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Whether you join us in the morning or at night, there's nothing better than a sober sunrise. We hope that you enjoy today's speaker. >> Hi everybody.

My name is Frank. I'm an alcoholic and my time has come. I uh I want to thank everybody before I get into my my thing and and and uh and not express some gratitude for uh for being amongst you.

Uh I arrived here Thursday afternoon and it seemed I've always lived in my room. Uh, and I've always walked among you. I've uh you've made me very comfortable.

I've not always been comfortable uh with people, certainly not with the rapidity that I felt a great deal of comfort uh this past weekend. I uh also I'm uh full of uh snapper, some uh some rice and uh carrots and stuff and uh a lot of apprehension. I um that always floods me.

I'm uh I'm always startled how nervous I get. I don't know if it's uh fear or excitement. Uh they they have the same physiological reaction.

My heart's thumping. And uh I was just going to try to remember to breathe every once in a while. Uh by the way, you're a good-looking crowd.

Uh, at one time I would have liked to have had a drink or two with each of you, you know, before I had to had to do this sort of uh uh loosen my tongue a little bit. Thanks. Have you heard any of it?

Uh, a friend of mine, uh, Willard from Texas says, "Um, my name will my name's Willard. I'm an alcoholic. And if I hadn't become an alcoholic, I wouldn't have become anything at all.

And my heart resonated with Willard because alcohol became central to my life. Um I didn't have much going for me before uh before I started to drink. I uh as I am now, and I I I I've always been uh kind of a a gathering of conflicts.

You know, I describe myself as somebody with a a personality, the foot on the brake and the accelerator in the same moment. You know, I desperately want to go somewhere, but I'm afraid to move. And uh and that was pretty pronounced during the early part of my life.

By the way, I was born in the mental hospital. My mother manic depressive. And my father ran from that experience before I was born.

So I really see uh as the Bible says the sins of the father or character defects if we want to use a a more comfortable vocabulary of the father are visited on the sons and I feel that that's that's really my genetic inheritance that I my personality is manic depressive to a large extent and I've run from uh emotionally charged uh experiences a lot of my early life has been a blackout I don't remember too much. Uh I uh I remember though from very early on being painfully self-conscious. Uh I came out of the womb lying.

I think I came out of the room lying in the sense of repackaging myself. I knew how to present myself instinctively. I just never knew how to be myself.

I knew where to get the haircuts. I knew how to dress. I knew how to speak.

I knew how to present myself as whatever I wanted to be. I was very into packaging very early. I just was never comfortable.

I was always somebody like our big book talks about somebody who was uh an actor. I was always performing. I remember at school uh uh you know I was enormously competitive.

I was so competitive I couldn't compete. You know that kind of personality. I uh I was terrific at math.

you know, I got the answers out before they finished the question. I love to startle them and me that I was so smart. But if I had to stand up and recite French or uh or or read or something, I became dyslectic and I was terrified.

You know, if I made a mistake on my feet and I was corrected, I got worse rather than better, you know. So, I was flooded with that kind of fear of being called on. I think I was this size at nine and I kind of stuck out at school and I went to uh Catholic schools and they can smell fear in Catholic schools, you know, and they would say, "Frank, would you stand up and recite uh and of course I would and I' I'd make an error." You know, Freud said, "A fear is a wish." And I was so frightened and afraid of making a mistake that I made them and I was humiliated.

Shame is my most powerful emotion. Because pride is my biggest sin. You know, I worried and cared about everything.

As you can hear, I'm I'm always startled how intense my my voices. I always love to think of myself as kind of this easy, fun-filled person, but there resides in me this enormously u uh intense person that that worries about everything. You know, I worry about the paper clips, you know, that kind of thing.

I think it was Bertram Russell said one of the chief symptoms of an impending nervous breakdown is a belief that one's work is very important you know and uh I kind of suffer from that kind of thing uh like tonight uh maybe some lightness will come uh anyway you you get kind of a sense of the personality that I I had and and uh of course in those days mental illness was nothing we talked about I come from a family we never talked about anything we were little chatter boxes is about things except if it was important you know and as soon as it became important it was uh agreed upon that that subject was important everybody got silent and I think as I I heard uh an affirmation of that kind of thing I think we couldn't talk about subjects because nobody had ever ever uh owned our own sorrows never owned our own grief our own disappointments we always went through life like we were Okay. You know, if you didn't talk about it, you could get through it. I think we all felt uh maybe genetically that if we talked about something, we'd all unravel.

If if somehow we were to acknowledge our pain, we would all fall apart. So, nobody acknowledged anybody's pain. We never talked about anything.

As I said, uh in those days, they considered mental illness bad blood. And I was watched, you know, and I watched back and I became very careful. I knew my mother lost her her boat because she talked about what was going on in her head.

