Audio
Transcript
Source: DICOBE-00353 – Clancy I – CORNHUSKER RNDP III – 1980-08-15.mp3 File: dicobe-00353-clancy-i-cornhusker-rndp-iii-1980-08-15.mp3 Duration: 00:43:27
============================================================
I don't judge, but, that's what kind of amuses me, you can see the continual efforts to make non-lethal the use of marijuana, and the people, some of our members from time to time have followed along on this dreary path, and they always use the same arguments, it's been proved in many laboratory demonstrations, that people of a relatively level emotional nature, can use marijuana without fear of serious damage, and what they always forget is, people of a relatively level emotional nature, ain't the ones going to use marijuana, they don't need it, it's the people who are flaky who need marijuana, thank God it's not harmful, just let me step over here to San Francisco, but anyway, so I haven't had any chemicals in my body, and much to my surprise, I sunk so low, that I could not afford any decent therapy, and I was driven into this second-rate pseudo-religioso goofiness called Alcoholics Anonymous, and it's the only therapy I've had since that date, and today I find myself in the position at least of a junior old-timer, I've come here tonight at tremendous expense, no little inconvenience, introduced badly, just to talk to you newer people who raised your hands here tonight, and ask you this important question, why can't you grasp the program the way we did in the old days?
Now as you can tell, I have front teeth, so you know I must be getting better, like our book says, we are like men who never grow new front teeth, they say you shouldn't pick your teeth in public, that's how I got those, I'll pick those, doctor, those off-gray ones to fit the others there, I had a difficult recovery, my first few months of sobriety, I lived in a backseat of an abandoned car, but there was an AA club parking lot, so there was a certain spiritual fallout that protected me, I got a job as a, a guy in AA gave me a job, my first job in sobriety was as a janitor in his jewelry store, a guy named Frank White, and I was fired after two and a half days, because I was dusting too long amongst the watches, and I told him later, later I became his sponsor oddly enough, some years later, he paid for that, that son of a bitch, but I told him that was the smartest move you ever made, because I had a picture of me in Seattle saying, see anything you like?
I was ready to go, boy, I got a job as a furniture mover, and I always hate to be pushed around by my inferiors, and this, remember the guy saying, hey, you without the front teeth, you bumped my lamp, I said, no, you're mistaken, sir, I broke your god damn lamp, I got a job as a dishwasher at the Gaty Delicatessen, I got fired because I, I don't want you to feel that I was paranoid, but I got the feeling the busboys were bringing in more dishes than the restaurant was using, which told me they were bringing them from other locations to make me look bad, so I didn't do them, and I got fired, I had a job as a janitor, I got a job, several jobs, by the time I was a year sober, I'd been sponsored all this time, I'd taken the steps even, moments, various moments of desperation, by the time I was a year sober, I was up to wrapping packages in an advertising agency, the same kind of job I'd had when I was 14 years old, and I just knew I was on a rocket to stardom, and by the time I was two years sober, I got a little job writing in a medical corporation, and I had a, I had a sponsor, a bad sponsor, like, like many people have had bad sponsors, I don't, in fact, it's kind of, isn't that tough to think about that today?
Today, we're so concerned about not hurting the feelings of the new folks, and every old-timer talks about their rotten sponsor, I don't know, maybe immoral or somewhere, I just can't make it out, but, I couldn't afford it, I couldn't, I looked so bad, I couldn't get a decent society sponsor, you know, an AA leader type sponsor, that's kind of, the kind of sponsor when you call it a sponsor,
[00:05:25]
you call up in the night and say, Fred, I've been drinking, he says, oh my gosh, wait right there, I'll be right over, I'll sit with you, just, just hang on, I'll get there, and he comes, oh, you want some food, here, let me help you, now that's what I call a sponsor. I had some old weirdo who said things like, if you ever want to talk to me, call me before you drink, because after you drink, all you're going to hear is a click and a dial tone.
So, don't encourage cruelty. And he had, he helped me get some of these jobs I'd lost, so he got to be very cross about me losing my jobs all the time. And he finally, I got this, and he'd ask me, I'd see him in a meeting and say, did you go to a meeting today, or did you go to work today? And I'd, no, Bob, I, you know, I got to think about my kids, and how much I've lost, and I, I want to stay sober, but sometimes it's just, you know, I've ruined everything in my life, I don't know where to turn.
