifically my stomach. It said, well I don't know if I have a say in any of this, but we vote no down here as far as drinking goes. We're still working on that stuff from yesterday. We can't hold food. that's the input that came in from the body then there was part of me that felt it was bad to be out of control like that there was sort of that side of me but basically the brain made the decision that day the brain was soon to get overthrown in the whole decision making process but that night the brain was making decisions it said basically yeah I know you've been throwing up and you've heard and you had about 20 hours of sort of feeling rotten But that's a small price to pay for that hour of fun you had last night. And that's it. I could sit down right now. That's my whole story. On a daily basis, I would make an equally ridiculous decision for the next 15 years until I came into AA. And that was, this is a small prize to pay for all the marvelous fun that I think I had last night. And when I get together with some of those guys, I'm sure they'll confirm that I had a good time because I got into blackouts and I would need them to tell me. And they'd say, yes, you had a marvelous time. You jumped all around the tables and swung and then I thought, good! I'm glad I had an amazing time and I had marvelous time because it cost me about $250. I got some teeth knocked out. I was arrested. And a guy should not go through that much anguish and not have a good time. So I was very grateful for the report that I had had a good time. And with that kind of logic and that kind of thinking, I still, like so many of us, had problems with that second step. I thought my brain functioned very rationally and very logically. and I came to learn in here that there was quite a bit wrong. Let's see, my drinking, what can I share with you about my drinking? You know, it's hard to share much about drinking. Drinking just destroyed me like it did everybody else. I guess I can tell you what I did to get my drinking money. I guess as we share what we did, whether we were a housewife or a doctor or a lawyer, a musician, whatever, we're really simply sharing the background music to the main event because that's really got nothing to do with alcoholism but in case you're curious I earned my drinking money in the Marine Corps flying airplanes and that's where I ended up some guy who were sitting around one Saturday afternoon they said let's join the Marine Corp and I said well I finish this beer first and then I was down there you know just Saturday afternoon yeah sure I'd like to go there fine. So I flew for 12 years and was a jet pilot. And, you know, I had a lot of fun. I don't know. What am I going to tell you about those years? I think it was exciting. I think there was a certain amount of enjoyment. I did end up getting married after eight years in the Marine Corps. We had six children. There's nothing compulsive at all about our behavior. It's funny how, you know, life goes along and the only thing I noticed that was a little bit different was, God, is he crowded around this table. There's not even any room to sit down around here. That's about how much events come into our foggy minds. It's crowded in here. What's going on? Big family, oh yeah. I eventually got very ill with this illness. I got so that I did not like to go out and get in the airplane. I was up at Cherry Point, and I was being checked out in a new jet. And it was, God, that thing was hard enough to fly if you were real sharp. And I'd go out there and look that thing over, and God, I'm not sure I want to get in that. It looked pretty powerful, you know. And here I've been flying all these years, and now I'm sitting there. I knew that I was coming apart inside. I knew that I was having trouble getting the car started and, you know, getting down to work. And I was getting frightened. I did not have self-confidence. I was being destroyed right as all of us alcoholics are from the inside out. It just started at the core. It started right with my soul and then worked out. And then finally started showing up in the physical tremblings and so on down. But by the time it gets out there, it's already destroyed the essence of what it is to be a human being. And that was what was really gone. Only I didn't know it. I just knew what the symptoms of it felt like. And it felt Like you were an empty person. It felt Like there was a shell. And I used to wear sunglasses. I was afraid somebody could look into my eyes. You know, that feeling or that saying that the eyes are the mirror of the soul. I started believing that as their paranoia set in. I wore sunglasses so that nobody could stop me on the street and go, there's no one in that man. Arrest him. Now, there's that awful feeling, you know, that I'm gone and no one knows it. What if they find out? We always had secrets. Secrets are awful, aren't they? You got a secret, you got a problem. These are a couple of ideas. One of the idea was a real man doesn't ask for help real man handles these things alone and you just endure it and you keep your mouth shut and you hurt and if all that stuff believed in it oh boy anyway the um discipline to get up in that airplane was getting a little more difficult to make because basically I felt that there was that distrust of the pilot. So I finally went to some doctors and told them, and they agreed we had a serious problem. The problem was those planes cost about a million dollars. and i was undergone some tests and um at the end of a couple of weeks the psychiatrist was left to be the decider as said that the high blood pressure the trembling these loss of vision and all of these symptoms that i described profuse sweating everything was caused by a childhood disliked of airplanes. 