And I learned very fast that you just didn't tell them what was going on in your head. So really from an early child, I had a private life, very private, secret life. And even to this day, I kind of follow the rule, uh, you know, tell them as much as you want them to know.

Uh concealment has been a very big part of my character. Camouflage and concealment. Uh pretending, you know, I'm a classical alcoholic 101.

You know, I'm always fine. You ask an alcoholic how we are. Sober or drunk, we're always fine.

There can be fresh red burns on our neck, but we'll always be fine. You know, as long as I'm packaged, okay. And uh I'm probably the 10th generation of people with those kinds of character defects or character uh personality defects, whatever.

Anyway, that's the kind of personality that was treated with uh that I treated uh with alcohol. Dr. Meninger wrote in 1938 that alcoholism was a desperate attempt at self treatment.

I started to drink when I was 13 and I needed it. Uh, as I often hear in these rooms, uh, it was hallway drinking prophetically from the beginning out of a paper bag. I was to learn to drink the right brands out of the right glasses with the right people in the right places on the planet.

But it was never to really change much from the uh, the hallway drinking out of a paper bag. You know, I came in here and I used to marvel when people said they were an alcoholic from their first drink. I used to think, my god, aren't they dramatic?

You know, but if drinking alcoholically means you drank to change things, I was alcoholic when I first drank. I drank to change myself. I drank to change my perceptions of you.

I drank to make life uh a less hostile environment for me and of uh the earth a less hostile hostile uh place for me to to uh to live. And it worked. I drank for power, you know.

I drank for nerve. And with a with a drink in my hand, I could say yes to life. With a drink in my hand, I had a lot to say.

And I thought you wanted to hear it and hear it and hear it. Uh I had a voice when I drank. I could sing sadly, uh I'm told.

Um but you couldn't shut me up. I became a little chatterbox. I've also another characteristic I've always had.

I've always been more comfortable with strangers than I am with people that I'm intimate with. In my family, I had, as I said, little or nothing to say. I just got through it.

But outside the home, I was a little chatterbox. I couldn't I could assume another personality. I could lie.

I could fabricate. I could dream. And uh and I lived uh you know, I was to find out later on that these things have names.

Uh how I lived. You know, I was always uh comfortable do and still am doing two or three things, four things at once, you know, uh or even now if I'm not being careful and monitoring myself, I can be on the phone watching television, doing a cross word puzzle and daydreaming, you know, get it all going. So, it's a way for me to distract myself from the whatever the focus or or thing I should be doing is.

And alcohol was a means to focus my life. Somehow it quieted the voices in my head. Uh it's a it's a known sedative and uh and I was able to function uh for a long time surprisingly well uh on large quantities of alcohol.

So I said I started to drink when I was 13. I was to drink for 23 years. Uh 13 of them on a daily basis.

I didn't get my hands on much booze till I went in the army. But whenever I did get my hands on booze, I um I was to stay in the drinking experience as long as it was. I never had what I call uh a thermostat.

You know, you see that with um so-called social drinkers, whatever that species is. But they'll say things like, "I've had enough." Those words never came out of my mouth. You know, people would scream it on my behalf.

They would say, "He's had enough." But I I genuinely never felt it. I always felt I was shifting into second gear when everybody else wanted to go home. You know, I wanted the car keys and I wanted to go.

I had places to go and drinks to dream and people to meet and a world and a life to live. Uh when I drank, alcohol fueled a personality, gave me access to a personality that I didn't know I owned. You know, I um I could be startled at my own conviction when I drank.

You know, I had uh access to a power. I could raise an army and march. I felt when I was drinking.

I was always afraid when I wasn't drinking. If we met on the street, the first words out of my mouth would say, uh would be, "Let's get a drink." And that would calm me enough, you know, like Pavlov's dog. You ring the little bell and the salvation begins.

Well, just the thought that we were going to have a drink would calm me enough that I would uh remember your name and be able to to engage in some kind of social exchange. you know, if uh if there was no drink around, and I remember going, as I'm sure some of you have, uh go into somebody's house for drinks or whatever, and they would uh it'd be a long time before the drinks were served, and they'd bring out u a you know, and they'd do one for you and one for me, and they'd put everything away. And by the time they sat down, I had finished uh the ice.

I'd chewed up the ice and it started to nibble on the glasswear. You know, I would be just a just a thirst. When Judy Garland, people asked about Judy Garland and she she said she just had a thirst and that's the way I was.

I just couldn't get enough in me. I was trying to quench quarrels, struggles, conflicts deep within my subconscious with massive amounts of alcohol. I make an analogy of uh my psyche being something like the uh the the layers of earth below the surface.

You know, there's enormous amount of tension and uh and uh and energy building all the time. You know, in California, the the pressures, the layers of the earth forces have enormous forces against each other for a long time. And every once in a while that there's an eruption and uh you know a piece of California falls in the sea and we're all surprised like we didn't know that 365 days a year 24 hours a day that pressure is mounting.