That was my variation of the Mr. Ross talk for that generation. I heard all that crap in your inventory, get your ass to work! If you go to work every day, people don't know how much you hate it, and they think you're sincere. By the time I was seven years sober, I was director of advertising, public relations at a medical corporation, because I went to work every day, I guess. By the time I was seven years sober, I'd become hip and slick again, they brought another guy and I into Hollywood, and we created the number one hard rock station in the world, something called Boss Radio.
People had shiny suits, and we'd, yeah, baby! But you get sick of pimping the thirteen-year-olds after a while. When I was ten years sober, I was downtown doing public relations at the oil companies, and God, they need it. When I was fifteen years sober, I was marketing director for a publishing firm in Beverly Hills. When I was five years sober, the same wife and all those daughters heard the crinkle of green in my wallet all the way to Dallas, into a post office box that they were living in there, leaped out of the post office box with hideous cries, fled to my side, attached themselves like a series of lamprey fish to a lake trout, bled me white, nine months and ten seconds later, another cap, who was, here's the one playing football today.
Then someone got me a, can't think of the word, what do they put on piano? Metronome. I got a metronome and I never had any more children after that. I think it's kind of funny, I think about that kid, I was thinking about that, I was kind of laughing to myself, thinking, you know, I was giving him some instructions over the phone before I came to the meeting, and I thought just before I left, I had to send him to his room because he gave his mother some mouth. Not much, but fifteen-year-old mouth. Nothing as bad as I ever did.
I said, Clancy, go to your room, and I don't want you to come out here until you apologize to your mother. I happened to think, he's bigger than I am now. Someday I'm going to say that and he goes, uh. Now, you don't have to go to your room unless you feel like it, I mean, maybe you'd like your allowance raised. Isn't this a nice success story, we all live happily ever after, out by the ocean in Los Angeles, same family, been married thirty-some years now, people stop me in the streets of Eau Claire where I was Friday with my mother and father, Thursday, on my way here.
I said, how did you maintain to hold your marriage together, you know, you were bad on your wedding week, you know, and how did you hold it together because marriages made in heaven are breaking up all over.
[00:10:10]
And I always tell them there's three things you have to do. You have to have a lot of pluck and determination and marry a Catholic who can't get a divorce. I don't know what order they come in, but that's a nice story. And there's only one thing that maybe if you're new tonight, I know we want to get on to the dance and really, I really can hardly wait to hear that loud rock that makes you sick. But, there's a funny thing, there's only one thing that may puzzle you.
How do you get from dying on the street to feeling better? You can say, well, you go to a lot of meetings, you work the steps, some days you just hang on. That don't quite get it if you're a thinker. It's okay if you're a drinker, but if you're a thinker. Let me ask you this. I'll tell you something. The most important thing I have said tonight, or I will say before I sit down, I said a long time ago and nobody paid any attention to it, nor should they.
I said, my name is Clancy Imuslin and I am an alcoholic. And that is the single most difficult thing I ever had to come to believe in my life. I might be some kind of an alcoholic, but not an alcoholic like my fellows, as the book describes. You're a real alcoholic. How can you be an alcoholic when your problem really isn't alcohol? Sometimes it is, because I like to drink and relax and sometimes I drink too much and sometimes I drink and have fun and sometimes…
Drinking does something good for me. Sometimes it does something bad for me later. But I don't drink because I'm one of these old crazy bastards who likes to sit and drink and get goofy. I drink because it makes me feel different. That's why. And it doesn't do any good to go to meetings. I don't know if I ever heard it, but I thought I heard it many times in meetings. I came in there sick and desperate and have one of these old AA speakers speaking at you.
And they all look the same. They all have got $350 suits and silvery hair and rosy cheeks and look quite a bit like Jim, actually. Not Jim. But they say things like, Friends, I stayed drunk for 41 years, night and day. Almost lost my job on two different occasions. Then one day I walked through that door and I knew I was home. They told me to put the plug in the jug and I did. And I've just never been so goddamn happy.
AA works for that kind of people, but not people who think and have feelings and are burdened by memories and what might have beens and if onlys and sensitivities. Now, how can I be an alcoholic if my problem is in alcohol? Thank God I stayed here long enough and I was desperate enough to not be able to run away from people who weathered my disfavor to save my life. Now, you think about that a second because everybody here tonight either did or will have to make that decision. I do not like them. Shall I leave?
