Audio
Transcript
Source: DICOBE-00095 – Sandy B – GOPHER STATE RNDP VI – 1979-06-15.mp3 File: dicobe-00095-sandy-b-gopher-state-rndp-vi-1979-06-15.mp3 Duration: 00:59:50
============================================================
Good evening. My name is Sandy B., and I'm an alcoholic. That was great, C.D. I enjoyed it. And I'm going to cut this short so I can get over and hear John's talk. You ready? First of all, I do want to thank you all for inviting Tina and I here. We've had a marvelous time. It really is exciting. And this is one of the conventions that really has a reputation around the country that people tell you, if you can get to this one, get to this one. Now I know what they're talking about. It really is exciting, and it's just so nice to see so many of you here and feel the love that's in this room.
I came into AA on Pearl Harbor Day in 1964, and I haven't been drunk since my first meeting. And it's my opinion that I owe it all to not drinking. This is my own opinion. I always talk as if there's somebody in their first week in the meeting. It makes me not be nervous because I know that after 14 or 15 years, I'm bound to know as much as somebody in their first week. And so I can sort of feel comfortable up here sharing a little bit. Because I think what I like to think about happens at a meeting is that new people get the good news. And you remember when you're new, you haven't heard any good news in a long time. Hey, we got a message for you, and you don't want to hear the message. It's been bad news for so long. And I think that's what AA meetings are. It's the telling of the good news. And believe me, that is essentially what the entire program is. So I hope that when I finish tonight, you have found out the good news about you. I did want to talk a little bit about myself's recent events that have taken place. In case you change your mind, you may not want to stay for the talk. But I was thinking it was almost a year ago today, and I'll just share where I was on a particular weekend roughly one year ago today. I was in New Haven, Connecticut, which is where I was born. It's my hometown. I also went to college there. And I was back my twenty-fifth college reunion. And obviously I wasn't the only one there who was attending his twenty-fifth college reunion. And as I got going around meeting some of the guys there that I hadn't seen in a long time, I soon found out I was not the only AA member who was back attending his twenty-fifth college reunion. But after an exhaustive survey, I found I was the only one on his honeymoon. And my life has been exciting since I've been sober. I think more things have happened to me in the years I've been sober. And it makes it interesting to see some of the things that have come along that I forget to talk about a lot of times in describing my illness. So if I start out with it, I know that I won't forget it towards the end. Some of the things that have happened to me since I've been sober, and I'll lead up to meeting Tina. Let's see. I was sober two years. I got thrown out of the Marine Corps. And I can remember the feelings I had about this.
I was thrown out of the Marine Corps. I go to a meeting every night and I'm thrown out. It just didn't seem like this was fair. I don't know if any of you keep track of what's fair or not. Some of us have a habit of doing that. A little sheet and we're going, okay, fair, not fair, fair. Okay. I determined that was not fair. Unfair guy. You know, I had, I was, let's see, I was about 35 years old. I had a career. I was a regular officer. CD was talking about a jet pilot. I was a big hotshot and all that. And here I am now sober. I'm really producing, doing this good work and I'm out. And all I got to keep was my sword. That was the total package that you got to keep there. No money or anything like that. I got to keep this sword. And I had six children. I didn't have a job lined up. And I had, what I really had was a lot of self pity.
And I can remember when you have self pity, you generally don't go to meetings because the people
[00:04:59]
get rid of it for you. So you stay home. I mean, if you want to keep it, you have to stay home.
[00:05:06]
I don't stay alone. You really build it up and nurse it and deal with it. You can really get it to grow. And I was in the room and sitting there going, this isn't fair. Meetings and get sober. He's supposed to let good stuff happen. And I've been looking for a job, you know, couldn't get things going and run out of money. Serenity prayer was getting me upset. I wouldn't read it anymore. Finally, it was down to, you know, some fundamental problems here. I had the feeling that maybe I'm experiencing enough pain. I'm going to have to drink to fix it. I mean, obviously there isn't a spiritual answer to this type of anguish. And I started resenting God himself. I just was into the, you know, God, what's the deal here? You know, I started going over this whole inventory again, those chain of events. And for some unknown reason, I happened to glance at the newspaper, take my mind off of the problem. And I looked back and back in the middle of the newspaper, there's a small article reporting a plane crash. And I started reading it further. And it turned out that this entire team of officers that I was working with had just yesterday flown into a mountain in Denver. And the whole, this whole group that I had just been working with was killed. And if I had had my way, I would have been promoted. The reason I didn't get thrown out, I wasn't promoted. And then you're out and I would have been on the plane. And there was this tremendous mixed emotion that swept across me. One of them was, wow, you know, God, this is incredible. I had a whole change of heart about the whole fairness of the situation. I also felt trapped, because I knew that God knew I was reading that article.