1960, you wouldn't get away with that in the Navy anymore. They've got a great alcohol program and they also know that us alcoholics lie a little bit. I don't think I ever mentioned that drinking very much at all. And so I was retrained and the Marine Corps had to make a big decision as to what you're going to do with a guy who's gotten in such bad shape that he can no longer fly an airplane. And I was here for, I don't remember how long that school was, I'll have to ask Don, but I was retrained as an air traffic controller. And now my job was to bring the planes in in bad weather when they couldn't see the runway. and if they couldn't see the runway we were even because I couldn't see the radar scope and it was fun running into Tom he's one of the we were overseas together and everything in our mutual blackouts we put some of the pieces together and my last year drinking I was in charge of a little unit over in Japan and I fortunately let everybody else do the work and I simply tried to get on my bicycle and ride down in the general area of where we worked and be there at some point during the day. And, you know, I've got to mention this one point. It's sort of digressing a little bit, but, you know, if there are anybody new, some new folks here, I have made some observations about employers, and this is what I have reached as a bottom-line conclusion. I think this is almost irrefutable, is that there are a lot of qualities in employees that you can observe and desire. And one of them is creativity, imagination, product knowledge, the great talent, potential. But do you want to know what they put at the top? Showing up. They promote people who just show up all the time Who have half the talent that you do There were guys who could hardly speak English That were getting promoted ahead of me And what they did, they showed up every day They just kept showing up, showing up And I don't know if you've noticed that, but this seems to be true everywhere. They really are interested in people showing up all the time. And so I just throw that out. If you're brand new, you're looking for a job and everything, show up. Damn. Same thing in meetings. Show up. Anyway, during that last year of drinking, that was it. I got into daily drinking. I wasn't flying anymore, and we saw the illness just accelerated. I went through just sort of a hell. I couldn't eat. I was frightened all the time. I didn't know who to turn to. I lost 50 pounds during that year just trying to dry-heat vodka and just get it down, stop the shakes, try and go to work. the awful anguish of being in situations that were just terrible. The one that sticks in my mind tonight was when President Kennedy was assassinated and we had a ceremony in the hangar and I didn't want to go to it because I knew it lasted like maybe two hours and two hours was way longer than I could go without a drink and I was on my way back to the Quonset hut to hide or to at least get what are the equivalent of two hours supply of vodka so that I wouldn't just shake apart. And the colonel saw me and stopped his jeep and said, Colonel, I'll give you a ride over. I said, no, I don't want to go with you. Get in. And I'm there and I'm standing in a room this big with everybody standing attention to this important ceremony. You know, the more important it is, the more nervous we get. And I was sweating and perspiring and shaking. And I know the people in back of me can see this body just shaking and quivering. And then I started realizing in about 15 minutes, they're going to play the national anthem. When they play the National Anthem, I'm going to have to salute. And my arm, I mean, when I shook, I just shook so visibly that it would have been like this. It would, you know, I said, OK, so I got that choice. I'm gonna stand there in this arm and everybody, what's wrong with that guy. Or I could run out of here, run, just run out and then explain it later on. Or I Could Not Salute and just stand there like a, you know, like somebody so dumb he didn't know enough to salute. You know, sober people don't get into making choices like that. It was nobody else. Nobody else in that hangar other than another alcoholic was thinking of running out the door during the national anthem. But that was agony. That was agony, and I chose to stand there. Just stand. That's what I did. I know I turned red just soaking wet from embarrassment and perspiration. And I don't know. I just got out of there, and it took weeks to get over the humiliation of that moment. And there were a lot of moments. The agony of alcoholism for me was just composed of so many moments that I would like to be able to go back and change. I would have liked to have been there at the hospital when the children were born. I really wanted to be there. I didn't want to be drunk and almost there. I wanted to be able to say things to my parents sooner, how much I did love them. And I couldn't, didn't know how. I was afraid. I wanted to do a good job. When I was there, I just wanted to. And I think the pain of alcoholism comes from within in constantly behaving just the opposite of what I wanted to do. I don't know how I got it. When we say in the 12 and 12 that we are a victim of this