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We hope that you enjoy today's speaker. My name is Sean and I'm an alcoholic. And that's the end of the facts.

All of the rest of this stuff is my opinion. And I'm not a spokesman for Alcoholics Anonymous. I'm not an expert on alcoholism.

I don't speak for Alcoholics Anonymous. Nobody speaks for Alcoholics Anonymous. This is uh the wonderful thing about Alcoholics Anonymous is a program without dogma.

We all just share our own experience. There are no experts here. There's no popes in Alcoholics Anonymous.

Although there are a few guys kind of getting ready for the job if it ever comes open, you know, but uh so I'm just going to tell you a little bit about what it used to be like, what happened, and what it's like now. The I want to thank you for inviting me to this. I mean, this this must be this must be the center, huh?

The the mystic nights of sobriety. I've been I've been I've been looking for the cult, you know, for for a long time. And who knew they were caterers?

This is great. Can you imagine taking a newcomer? We're going to take you to a meeting.

The Mystic Knights of Sobriety. Your worst fear. This is wonderful.

I want to thank Rick for asking me and Jack for hosting me. We've been Jack uh I mean the first thing you do in Edmonton is buy cowboy boots, right? So that's where he took me and I bought some cowboy boots.

Walk around me in Vancouver. They smile at me. You must be from Alberta.

I um So this is uh 73 years. Wow. Wow.

When those two old farts met, huh? Isn't that incredible? I um I I've been I've been doing this kind of stuff um this kind of talking stuff for 24 years now.

I've been I've been what is known as like a a circuit speaker. Um it's let me tell you I know what it is. It's the least important 12step work there is.

You know uh uh you know it's real easy for me to stand here and blab and look good and get on a plane and go back to Vancouver and you act never actually see me in traffic. you know, um I had to take the honk if you're a friend of Bill W off off my bumper cuz my driving is so Oh. Anyway, um the most important 12step work of course is, you know, the stuff that that that you're doing.

You know, the one drunk talking to another while the other one pukes on your shoes. you know that that you know that one- on-one getting somebody sober, talking them through the first night, taking them to the first meeting and getting through the first couple of days. That's the most important work there is.

Um and you know there there's the the incredible thing about this is that the it's um it's not speaking, it's sharing. So there's no performance involved. And I'm only here you flew me here to talk to to share with one person in this room.

And usually you never find out who that is. Sometimes you do, but most of the time you just never know who it is. And uh so it's been a it's been a wonderful experience for me.

Um but I was um I was asked to share Founders Day a couple of years back and uh it's kind of it's kind of a weird thing founders day because you know they're selling t-shirts out of Dr. Bob's basement you know which is weird and uh and Dr. Bob must be spinning in his grave in Akran for Founders Day.

And then they had just opened the guest house uh you know where the where the two dudes met and uh Henry had a Cyberlings guest house and they just opened it up for Founders Day and and so we all went you know of course I had to see it and uh it's about as big as this this platform here this little little guest house and uh so you all had to line up you know to to get into it to go through it and while you while you're online and it It's like Disneyland, you know, it was one of those snaking lines. They had little speakers with with uh with Henrietta Cyberling's disembodied voice talking about the first meeting. I mean, it was very strange.

And but the interesting thing is is when you get into the house, you look across like three football fields of lawn and at the back of it is this huge English manor house. It looks like Hampton Court, you know, and I can just see Bill Wilson, you know, 6 months sober looking across the Whoa, we've hit it. And uh and the room that they talked in is about this big and literally it has it has room for two chairs.

They were literally knee to knee. And knowing how Bill Wilson was as far I mean Bill Wilson could have sold snowballs to Eskimos and I mean he had Dr. Bob trapped in this little room for three hour.

Dr. Bob must have would have agreed to anything. I'm sure you just get me the hell out of here with this nutcase in my face.

And uh so it was really fun to see all that kind of stuff. But 73 years, it's hard to believe that 74 years ago, guys and and and and women like like you and me couldn't couldn't have gotten sober. We had no place to go.

That's not a long time. That's not a long time. We are part of what is basically the third generation.

Those of us who have got, you know, 25 to 35 years, we're kind of the third generation of Alcoholics Anonymous, you know, and the and the third generation in any family business tends to screw it up. And uh and thank God for the traditions and thank God for the old-timers and but um we got to we got to be careful about what we're doing because we're passing it on to the fourth and fifth and sixth and seventh generation. And I think it's really important that the message is not diluted, that we understand what our signalance of purpose is, and that and that in some way we can always keep going back to the basics, the uh the basic thing of of of one drug talking to another.

