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Source: DICOBE-00346 – Clancy I – AA WORKSHOP-CALIFORNIA – 1977-01-06.mp3 File: dicobe-00346-clancy-i-aa-workshop-california-1977-01-06.mp3 Duration: 01:08:48
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As one of those who were here five years ago, I just found out tonight that you've had other speakers in between. I didn't know that. I thought it was honoring the fine talk I gave five years ago. Well, I'm glad to be here, safe and sane and sober. It's always a pleasure to come down here, especially if there's a lot of accidents around the freeways of Los Angeles and it's raining heavily. I have a newcomer in the car to lull me to sleep with her story.
But some of you are not privy to having been here five years ago or four or three or two or one. Some of you are here in your first 30 days of sobriety. I'll say one thing. In my honor tonight, they finally learned after all these years, they now have a timing device when I speak. If this were a Lutheran church, that would be demolished by lightning. But we are all here, those of us who are less than 30 days and some of us who have got a couple of months and some got a year and some got a couple of years and some got five years and some got more.
But we're here for a universal purpose and that purpose is to somehow, first of all, find a way to stay sober long enough to find out what's wrong with us. And then secondly, find out what we can do about what's wrong with us. And then, after we are well, to find out that we have to keep doing it. And those are three definite and critical stages. I don't know of any… It's only one time worse around here sometimes when you're sick and that's when you're well.
And they both seem to be equally critical because the… I can't think of anything that's more… This is no great insight, but when you stop and think about it, there is nothing more complex than the human brain and its abilities to fantasize and illusionize and make something seem like something else and to change things and to change perspectives. It's a funny thing. When you change your perspective on something, it doesn't seem like much, but the entire world looks different.
It's just absolutely incredible and it seems like some sort of a metaphysical aside, but it really isn't because what we are dealing with here… But probably the number one thing we have to deal with, it seems to me, is finding ways to alter perspectives and to keep a perspective that we could live with. Because there isn't anyone here with the current set of facts in their life that if they looked at it from a different perspective, could not be made to appear hopeless and why even try?
Any small thing doesn't have to be a big thing. I remember years ago a guy had some little dumb thing. He said, here's a penny. A penny today isn't even worth leaning over and picking up on the sidewalk. If you say it, you just… But that same penny, in a matter of perspective, if I put it right here, that same tiny penny is larger than the entire universe that I see. It takes up the entire universe.
And sometimes my emotions are that way. Emotions that with one perspective seem to be alright. Since we have a tendency to become rather obsessive, our emotions can obsess and blot out the universe. The universe of our life. And that's why we cannot, apparently people like us, cannot trust our judgments and our intellect to make us better. And this room is full of people who have spent their lives using their intellect and their judgments to make them better.
And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And when it doesn't often enough, and you find drinking a better solution, you wind up in places like this. And the sad thing about it is, after you wind up here, that same goofy perspective and judgment can take over
[00:04:59]
and tell you, but you're not like these people.
[00:05:03]
You really don't have a problem of alcohol. What you have is you're surrounded by assholes. And you may have to change crowds, but I think you could have a couple drinks. That's kind of the, so that's kind of one of the first critical area that people like us have to face, I think. Of somehow staying here long enough to find out what's wrong with us. Now everybody who's ever, most, everyone who's ever come to AA knows that the purpose of AA is to take drinkers and get them sober.
And somehow you have to stay here long enough to find out that that is not true. Because if you think that's true, it really is a useless and pointless exercise. The purpose of Alcoholics Anonymous is not to get drinkers sober. I used to think it was for years. I came to these hideous meetings and sat through them with a singular lack of grace and patience. And hear these old fools discuss how overnight they became wonderful by putting the plug in the jug.
Or that's what I thought they said. And I just knew that they had no handle on what my feelings were. And that I had been cursed with the ability to see through this nonsense and this second grade therapy. Stop drinking, folks. Turn it over. Live and let live. Ha ha ha ha. You know. You should have been here for the first part of the meeting, folks. It really was good. Hey, uh, that's when I explained everything that I'm talking about now.
Is that the immediate family over there? Jesus Christ. Wow. It's either that or they got the smallest choir in this church I ever saw. I don't… That's really a shock to turn around and think you're going to see a wall. You have to stay around here a while to find out that you've got to stop drinking, but that's not what you're here for. You're not here to get sober. You can get just as sober as this in the detox center.
You can get just as sober as this in your own bathroom with your face in the toilet bowl. Your body will take care of it if your finances can't. Eventually, people like us always get sober. That's the problem with being a drinker. That your body always makes you sober. If you could stay drunk, I think I've always said, you'd have a much smaller membership in Alcoholics Anonymous, you know. You'd have a different speaker tonight, I'll tell you that.
I might still be the toast of the Chinese Palace Bar in downtown Juarez, Mexico. But it's just that being sober in the Juarez jail all the time that's such a drag. But you somehow got to stay here long enough to find out. Probably the most important piece of data around at that stage, and it seems almost unbelievable because it's something you don't hear much about before you come here, and that is that what you suffer from is not a problem with alcohol.