So I was stammering around, I had little prayers and stuff, and I'm going, well, listen, you know, I'm going, what the hell do you expect? You know, like, if you had told me, I wouldn't have been complaining. So if you're in the program a while and something looks bad today, you just wait a while. The full answer sometimes takes a while, and then you get it. And you don't get it unless you don't drink. So I like to talk about that don't drink part, because there are days when, you know, serenity prayer doesn't work. There are days when you don't go forward and our job is don't go backwards. Dig in the nails, hang in there, and that's how you make those days, at least in my opinion. And then the answers come. And it gives us a chance to find out what faith is all about. You know, hey, now I understand how this system works. I'm really getting a handle on what life is all about. And there comes the chance to test these principles, and I'm grateful for them now. They don't seem fun when we're going through them. And I went along, and I guess I had about eight years sobriety. And my whole marriage fell apart. And I felt that I was doing the steps wrong. This must be wrong. And I'm moving out of the house, and all six children, and somebody else is moving in. And I'm going, this isn't fair. Boy, am I going to hang up about what's fair. I'm going to tell you, you know, damn, this isn't fair. You want to see a guy who's avoiding these fourth and ten step inventory. But I'll tell you, when those issues come along, I'm inventorian. And I'm going, this is not fair. You think about, you know, we inventory all the time. We're comparing ourselves with folks out there. Not moral inventories, material inventories, and things like that. And I remember that crushing impact of that whole event just forced me into some more of these steps, more of this aspect of the program. And then came what I consider the nicest event that took place in my life. And that is, people are telling me, if you want a happy marriage, you ought to be married to an Al-Anon. And I didn't know much about Al-Anon. None of my children were in Al-Ateen.
Wife wasn't in Al-Anon. So I, last year, after Tina and I had gone out for some months, I finally got the solution to this problem, and I married an Al-Anon. And that has just been marvelous. We had an open speakers meeting. There weren't any Al-Anon speakers meeting back in the Washington area. And so for the last year, I've been a coffee maker at an Al-Anon speakers meeting. And it's very good coffee. And it was good. And I'm there, and I want to tell you what happened. You know, there,
[00:10:00]
you're going to listen. And I'm listening, so I heard a hundred Al-Anon talks in a year. What I can share with you is what I learned about the new dimension of alcoholism is, it was an incredible change in perspective on what I knew about alcoholism. And I don't know how to describe it. The only way I've been able to even come close to it, to share with you what I felt inside, a sudden realization at the end of about the tenth month, was the same feeling I had when they shot the television pictures of the earth back from the moon. Now, you know, I knew all about the earth, and we had taken pictures from airplanes, and I'd flown around it and everything. But until they shot those pictures back from the moon, it was impossible to see the earth from the moon. You could imagine it, and you could do that. You had to have that change in perspective in order to see from that side. And I had that same feeling that I had a whole new insight into this illness called alcoholism and the magnificence of the recovery that I had completely missed. And I just am so excited about this sharing that's going on here, the Al-Anon speakers in, and we're all just human beings with the same wants and problems, and there's really very little that separates any human being from any other human being. I can't think of it now. I had drawn artificial barriers.
I look upon it, and I do want to talk a little bit tonight about that last half of the 12th step, about carrying these principles in all our affairs. And I hope I do get to that. I know I will. I'm going to try and get back and talk about my story, but I do want to get back into that part, about the artificial lines I had drawn around the program, how I felt comfortable in AA, but not comfortable outside of AA, because they wouldn't understand out there. You know why they didn't understand out there? Because I said they didn't understand out there. That's it. If I say they don't understand, it's a non-understanding place. Because I've learned now that I create my own world. If I say they're lovely people, they're lovely people. And this is something that is exciting to me, that these principles offer us this chance to change the entire world that we live in without chemicals. What an exciting adventure. Life didn't start out too exciting for me, though. Let me just tell you that right now. Best of my recollection, being born was very upsetting. I was slapped around. I was uptight right then. I think I was born nervous. Who's this kid? And I just remember as a little kid walking around, scary. The world was scary. There were little scary noises everywhere, dogs jumping out. I just have these great feeling about being scared as a little kid. I still wake up that way. You know, I don't know if anybody else is like that. But I wake up in the morning very often going, oh, God, I'm alive. Get my breath, you know. I don't know what that's all about. It used to really worry me when I stopped seeing the guy.
Psychiatrists could have kept that going for years. But that was sort of my feeling. And I had my relationship with the rest of the world was sort of one of don't let you in. Whatever you were, you were dangerous. And I think my New England upbringing, I picked up a few of the ideas. And I think any of our upbringing isn't necessarily what we were taught. It's what we heard. Something else may have been said or intended. But these are just the things I heard.