illness, I really believe it there. It was almost like I was incapable of this different behavior. I just was always doing just the opposite of what I wanted to. And then I would try and pretend that what I did was what I wanted to do. I would come across as a guy who didn't care. Hey, I'm carefree. I don't care that I'm not like this. I'm sort of footloose and fancy free. Ha, ha, ha. and I'd go down to the bar and find other guys with the same problem. And we'd all pretend that this was normal to not be a good father and to not have a good life. To not be home. Ha ha, aren't we having fun with the bowling machine in the bar? Yay, yay, yay. Boy, this is real fellowship. This is what life is all about. And we would all tell each other those lies and we'd feel so good about everything and then we'd go home and then мы wouldn't be able to go to sleep and then We'd sit on the edge of the bed and then Мы'd dry heave and cry because I didn't want to be down there. I didn' t like those guys. They didn' d have anything. They were just supporting my illness, and I was supporting theirs. And we were just sort of a mutual group of sickies trying to hang in there, trying to explain abnormal behavior with a socially acceptable explanation right out of the big book. and that is called rationalization. We're going to give some socially acceptable explanation for stupid behavior. And if you can do that, you don't have to change your behavior. You just get good at explaining. And that's what the illness does. Boy, do we get good At explaining. We explain destroying ourselves as a great plan. We finally explain that to ourselves that it makes a lot of sense to continue this destruction. That's kind of what was going on. I am so grateful that the physical part of my illness caught up with me before the mental, well, obviously the mental you can see has had some residual damage has been left there. Hello, hello, hello. Hello, but but the physical did catch up and it caught up in Virginia and that's how I ended up being from Virginia see, I didn't plan it at all I just happened to have a convulsion in that state and got locked up and I'm too lazy to move so I'm still there and I was attending school and I wasn't in a big classroom and my body stood up as if to ask a question and I had a ground-mouse seizure. And that called my illness to the attention of everyone. You can no longer, even in the Marine Corps, they couldn't ignore a seizure in this huge classroom. They had to stop and go, would you get the seizure out of here? Several guys looked over, what's his name, Beach, looked down, oh yeah, well, everybody sort of promoted themselves who were slightly behind me. There are several generals in the Marine Corps that never would have made it if it hadn't been for me. And the reason I say that is they, next to me, looked very good. On their own, they were nothing. But next to my face, next to God, they looked good. They looked like a million dollars. And so I was the guy that just contributed to their well-being and I've never heard from any of them and maybe they don't know how to get a hold of me. But I ended up in the Naval Hospital at Bethesda in the nut ward section. They now have an alcohol unit, but back then they just, bam, locked all the doors. And I love to talk about this. This is my first time sober. I am now, I've been in a straight jacket. I went through the DTs and I'm coming to them. And this is the first time that I have, since I started drinking, went a week or two or into months without drinking. And we came to, they had a little room in the back where they had no belts, no sharp objects, no razor blades, no matches, nothing. You know where I'm talking about, in the bathroom of the nut ward itself. And I came to in a crib with sides on it, the bed there so you can't fall out and jump on. And somebody had wet the bed I was in, and I'm lying there. And there's a couple of guys over here in cribs also. And every five or six hours, a corpsman came back in there and looked around to see what's going on. And he had matches. And that's when you got a cigarette going. And we soon learned what could be done together that could not be done alone. Three of us could keep a cigarette going 24 hours a day. One guy would pass out and hand the cigarette over, and we'd just keep this going. and over on the other side of the room was a Navy commander by himself and he was in a little sort of a crib over there and he obviously couldn't keep his cigarette going and this is the feeling that came over me after three days of being locked up in there I sat in my crib with a cigarette looking at this guy who was waiting for a corpsman to come in he may have three hours before he gets a cigarette And I'm saying to myself, now there's a guy whose life is unmanageable. There's a man who's unmanagable. There's the guy with a problem. If I ever got that bad, I would want to do something about my life. And you know, you get an AA, you can compare yourself right out. You can be looking around, well, I didn't get as bad as that person over there. Guess I'll go back out. Well, you keep doing that and you'll be the one that everybody's comparing against. I eventually got out of that back room and I stayed locked up in there for five months. It was a very slow process of working. Now, I'll tell you one thing. In group therapy, the psychiatrist ran the whole thing. In groupotherapy one time, all the other people had these different mental illnesses, were sitting