What you suffer from is a disease called alcoholism. And it's not selective, and about 7% of people who drink alcohol get it. But you can't, it's kind of hard to understand that because you don't hear much about, you know, you hear about TB and flu and cancer and things, but you don't hear about alcoholism because alcoholism is not, it's not a readily identifiable disease. They can take a test on you, and if you've got a lot of white blood cells, they might tell you you've got leukemia, but there's no test they can give you for alcoholism.
There's no test. The test comes in the symptoms. And it's really, we are in the stage of alcoholism about the way they were in cancer before the days of operations. You could see the surface symptoms, but you didn't know what they were until it was too late. And there's no test. You know, you hear people sometimes from podiums, and they mean well, I think, but they say things like, on a real alcoholic, you can give him two drinks, you can measure that spinal fluid, and all the alcohol is in there. That's baloney. That's baloney.
There's no known test for an alcoholic yet. Science may one day accomplish this, but it hasn't done so yet,
[00:10:00]
to quote something I read the other day. Whoever it was, maybe Collier's or the Post. Now, the hallmarks of alcoholism are what? That every time you take a drink, you get drunk, right? Wrong. That is not the hallmark of alcoholism, that every time you get a drink, you get drunk. In fact, a lot of alcoholics die from alcoholism because that's how they base it. They take the test. They say the first drink does it, I'm going to run a test.
No obsession. Happy days, Lamar. That isn't how you measure it. You measure it by something that you may not even understand until you've been around here a long time. You won't even understand it. So, it's nice that people come to AA kind of desperate, because if they didn't come kind of desperate, they wouldn't sit still for that wait. But the way you measure alcoholism, it turns out, is by two things.
First of all, alcohol has to do something extra for you. And secondly, alcohol has to do something to you. Now, if either one of these aren't there, you're not an alcoholic. And there's one third thing. The absence of alcohol has to become intolerable. Now, that's all, the only test, but these are abstractions. You can't measure it. I was sober for years before I understood that alcohol did something extra for me.
That's what makes an alcoholic. If it doesn't do anything extra for you, you'll never drink enough of it to have it do anything to you. Because when it starts to do something to you, you'll say, screw it! But if it's doing something extra for you, you have to use it to get over what alcohol is doing to you. It's a two-headed sword, but I never knew anybody who knew that when they were doing it. And I know a lot of people that have been sober a long time but don't seem to know it yet.
But it boils down to, you know, they say all these various clinics and National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and all these people, and I don't know some of the directors, so I'm not terribly impressed by them, because they're just people. And they're just hanging in there, better than working. But on the consensus of most, on the consensus of most educated guesses, about 7% of people who drink are or will become alcoholic.
Now, what makes them an alcoholic? The stereotype of the alcoholic has been said so many, many times. The skid row, if you're on skid row. But only less than 3% of alcoholics are on skid row. That leaves a little over 97% who are not on skid row. Now, some of these are in the lower echelon, some are in the middle of the class, some are in top class. I have a guy that I sponsored who on his last year, just before he almost died, before he drank himself to death, made $100,000.
And if it's measured by poverty, he ain't got it. But if it's measured by needing respiratory help to keep breathing, he has got it. And he finally opted for the respiratory help. There is no way to measure it. But there is one thing. You know, I spent a lot of years around AA because working with people is kind of my bag. And I wouldn't advise it to anybody else except… I mean, I would advise it to everyone, but maybe not to the extremes I've done it because I only do it I only do it because I need a lot of presents on my birthday every October.
But other people, if you could make it on your own, work with just a few. If you had a lawn like mine, you'd need newcomers. But the… I've often wondered, what is there? What is there in an alcoholic that I could say to a guy, if you've got this, you've got alcohol. If alcohol does this to you, you're an alcoholic. And I've never found anything that every alcoholic has in common. I've never found anything that every alcoholic has in common that alcohol does to them.
[00:15:01]
It doesn't make all of them broke, it doesn't make all of them stay drunk all the time, it doesn't make all of them do anything. It varies. Different things have, do, different alcohol, alcoholic approaches do different things to different people. If you hear a guy tell a drinking story, and you can get five minutes of identification out of an hour of talk, you'll do very well, because it does something different to everybody.
It turned out, as I've thought about it for years, the thing that's finally struck me is this. There is one thing now that I can see, and I've been sober a lot of years, I've listened to maybe a hundred and sixty-fifth steps now, and I've listened, I've gone to meetings regularly for over eighteen years, and I've tried to hang in there. And the only thing that I have ever seen alcoholics have in common, and that didn't even make itself known to me for many years, is what alcohol does for you.
But that is something no alcoholic ever seems to be able to identify, because he has no way to compare what alcohol does to him as what it does to someone else. He has no comparison, because he must measure his inside against their outside. And there is no basis for a valid comparison. And I don't know how many nights, for instance, I've stopped after work, leaving an advertising agency, or leaving a college where I was teaching, or doing something, and stopping to have a martini with a friend, and he drinks half of his, and says, well, I've got to go now, my wife has dinner ready, ha ha, good night.