And what I heard was, well, up here we're very stoical people. And we don't let anybody know that we're having problems. So you just sort of tough it out and act as if you don't have any problems. I'm picking up on that. And I'm going, but what do you do with the problems? You just pretend you don't have them. OK, so I'm having trouble internalizing that. And then came along with very often in the process of growing up is very helpful to people. In my case, I don't think it was very helpful. And this this instrument was the church. And I got marched into the Catholic Church at a little, you know, six years old, whatever it was. I don't know what was said, but I'll tell you what I heard. Welcome, little boy, you're in trouble. Up to now, you've been guessing what the rules of the game are. Now we're going to tell you what the rules of the game are.
The Rules of the Game are, now we're going to tell you what the rules of the game are.
[00:15:01]
Okay, these are sins, and these are what you're going to do, and if you sin, and everybody does, you go to hell. Okay, and it's hot down there. There's an intermediate stop called Purgatory. With any good luck, that's where you'll go. I had an obsession with Purgatory. Purgatory, even the name sounded mean, Purgatory. What do I want to go there for? Why is everybody going there? I'm trying to figure out how not to go there, and I felt, so what is God after me for, anyway?
I just said, you know, it's because you're guilty. Of what? Of what? Man, start thinking about all the things that you can do and you should not do. And there was this list, and there were sins, and God, I had the same problem Jim was talking about. I related to his talk so well, just one item after another. I lived in a neighborhood that was, I don't know why, but in my particular neighborhood, impure thoughts moved around.
They came in my bedroom. Those things are costing you time in Purgatory. Get them out of here. Go away, impure thoughts. I know what they are. You have to confess these things, and they're very bad to have. And early on, I learned the futility of trying not to think something. Have you ever tried that? Of course you have. When you come into AA, they say, very simple, don't think about drinking anymore.
And you go home, okay. Six seconds later, Budweiser comes into your house. Don't think about drinking. How the hell do you not think about something? Get these thoughts out. Well, you know how it goes. You get to be a teenager, and you're wandering around. I saw some cowboy movies. That's where I picked up my basic philosophy of life. And I do share that. It tied into what I had been taught up there, oddly enough, New England and the cowboys.
And what it was, was a real man never asked for help. I mean, a real man. The rest of the world, if you know what I mean. Crowd. But we're not in the crowd, you know that. Secretly, we float above the crowd, but we don't tell the crowd because it would upset them. We sit at AA meetings. We're in business. We're all these places. And we don't go around telling people that we're better than they are.
We just keep it to ourselves. That's what humility is all about. You know. So. You're going to be tough to get through here tonight, aren't you? Anyway, I'm picking up on these ideas. And they're being reinforced by a lot of these movies. And I've always talked about this one scene in particular, because it's in all the movies. The town's in trouble. The bad guys are jumping all over the place. They're drinking and tearing it up.
And the townspeople say, let's go out in the desert and get whoever the hero was and get him in here. And they'd write up, please come in, come in and help us. And this guy lived alone with his horse in the desert and came into town when there was trouble. And they came in, here he comes, here he comes. And that was the end of the movie. It was a big scene. And this guy, whoever it was, walked into the bar, you know, and he's big and cool.
You know, never smiled. Yeah, he's looking around. He goes in, has a drink. Where's the trouble? And then there's the drums are beating and then there's the big shootout. And all the bad guys are shot in a tremendous scene. This guy gets on a horse and rides off. And then people are going, who was that man? I want to thank him. Remember all that scene and the music and square dancing, everything's happy.
And he's back out there and they go, there goes a real man. That was the punchline of all of that. And I'm going, that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to be like that. And I just related to that. And I was, I guess I've been in AA three or four years and this thought appeared in my mind, you know, it's really weird to live alone in the desert with a horse. Just a strange hero to have, but I had that never questioned ideas.
I don't know about you, but I never questioned my game plan for living. It was put together haphazard, scared little teenage kid, developed a whole set of ideas and convictions, part of which were regionalized, part of which I heard from a drunken uncle, part from a movie, part from a book. It just haphazardly got put together about what life was, what you were, values, God. All of it was assembled by the time I was about 15.
And I came into Alcoholics Anonymous and you asked me to question that package. I don't know what takes over there. I think pride of authorship.
[00:20:03]
Question my package for living? Why? Well, you're still in the nut ward and you get locked up a lot, you throw up all the time. You know, look at the results you're packed up. Forget the results. The theory is what counts. I don't know. I just put this thing together and I just don't want to let go of it. It is our burden that we bring in here. And I can remember in some other talk I talked about this, how we clench onto this as if it was a huge rock that we're carrying around our shoulder, that we feel good about having there.
This is my deal. I put this all together. And we end up out in this ocean of alcoholism trying to stay afloat with this rock. Finally AA comes by this great life-saving vessel. And somebody throws a lifesaver over the side and we're hanging on to it. And we keep going under and they're going, are you going to get aboard here or not? Are you going to join AA or stay down there? He said, I can't get up here. And they're yelling down to him, drop the rock!