And that is the dividing line, as Jim was saying this afternoon. I do not like the Dr. Fell or whoever it might be. And then your whole existence comes down to, I do not like them. Shall I leave? And the answer to that is whether or not you will ever survive. I am glad that I could not get away and so I did not run. I might have thought I had a little more strength and stamina or a place to go. But I came to learn the most single important fact of my life, and I want to say this clearly because most of the people who have heard me talk before have heard me say this, but I want to say this to the people who have never heard me talk because I've never heard a more important fact.
I've never heard a more important fact. I am glad that I survived long enough to come to understand that if my problem is alcohol, I am not an alcoholic.
[00:15:11]
And conversely, if I am an alcoholic, my problem is not alcohol. Now, doesn't that sound upside down? A little too many shock treatments down there in Texas. But I'll tell you something. If your problem is alcohol, you really don't even have to go to A.A. I've never really been able to understand what they are trying to say, but what they are saying, in effect, is this. You hear speakers all the time say, All my life, alcohol was my problem.
When I was sober, everything was wonderful. Then I'd get drunk, and everything went to hell. Then I got sober, and everything was wonderful. Then I drank, and everything went to hell. Then I got sober, and everything was wonderful. You just want to holler, Why do you drink? Jesus! It makes you sick. I'll tell you. If your life is okay, except when you drink, I've got a solution tonight that's going to revolutionize your future.
You don't have to go to these cockamamie A.A. meetings. You don't have to be abused by funny-sounding old-timers. You don't have to put up with these hot, barrack-like rooms. Here, I'll tell you what you do. The next time you're feeling good, just don't drink. And live happily ever after. That's all you have to do if your problem is alcohol. Don't drink, and you're home free. But if it turns out that you suffer from what I suffer from, you may go to your grave, maybe 30 years from now, maybe 2 weeks from now.
If you're lucky, it'll be 2 weeks. And never have the slightest clue of what the hell was really wrong. Because you can prove it isn't alcohol until you die. It's a life that seems to be composed of stumbling from crisis to crisis, to building hopes and watching unfeeling hands rip them away, of trying to maintain integrity in a rotten world and even eventually having to nickel and dime your own integrity away just to keep even, of going from anticipation to disappointment again and again, of watching people turn bad around you, of watching their pettiness and their nastiness and their hypocrisy, and never have the slightest idea of what's wrong.
And it turns out that that particular lifestyle is the lifestyle I had and could not identify it and could not find a way out of it. But there's a name for an illness that characterizes much of that with one addition. And it isn't alcohol. It sounds like alcohol, and we talk a lot about drinking an AA, so a lot of people think it's alcohol, and a lot of people come to AA and never can stay sober because they think they're here working on an alcohol problem.
And it isn't. It's something called alcoholism. And the difference between an alcohol problem and alcoholism, it's a three-letter suffix, what the hell's the difference? But that's the difference, I believe, whether people like you and me will ever have any chance to walk in the sunshine in that world or whether we will furtively go for the rest of our lives. And the difference is just this. If your problem is alcohol, when you get sober, you are recovered.
No further therapies required. You just say, hey, man, this stuff is eating me up. I'm going to drink that no more. But in this funny disease called alcoholism, when you get sober, unfortunately for you and me, it looks exactly the same. It looks the same to your family. It looks the same to your doctor, as a rule. It looks the same to your employer. It looks the same to the police. But most deadly, it looks the same to the patient because nobody ever seems to understand at that juncture that the thing that characterizes alcoholism is that it continues on after you're sober.
You don't slur your words. You don't stumble and fall down anymore. You say, I'm straight. But alcoholism doesn't manifest itself that way. It seems to attach itself to emotional perceptions and reactions that distort the perception of reality.
[00:20:02]
And there's no way to know it. There is no highway patrolman who's got a balloon to blow up to measure your anxiety today when you're sober and trying to hang on. And there's no white line to walk to see how badly you need someone to love you. And they can't take a drop of blood out of your ear and determine, say, this fellow's really feeling a lot of frustration. We should help him. Because when you're straight, you're supposed to be straight.
And then you're okay. And these perceptions begin to warp and you get reactions. And the reaction, I see them sometimes as like this. One of the alcoholic emotions, I mean, not really alcoholic, but those emotions of that type of a personality. You begin to wonder what people really mean by that. I heard what you said, son of a bitch, but what did you really mean? Why do they all seem to like each other more than they like me?
Why doesn't anybody care how I feel really? And you go on and on and on until you get to a point I think of as graying out. You still see the world, you still see the colors, the green, the blues, but there's a patina of emotional gray over everything. I'm sure most people in here have had that feeling where you just, everything is all right, but it's just a gray, pointless, frustrating, stinking world.