Now does that, what does that tell me? That alcohol doesn't do something for him, or does it tell me he's a square freak and I better avoid that dumb son of a bitch forever? Because I need five of these just to go home and face that old dragon. That does not tell me alcohol does something different for me, that tells me I've made a bad marriage. I have no, I never had the idea that alcohol did something special for me.
But that is the mark of the alcoholic, unless it does, what it has to do for me, it has to alter my relationship to my environment, and it doesn't do that for most people. That's why social drinkers don't like to drink too much. And that's why everybody in here does. You know, the, I, when I was sober a few years and working in an advertising agency, we were writing copy for Camp Chat Kilvodka one day, and we were sitting around a table kind of talking about how we could put out a billboard.
And I remember saying, kind of in jest, I said, you know, it's too bad we can't put on that billboard, Camp Chat Kilvodka really goes boom! Better than anybody. And I looked around and they all, them boobs, it didn't go boom, it went bleh. And I knew then I'd better watch my step. And I'm putting out, I remember once upon a time, just shocked, I was putting on a cocktail party up at Perino's for David, what's that puke's name from New York that does the TV show?
Anyway. Saskia. Met all these people, and I remember how shocked I was, a whole room full of people, I didn't find, I'd say, you want another martini, Fred? They'd say, no, no more for me, I'm starting to feel it. You just want to grab them by the shoulders and say, that's when it gets good. If you don't feel it, why drink it? But they're apparently conditioned to their environment, or life, or whatever it is, and jeez, I just, I never have really trusted non-drinkers, I think they're hiding something.
You know, as I've said this many times before, but I'll say it one more time, I was thinking about New Year's Eve, you know, New Year's Eve is the time when social drinkers say things like, I'm feeling a little tiddly, would you mind driving my car home for me, dear? And if anybody in this room ever said that, I'd just be sick with disgust. The correct answer is, it's my goddamn car, and I'll drive the goddamn car, and if you don't like it, you walk your ass home.
I don't intend to give up my car keys when I'm at the top of my game.
[00:20:07]
But what alcohol does for you and me is something special. It changes reality, and it doesn't do that for most people, and it doesn't do it to the extent we need to have it done. It doesn't change the facts, it just changes the perspective. The first drink I ever took made a whole face full of pimples leap to the floor, and when I threw up, they leaped right back up. For a moment in time and space, I…
Ain't they pretty? And the last drink I ever took made the all-night theater I was sleeping in on Skid Row in Los Angeles look all right. And somewhere in between, a lot of things happened, and I never… The reason I knew that alcohol per se was not my problem was because I didn't feel comfortable when I was sober like other people seemed to feel, and I blamed it on a number of things. I had no idea that my life had become accustomed to a perspective disorientation by inducing a fluid that did something for me it doesn't do for most people, because that's the tab of it.
If it does something special for you, it eventually makes reality more and more painful because you're used to the change of perspective, and eventually the curse of alcoholism is not that you can't get sober, not that you can't go on the wagon, not that you can't stay sober. Some people stay sober for months, but the curse of alcoholism is eventually sobriety and continued reality becomes untenable, and the alcoholic must always begin to drink again next time.
Or take Valium, or take Darvon, or take Librium, or take Amphetamines, or do something, or smoke marijuana, do something to reorient reality. And so if you've come here to get sober, you've come to the wrong place in a sense, because getting sober is a very transitory thing, and a lot of people, an awful lot of people, an awful lot of more people than there are in AA in the world, will die from alcoholism and never know it.
And most of them will die absolutely and sincerely convinced that they are not alcoholics because they are not on Skid Row or they didn't stay drunk all the time, or unlike real alcoholics, they have secret sadnesses and sorrows and emotions that other people don't have. They're not identifiable. I would say that to the best of my knowledge, if you could identify an alcoholic personality, just the emotional personality, I would say that every alcoholic I have known, much of his and her life has been characterized by a sense of unease.
That's all. Just a sense of unease, no big traumas, just kind of a, this isn't quite it. This isn't quite it. And this for a while makes it it. And then after a while, this starts doing stuff to you, and you start getting some heat about it, and you start having some bad luck with it. And unfortunately, that sets up further conflicts in sobriety. And the more conflicts there are in sobriety, the more painful it becomes.
And when sobriety becomes painful enough, you have to drink to ease it off. So as it goes along, you are drinking to get rid of the effects of your drinking. You are drinking to forget your drinking. You are drinking to forget what your lost dreams and your illusions and all the baloney things we can talk about. But what it boils down to the last analysis, I'm drinking to make it all right.
[00:25:01]
And for most people, it doesn't make it all right. And so they are cursed with having to grow up emotionally and learn to, if they can, maturely deal with conflicts in the world. But people like you and me don't have to do this much. We grow up physically. We grow up intellectually. But if alcohol does it for you, the emotions stay almost childlike in many areas. And that's another thing that's almost impossible to describe.
You can't measure emotions. You can measure intellect. You can measure size. You can measure weight. You can measure speed. You can measure all sorts of things the body can do. But you can't measure emotional reactions. There's no tool that you can put on. A lie detector might do it, or something like that. But how do you measure a feeling of rejection? How do you measure a feeling of a tantrum? And you know it's not really a tantrum, because God damn it, I'm an executive.