Remember that. And we go, but it's my rock! I might need it. You got rocks up there? We don't use rocks up here. You can't get up here with a rock. And that struggle going on, we're going under for the third time, fourth time. And we're going, I don't know how to make the program. I can't see… And they're just yelling, you're going to have to drop that rock. And it was this great fear with this horrible feeling.
This is the real me. I'll be nobody if I let go of this identity. There'll be nothing left. Finally we just close our eyes and drop it. Well, I'm sure something horrible is going to happen. We're suddenly surfaced and we're moving through life like we never thought we'd be able to move. And then we're just wondering, wonder why I was so hung up about holding on to that? And it's a strange thing, but it took that great gift of faith to take that risk.
It really is. It's that I have to trust these people. It also took something else that we can hardly take credit for. It took a sense that we were going to die if we didn't. So we can't take all the credit for this thing. Anyway, I want to share. I was this nervous, skinny teenager with a stupid plan for living. Great pride in it. Pretending nothing is wrong. Frightened of other people. No, I'm going to purgatory. Just everything was wrong.
And I began to worry that people would find out what I had inside there. I started noticing that people looked at me more than they used to. And you know, you glance and there's somebody glancing at you. Hey, what did that mean? And the world started getting a little more hostile than it had been. And I became more suspicious of people. And I'm looking and I'm going, damn, there really is something wrong with me.
And if they ever find out what's really wrong, I mean, if they knew what I was just suspicious of, about how terrible things are inside, there must be something wrong that even God doesn't like. Because he doesn't even communicate with me. And I had that feeling that he just had me born guilty of something awful. All these things. And it was under those conditions, this much growing up had taken place, that I found alcohol.
And the only drinking I really talk about is this first night. Because it was so marvelous what happened. I'm in college, threatened by the people that are there. I never saw so many intelligent people in my life. It seemed like everywhere these guys now discuss every issue. It did not feel adequate. And I was at a cocktail party. The people were all talking about me. I knew that. I could see them over different corners going, who asked him?
And I'm going, Jesus. I'm standing. Wipe your feet back and forth. Well, I guess it's time to go. I've only been there a minute. Go back to my room where it's safe. And then I'll think of something. Damn, this world is tough to live in. It's a real rough life we have here. All those thoughts are going through. A little perspiration coming down. And a tray of drinks went by. And I remember taking one.
My roommate tried to get me to drink, but I was taking a pledge. You've got a lot of time off from purgatory if you made it until you were 21. I forget the ground rules on that. But this was more pain than what I thought purgatory was. It was important now, to fix the pain now.
[00:25:00]
We're always into short-term solutions anyway. Very seldom in for the long haul, day at a time. So I grabbed the whiskey to change me so that I would feel better. Because these guys told me you would. You will feel different. I drank the whiskey and I'm here to report I did not feel anything different. I'm sitting there going, nothing happened to me. What is wrong with this stuff? I was looking for a fix.
And I had nothing. I had no reaction. I looked at the people in the room. It had completely changed them. I drank the whiskey and they became friendly. I like this. I drank whiskey and somebody said, hi over there, come on over and tell a joke. You look like a real funny guy. And I went over and napping away. They liked me and I'm going, isn't this amazing? This world becomes like the one I dreamed of.
When I drink, people have brotherly love for one another. They have principles and values and they're beautiful people. And the world is just, what a charming place to be in this world. It was like Alice in Wonderland went through the looking glass into a new world. And I liked all you people in this world. And you know, it was translated later on into some real displays of this in the bars up around Connecticut.
There was a code of ethics there about bar seats and beer mugs you could leave there. You could leave money on the bar and go throw up for an hour or two hours. And when you came back, the money was there. You see what I mean? You would never steal somebody's money in the bar. The drinkers had a higher set of values than the rest of the world. There was this extra bonus. It was superior to all the other people from a moral point of view as a drinker.
Strange conclusion to reach. But I think I was an alcoholic before I ever had a drink. I was just waiting for it to come along. I had all the ingredients. I was a neurotic. I was nervous. I had stopped growing up at age six and was internalizing every problem I saw. I didn't communicate with anybody. I had already gotten into the isolation booth I was self-sufficient, afraid. And the only missing ingredient was the chemical.
And now we poured that in and we were off and running. I was what they call a primary alcoholic. In the textbooks it means I drank socially for 10 or 15 minutes. I was a rock star. You know, it's alcoholism and Jesus, the rest of it is one big rumor. I heard a guy steal this line from him. He said, my story has two parts. What took place during the years that I drank and what I thought took place during the years that I drank.
I only know what I think took place during the years that I drank. And we could get up, friends and my wife and so on and they could fill you in on what really took place. All I know is what it felt like inside. What it felt like was being afraid and it was lonely. And this was a fix to these problems and I didn't realize that it was causing more than it was fixing. It was just a vicious snowball. And it went along.