It's there. It's a known thing. And my psyche is just like that, you know.

Yet I go around pretending I'm okay. I'm fine. I'm not disappointed.

I'm not full of sorrow. I'm not full of despair. I'm not full of grief.

whatever the emotions are, I go through life pretending, somehow ignoring them, not being conscious of them. And um and that's that's a method for me to live. I mean, that's what what I would be like and was like uh when I drank and I would be like now without alcoholic synonymous.

I I drank to be unconscious. If anyone watched me drink, they would have said that man wants unconscious time. I wanted to smash my five senses as fast as I could because if I was on this on this strength, uh I really wanted another one behind it.

You know, we had a uh by the way, I'm a member of the Oxford group in New York. I invite you all to come, not not together, of course. Uh and uh we meet on Monday and Wednesday at on West 84th Street uh at 7:30 and it's wonderful.

And we have this woman in the group. Everybody loved her from the first time she met. She said her favorite drink was the next one, you know, and um and that was right for me, you know.

I'd already finished this one or discounted it in some way and was really scheming and conniving. I loved it. You know, um if you met me at the door with a vase full of an ambered fluid and you said, "Uh, Frank, I'm uh I'm making your first drink.

After that, you help yourself." And you had unopened bottles behind the open ones. Then I could relax. I knew we'd be unhurried.

You know, we would get to know each other. We find bonding that night. You know, uh if if we weren't in that situation where there was unlimited access to booze, say we were down to about that much in a bottle.

I was finishing her sentence to get out of there and get to a bar because what I really wanted was unlimited access to alcohol. I if I was at your home, I'd try to become the bartender, you know, sort of uh on the way to your drink, I could splash a little more into mine. I really wanted an endless drink.

And what I had from pretty much the beginning was a peasants's capacity to consume a lot of booze and uh and be upright and talk. I've had blackouts from the beginning. I thought blackouts were rest periods, you know.

I thought um my my blackouts are I could do a qualification on blackouts. Uh they were uh many blackouts in the beginning. You know, people would kind of change places and uh I'd become uh a little later on in the same uh uh situation or the same at least I know what the subjects were in the beginning until the end of my drinking.

I've met people and uh I've been places that I have absolutely no memory of. And that's the real sadness of my alcoholism. I think not the uh not what I call the tip of the iceberg, the carnage of my alcoholism, but the real sadness about my alcoholism is I've been to some of the most uh attractive places on the planet with some of the most gifted people under some of the most auspicious situations and I was drunk.

I was on it. I wasn't there. You know, it's that aspect of an unlived life that uh that uh fills me most with sorrow because I had lots of opportunities and uh to be present to people and to have people who made themselves available and present to me that I just squandered.

You know, the only thing worse than being an alcoholic, I think, is watching in your home one that you care for disintegrate in front of you, as we we heard her own the other night talk about this. And I did a lot of that. If you loved me, I pushed you away the fastest and the hardest.

I was a runner, you know. Um, a friend of mine calls them Kleenex people. You know, you kind of use one up and another one pops up.

And, uh, and that's the way I went through life. um running. If you don't like yourself, you're not going to bring much into community.

You're not going to bring much into relationships. And you know, I was baffled by it. I didn't know what I was.

I didn't know uh what I was running. I was running into relief is really what I was trying to do. Relief drinking.

Uh but as we know, we can't run long enough or far enough uh uh to get any kind of prolonged sense of relief. And uh and I always as we know I always brought myself with me. Uh I ran to California.

I lived in California 6 years and uh tried a whole new fresh life. I had a a job and uh down the peninsula lived in San Francisco for two years and I could never get to work on time. Not surprising.

And uh so I moved down the peninsula to be closer to work. And then of course I'd uh I'd be in uh San Francisco virtually every night drunk out of my skull either risking another uh another DUI on driving Duncan driving arrest trying to drive down uh uh down to to to where I lived at that time, Los Altos. Uh or or trying to find a place to stay over with somebody to stay over with and uh try try to hit work the next morning, you know.

So, um it was it was a no-win situation. Most of my uh most of my drinking life was kind of spent trying to accommodate alcoholism. You know, somehow uh uh if you if u if I had probably any conscious sense of defining myself, I was a drinker, a juicer in those days, we called us.

And uh uh my my drinking wasn't negotiable. What the rest of my life was negotiable. The people in my life, my jobs were negotiable, it would seem.

I wasn't conscious of that. But all those things could be changed. What couldn't be changed is my capacity to drink or my my my willfulness at drinking.

I was in a game over my head long before I knew it. Uh as I say, I never measured a drink in my life. Um, and I worked for pharmaceutical companies and their advertising agencies.

So, I had unlimited access to uh to pills and I simply took pills to medicate acute alcoholism. I didn't mind being an alcoholic for a long time. I would read things like the Merc manual about being an alcoholic.