Executives don't get tantrums. They get moods. But I, and it's a sad thing to watch grown-ups who are brilliant and bright and smart, when the right buttons are pushed, turn into emotional children. And they know they're not children, and it gets to be too much. And when you say to someone, you know, your emotions are weird, that's an invitation to the waltz right there. Do you think so? Now your face is weird.
So in a sense, you come here. When you first come here, it's always nice to think, I'm going to come here to get sober, because no one wants to admit they're screwed up. But when you get here a little while, hopefully you can stay longer to discover that the problem you have is that you have a mixed blessing and curse, and that is that alcohol does something special to reorient your relationship to life.
And conversely, when it has that, it eventually makes sustained reality untenable. Now those two things together, when they come together, are called alcoholism. And the strange thing about it is that it's one of the few diseases known to mankind where one of the leading symptoms of the illness is your own brain telling you you haven't got it. There is no other illness known like that. We were talking tonight before the meeting about a fellow named Brown down in San Diego with cancer in the hospital, and how very sick he is.
He's very thin, his body's being drained by the cancer. And you know, there's no question in his mind, that if someone came into any cancer ward in America and said, would you be willing to take 12 simple steps and sublimate your judgment and get your health back, there'd be no doubt. You bet. If you walked into a heart ward at UCLA where they're all just waiting to go, that's all, the cardiac monitors going beep, beep, and then finally, he said, would you think an hour and a half a night would be too great an imposition to interfere with your social life to get over this?
Jesus, no, let me go, baby, I'll go and I'll run backwards to get there. But you tell a person with a drinking problem, you really have a problem, would you be interested in looking into AA? Ha ha ha ha ha, cheat. I'm not like that. And so you have to stay here long enough to find out that the very things that make you think you are not really an alcoholic are the symptoms of alcoholism. So hopefully we can stay here long enough to find that out.
And then the next step is that you have to stay here a while longer to find out what you can do about it. Because the solutions this organization offers don't seem like much. You know, if the maxims on the wall don't drive you screaming into the rain, you know, I've got $105 in hot checks, what'll I do? Turn it over to God. Turns it over to the San Diego. God turns over the San Diego Sheriff's Office.
[00:30:01]
Is that some kind of a joke? I've got to watch out this plant. Every time I take a step, I go down. Thank God, I thought I was crippled. Anyway, the steps of AA are not what you would call your basic crowd pleasers. The steps of AA are full of paradoxes, but you never know that they are until you've done them, and so most people never do them until there's hardly any alternative. And then they do them, and they go around taking bows at step meetings. Yes, I've done that. Yes, I've done that.
If it gets bad enough or you take them long enough, you get invited out to speak. And I think the great paradoxes of alcoholism, some of the great paradoxes, for instance, one of the steps that once you've been around a while, not when you're new. Everybody when they're new wants to take an inventory. I guess that's all right. Different strokes for different folks. But to me, taking an inventory when you're new, either you lie or you don't get to it. You don't get down to it.
You have to be around a while to realize how sick you've been. Everything seems all right when you're new. Well, I'm all right. A lot of people are like me. It's just the world is screwed up. You have to be around here, wait for a while for the world to… I think that's one of the great things about the first year of sobriety. I hardly remember ever working with anybody who hasn't somewhere in the first year said or implied, Jesus, I'm getting sicker.
Everybody around me seems to be doing well, but I… Have you ever heard of anybody snapping in sobriety? And you have to explain to them. That's one of the first real signs that you're getting better, because a lot of your crap is starting to look weird to you for a change. What seemed all right six months ago, you start to get a hint is maybe just a… Maybe not everyone is married to a sheep, you know, just…
Or whatever your bag may be, but not just that, but so many of the conditioned reflexes that you live in fantasy with, when you start to shape up, you begin to realize little by little, this is funny. And then you think, I'm getting sicker. You're not getting sicker. You're getting weller. That's one of the ways you know you're getting weller is when you start to have questions about your sanity. And you think, I've got questions about my sanity. Maybe I've got alcoholic insanity.
If you've got alcoholic insanity, alcoholic insanity is caused by sufficient alcohol induction to remove the functionality of your brain. One of the great marks about worrying about your sanity is if you're able to worry about your sanity, you're sane. If you don't worry about your sanity, you may be in trouble. I don't worry about mine and I'm in trouble. But all of the vagaries of… You've got to remember, when you're first sober, after you've been through the first flush and then you start doing these things, there's a lot of swings because your brain is used to sporadically, sometimes regularly and sometimes periodically, changing reality.
Alcoholism is the closest thing to schizophrenia known, because when you get enough here in schizophrenia, you just move to this personality. But we have a matter of choice. I induce schizophrenia. True story. I change it. I can induce a form of psychosis. But I'm not aware of it. For Christ's sake, having a drink inducing sky psychosis? You're a full of crap. I'm a man. I drink. When I don't drink, I'm not a man.
Shut up. Analyze, don't utilize, I say.