Just to set the record straight, what I did, I eventually graduated from college, although I don't remember it. I had blackouts early on. One Saturday afternoon some guys were sitting around and they said, hey, let's finish our beer and join the Marine Corps. Okay. I didn't have anything planned for my life anyway, so, I envy those people who knew when they were eight they were going to be a doctor.
I was still looking for the men's room and things like that. I don't understand. I don't relate to people who know what they want to be. You know, like I said, I was home last year at this reunion, went and saw my parents and they were asking me that, what are you going to be when you grow up? I don't know. So I did join the Marine Corps and that's when I got into this flying business and I flew for the Marine Corps for thirteen years.
And as C.D. said, I got into fighter squadrons and I had a lot of fun. It was a very exciting life. You get in these jets and you fly around and there's some good drinking stories about the airplanes and the camaraderie. And I enjoyed it and had some overseas tours and it was very exciting. But the drinking was progressing extremely rapidly. I ended up only drinking for a total of fifteen years, which is not the longest haul by any means, but it's not the shortest either, so I guess I'm sort of in the middle there.
All that was happening was a destruction inside.
[00:30:05]
I think I could have held up to the physical, I could have held up to the mental, but when it was taking away even the faintest glimmer of hope that the situation would ever be fixed, that's when you feel like cashing the chips in. I don't know if you remember this, but in the early years of the drinking, I kept saying, oh well, one of these days I'm going to stop this. One of these days I'm going to wake up and I won't feel like I have to go out and get drunk and I'll be off on a different road.
But in the last few years of the drinking, I didn't even mess around with that kind of thinking. I didn't even try, because I didn't believe it anymore. I couldn't even kid myself that this was going to end. I just accepted it. I said, I wonder how long it's going to be to the crash till it ends. And that makes it difficult to get excited about getting out of bed in the morning, when you know you're going to take one more step backward, one more step backward, one more embarrassing, humiliating event is going to take place today.
I remember as the years went by and the shakes set in and I got into daily drinking, I got grounded from flying. After all those years, I started shaking so bad, I got up in a plane, I was having withdrawals, flying around. I had one hand on the ejection seat because I thought I was going to go out. And my body is just screaming for a drink. And if I had known what CD did, I might have lasted a few more years.
I wouldn't take a drink up in a plane. No, no, no, I'm going to hold out. And it was just this feeling about maybe I'll just punch out of this thing and see what happens. You know, maybe the chute won't open. That was sort of my attitude about life at that point. And I did go see the doctors and that's sort of a long story, but I ended up being grounded in the Marine Corps. Even then, that was back before we got a lot more knowledge about alcoholism as we do now.
Even they didn't understand what was going on. And lo and behold, I was retrained after this whole history was developed as an air traffic controller. Now, I'm sitting down there in bad weather and planes are coming in and I'm talking to them on a radar scope and I'm looking at it and it's hard to see what's going on there and shaky and all that. Unfortunately, I don't have any bad stories to tell about that.
But that's what I did in the last year of my drinking, was to run an air traffic control thing for a marine air group overseas. And that's when I got into this round-the-clock drinking and was into my final ending. And during that year, I had malnutrition. I didn't eat. I lost about 60 pounds. This is just a horrible ending to the illness, where you're getting up in the morning, you're drinking vodka to calm down a little bit and try not to throw up and go in, shave with both hands.
I don't know if any of you got to that, where you hold a razor. If you ever hold a razor with pressure, one against the other, you can hold it relatively steady and put your elbows on a shelf and then move your face. Laughter The obvious answer was to get an electric razor. But pride came in. Oh, if you got an electric razor, you're an alcoholic, you know. Laughter But the shaking, it was just awful, this loneliness.
There was no sharing this with anybody. It was a very solitary confinement and noisy. I had forgotten how noisy alcoholism was. I don't know what all that noise was, but I mean, you're just sitting there. Then there's this buzzing going on, and there's this sweating that's making a noise. There's this smell going on. There's twitches made a little ding, you know. You could hear twitches. You just sat in the room there, jumping and hearing noises over there.
Is that a real noise or is that just my built-in sound system here? It was just a racket. There was no way, you know, and we wonder why you can't pray your way out of that. You couldn't hear the answer to a prayer. It's just being totally blocked out. We're blocked out, you know. I was thinking the other night of a line in a play where somebody had just run through a cemetery at night. They had been frightened by something, and they ran through, and they got all the fear of the ghosts and so on down, so they ran through the cemetery.
[00:35:02]
And he was describing this event to a friend of his, and the friend knew the area, and he said, hey, that's a historic cemetery. What did you think of some of those gravestones that are in there? And the guy said, God, I was too terrified to be taking a tourist trip of that thing. I didn't see anything I went through there. I was just running. That reminds me of my whole life. When you're terrified, you don't see anything.