I had lots of stains around that page in the Merc manual. I just didn't want to look like an alcoholic. You know, it was the thing the cosmetic effects of alcoholism that troubled me the most.

Not what I experienced, but what you saw. You know, if you saw a drooling, snarling uh indemnitus pig, that stung me if I was conscious of that. Um, you know, because that was not my my mental picture of what I what I wanted to be.

And yet that's what I had become. You know, if you're um if you're an alcoholic and you drink, you become what you hate the most. And all the things I'd run from all my life, coarseness and vulgarity and uh a lack of uh sensitivity is what I had become at the end of my drinking.

Um and yet I persisted again. And you know, one of the the most important things um about me was my jobs. I was uh I was able to get uh good jobs and hold on to them for a period of time.

The the period of time seemed to be about 24 months. Uh by then I had disgraced myself and people uh people began to know and worse I began to know that I wasn't going to succeed, that I wasn't going to be there any length of time and I would have to run. Um, I didn't know that I had changed jobs every 24 months till I'd been sober for a while and did my resume.

And it was like a lemming, you know, a lemming jumps up every seven years and starts running toward the sea. In 24 months, I would know that I had to get my resumes out and uh be by then I' I'd be so become so engulfed in my character defects and lack of promise and lies and uh and uh humiliations that I had to leave the environment. And I treated that like I treated everything else with another drink.

You know, I was a a pig drinker. I thought I had a lot of class. I don't know where I got that uh idea, but that was to die very hard.

I thought I had a lot of class when I drank. I knew the brands to drink. I knew the glassware to drink from.

I knew where you were supposed to go and uh and all that stuff. Uh you know, the Zelda and Scott fixturial part of alcoholism. It's more than a physical addiction to a chemical substance.

It's a whole lifestyle. And for a long time in my in my life, I was able to foster using alcohol. I was able to change my consciousness and create a life that I didn't own that wasn't mine, that I never really uh uh felt other than a visitor.

One of the uh the deep-seated feelings I have in my life is that I'm an intruder, that everybody else uh knows each other and knows what's going on, and I'm an interruption to that. It's still very hard for me for example to go into a room where a meeting has begun in my own group I get there early because it's very very difficult for me a moment it's much healed by now but a moment happens when I enter a room and people turn and look at me that I get a sickening feeling like I don't belong there and that's what I tried to treat with alcohol with massive amounts of alcohol the feeling that I didn't belong that I was another uh that everybody else had kind of an agreement uh and an understanding and I was not party to. And it took vast quantities of alcohol to steal that uh that feeling of intruder.

And uh and it and it never short of a blackout, never short of being unconscious. Um in fact, I always I I always think it's ironic that in Alcoholics Anonymous, we ask the alcoholic to tell her story. You know, my my neighbor knows more specific details of my drinking.

Uh looking through her curtain I do. Uh uh and surely if I'd known I'd be talking about it so long and so often, I would have paid more attention, you know. But uh but alcoholism isn't paying attention.

It's going through the stop signs. I came into AA and for the first year I think I raised my hands asking things like why didn't anyone tell me. Everybody told me.

Every cell in my body told me what I had become. I just wasn't able to hear, see, feel, taste, or touch any of that experience when I was drinking. I just moved on to another drink.

And um one day I just couldn't do it anymore. It was June 10th, 1970 and into my consciousness came to call alcoholics synonymous. I don't know where the capacity came to act on that idea together with the idea to get those two things in the same moment is virtually statistically impossible for an alcoholic.

Apparently in blackouts I talked about going to the mener clinic. I talked about paying Whitney and a lot of people offered to send me in blackouts. I didn't remember these until I'd read read some letters after I'd gotten sober and people repeated those those uh offers to me.

Um but into my consciousness on that hot June day came the call Alcoholics Anonymous and I was able to act on it and um I couldn't spell Alcoholics Anonymous. I didn't know how many H's or L's or in what order they were. I'd done a a vast quantity of uh a vast amount of damage to my central nervous system in addition to never measuring a drink.

I never I never counted a pill. You know, I'd ran out of prescription once. Take as needed.

You know, it seemed seemed to me a very enlightened way to deal with, you know, kilograms per body weight per hour. And u you know, with pills, you kind of have to anticipate what mood you want a half hour or so from now. you know, do you want to be cool, chilled out a little bit, or do you want to be impassioned or some of each, which is uh the way I would go?

I also took diuretics because I didn't want to look like a bloated drunk. I didn't want to look like I'd become. I took a serpentina because I was afraid I was going to have a heart attack.

my my bed at night. It's a weird thing, but I'm sure many of you have experienced, but you take massive quantities of a known sedative and your heart rate goes bananas. My bed would literally vibrate uh with a pounding heart at night.

I was afraid I was going to have a um a massive uh aneurysm or something like that. So, I took a roia serpentina and everything else. I took rolin.