[00:35:03]
But the steps of AA, usually we are driven to them. Very few people take them by joy. Oh, the lights are working. Well… Gee, I didn't know what time it was. So you got to stay here and maybe, when you start to get painful in reality, maybe you might have to find someone to help you. Maybe you might even have to find a sponsor. They may probably turn out unworthy later, but when you're sick, they're all right.
You might get someone to save your ass, is what they say. And you might do some of these things. And then you get into the third phase. I spend a little less time in the second and third phases because I, in my opinion, people that have been around long enough to understand this don't need quite so much explanation, I guess, just reminders like we all do. When it's all right, then comes the third critical part of sobriety.
Because the brain says, now you've got it together. And they say, return to normal living. It isn't normal living, sitting in them crappy, drafty ex-churches and all those hideous meeting halls. Just smoke, poor, making your eyes bleed. And hearing somebody up there, I used to drink, but now I'm sober. Oh, happy birthday, happy birthday. And then we have to begin to understand that that is really what it is, even though our mind tells us this, what it continues to be is what it's always been.
The purpose of Alcoholics Anonymous after you're sober a while is a continual reinforcement of your growth to emotional maturity. Has nothing to do with intellect, has nothing to do with anything except reinforcement of your emotional ability and stability. And to keep it growing, and sometimes just to keep it even. I don't know anyone in Alcoholics Anonymous, or anyone maybe in the world, but I know this organization, that when the right numbers of buttons are pressed, cannot disintegrate.
I don't mean get drunk, I mean just BAM! Some of the most wonderful speakers I know. I no longer get angry. I no longer find it necessary to be cross. I just love everyone. Go up and lay a hot cup of coffee on their suit. You son of a bitch! I didn't say that, so don't lay it on me. What it means is relatively speaking. So we stay active. I don't stay active in AA, I'd like to, you know, it looks, someone's telling me today that I'm just so dedicated.
Just such a wonderful, dedicated, given my life to AA. No dice. I'm active in AA because it has evolved that I am more comfortable than I've ever been in my life. That's why. I hate to tell you this folks, but I do it for number one. And it takes a long time to learn that by helping others, you make yourself feel better. Because it goes against my intellect. And to do things you don't want to do, because you said you're going to do them, and later you feel just as good as if you wanted to do them all alone.
As I was saying, you know, sometimes in our meeting, people come up to me. I've quoted the same thing. They say things like, I'm over in the VA psych ward, I don't know who you are, could you give me a ride home? And I just, you know, I look at them. And I think to myself, do you know who you're talking to, you crazy son of a bitch? I'm Clancy Eye from up in the sky. I sponsor half the people in this room, I give my life to A&A.
I'm a wonderful, dedicated man. And of all these people who do nothing, and I do everything, why do you ask me to give you a ride home? Why do you ask me to give you a ride? And I've asked them! I can think all of these things, as long as I say, okay. And the funny thing is, when I go home I think, oh I, just another nice action by a nice guy. So I guess we're all in this mess together. You've got to stay here long enough to find out what's wrong with you.
And you've got to stay here a while longer to find out what to do about it. And after it works, you stay here to let it work for the rest of your life. Thank you.
[00:40:09]
Let me take three or four minutes to discuss that, if I may, because I think it's an important thing. I was raised in a very, very extremely strict religious ethic. Norwegian Lutheran, which is very, very strict, very tough. And when you sin there, it is adios. And when you sin as much as I did, it's, when anybody mentions God, you just skulk. And the way that I intellectually overcame that, because you can't live with the knowledge you are damned, is that you develop an intellectual disbelief in God.
Because if God doesn't exist, you're home free. If he does exist, you've got a lot of problems. And so little old ladies come snuffling up and say, have you returned to God? You tell them to go screw. You want to hear it! You tell them to go screw. You want to hear it! You want to hear it! And when I was, I had been slipping around AA for nine years, through a series of bad breaks and misunderstandings.
You think it's easy to be the only intelligent person in the whole South? But anyway, I remember I was talking to my, an old guy one day in the 6th Junior Club, and I was explaining to him my concept that I could not accept intellectually the presence of anything greater than the human mind. In the, there was no higher power. It's nice, but it's a petty bourgeois belief that enables people to get a cop out for their weakness.
And it was, you know, it lost a little of its credibility. I just had my front teeth kicked out, I had a t-shirt covered with vomit, and I was living in an abandoned car, so it lost a little of its strength. But that's what I felt. And he said, he said, I said, I cannot return to God. First of all, he pointed out to me a very, very strong and important thing that everybody that's new should remember.
Nowhere in the steps of AA does it ever ask you to return to God or to a higher power. Ever. It never asks you to do that. It asks you to come to believe in a higher power. And the reason it doesn't ask you to return to a higher power is because your belief in a higher power from before will undoubtedly be as immature as your belief in other things. That your thinking is a little weird. And it may be correct, but you have to be willing to evaluate it.
And he says, you don't have to return to anything, you come to believe in something. He says, do you, what he said, do you believe that there's a power greater than yourself? And I said, no. He said, what if I prove there is? And I said, prove it. And he said, go outside the 6300 Club and stand on the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax and take off your clothes. Take off your clothes. And you will see a power greater than yourself in a black and white car come right around that corner.