You don't appreciate anything. You're just running. Somebody says, well, did you like that city? I don't know, I just ran through. Did you like those people? I don't know, I just ran through them. When you're frightened and you're running, no wonder life is unpleasant. You can't let any of it in. There's no absorption of any of the things that are around that help us now, that we have time to sit down and not run and allow this input of friends and voices and people.
But remember that? Everything was blocked out. If you were blocked out, friends were blocked out, God was blocked out. Absolutely blocked out. I think this fear near the end and that noise and all of that had built a prison that no human power could touch. And I think when we got that, we have what we call the illness of alcoholism. It's that prison. And we come into AA, and just to run my story through, I did come into AA shortly after that.
I had a convulsion seizure in a career school in Virginia. That's how I ended up in Virginia. I was in a big classroom and all of a sudden my body stood up and boom, that was it. And that called everybody's attention to my illness. Convulsions are one way to, hey, that guy's got a problem. Up till then, everybody can deny the illness, you know, but the convulsion really helps in the diagnosis of what's going on.
And that's when I ended up in a mental institution, the Bethesda nut ward, as we call it, in the Naval Hospital. I was there for six months. And let me say that I did learn about AA there. A corpsman came in, said all drunks fall in, right face. And I was marched into an AA meeting. That's how I got to AA. I don't know about you, but I didn't want to be there. It was not my choice to be there. I resented being there.
If you're new and you're here tonight under pressure, hey, good. That's how a lot of us got here. Pressure, pressure, pressure. Basic training and learning how to do things you don't want to. Yeah. Secret to life. Oh, I shouldn't have let it out of the bag. Oh, well. Damn, save an effort later. And we get into different kinds of pressure that gets us here. And I always run through my little list. We get it from the family.
We come home and they're going on vacation. You're not. Or the, your boss calls you in one day, said, hey, come here a second. I want you to meet your replacement. Me. Or your doctor says, listen, don't buy any long-playing records. I want to explain liver damage to you. And more recently, this is my, where I think we're really getting the pressure from the judges. Oh, they can wisen up about this illness and the whole court system.
And they're calling us in there and they're saying, young man, you've been in here ten times for drunken this year. I'm going to have to get really tough. One AA meeting or a year in jail. And the guy stands out there about 30 minutes trying to make his mind up. They, they know they're serious about that. Not drinking, you might be able to get a drink in jail. So we get here under pressure and that's how I got here and marched in and we don't want to be here.
But things start happening. And I'm very grateful that I got a big sponsor. I got out of that place. Oh, I do. I always do. This is a big crap. Maybe I'm going to find this out. When I was there, I don't know if you were in nut wards, but one of the big things in nut wards is clay class.
[00:40:01]
This, this particular time I'm referring to is the fall of 1964. Bethesda Naval Hospital. There was another patient in there. And if you're in this audience, you know who you are. You were a Navy lieutenant commander and I'm not going to say your name. I clearly had made the best ashtray. Nobody will ever know what the hell that laugh was for. Wait till you hear what happens next. And this guy came into my room smoking a cigar, pretending like it was an accident, put his cigar out of my ashtray and squashed it.
And his ashtray won. And I know that if he's here, he would like to do his ninth step. So I'll be up here after the meeting, but as you can see, it's hardly anything to me. And when we get rid of resentments, they're gone. I mean, so the guy that called on me, he was a big Marine and he's my sponsor and he still is. And I'll just tell you what his first words were. And then you'll know why I'm still in AA.
Hi, my name is Bill. This is a 12 step call. I talk, you listen. So I stayed sober for three months out of fear of sponsor and got off and running. I went to a meeting every night for, I don't know, six months or something like that and just got totally immersed in AA. And as time has gone along, I've had the marvelous chance, I guess, in the last four or five years to really appreciate, at least inside of me, this program.
I just think about it now as a program for human beings. And I'd like to just spend 15 minutes or so talking about some of the things that I love about these principles. The ironic thing is, there's no alcohol around here. I don't know why we still call it alcoholism. There's no, we're not even talking about alcohol anymore. Our problem has nothing to do with drinking. If it does, we go to hospital.
Hey, this guy's been drinking. Okay, good. Let's fix it. Now he stopped drinking. Oh, good. Now he can come over to AA. We're trying to deal with no alcohol. You know what I mean? We're dealing with sobriety. That's the problem. We're not here to learn how to drink. We're here to learn how not to drink. What a strange thing. They call this a program of action. You know what the action is most of the time?
Jim was talking about no action. Not doing this. Not doing that. It's a whole lesson in life. And I look at it now that us alcoholics and the Al-Nahds, anybody who's been affected by alcoholism, which just takes life and shows man's weakness in a very graphic way. It just zeroes it all into one ugly light, which is the alcoholic and his inability to allegedly control alcohol. But then as we remove the chemical…
But then as we remove the chemical, we find out, it wasn't the problem in controlling alcohol, it was the problem in controlling myself.