Now that does not make you an alcoholic. There's another term for that. Medically speaking, that's called acute neurosis. One other thing must be present to be an alcoholic. Alcohol must have a special effect on you that it doesn't have on most people. Now what is that special effect? Makes you drunk all the time? Nah. Is it that every time you take a beer, your hair grows long and you leap on passing nuns?
Nah. Makes you drunk all the time? Not at all. What's the worst night of the year to go out and drink? Amateur night, New Year's Eve. Those crap heads out there, they don't know how to drink for nothing. If you ever want to have some heartache, go out and, not that you would, but go watch. I remember thinking, the one night I want to be off the street is New Year's Eve because amateurs don't know how to drink.
They don't know when they're going to throw up. Everybody in this room and all the speakers that we've heard, you've got at least 15 seconds to recognize the symptoms. You say, pardon me, just a second. Anybody got a cert? These people don't know what those symptoms are. They say, when I was saying to Betty, I said, you son of a bitch. They don't know when they're going to fall down. Everybody in this room, I'm sure, a hundred times has developed that art of…
Those people just fall down. They try to drive with two eyes. This is the way, this is the way. It seems to come down to something that eluded me for years when I was battling whether or not I was an alcoholic, and that's this. The measure of the alcoholic really is not what alcohol does to you. It's something much more complex. It's what alcohol does for you. And it's something nobody that it does something for ever seems to realize.
But I had to come to understand that alcohol literally has the ability to alter my perception of reality. And it doesn't do that for most people who drink. But it literally changes the way the world looks. There is no therapy in the world that works as well as alcohol on an alcoholic. It's just there isn't a person in this room who doesn't know the feeling when you're uptight and tense and you've done everything you can and…
You take a drink and it goes… Nothing changes but, God, it looks different. Now, if alcohol does for you, that's something that's for you, it's great.
[00:25:02]
And nobody ever who has it never knows it doesn't do that for other people. And the people it doesn't do it for, it doesn't know it does it for you. So you're screwed no matter where you go. But if it does that for you, eventually it starts to do something to you because it erodes further your ability to cope with reality. Because you don't have to learn to cope with conflict if you've got something, a way to disguise it.
And eventually you get to a point where alcohol begins to be a problem. And sometimes it's… People have drunk 30 years before they cross that invisible line. Sometimes they cross that line the first drink they take. But when they do, it begins to be an imperative in their life, in people like me. And then you've got to stay sober. And being sober is just like being naked in a porcupine factory. It's just…
Everywhere you sit, it's just bad. It's just bad. And so the curse of alcoholism, it turns out, is not that you can't get sober. Not that you go to a treatment center and be straightened out. If you can't afford a treatment center, as was said, lay on the bathroom floor. That works all the time. Or a way… Sometimes you hear people say things like, I just couldn't, I can't get off of this one. I can't get off of this one.
I give them a solution I found in Minneapolis in 1950. Slap a cop. You're off of this one right now? But what can you do when you get off of it and the world slowly goes to hell around you little by little? And the tensions come back. And you know that you're different. You know, I thought if I had to design a flag for AA, it seemed we should have one. Every other flaky organization got one. And you had to design a flag that we could all gather under and march on to Washington.
If Joe were in the lead, we'd say, Well, here we are in Seattle. If we had to march on to Washington, you know. What would you put on that flag? I need booze. I need alcohol. Something much more intense. Just this. But you don't understand. That's all I know. And that's all you know and we all know. But you don't understand. And it's hard to realize that Alcoholics Anonymous is not designed to help you with your drinking problem.
There is no agency in the world that can help you once alcohol begins to do something special for you. Now you have to deal in the battlefield of sobriety and sobriety is untenable. I sometimes, I just want to say this quickly. I think the best definition I ever got of alcohol, what alcohol does when I was sober about a year, and I went through all this stuff. I'd take these steps. I was wrapping packages.
I was working in this advertising agency on Wilshire Boulevard wrapping packages and I had no front teeth yet. And I thought, these guys running this advertisement, I'm smarter than they are, but they'll never know because I look so bad. And one of our accounts was something called Kamchatka vodka. I don't know if you have it here, but they have it up and down the coast and they've used the same billboard for 40 years.