I guess if you had any clothes, they'd have to grab you any way they could. They wouldn't get a very good grip on me, I'll tell you that. I don't know. You're not taping this, are you, Slim? And he said, that's one of the problems of being a drinker. The world is so full of powers greater than you are that work to your disadvantage. He said, what you have to try to come to believe here is that there may be a power greater than you that's, you know, that's working to your advantage.
He said, do you think I'm doing better than you are? I said, I guess you are. He said, I'm your new higher power. And he became my higher power. I invested in him as much confidence and hope as I could. I didn't really believe it intellectually because I knew it was a scam. And there's always well-meaning people who say, you can't put your faith in a human being. But I'll tell you something. When you're having trouble believing in anything, I would strongly suggest you believe in what you can believe in right then.
And if it's an AA or if it's a meeting or if it's a program or if it's an abstract, it doesn't make any difference. But you better try to believe in something. Difference, but you better try to believe in something you can believe in because sooner or later it's going to be two o'clock in the morning some night and the world is going
[00:45:00]
to be coming apart and you're going to have to turn to what you believe in and if you've been shucking them, you're dead. And so I think it's a good idea. I would much rather that old man was my higher power and he saved, literally saved my life. And I didn't have much invested in him, but more than I'd had previously. As a result of trying to please him and get him off my ass, maybe other people do things for love, I do it to get the heat off. I eventually did things that I ordinarily wouldn't do. I remember one day when I was going to commit suicide, that old fool helped me into taking an inventory, something I swore I'd never do because that's one of the great paradoxes I was mentioning earlier. When you're so wrapped up with these emotions and these memories and these, what might have been, your guilts and your remorses, how can I forget them? Write them all down. I've spent thousands of dollars and many shock treatments to forget them. And I should write them down so you can get your jollies. And if that isn't bad enough, if you're not quite reduced to disintegration then, read them to somebody. Read to some plumber what you wouldn't dare tell your psychiatrist.
You sure you'll still respect me? You won't stop calling and sending flowers, will you? But that's the paradox of AA. That by the time you get so desperate you do that is when you begin to get rid of it. Another paradox of AA is that you get over hatreds of people by making amends to them that has no intellectual sense whatsoever. But that's what you do. And I did things for that old man to win his approval and desperation, my own desperation.
And eventually I came to believe in AA as my higher power. Not very strongly, but tenuously. And I still had some belief in him. I mean, I had belief in him, but I was feeling a little better now and I was wondering if maybe I hadn't outgrown him. And then I, as a result of believing in AA and trying to do things, I eventually found myself one day at a meeting and there was a vulgar and profane man speaking. And he was an old army sergeant. He was speaking at the Beverly Hills Stag, which I went to at that time, hoping someone would come up with money for my front teeth. And he was talking, he got sober in 1936 in Akron, Ohio, under the founder, Dr. Bob, in his own little hospital bed. And he said, I, they told me I don't believe in God. I don't, I told them I didn't go for that crap. But they convinced me over a period of time, and I'll tell you this. I was sober. I don't know how long it was then, 25 years, 24, three years or something. He said, you gotta believe in God. No matter what you call that son of a bitch, you gotta believe in God. No one really explained it to me that way. And I went back to my abandoned car that evening. And I, I said, thank you God for keeping me sober. And no lightning flashed and no burning bush spaked to me.
Not much happened, really. I was a little disappointed. I thought he must not have heard me. But from that day to this, I've never had a day that I haven't prayed. My prayers have become sometimes a little more sophisticated than I want them to be. And so I've had to, in a sense, get back to the whole praying for knowledge of God's will for me and the courage and strength to carry it out. And since that day, I've had an abstract God that I would have never, but I had to build up my self-worth in order to enable myself to come to believe in God. Now, having, coming to believe in God is a great thing. It's a great thing. But also, you gotta remember this. I don't believe that God changes, but
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I change. And sometimes I think it's, I used to think years ago, after I first started believing in God, it was great on my little spiritual honeymoon. And then one day I think, that's crap. That is, you know, that's baloney. That same old nonsense came back. And I had to go back and address myself to grab on my shoulder, my sponsor's arm again. And in a couple days, get back to where it first took me eight months to go through. But I know this. What some of the most tragic cases I know are people who have found God in AA and in so doing, released the agencies that helped them find God. And they give up AA sometimes. And they give up their sponsors. They give up everything, because now they've won with God. As though they, because in discovering God, they have somehow been invested with God-like qualities, and they haven't. They're still dingy people who have made a breakthrough.
And sometimes these people become so spiritual that they're not really spiritual, because spiritual means living at peace with your environment. They get too good for everything and everybody. They used to be not good enough for everybody, now they're too good for everybody. They're equally sick on other ends of the spectrum. They say things like, I walk alone with God. And when you walk alone with God long enough, you get to be God's spokesman.
I know a case like that right now. And God's spokesman just acts as, you know, you just want to say, let me see your franchise agreement. Just see, make all those, them signatures are all set. Because I don't remember, I don't remember reading about your appointment. But once in a while, these people, they get direct messages from God. I used to get direct messages from God at one time. They were, in retrospect, they were signed God. They're written in my handwriting, but they're signed God. And I thought they were from God. There's nothing wrong with a transmitter. The receiver gets a little spooky sometimes. I pick up other messages and I misread the call letters. But sometimes people who walk alone with God long enough, God leans over and says, why don't you have a beer? I will be done, Father.