[00:45:00]
This is what I'm trying to do. If I just didn't drink, that's all the problem was, we wouldn't need all these meetings. If you can imagine that when I was 16 years old, I picked up a jar of mayonnaise, the feeling, oh, I'm going to be all right, and you understand, and so on and on. All this input, and there's this, what we can do together, we can't do alone. No, not for the alcoholic. No, or the neurotic, for that matter.
What do we look for? I say, how do I spell relief? V-O-D-K-A, that's how you spell relief. Yeah, I got rejection, okay, I'll drink to that, and down it goes. And I get relief, but I never learned how to deal with rejection. I never learned how to deal with financial insecurity. Hey, I don't have enough money. Then you get some money. Hey, somebody's going to steal my money. Either way, you lose. You don't have the social security, whatever you want to be.
You want to be the president of the company, you find out you're not. What are you going to do about that? All of these things that many people get in the process of growing up, I feel as an alcoholic, I took shortcuts. There was short ways around things. There always was an easier, softer way. I remember when I first started school, what they said, this is how school works, everybody. I want you to pay attention today, because we're going to tell you this applies for the rest of your life when you're in school.
This is how you do it. You go to class today, we have an assignment. You go home tonight, and you do the homework on today's assignment today. And you study ten minutes. That's it. That's it. Okay? Got it? And you go, okay, now it's that night. And is there something else to do that's more fun than that ten minutes? And we say, hey, I don't have to do it that way. I'll crash study the last night. I have a shortcut to this whole problem.
And then maybe we're successful at that, and I translate that over into all the life. There must be an easier way. That's how everybody does it. If everybody does it that way, it must be not creative. It must not be imaginative. I'm certainly not going to do it the way the masses are doing it. There has to be an easier way, and I'm looking for that. And I think that's what I missed in growing up was, what was life all about?
What am I going to do now here as a sober alcoholic? I suppose the questions that occur to me are typified by a story that I heard. And see if you relate to this. It was a business convention, and there were three guys sitting down in the cafeteria, and everybody else was out tearing up the town because the wives weren't invited. And it was one of these resort areas, and they were just out having a marvelous time.
And these three guys are sitting around in a coffee bar, having cups of coffee at about nine o'clock at night. And they finally introduce themselves to each other, and they're asking about themselves. And finally the one guy says, you know, here we are sitting in here behaving ourselves. Everybody's out there. He says, I'll tell you why I'm here. I just had a heart attack about six months ago. The doctor says, boy, it's touch and go.
Touch and go. I'm down here. I'm going to go to bed. Reasonable hour. I'm eating good food. No smoke. I am just taking it easy. What about this guy? The second guy says, well, he says, I'm a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. I'm an alcoholic, man, and I got in here, and if I don't try and follow certain principles, I'm going to die. It's that simple. Then came the third guy. He says, what about you? He said, oh, I used to always behave myself.
Now, what I'm trying to express to you tonight, and this is what I think the problem is in me, why do I think the third guy is a jerk? And I'm going to tell you something. That's a good question to go ask yourself. Why do I think that guy's a jerk? And I think this program forces us to answer questions like that. Why should a person behave himself? I think that's what we're coming down to. Why should I, now that I'm sober and over the initial shock of sobriety, why should I try and improve my conscious contact with a higher power?
Why should I be interested in character building? You know, I like to go out and read. It's not me.
[00:50:01]
It's not the real me. Be into character building and sitting around trying to figure out what doing the right thing and how to be useful to people. You know, that is something for saints. What are we, saints? You ever say that? That's a good way to get around those questions. What are you talking about? Let me get a hold of that. They'd be perfect. What are you going to be, perfect? Come on, we're just human beings, you know.
Win a few, lose a couple. What are you, a saint? What is this? Okay, that sounds good in conversation. But you know, you get back and you're going, why am I choosing to do the wrong thing? Why am I unwilling to give up whatever's on the top of your list? It's an interesting question. I think the answer is because we're human beings. This is the challenge of life. This is how the higher power put the whole system together and he gave everybody an equal challenge.
When I hear Chuck C. talking about the universal spiritual laws, it makes the whole system fair. I know that now. I know that anybody who cheats on his principles gets his own punishment. I don't have to go running around fixing it for him. I know that when I do, and when anybody does, we move that further away from our own contact with a higher power, which produces the same results totally that I found in alcoholism, which is when I get totally isolated and can't have the remotest chance of any contact with that inner source of strength.
And if there's anything that AA and alcoholism does, it takes our pain and our illness and it focuses it right at ourselves, just as if it was a gun at the back of our head. Your illness is terminal if you're new. You're going to find that out in the first step. You're going to find out that if you don't really get this thing going, you're going to have a rather awful ending. So you have a lot of motivation to try some of these things that are offered in here.