Nowadays, we think a 12step call is driving somebody to a treatment center. Um, but that ain't it. It's it's me sharing my experience, strength, and hope with you.

I was born in Victoria, British Columbia and all I wanted out of that town was out. My father was a drunken sailor and my mother was a saint, you know, and uh so we you know that you know I' I've come from a large Irish Catholic family so you know alcoholism is largely unnoticed in in in our society. You know you just simply the element that we live in.

It's like goldfish trying to describe water. I mean, you know, occasionally there were the ones that had the failing. You know, he has the failing.

I had an uncle I had an uncle Joseph, a great uncle Joseph who was my aunt Mary's my great aunt Mary's brother. And he used to walk through this huge house. I've never heard him speak in the entire time.

He never said a word. He'd just walk through the house and go down the basement where he had home brew. And he would stay down there.

And uh occasionally there'd be like like gunshot sounds coming from the basement, but it was just a batch that blew up the tops, you know, that unbelievable. So anyway, you know, drinking was just something we did. I don't remember my first drink.

I I have no idea when my first drink was, but I do remember my first drunk. I was 14 years old, and uh uh by that time, you know, puberty was hitting. And I don't know about you, but I I puberty didn't feel good to me, so I skipped it.

I, you know, >> I just I just got drunk, you know, and uh and sailed through it as best I could. Um the first night I, you know, I blacked out, I threw up, and I could hardly wait to do it again. And uh I did it every chance that I could.

And by the time I was when I was 17, um I discovered the wonderful world of chemistry. Um, I started raiding my parents' um uh you know, medicine cabinets. And uh that was fun.

And uh by the time I was 18 years old, I uh I said the phrase that only an alcoholic says. And uh if you've ever said it, you're drunk. If you've ever heard somebody say it, you're listening to a drunk.

And uh that phrase is, "I can control my drinking." I said that when I was 18 years old. I had been getting drunk for four years. I had been uh I've been taking drugs for a year and I was in trouble with the chemicals.

But the idea of living without them, without something to kind of cushion what I perceived as an ever increasingly hostile world was impossible for me at that point. I had become addicted. I didn't know it.

So I started the great obsession of every abnormal drinker to control and enjoy my drinking. Now, I don't know about you, but I never got control and enjoy in the same room at the same time. Ever.

Ever. I mean, I, you know, when I was controlling my drinking, I was miserable. Yeah.

The only way I've ever enjoyed my drinking is wildly out of control. I mean, I just want you to know that I am a 3:00 a.m. Stark naked, howling at the moon drunk.

You know, that's what I am. It just, you know, I just I'm I'm noisy. I I I I I I describe myself as kind of the suicide bomber of drinking, you know, and when I when I blew myself up, I took a lot of people with me, you know, and uh I did a lot of damage to a lot of people.

You got into a lot of trouble if you had a little drinkie with me because we were liable to end up tattooed and in jail, you know. Um, but I always had this kind of, you know, this kind of sweet Irish face and I could talk my way out of more things. And I unfortunately did.

You know, if if more people had just stood back and said, "That's I'd have been here a lot sooner." But I uh but I managed to do that. I uh we our family moved to California. I went to San Francisco State University and majored in in journalism and drama.

And uh and then I u I moved to New York to become an actor. and uh uh when I was 20 years old. And by the time I was 24 years old, I I'd appeared in several Broadway shows.

I'd done some national tours. I was doing television commercials and all kinds of stuff. And I was drinking a quart of scotch a day.

And I'd picked up a little non-habit forming marijuana habit. And uh and u I was working the docks. Not the kind where the ships come in.

Doctors. I love doctors. I love doc.

They're so stupid and they're so arrogant and you know it's just perfect you know and they don't know how to say goodbye without writing something you know so if you give them the right symptoms they'll write what you want so I the one of my first investments was a physician's desk reference so I you know went through all the meds and and and figured out you know you know my god I suffered from fatigue I suffered from insomnia I suffered from weight problems I suffered from underweight. I suffered from whatever I could and uh and I went and talked to all three of my doctors and they all three gave me prescriptions and then we'd meet for for drinks and swap pills. Here, you want to try pink one?