I met a SBA man at a cocktail party and he had you can imagine what trouble he when he reported to me uh that a rolin would postpone a blackout. I was never to go forth without taking a rolin after you know I felt felt like I had another half hour of conscious time before the curtain came down. Um I suffered from personality disorders, multiple personality disorders.

Uh I was a different person with different people. I had a persona at the office, you know, a free three free button suit kind of thing and talking. I even had an office voice.

People would call me and say, "Hey, Dick, stop the office voice." And um uh and then I I I would uh you know have have drinks and stuff with people after work sort of in that uh you know social situation. And then as the night progressed I uh as that big book talked about, I ran with lower and lower companions. you know, finally the after hours places and under the bridge places late at night.

Uh more and more anonymity drinking toward the end, you know, giving false names, which was an early uh experience for me, creating a personality and assigning that personality, all kinds of uh uh uh statistics and uh and naming and stuff like that, fabricating a person and trying to be that person and stay that person. Uh, and you can do that in a large city and get away with it for a long period of time. And you can mask your illness.

And um, and I did it as long as I could. I drank as long as I could. And I think that's true for every other alcoholic in the room.

I don't think anyone stops a half hour before we have to. I've never had that experience where somebody stops and comes in and picks up a folder or something or checks us out and goes off to a party after. Uh, most of us, if you're like me, came in a decade after I should have been here.

You know, we're the leftover ones. Friend of mine says, "Every alcoholic stops drinking, Frank. It's nice to be alive when you stop." You know, I just happened to be alive when I stopped.

And it certainly was by no merit of my own. I never I never took any kind of uh u small uh uh point or or made any kind of small effort to extend my life. Everything I did consciously was to extinguish my life.

As I said, to smash my five senses as fast as I could. And uh I was a drunken driver. You couldn't take the car keys away from me.

When I stopped drinking, I could um you could buy your way out of uh out of uh those kinds of uh experiences. They weren't on the lookout for uh drunk drivers the way they are now. And I got away with murder.

I didn't hit anybody. I mean, I didn't commit murder, but I I walked away from uh uh many many total automobile accidents. I had I had a Yamaha in California, which I had to be drunk to get on.

And I was so afraid of it with reason cuz I was flung off it a lot. And uh I remember being so wasted so wasted from drinking. You know how you got where you just couldn't do anything.

You know, you couldn't get the muscles to to move at all. You just didn't care anymore. And I remember being on that and stopping at a light and not having enough energy to put my foot down, you know, as I stopped it and it would fall over on me.

And even that didn't bother me. What bothered me is if somebody was in a car next to me and watched me fall over, you know, the humiliation, you know, I remember a man jumped out of his car and said, "Can I help you?" And I heard myself say, "Yeah, just help me get it started. I only I'm only in trouble when it isn't going." you know, and uh I knew that that was a metaphor for my life later on, you know, that I was fine when life was going, but if it ever stopped, I could I was baffled about how to start it again.

And um what startles me most is uh how I stayed uh able to function, you know, as long as I did. But one day, as I said, June 10th, it was over. And I called information and they gave me uh the telephone number of New York Interroup.

And I called I called and there was a woman alive at that time, Marion, and she said, "You had to get down here." And I went down there and I've been in AA custody ever since. You know, I just wanted some beers. You know, I I pleaded for some beer because I really thought you were giving your liver a rest if you were just drinking beer.

You know, beer didn't really count. uh beer and wine were in the food category, but they sent out for cigarettes and they sent out for uh for soda and sandwiches and stuff. And I stayed I stayed in a in in New York in that day and I went to my first meeting that night and I walked from New York in that time was on 22nd Street.

I walked into my first meeting, Butterfield on 72nd Street. Um, and um, I went to a beginner's meeting that night and I heard a man talk about his trip to Australia. He was an actor getting phone call through Australia and u I, um, I thanked him for his his talk some months later and he said uh, he had never been to Australia, you know, so I just remind myself when you're new, you know, you fabricate your own stories.

You don't have to have any any input from the speaker. And I'm sure that's going on tonight. Uh it's kind of a relief for the speaker to know that.

Uh but anyway, I've been an AA junkie ever since. I think everything is adhering to AA. Everything is sticking to AA.

And I mean adhering to AA with all the nobility that if I took a bug with enough velocity against that wall, the body the body juices of that bug would adhere it to the wall. And my alcoholism was violent enough to propel me into alcoholics anonymous with enough philosophy that I've stuck. And I also have come to AA in the month of June.

And you know, you stick to those chairs in June, July, and August. Those metal chairs, if you're a sweater like I am, uh, and it's hard to leave with a chair stuck to you if it be not be noticed. Uh, and uh, I didn't think much was wrong with me, as all of us did.

I thought I'd be out of there quick. I felt uh, I thought you all had a sense of humor, though. I never had the ability to laugh at myself.