around and they would be describing what their feelings were and coming around and the psychiatrist asked this guy who was a manic-depressive, what do you think about this guy who says he's an alcoholic? And you know what that dummy said? He looked right at me and he said, You ought to stop drinking. And the next time I heard that was right in here, folks. That was as stupid as... Right near the end of that period of time, AA managed to talk the head doctor into allowing a meeting in the hospital. And I got to AA because a corpsman came in and said, all drunks fall in, right face, forward march, and then I'm at an AA meeting. So I got here under pressure. And if you're new and you got here, under pressure? That's right. That's how you get here, under pressure. What do you think? You think we sat around a house and said, hey, I may get into trouble later on. I think I'll go join AA. You think that's how we got here? Never happened. We get here with very subtle pressures. You may be that our wife says to us as we come home from work one night, they're all packed in the station wagon going off on a vacation and we're not going. Or you may go down to work and the boss says, come here, I want you to meet your replacement. What? Or your doctor says, listen, don't buy any long playing records. I want to tell you about your liver. And more recently, the federal judges and the local judges and the whole judicial system is getting in the act. And boy, they can really apply the pressure. So they get one of us up there and they say, you know, we've arrested you about ten times recently for drinking out there. I'm getting tired. We're going to have to take drastic steps. It's a year in jail or one AA meeting. And the guy stands out there for about 15 minutes going, wow, what a tough decision. So it's not a place that people get to by accident. And so if you're here under pressure, that's right. That's how you get here and in a way that's what keeps us here for a while at least. I'm just delighted that that's how I got here. I did drink for three days after I got out of that place just to prove a few points and ended up making a phone call and a huge Marine came into my house and knocked on the door. And there was that relationship was established right off the bat that you remember how that all works in the beginning? Okay, get in the car. Okay, sit in the front row. Okay, here's a coffee. Okay, don't spill it. All right, I'll only give you a third of a cup. I know your hands are shaking. Sponsors know. They don't give us a full cup. They know when we're shaking and they just happen to give us a third of a cup and we can handle that with both hands. And after four or five months of sobriety, you've got a half a cup and then you're getting up and... I love to be at restaurants now, you know. I would just sit at a luncheon or something like that and grab the coffee pitcher and go around and pour everybody's coffee and I'm just... I feel like going to everybody, look, look, Look what I'm doing, God damn it! Look at me! Anyway, you know what I'm talking about. That great feeling coming in here. And then the real work started. Gee whiz, you know, all of a sudden we got the not drinking part over with and you've got to get the not drinkin' part. I do have to touch on that. I know that it may sound stupid but it is important to mention that I did come into AA on Pearl Harbor Day in 1964, and I haven't been drunk since my first meeting, and I owe it all to not drinking. That's why I haven'T been drunk. Nothing else has been drunk, OK? Now, somewhere later on, I started getting comfortable, and I started getTING happy with not drinking! Now we've got a miracle! I'VE BEEN LOCKED UP IN A LOT OF PLACES YOU COULDN'T GET BOOZE, AND THERE WAS NO MIRACLE THEN! THE MIRACLES IS THAT I'M AN ALCOHOLIC, AND I PREFER TO NOT DRINK! I think life's much better without it. So that's the change that takes place in here but none of it's possible without the not drinking part. I've come to believe that it's very difficult to have a spiritual awakening while you're throwing up. So those of you that are the real intellectuals and you're kind of new and you said, you know, maybe I could drink a little wine do the steps and then get the desire to stop drinking. Just, I don't think it'll work that way. It really won't. Guy, if you're having a problem with the program, you notice that you keep missing meetings and you're arrested a lot and just, you seem to be reading the literature and everything, check your drinking. Hey! Oh, yeah, that's it. Every three or four months I get drunk. It's probably from drinking. Assuming that we can master that We're now on to more advanced sobriety And the funny thing is That a lot of us And I am certainly one of them Did not think I needed advanced sobpriety Why go beyond the not drinking part? Why press onward into all these steps And principles and all of these things if you don't need them. And that was the category I put myself in. I said, wait a minute, I haven't been sober six months, haven't taken a damn step, why should I ruin... You know what they're all saying? If it's fixed, don't... Or if it's working, don'T fix it, that kind of a thing. Why should I mess around with that? I just... I'm going good. Put the plug in the jug and go to me. That's it. You don't do anything else. I told myself that all of my problems were caused by drinking. And now that I wasn't drinking, I was perfect once again. And I had forgotten my childhood