So I want to keep, I want to believe in God and I do the best I can. I hope I do it successfully. But the other hand, I don't, I want to keep one foot firmly planted in the knowledge of my own human fallibility so I don't get caught up in that baloney. But I think praying is a wonderful thing. I'll tell you again, the way I could intellectually, after I was, oh maybe sober a year, and I was trying to intellectually explain to myself how could I believe in God when there was no intellect, because you know, I always have been troubled by these goddamn intellectual or pseudo-intellectual games. And the definite, the way I could think about it, I would not think of it that way now, except if it were a really tough time, I could fall back on it, because I think there's a, I have a more personal relationship with God.
But I remember thinking, maybe God is like the television transmitter up on Mount Wilson. And he is sending out a message of love and peace of mind and everything to every set in Southern California. And each of us are little TV sets. And some of us never even turn it on and say there ain't no transmitter there. The screen is blank. But all the knobs I've learned about NAA helped me get that picture. Now I don't understand prayer. What does prayer do? Prayer, I don't understand what a horizontal hole does to my television set, but it makes the picture stop, you know. And taking actions and trying to be honest and trying not to hurt people and trying not to be dishonest and so on. All kinds of little knobs that don't make sense. But if you, if you operate them, you get a picture.
And like everything else, when I get a picture, if I get a little bit of a picture, if I turn that knob all the way, it must make the picture ten times as good. It just makes it all hell again. I got to dial and knob around. But I had to come to believe that God does not like me more or less than you. Because if he likes me more than you, he's liable to like me less than everybody else. I cannot accept the idea that God operates by whim.
Because I always feel kind of sad when I hear people get caught up in that terrible self-obsessive
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thing that God is somehow running the universe to teach them lessons. Is that, you know, I heard a guy a few years ago say, I was drinking in the club car. And I, I suddenly thought, no, I'm going back to AA. And I went back to my seat in the Pullman's and outside of Rock Springs, Wyoming, that train derailed and five people in the club car were killed. And I knew that God meant it for me. And I kept thinking, what did God mean for those five poor bastards in the club car? You know, as though the entire world is going to teach me lessons. I got to believe that there's a certain amount of fatality involved in it.
I believe that if I, I will get a peace of, a peace of mind in a picture in direct proportion to my willingness to operate the buttons, whether I intellectually understand them and how much I'm willing to do. And that I think that we all have different sets, but the picture's available and you may get a prettier picture than I do, but I can get a pretty picture for me too, prettier than I ever had. And you can get, you know, I cannot measure my peace of mind by how much Chuck Chamberlain glows because he had a better set coming in than I did, as far as I know. God, he was a deacon when he was drunk. My case was different.
But I would say, now, I may have told you more about my concept of a higher power than you really wanted to find out. But I believe that you got to believe in what you can believe in, first of all. And once you believe in it, you reinforce it. And once you find a belief that gives you some freedom, you better not tear loose from the very forces that got you there. Okay? All right. Nobody dares ask a question now, the length of these answers.
You're leading the meeting, miss. Let her have a chance to talk. Hi, Shirley. Only when the heat's on. All I ask of God is that he keep it smooth for me. And if he doesn't, he's in trouble. I may punish him and go an hour and say, baloney. Yeah, I think that's true. You got to remember, that end of it is fine. It's our end of it that's fallible. And the receiver sometimes, it gets jammed by static. And you're sure your faith gets weak. And that's why you can't afford to rely on your relationship with God because you are unable to keep up the reception. So you have to have stabilizing forces around you, humans and meetings and people, till you get your perspective back to where you can get that faith back again. That may not be true of all people, but I've been sober a long time. I've been active a long time. And I've been doing the best I know how, which is none too good sometimes. But you know, I've out-survived a lot of people who told me I was sinful. Because it isn't a matter of sinfulness. I don't think there's any sin in AA. There's no sin here. There's no good or bad. It's survival and not survival. What enables you to survive and what enables you not to survive.
Some things you got a better chance surviving with than other things. Because I, you know, I work with new people and I tell them, stay out of their rack for a while. Don't get laid right away, please. I get to do their morality. I don't care about morality. But I know that they're obsessive people and they get obsessed in those relationships and pretty soon their, quote, love, unquote, pushes their knowledge of their need for sobriety out the window. And every one of us know all sorts of new people who, who they're, who get drunk at their mate and lose their, everything in the process. And all the things that AA tells you. I don't think that morality has much to do with it. They say be honest. Why be honest? Because it's good? No.