Everything about me was intense. If you'd killed your mother, I'd say no big thing. It's been done before.

Shakespeare wrote about it. you know, I'd minimize your sufferings. But if I had a pimple, I was inconsolable, you know, and the more people tried to to help me and calm me, the worse it got.

You know, if they said, you know, it's not so bad, Frank. You can hardly notice it. I would say in my head, sure, easy for them to say.

It's not on their face, you know. Um, and I was like that in AA. As I said, I had done a lot of damage to my I stopped pills and booze in the same moment when I uh came into AA.

I remind myself of the access to power that I had when I anchored AA. And I think that's true for all of us. We have access to a power in our lives that's amazing.

And I was able to stop pills and booze in the same moment. And I didn't convulse. I was a convulser.

I had lots of convulsions in the presence of physicians as well as parties. It was my party trick kind of thing. You know, uh when in doubt, Frank convulsed.

When I came into AU, it was not uncommon to see people convulse at a meeting. I can tell you nothing is more riveting than to see a convulser at a meeting. You know, we're not we're not fooling around with theory when you see somebody convulse from acute alcoholism, the withdrawal of acute alcoholism.

And um and I had done that a lot in my life and survived, you know. Anyway, I was alive at the end of my drinking. And I I like to remind myself that I didn't need Alcoholics Anonymous to survive my alcoholism.

That was a gift of God. You know, that was grace. What I needed AA for and continue to need Alcoholics Anonymous for is to survive a recovery.

You know, what do you do with five senses reporting a 100% of the data to you when you lived on marginal amounts of information most of your life and fabricated most of that? You know, suddenly I found out I wasn't the cute little thing anymore. And uh and suddenly I was I was flooded with the reality that I had squandered every opportunity I'd been given.

That anyone who loved me and cared for me I pushed away and ran away from. But the only the only thing I could I detested in my life apparently from my behavior was love and intimacy. You know uh my life speaks to one night stands kind of thing before Alcoholics Anonymous.

Even though uh for a great deal of my life people tried to make space for me in their lives and to find a space in my own. Somebody said the worst curse of the gods is the inability to love. And I really feel while I was drinking, I had just uh uh cretailed any capacity really to love and u in any kind of genuine and uh meaningful way.

Anyway, those are the those are the things that began to happen to me in recovery. I was uh of course I was I uh it's a paradox. I mean I I uh I was also filled with joy.

As I said, I I began to develop a sense of humor. You know, um I could laugh at you laughing about yourself. You know, I've always loved aa and the uh the lightness that they they handle the carnage with.

You know, the man would stay up uh stand up and say, you know, he um he took all the money. He burned his burned his house down. He he uh left his baby on the bus and he ran over his wife in the driveway.

And everybody after the meeting would say, "God, thank you, Fred. you really helped me, you know, and uh they'd be lining up to to thank Fred and uh the more carnage in the story, the better we felt, you know. Wow, that was a powerful talk, you know.

And um and because you were able to keep uh to to treat your sorrows with some kind of levity, it began to to get into my own. You know, I remember reading a review when Sylvia Pla suicided that Sylvia overvalued her own sorrows. And boy, did that have a name that did that have my name on it.

I'd always overvalued my own sorrows. You know, when anything about me was heavy and uh A's lightened me up enormously. It might not sound like that tonight, but uh it lightened me up enormously and uh also has transformed my life in many ways.

The I I've I've been given on a a daily reprieve from uh from alcoholism and and the ingestion of of any other kind of uh of uh mood altering chemical uh for over 22 years now. I really feel in my soul that if I can do it, you can do it. Anybody can do it.

As I say, I started off and I wasn't very wrapped from the beginning. And yet somehow I find I found a method of living through the 12 steps that can give me a ch an opportunity to be happy. I would never have described myself in my life as being a happy man.

I always felt that somehow dark there was a darkness, a shadow self in me that would always spoil my life. you know, sort of the dark Irish uh you know, I'd be looking at the churning sea while the rest of the world went on in in joy and happiness. And uh that's no longer true.

I don't see myself as that. Uh God has done for me what I could not have done for myself. I tried to I tried to create a mood.

I tried to titrate a mood chemically. I tried to be happy, joyous, and free as long as I could chemically by inducing all kinds of chemical reactions. Today I'm to the right of Mary Baker Eddie.

You know, I just don't do anything and I accept the mood assigned. And often for me that that's a great deal of pain. Uh uh it's not it's not been uh you know ho ho ho and off to lunch.

And uh someone someone the the other day said something about uh may have been in a workshop I I was at this weekend but somebody uh mentioned uh you know that it's not what's the problem but who's the problem and who's the problem is always I'm the problem. You know, I really see that clearly on my left hemisphere brain, but there's this other operational right hemisphere that's superstitious, that's uh that's dying for um for a kind of a sense of peace that I never I've never known for any prolonged period of time before Alcoholics Anonymous. You know, there's there there I I've had occasions of loss of self, total loss of self, and feeling part of a community that I never dreamed I could own.