Vodka is pronounced Kamchatka. And I came by with my packages one day and these dumbbells were laying out a new board, different colors, different lettering, but the same words. And I thought, I'm going to let them know there's a guy back there who's got a little something on the ball. He says, none of my business guys, but how about putting on your billboard there, Kamchatka vodka goes boom. Better than all vodkas everywhere.
And they looked up at me and said, is that supposed to be funny? Why don't you wrap your goddamn packages? We'll write the billboard. If I had to report to my sponsor, I'd have punched him right in the face. I went to a meeting that night, I was just crazy. That's the termination. When you're sober and you make a suggestion, they laugh at you. I found, I saw my sponsor. Mom, I'm going to die. Shut up, he explained.
I said, Mom, God damn it. I'm hung in there. I've done these things. Lived in an abandoned car 10 months. I tried to get these guys to put me down because I've got a front page on me. He said, tell me, tell me the story. So I told him the story just like I told it to you. He said, tell me, tell me the story. So I told him the story just like I told it to you, a little more flamboyantly. I said, you see, I gave him a good idea. Whether they used it or not, at least they couldn't listen.
[00:30:03]
But they would have listened. Oh, good. I said, why don't you get this through your head? They are not against you. He used to have a want to wave his finger under my nose when he was… The only time I ever really missed my front teeth. But I wasn't going to give him the pleasure of gumming it, I'll tell you that. He says, don't you understand? They're not against you. They don't know what the hell you're talking about.
What's that supposed to mean? I've been telling you for a year now. Don't you understand? People like that. Kamchatka vodka doesn't go, boom. To them, Kamchatka vodka goes, bleh. That's why you're in this meeting and they're not. The next time you may wish that you were a non-alcoholic or secretly think you are, I will tell you, in my opinion, there isn't an alcoholic in the world who could stand to be a non-alcoholic.
Would you like to have your back to the wall and the hounds of fate ripping at your throat? Oh, God. And they'll go, bleh, bleh, bleh. Despite what you may think is not to make you wonderful, highly spiritual. I mean, you get spiritual, but not in the way you think about it. Some people come here, learn how to pronounce God and become so spiritual they float off the top. The last words are, I no longer need meetings.
I no longer need meetings. I walk alone with God. Then one day God gives them a beer and here they come. As all the speakers have said today, the purpose of AA is to act your way through certain situations and little by little, the purpose of AA, I believe in the bottom line, is to do the same thing alcohol used to do. To little by little alter my perception of reality. To make things change that don't change.
They look different little by little. AA is a much slower way than wine. But you don't have to vomit up chapter 5 every morning. There's something to be said. And the most important thing to remember for new people, I think, is you don't get sick like this. We get sick like this. Oh, I've got it under control, thank Christ. I'm about to keep an even. And you don't get better like this, despite how fast AA talks go.
Everybody gets better like this. Oh, I found a wonderful new way of life and I'm… Oh, Jesus Christ. And what you and I have got to do is hang on to each other when you go through those dips so you don't think this is the end of it all. The point of AA is to little by little, whether it does anything for me or not, make the rest of the world shape up. Just little by little. And one day they get almost tolerable.
But then if you get carried away and don't take care of yourself, they know it and act funny again. That's why they say don't get too hungry, angry, lonely, tired. Not because they're bad things. Those are things that push perception triggers that make things look crappy. That's why you don't want to do them. The point of AA is to make the world shape up. That's why I still go to meetings regularly.
That's why I was at my home group this week and will be at another one tomorrow night in Los Angeles. It's not because I'm a zealot. But I know that if I don't go to meetings, strangers know about it and act funny. And that's what we're here for. I mean to say, you go to a lot of meetings, you work the steps and some days you just hang on and little by little
[00:35:00]
it gets better. There's only one thing I want to say before I sit down. I've said this before. But you've got to be careful you don't stay in AA active too long because it can warp you further than you meant to go. I wanted to get here and somehow I kept going. And about six years ago I found myself in a position where I left a job as a marketing director in Beverly Hills and now as most of you know for the last six years I'm no longer a marketing wizard out in Hollywood.
I'm the director of the midnight mission on Skid Row in Los Angeles. Don't clap. If you're touched, take up a love offering. And my friends were just staggering. What the hell would you give up that job to work at the midnight mission? And I told them I told that son of a bitch when he threw me out I'd be back. That is, I don't know why they guaranteed me such a significant decrease in salary I couldn't pass it up.