and I had forgiven the nervous teenager and I'd forgotten all of this skill. I'd forgiven that I had nothing going before I had my first drink. I was back to zero and was willing to settle for that. The wonderful thing that happens when we do this, and I think a lot of us get into this, I'm just going to go there and eventually I'll get into those things, is, and I've come to believe this is one of my best friends in life. This is my own personal philosophy. One of my Best Friends, and I honestly believe this is how my higher power communicates with me, is with pain. Pain, I used to just, oh my God, pain, you're not supposed to have that. Pain is what tells me when there's something physically wrong, so that I go see a doctor. And pain is what tell me when something mentally wrong, and I go share it with somebody else. And painis what tellsme when something is spiritually wrong, and I've got to fix it, and I'm off the beam. It's funny about life. I've decided, now you're going to hear some of my own philosophy, but I've decide that the secret to life is that it's not a secret. that the answer is so obvious, you just walk the straight and narrow and do the right thing. That's the secret to life. The problem is getting the willingness to do it. Who wants to behave themselves? I mean, the secret of life is to behave yourself. I don't think you really have to go beyond that. The problem ist, who wants to do that? And it's kind of funny that that's really where it is. We're sort of driven towards that inevitable line down the middle of the river. The massage parlors are over near the shore. Over on the fringes, way away from this straight line, way away From the Straight and Narrow is where the fun is. And we were born with these instincts. I'll tell you, when they wrote that book, that 12 and 12 and that fourth step, and they put a model in there of a human being and they described that we needed those instincts by God in order that we can survive and reproduce and function as a society and they're absolutely necessary. And the challenge of life is to get those things in balance with our approach to life and to learn that those instincts are just what they are. They are not ends in themselves, but they're simply components of us as human beings. And our challenge is concern. That's what life is, dealing with those instincts. Coming to terms with, but I want to eat a whole bunch of ice cream, but I don't want to gain weight. But I don'T want to cough anymore, butI want to keep smoking. But I wantto have three girlfriends, butIM afraid my wife will find out. But I want to have the wonderful thing about all of these things that aren't on there also promoted a lot. The straight and narrow isn't promoted of a business convention. And you see all the guys are there on the weekend or at their homestead, a green briar at one of these fancy deals. And the bars and the action and all the fun that's going on. Three or four of them are sitting around the snack bar drinking milk and having a cheese sandwich. And the three of them are going, you know, number one might say, well, how come you're in here behaving yourself? The guy says, I've got a heart condition. What about you? I'm a damn alcoholic. I've Got to Behave Myself, Too. Then there's a third one. He says, how comes you're here? He says I just always behave myself. That's the one that puzzles me. I don't relate to that. I don'T RELATE TO THAT. I RELate to pain, is how I find out whether I'm supposed to do this or not. I'M ATTRACTED TO ALL THOSE THINGS, AND MY INSTINCTS ARE JUST AS GOOD AS ANYBODY ELSE'S. AND I LIKE TO MOVE OVER TO THOSE FRINGE AREAS, and I thought pleasure was a lot of fun, and it seemed like it was a good idea. And so I don't blame myself for all of those things. That's part of my humanness. My guilt used to tell me that I shouldn't have those desires. My guilt Used to tell Me in my self-centeredness, Yes, I could understand it in you, but I shouldn' t have these feelings. I shouldn''t have these urges. I shouldn ''t have These things. And I find out, Wait a minute. I'm not in charge of whether I have those things or not. Those were given to me by God. That's part of being a human being. My challenge is, what am I going to do about them? What am I gonna do when it's time to fill out the expense account? I got a lot of choices. I'm all alone in the room. Nobody's gonna check it. Nobody will ever find out. The only person who knows is me. Margaret talked about picking up the paper when she threw it in the ladies' room, you know, and it missed and then going over and picking it up. I relate to that now. It was a long lesson in life of finding out the extra value of simply doing the right thing. When I do that, I have a different past. I start accumulating days where I may have done the right thing one or two times, and I realize how comfortable it was to have done the right thing for no other reason than it's simply, it was the right thing. And it's not like, hey, is it a problem to figure out what the right things are? I've never had a real problem figuring out what the right thing is. I always knew what the right thing was. The right thing put the right amount down on the expense account. The problem was nobody else was doing it. The problem is you got more money if you padded it. Everybody cheats on their income tax. That's fine. Everybody cheaps themselves spiritually. Everybody pads this. Fine, everybody cheaps themselves spiritually." A.A., we come in here