And that's what I'd like to talk about a minute uh uh in in in what we have here. You know, I need Alcoholics Anonymous more today than when I entered AA in a way. The only thing I needed then was not to drink that day.

And I was given that gift and I given a lot of help not to drink that day. I still believe that that's a that's a necessary known uh centerpiece to my life today that I don't take uh any more alcohol into my life. Uh but I also have to be emotionally sober.

I know how to spoil my life on yours by being uh intoxicated with my emotions. You know, I call myself a psychic vacuum. You know, I can pick up whatever the mood of the room is.

You know, I can be on a bank line and some people be quarreling in the next line and I want to get in it. Now you wait and let her go first, you know, and uh I want to run I want to run the world, you know, and pretty soon that that that can be intoxicating and I'm flooded with that kind of fear and then somebody says snotty something snotty to me and the war is on, you know, and I see how I can do that to myself to distract myself from the real issue is is somehow control of myself which takes all my energy. you know, I um I've been in this hotel just over uh two two and a half days or something and uh with a maid coming every day.

My my room still looks like teenagers live in it. You know, I remember once I had somebody up to my apartment in New York and they said, "My god, Frank, your apartment's been robbed." You know, there was stuff all over the floor. Every doorork knob had clothes on it, stuff strewn all over.

And uh that kind of chaos is still very easy for me to produce if I'm not in in uh in the right spiritual condition. You know, my secretary can can order my desk and if I'm there a half hour, I can't find anything. You know, so I haven't been given permanent remission from my disease.

You know, I have to be vigilant. I think it would be spiritually arrogant for me to believe because I've been sober now over 22 years that it's always going to be thus unless I'm careful. And today I not only want to be clinically sober, but I want to be a happy man.

And I want to be a man that's u emotionally sober. And that's that's a a welcome adjunct to your life as well as a happy component to my own. And that takes a a regular application of the 12 steps for me because as I say my natural bend is to ignore my life is to not be conscious of what's going on you know uh to deny that there any problem and uh I'm a problem and uh and I live with my problem.

I live with a a cocka spaniel, a six-year-old cocker spaniel who I adore and uh adores me and uh you know if I drop some money or I can't find lots of sets of keys because I lose them and uh but I will stay obsessed looking for that particular key with the blue the set of keys with the blue tag on it until I'm late for work rather than taking another set of keys and hunting them when I'm not late. You know, I'll get stuck in a magnetic field. Just as if I if I was uh when I was drinking, you know, if I was caught in a drinking pattern, uh I went wherever the alcohol went.

You know, if you had it in your garden, I was sitting uh running over your barbecue or any odendrin. if you moved into it through the kitchen, I was there sitting on the stove, leaning on the refrigerator. And uh that same kind of behavioral pattern, you know, getting caught in some kind of crazy thing can happen, an obsession or whatever like summers storm can sweep into my life and I if I'm not conscious of what's going on that can uh engulf me and I can be paralyzed and lose precious lifetime uh you know ability to live a life by squandering my time doing things that uh what I call are demons being you know hit by demons or whatever.

Uh just uh not living a lived life, a fully lived life. So I need the steps not only to be sober but emotionally sober but to be effective. I want to be the most effective individual I can be today and that takes some vigilance and I have the 12 steps to do that.

I also think collectively we have 12 traditions to keep our collective emotional sobriety. I need you people. Alcoholics statistically not statistically do not stay sober by themselves.

That's a known. We need a community in which to stay sober, you know. And not only to stay sober, but to get insights.

We all know the power of a gathered AA meeting. Everyone in this room has been on a meeting where our lives have been formed by the collective power in that room. where I have seen and and understood and accepted things about myself that I could never have have have happened in another in another environment.

I think every Alcoholics Anonymous meeting is a prayer. Everybody who comes to an alcoholics meeting, whether we're conscious of it or not, has said, "I'm not enough by myself. I need something else." And I think every Alcoholics meeting, Alcoholics Anonymous meeting is a meditation.

You know, I've never left a meeting that I didn't feel even for a micro moment uh a deep sense of healing and a deep sense of uh of rest. I have a friend of mine, she said she came to Alcoholics Anonymous to rest. And I feel that my soul needed a place to rest.

I'd always been restless, irritable, and discontented. until I reach these rooms. And we have 12 traditions to facilitate keeping the room a special place, a container for this healing power that we all need.

And that too requires sacrifice. I have to make sacrifices in my personal life if I'm going to be happy and sober. I have to change.

I have to fundamentally change the way I look at things, the way I perceive things. I have to have an spiritual awakening in my life today as I did uh yesterday. I didn't stay drunk on yesterday's drinking.