Let me have one of your yellow ones. Let's see what that one does. You know, >> so um I was uh I was in pretty bad shape.

So, by the time I was in my mid20s, I was starting to go to moral superiors for help. I don't know if you did that. But I went to doctors and psychiatrists and psychologists and social workers and you know gurus and spiritualists and priests and man seniors and nuns and policemen, lawyers and judges and um and um and some of them were very earnest and knowledgeable people and they uh and they would uh you know discuss us with me what was going on and then they would make the mistake of saying this is what you should do about your problem.

Well, anybody points a finger at me, I bite it off at the knuckle, you know, and uh so I decided what I needed was a good woman and I met her at an elevator and uh we started our dance of death and eventually we ended up in AA and Alanon. Um, I was living in New York, so I took an Actor's Geographic, which is a national tour and it closed in LA and we got married and she settled down. One day she was having a sip of whatever the hell she was sipping and she said, "This is boring." And put it on the table and never drank again.

And then she noticed that I drank a lot. And let me tell you, I didn't marry a tea totler. I mean, nobody married somebody who didn't drink.

I didn't know anybody who didn't drink. She was a 10 martini. What the hell, girl?

And all of a sudden, she just stopped drinking. She didn't go through withdrawals, nothing. She wasn't an alcoholic.

And there I was way out there, way over my skis, you know, just crazy. And uh I was kind of restarting a a a career in in film and television. And in the meantime, I got a a real estate license and started selling real estate.

and uh my life was just uh tipping out of control, but I managed to accumulate a lot of stuff that didn't that so it didn't look like that's what was going on. I had a house in the Hollywood Hills. I drove a Mercedes.

I had a pretty wife and a pedigree dog and uh and a decent job and a little bit of a career and uh so things and I was well-dressed and everything looked great except that I was dying. And what was slowly dawning on me and becoming very hardrooted in the bottom pit of my gut was that I could not not drink and that and that it was pretty clear that my life was ending but I wasn't going to die. And uh that kind of that kind of despair was kind of it was kind of seeping into everything.

You could smell it on my clothes. And uh and I couldn't I couldn't go to sleep without a little something and I couldn't wake up without a little something. And I couldn't get through the day without a little something.

And I mean there were formulas and recipes and all kinds of combinations. And uh it all came crashing and burning on down on me on uh April 23rd, 1974. I uh basically I couldn't handle another Easter, you know, all that dying and hiding and yeah, that was just the eggs.

And on April 24th, I was uh I I went to work and uh it was a day at the real estate office where we had to go look at new listings and it was my turn to drive and uh I had been arrested the night before. I uh I was dressed pretty much like this only I had fingerprint ink. It's a nice touch, you know.

And uh we were driving and there was me and three and three women in my car and they started talking about drinking. There was a there was Mary uh Mary was uh about 70 years old and she was this adorable little Irish lady who uh drank uh three drinks a night. Her entire life.

Every night of her life, she drank three drinks a night. And then there was Chris who was going through a divorce and she was drinking too much. And there was Suzanne who was sitting next to me.

And Suzanne had six years of sobriety. And Suzanne was having a hell of a good time. Suzanne laughed a lot.

She made no bones about being an AA. She you know, everybody knew. And uh I thought that's a little tacky.

You know, you come I come from kind of Scottish stock, you know, and you don't discuss your medical problems with people, you know. You just don't do that. you just tough it through.

And uh so they wouldn't shut up about drinking that morning and I was uh uh the I I had be I had decided um uh a couple of years before that that hard booze was the problem. So I became a wine connoisseur. Now a wine connoisseur is a wino with a checkbook.

>> Yeah. >> And I have guzzled some of the finest French wines ever made. Good color.

Excellent bouquet. God. Um, but uh, oddly enough, about a couple of weeks before I crashed and burned, I switched to straight cheap vodka and I was on about a twoe vodka run before it all crashed and burned.

So, uh, the vodka, which leaves you breathless, um, um, was kicking out of my my liver that morning and you could smell it. You know, that that that wonderful kind of alcoholic, that that that sharp, you know, that sharp thing that no amount of cologne can cover. And uh, and Suzanne was sitting next to me and she got a whiff of it.

And uh we got back to to the uh the office and I took her aside. It was 11:00 in the morning on April 24th and I said the last phrase. I said, "I'm an alcoholic and I got 20 minutes before I go to pieces." And that was absolutely true.

