If you got syphilis, keep your hat on so we know who’s got syphilis around here. Thank you. Thank you. No, you don’t. Just let us know when you’re ready. We’re ready. It says in the book Alcoholics Anonymous, some of us tried to return to our old ways and the result was nil. That’s the topic that I’m going to try to talk to you a little bit about today. But first off, I want to read something to you that I haven’t read for quite a while. And there is a videotape on this particular thing, and I hope you haven’t just played it recently. But, uh, I read it for two reasons. One, to, of course, pass it on to you. And then the other reason is sort of selfish because I use it on a rather daily basis in my own recovery program because it, it meant so much to me in the beginning of my recovery. It’s quite common in Alcoholics Anonymous to see people when they get the book Alcoholics Anonymous, whether they buy it or get it as a gift or whatever, and they do manage to get around to reading it.

You’ll see people sometimes underscoring words, circling sentences, or making notations about paragraphs or, or parts of the book that appear to be a, a little bit more important to them than others. A popular way of doing it nowadays is with yellow felt pens. They sort of scribble through the, the black writing to emphasize a particular passage in the book. Uh, I’ve done that for many, many years, uh, because I had a lot of difficulty reading the book and understanding the book because I, I can’t read very well. And, uh, over the years, as a result of all of this, uh, going back for points of reference and underscoring, my book began to fall apart, you know, and, uh, got in pretty bad shape. And so one day, about 15 years ago, I decided to have my original book, which I still had, uh, rebound and, uh, put into a sort of a little folder-like so that it could get preserved. Uh, not that it had any importance to anybody else i- in life except me. It was very important to me.

And I still have that book, and I keep it in a trunk, uh, for just sentimental reasons, I guess. But, uh, the day that I was getting it ready to take down to the guy that was going to bind it for me, I was putting the pages together. I started reading some of the things that I had underscored over these 30-odd years, you know, and, uh, things that, uh, at one time or another undoubtedly seemed to be very important to me or seemed to be something that I wanted to dwell on. And after I wrote down, uh, most of these things that I had underscored, I put them into sort of like a composition form, four little paragraphs, and, uh, I’ve chosen to read them at AA meetings for, for many years now. Uh, we read them up here at the St. Patrick’s Day celebration, the Oktoberfest, and, and then any other particular occasions. And I want to read them to you today.