I had to have fresh alcoholism today to stay drunk when I was drinking. And I can't stay happy, sober, and useful on yesterday's spiritual awakening. I have to have something fresh in my life today.

And I didn't get drunk on Bill Wilson's drinking. And I can't get sober on Bill Wilson's spiritual awakening. I have to own my own, you know, but joyously, we've been given a method to get our own spiritual awakening to fundamentally change our lives.

And uh but I I haven't been able to do that permanently. Uh but I can do it on a daily basis when I'm when I'm in the companionship and the company of people like yourself. I am more than I ever could be when I'm in your company.

I remember that Johnny Matthysse song, I am everything I ever wanted to be when I am with you. And I feel that very fundamentally with Alcoholics Anonymous, you know, um I could be generous and good when I drank, sober. I can be cheap and petty if I'm not careful.

You know, I can be engulfed by fear by uh uh an old friend for me uh be flooded with fear and um and so uh you know I take showers every day. I shampoo my hair every day. I need a place to go for emotional hygiene and that to me is my groups you know but the place itself has to be a gathering of people who are in agreement.

You know, our first tradition talks about unity and the second is that there's no authority in AA but a a group conscience. What this little container of people 8 96 of us tonight uh we are the group conscience of Alcoholics Anonymous in this moment of time and in all of our lives in this second we are it and we're only as good as we're as informed. Um, and and that we're all conscious.

Consciousness is what Alcoholics Anonymous is about. I always startle myself and my my life changed 180 degrees in one moment from someone driven to extinguish all the consciousness in his life. One moment.

And the next moment I'm in a program designed to increase consciousness. Now, if that isn't an insult to your central nervous system, there's hard to imagine anything else, you know, and I think collectively we have to become conscious of our environment. We're really environmentalists.

I have to become conscious of the of the fact my own environment, my own body, mind, and soul, what condition it's in, and what I can do to improve that environment in the context of the 12 steps. And I also think what we can do to become the most effective Alcoholics Anonymous package we can be today. You know, not only the fact that we we may last another 57 years, which is already a miracle in a critical mass of alcoholics getting and staying sober.

There's virtually no problem in this room that has not been faced and done sober. Everybody in this room is a teacher for me if I'm willing to learn. you know, and and AA's created an environment where I become willing to learn.

Um I um you know, don't don't want to lecture. I I I can get swept away, but but I uh I have an opportunity on a daily basis to be engulfed in Alcoholics Anonymous and its history. It's been an incredible gift for me.

Um, and I value it more every year. You know, I just know what each of us in our own uh own recovery has an enormous precious gift. And you don't have to go far outside to see how rare that gift is.

And you don't have to be around Alcoholics Anonymous to know how rare the gift is. Even in Alcoholics Anonymous, how rare it is to hold on to it. You know, we all have it today.

And if we stay together in the right environment and serve each other, we'll be around another 57 years. And not only will we be around, but maybe we'll be more effective at uh at carrying the message to the suffering alcoholic in the room. You know, I always thought for a long time that the u the suffering alcoholic was the new person, the brand new person.

But I've been around a long enough and I've had enough experience with my own life to know that I can be the most suffering alcoholic in the room. And um and that I need you all to to minister to me, you know, and I've I've become conscious in recent years of uh of the early times. We have several of them here tonight, people that I've known over some years, and how precious they are to me.

you know, just to see them fills my heart with a with a sanctity, with a sense that uh I'm going to be okay. I just have to keep watching my feet and doing what I've been doing up until now. And um I just want to end uh I want to uh end by uh by reading something.

You know, we we we now fill u beautiful hotels. By the way, I was drunk in this hotel. So I can't tell you much about that story, but I I sort of had a dim memory of lurching around the lobby.

Uh and in those days, it was the 60s. I was contentious of people who sat in lobbies, you know. I thought, God, don't they have anything else to do?

Now I'm happy to sit in lobbies and people watch. So you got to be careful what you hate. Uh I'm uh you know but anyway we can feel happy uh pretty hotels and uh and be attractive people.

But I just want to close by reading something and say a prayer for me before you forget. Uh and let me end by this. This came across my desk and it's a Dear Abby letter and uh dear Abby I'm a sailor in the US Navy and I'm also a cousin who belongs to Alcoholics Anonymous.

My father have my father has epilepsy and my mother has syphilis. So neither of them work. They are totally dependent on my two sisters who are prostitutes in Louisville because my only brother is serving a lifetime in prison for rape and murder.

I am in love with a street walker who operates near our base. She knows nothing of my background, but she says she loves me. We intend to get married as soon as she settles her bigamy case, which is now in court.

When I get out of the Navy, we intend to move to Detroit and open a small house. My problem, Abby, is this. In view of the fact that I intend to make this this girl my wife and to bring her into my family, should I or should I not tell her about my cousin who's an AA?

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Until next time, have a great day.