and they keep hammering that thing. If there's an expression that is repeated and repeated and repeated throughout A.E. literature, it is spiritual values come first. Spiritual values come before us. And you read that and I go right on. Boy, I buy that. Now let's fill out the expense account and we'll put this down here. Spiritual values come first. There is a price. You know, as I start taking inventory, I start looking back over my life, there's a price I pay every time I'm not on the straight and narrow. Every time I're not doing what I know inside is the right thing. And I knew what the right things were. There's a conscience in there. The big book says that God is inside each and every one of us. He's been there ever since we're little. All I had to do was really look inside, and there it was. There was a part inside of me that wanted to be good. And I've come to believe that that's the God in me. It's just there. It wanted to reach out and say to people, I love you. It wantedto touch other people. It wantedtoshare. And I hadto pretend it wasn't even there because it didn't fit in with all the rest of my ideas. It was inconsistent with how I was behaving, and I just had to pretend there wasn't anything inside of me that was good. So, I never did take that inventory. And you know, we get into AA, and I want to touch on two of these steps near the end that I find so great for me now. And that's inventory in that tenth step. If I were to say to a new person, are you looking for a plan for living? I would have to say that it's all in very few pages in the tenth step Once we've taken care of the past and once I've gone through 1949, 50 and all amends and I've sort of gotten that, I am now ready to live a day at a time. The question arises, how do you live a Day at a Time? What are you supposed to be doing? What is a human being supposed to Be doing a Day At a Time ? And I think it's all there. I think every single bit of knowledge that I need is in that discussion of the tenth step. An inventory, in my opinion, this is one alcoholic's opinion, is one of the most spiritual things that I can do. It is a marvelous act of humility. At the end of the day or during the day, I'm going to take an inventory. When I take an inventory, I change the perspective on myself and my surroundings. I'm looking at my relationships with other people. I'm thinking in higher terms than where I was before I took an inventory. I like to think about the zoom lens on movie cameras in Hollywood, and they can come zeroing in on a close-up. And you've seen them come on in some of those television programs, and all you can see is the guy's eyeball. They can get in so close. And then they can zoom back, and you can seethe whole planet Earth all out of the same lens. When I wake up in the morning, that thing is zeroed in all the way. I'm so self-centered and so close in that that's all I see. My whole world is just me. And if I can get... In order to get comfortable, I want to try and zoom out. I wantto get that feeling, that perspective of being part of something. Whenever I'm part of someone, I'm comfortable. When that lens is locked in real close, I am uncomfortable. I'm very uptight. Oh, this is important. It has to work out. I don't see the big picture. I don' t see how all these things are working together. And I don''t even think about you and your problems. I'm just locked in too tight. And there's an interesting axiom in that tenth step. It said, if something disturbs us no matter what the cause, there's something wrong with us. And to me, that's the key to all of my problems. The key is that I always used to blame people. And I find that as a useless word. Blame doesn't serve any purpose whatsoever. It means I'm going to change you. It means that I'm not going to do it. It means, I'm gonna make an attempt to change the situation. And now I realize that as each situation comes along, I've got to develop what I call the key to my life. And that's self-restraint. it's that the pause where I do something that I never did before and it's one of our slogans in AA I think bang the situation happens a guy cuts me out in traffic bang the guy says an unkind word bang somebody comes in and says they don't like the paper you just did at work now you're going to respond you're gonna react to that situation if you could just build in a buffer zone of about a second and a half maybe two seconds where you go, oh, who? And then give the answer. That self-restraint, just that little buffer, and you don't say the unkind word that takes eight years to undo. And you don' t snap your kid's head off and then wish you hadn' t done it. You build that war, that time zone of two seconds where I think self- restraints, self- restraint. I think about, did you ever watch these animal shows and I love to watch these little bears and you see them playing, little bear cubs in there out playing in their room, tearing each other apart and then the camera's up above them and they go running off around a big boulder and by the time they get halfway around they're all totally on their own. They're just totally self-centered and they come around the other side and they bump into each other and they scare the hell out of each other and they jump up in the air and they're scared and they'll go, and then they go, oh, it's my brother and then они остановят. If one of those was an alcoholic like he would tear them apart first and then go, hey, that's my brother. No thinking. No thinking, just