My name is John Mooney, and I’m an alcoholic. Hi. Hi, everybody. I, I’m grateful for the chance to be here. I was here five years ago down at the Landmark Hotel, and, uh, I was concerned a few minutes ago with Corneal. And I said, “Corneal, you know what? I wonder if they’ll remember those jokes I told five years ago ’cause I haven’t gotten any new ones.” But when all the new people started standing up, I, I figure there, there’s probably a whole lot of people who’ve never heard of me sitting in this room tonight, and I’m sure there are a lot that have never heard my, heard me talk before. And since I’m, uh, belong to the old style of AA, old Class A that tells a story, and I would feel better if there’s somebody here who hasn’t heard it. Will everybody who’s never heard me talk or heard one of my tapes raise your hand? How about that? Thank you very much. I can talk freely without any fear of re- being repetitive with a rather large group of people.

Um, I came up here to get, uh, to, to stay sober, to get a little deeper in my sobriety. I’m a professional who works with alcoholics, and I consider this hazardous to sobriety and trying to help other people with their problems. Therefore, I’m grateful for the chance when I can come out to a group of people in AA and spit out all this garbage and let you kind of nurse me and help me back to some stability in my life. And I need this periodically, and I need it this weekend. We were out on the West Coast all, uh, for two weeks now on things that were not AA. We went to some AA meetings out there, but it was other things. And I was almost panicky, really, in getting over here to Myrtle Beach, where I can kind of settle down and be myself and be with you people that, that mean so much to me.

So I’m grateful for the chance to be here, and I want to thank the committee, the board, Corneal, and Dupree, and all the others that give, gotten me a chance to be at this thing and to experience this weekend. I’m having trouble with responsibility, and, uh, I, um.. Uh, they know this, so they assigned me this weekend two simple tasks. They says, “Now, there are two things we want you to do. We want you to be there Saturday night at 8:00, and you are not to be late.” And another thing they assigned me to do was to take Tony and Helen, who talked to you this morning, to a restaurant and be there at exactly 6:00. And they said, “The restaurant’s out of town, so you better plan this thing.” So after lunch, I went out, and I located the restaurant, and I did a dry run. I took my car, and I measured the distance from the re- restaurant to the, to the Driftwood Motel, where we’re staying. It’s nine and four-tenths miles.