So you have saved the burden of looking over the, your shoulder to see if them bastards are finding out. That's all. You can look ahead this way and see why there's a dragon there. Yeah. I don't think there's such a thing as good and bad, but I think that we all have a tendency to be obsessive and extremist sometimes. And that's one of the. Famous, Sometimes. And that's one of the – again, one of the negative paradoxes of AA. The longer you stay here, and the more you work at it, sometimes you get feeling so good that you
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can justify not doing the things. Until you get hurting again. And you got to do them again. So just continue warping back in. Well, here come another group in from – all the way from San Marcos. Must have had a tough trip. Wow. I don't know how you people come out in the night like this. Oh, God. Not quite ready for the social hour, if you'd like to wait in the lobby till we're done. I don't know why people don't like me. I try to be nice, don't I? Yes. Every human being sometimes has feelings of weakness in every area. Linda, don't be afraid. Hi, Linda.
I conceive emotional maturity – to take your questions in reverse order, which is the order they should have been put in. Feel free to ask anything, honey. But I suppose emotional maturity, in what glimpses of it I've been able to catch, is living at peace in reality. In your environment. And accepting the fact that you are not – you are neither bigger than you think you are, or smaller than you think you are. You know, in living in reality. That's what I consider to be emotional – I used to think emotional maturity is where you smile all the time. That's not true. That's a mark of insanity. The only guy I ever knew who smiled all the time had the next bed to mine in the Texas Nuthouse Shop Ward, you know. How you doing this morning, Fred? Just fine, just fine. That suddenly struck me, that poor son of a bitch was never going to get out of there until he stopped smiling. That indicated there was something terribly wrong. I don't think emotional maturity is based on happiness, that you're always happy, because life isn't always happy.
Because no matter how you slice it, I am slightly more interested in my welfare than I am in yours. Nothing against you personally, God made me that way. It's called the conditioned instinct of survival. The survival instinct makes people protect their lives. Alright. And if all things being equal, you and I want the same thing, unless something strange happens, I'm going to get it. Because you won't miss it as much as I will. But that's all of life, in a sense. But I guess maturity is coming to understand that other people feel the way I feel, and other people have their wants and dislikes. But I think emotional maturity is, you have to many times act ahead of where you feel. That's I guess another definition of emotional maturity, of not, of acting better than you actually feel at a given moment.
And we say act as if. I don't want to be a hypocrite. Well, not being a hypocrite has got you so weird you can't hardly believe it, so you might as well try being a hypocrite. Be a hypocrite in one area instead of every area. Try that for openings. And I don't see anything wrong with having long-term goals, I suppose. I have a baby who a couple years ago, or a few years, five years ago, six years ago now, was five years sober and was a carpet salesman, just got married, says he wanted to go to law school at night. Now that's five, four or five years at night school. And he says, what do you think? And I says, I don't think you ought to go for a law school. But why not go for a semester and see how it feels?
And he went for a semester and we talked about it, and he says, go for another semester and see how it feels. And well, he got his law degree last year and he's a big lawyer now. But the thing is, if he'd have gone, the long-term goals sometimes get overpowering when you're feeling weak. They're great when you're setting them. I'm going to be king of North County and my castle will be at Camp Pendleton and I'll have agents everywhere. And it's so
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embarrassing when those kind of long-term goals go out in the street and find out people say, here comes that asshole again. Most people like you and me, I think, Linda, it's okay to have a long-term goal, but break it down in achievable short-term increments. Because otherwise, a long-term goal can get you as obsessive as anything I know, because you have no place to ever stop and reevaluate. It's got to be up there, up there, and pretty soon it's like these guys who work, who are workaholics, not alcoholics, but workaholics, and work all their lives to get to be 65 and have it all together. And they get there and shit, this ain't it. But there's no time to start over then, you know. I've changed my mind.
I think the basis of Alcoholics Anonymous, what it teaches us, is to reduce our life to short-term goals that can be achieved in increments that will enable you and me, because not only that, not only is it easier, but it also builds your feelings of self-worth to achieve the short-term goals, which maybe over a long period of time will give you a better chance to achieve the goal you wanted. But you want to get so caught up in the long-term goal that you don't have time for the short-term goals that enable you to sustain your self-worth.
So I don't see anything wrong with short-term goals, and I think that any emotional maturity you find will come and go, as it does for all human beings. And the only difference between us and the people in the street in that area is that we are reminded about it, and they are not. And we have an instant escape if we let ourselves get crazy and they don't. So I don't think we're all so terribly different. The only major difference between us and them is that you and I have been blessed by finding a socially acceptable thing, alcohol, pills, that will enable us to change reality, and most people don't have that. As a result of that, we have diffused reality and made it rather untenable to live in, and we have to learn to live in reality.
We have to, in a sense, grow up after we're grown up. Emotionally. Not intellectually, but emotionally. And the major difference, I suppose, between us and them is that we've got to remember that no matter how long we stay sober, how wonderful we become, how spiritual we hype ourselves into thinking we are, I must never drink alcohol again. Because if I do, no longer how much I've been sober or for what my motives are for drinking it. When I drink alcohol, it will again do more for me than it does for others, and will show reality out of perspective. And we'll start the entire spiral again. So there's no length of sobriety at which you can drink safely.
Not because what alcohol does to you, but because what it does for you, and will always do for you. So you and I must live in sobriety. We can live desperately or relatively comfortably. And the point of AA is so that you and I can live as comfortably as we used to drink to try to feel. And I think it's possible because it happens. Thank you.