And it's a wonderful thing to have. It's there forever. Because if it wasn't there, I might cop out on some of these steps. I look upon my illness as a gun at the back of my head. And when I come walking along with my normal behavior, I've got other things to do today. Why should I want to be in to taking a moral inventory? And if you get real quiet, you can hear a hammer click on a pistol. I remember why I want to take an inventory.
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I remember why I want to take an inventory. And you get the book out and you're really rolling in there. We're doing a lot of things in the beginning because we're going to die if we don't. And so we have a rather strange way that is electing us to choose the straight and narrow and start walking down the middle of the road rather than over on the side where the massage parlors are.
There's more advertising of the life out there. There's more boulders. There's more trouble. But this is the place that has been suggested as the easier, softer way. It's right down the middle. Right down the middle. Trying to do the right thing one day at a time. Invest in your ability. That's the kind of thing. But I have instincts just like everybody else does. I have one's sexual instincts. I have the desires for financial security.
I'm into this competition in this society. All those pressures are on that are sending signals to me that remind me of hypoglycemia. You know what hypoglycemia is? It tells you that you need sugar when you really don't. It's false signals coming up in the body. A lot of alcoholics have that. And you keep eating candy bars to fix what you think is wrong. It's the exact opposite you should do. I think the same thing happens to me with spiritual principles.
I get the signal coming up from every one of my instincts that the answer to this problem that I may have dealing with financial security is money. Not prayer. It comes right up from me. Every fiber in my body says the answer to this problem is not spiritual. And the program says the answer to that problem is spiritual. And we're back to what Jim was talking about. Learning how to do the opposite of what you feel.
Learning to say, all right, I've tried all those other things. I now must try this. And I think that pistol at the back of the head is what gets us started to even get some of the results of these steps. And then we're attracted into it. And then we start getting some of the results and we find the obsession to drink has been removed. It's one of the biggest things that takes place. But then I have found there's something that sets in.
[00:55:02]
I don't know if this has happened to any of you. I start getting worried about how much I might progress. I get this fear of being a saint syndrome. I don't know if any of you have that. Hey, wait a minute. How good should you let yourself get? I get too good, people won't like me. That's a good reason for not trying. And I couldn't explain this to me. Why would I want to settle as the seventh step talks about?
Interesting sentence in the 12 and 12. It says, we tend to settle for as much perfection as will get us by. You know what I mean? Get the neighborhood out. See how perfect they are and then we'll get that perfect. That's good enough. Why get any better as a human being? Why choose to move on beyond that? And it's an interesting question. I came across something, and I want to just stop with this. Came across this article somebody gave me.
It was talking about this problem, this dilemma of settling for mediocrity and the fear that I associate with it. And this is the little story. It was the story about a little boy. He's lying in bed at night and he's awakened in the middle of the night with the twinging of a toothache. And he knows that it's keeping him awake. He tries to go back to sleep and he can't. Just this little pain. And he knows that if he gets his mother, she'll give him some aspirin and he'll be able to go back to sleep.
And he wants to call out and have her come in and give him some aspirin. But he doesn't. He's weighing the whole situation. If you want to know why he doesn't call out and ask for the aspirin, this is why. He knows from past experience that if he calls out and asks his mother to bring in the aspirin, she will bring in the aspirin and he will get the relief and he will get a good night's sleep, which is what he wanted.
But he will also find that the next day she will make a dental appointment and that he will find himself in a dental chair where the nosy dentist will not only check that tooth, but will check all of the other teeth. And there may be subsequent appointments until we do an entire overhaul of the whole mouth. But what we wanted was just to go back to sleep. We don't want to overhaul the whole system.
I just want to fix this little problem that's bothering me. God is the same as that dentist. He won't be called in to do spot-check repair work. Therein lies the dilemma. Do I want to call him in or try and do it myself? And I think that's the challenge that we find here in AA. It's the challenge of growing up. And for those of you that are new, the exciting part of this challenge is finding out who you are, what is inside of you that you never dreamed existed, and what a marvelously interesting person you are.
You've been afraid to look, but with this group around you, you will finally explore this unknown territory called the spiritual side of you. You are in for treats that you never dreamed of. You will find that your limited imagination never would have given you half of the treats that you're going to find here in AA. And your greatest gift is your weakness. Your horrible illness is the reason you are able to reach out a hand and save another life.
The program is filled with paradoxes like that, where everything that seemed bad turns out to be good. The reason you can bring hope into a family's home in one night is because of your horrible past that you were so ashamed of. You come out of the jail, you have the message, you walk in, you say, I know how to get you out of this. Come with me, you stick your hand out, you're part of a miracle, and the reason you are is because you're so weak.
Our weaknesses lead us to the ultimate source of strength, which is with us here in this room. Thanks.