I don't know why. I was tired of advertising. I was tired of writing stuff I didn't believe to impress people I didn't like. True story. And I don't know. And it is not an alcoholic treatment center. I'm not putting down alcoholic treatment centers. I know that a lot of people are here because of alcoholic treatment centers. They don't stay here because of alcoholic treatment centers but they get here that way.
I'm not an alcoholic counselor. I'm not even qualified to be an alcoholic counselor. Most of my sobriety I work. Never had a chance to take that two week course. I don't I don't I don't mean that I don't mean that in a negative sense. I'm just reporting. We work at a level way below that. We work at people who who are, you know, I used to for years come to work and have the pleasure of having my secretary bring me a cup of coffee and morning report and I'd see how our sales were in New York and Chicago and if we were going to sell in Paris next year should we go to the book fair in Germany and and just great. I go to work now and it isn't that way. I feel my desk who got stabbed in the doorway last night and who fell downstairs and snapped their spine in a convulsion and who in fact this who's got the knives not this is the first time in my life that I have felt sufficiently constrained that I've recently gone to the police academy in Los Angeles. I took five of my employees to get to go through the licensing procedure to carry mace because there's so many knives on skid row now you just can't tell when they're coming and you've got to have something ready and first time that's ever happened and we try to help people do better not alcoholic treatment at all it's way below that. It's trying to keep them alive we feed maybe 200,000 meals a year and bed down 50,000 men. The funny thing is we don't take any funds from anybody I send a letter twice a year to the citizenry and the donations keep it going. We have to take any crap from nobody. We just do it any way we want to. And somehow when I go I'll let you know when to clap somehow when I go home at night I get in my car and leave skid row and go back to my home out by the ocean and my boy telling me about his football practice I feel more like a man than I did coming down all the elevators in Beverly Hills in my shiny suit being slick. I don't know why that is it just tells you how AA can screw you up forever again now don't misunderstand me you people who raised your hands tonight even if you go to meetings even if you go to sponsor, mean sponsor even if you work the steps we can't guarantee you that in 15 years you can have your own mission you know you may have to get rich you dummies but I can guarantee you something even better than that I can guarantee you that most of the time you'll be in the world almost free of crap heads you'll be in a world that makes sense I don't know any better feeling than I have than to walk down the street of Eau Claire, Wisconsin Thursday leaving my mother on the way to see my father people I never would see again my children who are very close to me now in fact one of my daughters and her husband and my grandchildren are somewhere in Kansas on their way to their new university in Kentucky where they're going to teach at this fall they're just having a ball and everything is going good in my life and it'll go good as long as I remember what's happening before I sit down and say one thing I saw some of you people in New Orleans I want to tell you about something that happened to me
[00:40:00]
maybe give you some hope in 1970 I was the noon speaker of the International Convention Miami Beach on July 4th Independence Day God what a wonderful thing I looked at the program the first speaker of the morning on July 4th was the man who took me to my first meeting in Eau Claire, Wisconsin in 1949 and the last speaker that night at the old timers meeting was my current sponsor not the one I had when I was new he died but the one I had had for the last 15 years a man named Chuck C and I was the noon speaker and I talked and by God I had a feeling of oneness I'd been a barb and a defiant member of AA and I'd started new groups to punish people and and I did too I'll tell you and when I at some height of the feeling that was the major spiritual breakthrough of my life I had spiritual breakthroughs the young man Max read tonight spiritual breakthroughs aren't always instant wins they're evolving things and I thought for once I've got the oneness with AA I have waited 12 years to feel this spiritual surge and I'm coming home on the plane I thought I don't have to be a some barb in the society anymore I could be a leveler I could help people with love and understanding and not get upset I'm going to be better in my home and better in my job on Monday morning I got on the freeway the Santa Monica freeway downtown I had my rear view mirror set so I could see the road and a little bit of me because I had not seen myself without any tension just love and I looked forward to the best day of my life I came under the San Diego freeway and a little old lady in a Toyota came off the off ramp about 70 miles an hour and just missed me by about half an inch like that and the new spiritual leader of the western states without blinking an eye just lowered his window you crazy bitch did I stop your car stop damn you just gone I had to chase her all the way to La Brea Avenue just to come up next to her and say I forgive you you bitch so I thought I'll go to a couple more meetings I want to tell you something the world gets to be a good place but you never can tell there's going to be some old bitch in a Toyota coming at you so I suggest you stay here with our distinguished speakers who have been here for many years with people in this community who have been sober a number of years not to become wonderful or fantastic but something infinitely more important to live in a world that you enjoy when that happens it's worth everything it took thank you applause