boom. We get startled and then react. And I feel that this is something that is learnable. It's something that has come very slowly to give myself that extra little moment in that step as a way of life. And the last thing I wanted to talk about is meditation. Now you're going to go, what is a comedian going to do about meditation? How are you going to approach the word meditation? I find it the most ironic thing in the world that you're going to come into AA meetings and find drunks talking about meditation. But, you know, I think we know something about it. Meditation, as far as I'm concerned, is kind of like my first day in class in high school when I was learning a foreign language. Do you remember your feeling, those of you that may have taken that one year of French or one year Spanish, and you're sitting in there and you've got books, and none of the words look familiar. And people are talking up there, Buenos dias, buenos tardes, buenos días. And you go, hey, what is all of this? And then finally, you know, you get a word that you learned. And you're going, muchacho, hey! And you are all saying it, muchachos. Hey, muchacos, how are you doing, muchaco? And you just clicking out that word. Now you have one word. And after another week or two, you have two or three. Then you have a sentence. and pretty soon you're getting a whole paragraph and they say that with practice in a foreign language you eventually will think in it. You will eventually think in that language simply through practice. I really believe that's what meditation is. It's like learning, for me, it's like learn a whole new language. I started learning like one little word. I had to just make a beginning somewhere. I had the same idea. I had this guy is going to learn something about that because it's there. And as my sponsor pointed out, there's a prayer in the 11th step of St. Francis and the directions come right before it. And it said, read this prayer several times slowly. And then he said, now sit down, I want to go over that again. You read this pray several times slowly. Now we'll get it one more time so that you get it. You see this prayer on this page where you read it several times slowly to yourself. And I found myself reading that and then saying to myself, I've read it, says something about make me a channel, says something better to love than to be loved, says something more about being loved than to love. Something about better to understand. My question is, what's that got to do with me? I see it there, see all the words. What has that got TO DO WITH ME? and if you're new I would ask you to read that and I would say if you want to meditate take that it's only about four, five, six, seven sentences look at all those words sit down in a room and say to yourself what has this got to do with me? And just keep thinking and just keep reading and say what has these got to do with my life? What has this to do with me what have I got to do with this better understanding you're meditating you are thinking on a level that you never thought on before you are spending time on what I call character building you are devoting ten minutes out of your day to character building you have taken down a book on character building and are looking at it and most of us when we hear the word character building we go I'm not into character building, I'm into bowling I'm really into this and then we get the pain of not doing these things and the pain says why don't you get into character building and then I'm not going to do it. And then we say I think I'll get into character building like it was our own idea and it was really pain. It was our illness. It was the threat of going back to drinking that pushed us in there. My illness which I, you know, just look now as a great blessing in disguise has pushed me into every area that I never would have gone voluntarily. It has forced me into the spiritual side of myself. The fact that I'm going to die if I don't has caused me to open a book, to look in there. And any time I say, well, I don' t think I'd better make amends, my sponsor goes, your illness is still fatal. I said, I'll make one amend. Got to stay alive. And that's why I'm so grateful for this illness. This illness has put me where I never would have been if I wasn't an alcoholic. I'm not the kind of guy who would have voluntarily read anything, I don't think, about character building. Because I would have settled for as much perfection as would get me by. I would've settled for mediocrity in the spiritual life. And then I woulda bitched like hell for the rotten results that I was getting. And I think that's what we do is, you know, it's up to each one of us. You wanna settle for mediocity? You'll get it. You wanna try for a little bit more? You'll Get It. and I think our steps are the I think they were God inspired they had to be to give us this kind of insight this kind of plan and this kind of hope and joy for the future thank you very much Randy that was a wonderful message Remain standing, if you will. According to the statisticians, we have 1,500 registered in attendance. Thank you. There will be the final meeting of this convention in the morning at If you don't set your watches back It will be 11 o'clock If you set them back it will be 10 o' clock If you do not set them Back you will be an hour early Those who will please join me in praying the Lord's Prayer Our Father Who art in heaven Hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever amen