And she heard the screaming and she canceled all her appointments that day and she twelled at me. She took me to her apartment. She sat me down at her dining room table.

She got out the big book. She read chapter 3, chapter 3, chapter 5 and the traditions. And I thought, "That woman's going to read that entire book to me." I And then she told me her story.

Now, mine was sleazy, but hers was disgusting. I mean, whoa. Ooh.

But that that that first glimmer happened, I thought, "My god, if she can not drink, maybe I got a shot at it." And she said, "Uh, do you believe in God?" And I said, "I suppose so." And she said, 'Th that's good enough. She said, "Uh, you think you cannot drink for the rest of the day?" I said, "Of course." And then I immediately thought, "Oh my god, what did I say?" So she said, "Fine, let's go to your place." So, we jumped into her car and we went to my place and she poured out all the booze down the kitchen sink. Now, I had explained to her that drinking was the problem, but I had psychological problems and so I needed medications.

You know, I and uh she said, "Listen, honey, in Southern California, we describe uh sobriety as clean and sober." And I said, "What exactly does that mean?" She said, ' That means we don't uh drink any alcohol and we don't take any self-administered mind altering chemicals that affect us from the neck up. I was real disappointed at that news. And uh so she not only cleared out my uh my booze cabinet, she cleared out the medicine cabinet.

A great huge cardboard box of prescription medicines and a big bag of grass and some other things went out into the trunk of her car. She said, "I'll take care of this, honey." So, I couldn't I couldn't go back to the garbage can and go through it, you know. So, uh she took me to my first meeting and it was exactly as I was afraid it was going to be.

It was in a church basement. It was filled with smoke and all those people I never would have drank with were there, you know? I mean, you I mean, and it must have been a slow night for newcomers cuz they're real pleased to see me just hi, you know.

It was like being dropped into a shark tank, you know? I' never seen so many teeth coming at me in my entire life. And he shook my hand and he wouldn't let go.

Have you noticed that? They don't let go. You know, they hang on to you and then they lean in and say weird stuff to you that makes no sense at all.

You know, keep coming back. First things first, one day at a time. It's like being stoned to death with fridge magnets.

Jesus. And then you touched you were touching you. Oh my god.

But you know, an odd thing happened at that first meeting. A thing that I mistook for a long time. I thought I fell in love with Alcoholics Anonymous the first night that I was sober.

And that's not true. I've always mislabeled my emotions. What did happen at that first meeting was that I felt safe.

I felt safe for the first time in a very very long time in my life. I started listening to the meeting and I, you know, the meeting had that same buzz that was that that this one had as everybody was coming in here to dinner, you know, and everybody was talking, nobody listening, you know, and you know that buzz that that thing, you know, cuz we're all adrenaline junkies, you know. And so I mean that buzz in the rooms was just electric to me and uh I loved it.

And um and then they had a couple of speakers. Now meetings in this was in Hollywood, California. Now meetings meetings in Hollywood are huge.

The first three meetings I went to were 400 500 people each. They were like one day conferences. That was that all the meetings were like that.

They were huge meetings and they were all speaker meetings. And so the speakers got up and started talking and they would tell their you know their whole story their whole lives. So you got a whole I mean I just started identifying like crazy and uh and gradually what started to happen is when I got up enough courage to tell you who I was.

You never ever said this is what you should do. What you said was I know how you feel. Well as soon as somebody says that to me it dampens down the anxiety enough that I can listen.

See, I got a listening problem. I got a hearing problem. I don't hear what you're saying.

I've always had that problem. And uh but as soon as you said that, I could I could calm down enough. And then you never said, "This is what you should do." You said, "This is what I've done.

This is what I've done." And I could take that. I could take it because it was your own personal experience. So it was true.

It may be more true for you than it was for me, but it was true and I couldn't I couldn't deny it. So, it was incredibly powerful that that sharing right from, you know, from where you came from. And uh I remember I I mean, my chips were a little scattered when I first got.

Now, like I said, I I arrived in at my first meeting dressed like this, except more expensive. I had on a $250 This is 1974. I had a $250 sports jacket from Saks Fth Avenue.

I had a Italian loafers, French gabarddine slacks, a designer tie. I looked fabulous in my first day, Amy. I did, but there were a couple of things that were going on that I wasn't aware of.

One of them was I had been drinking straight vodka and I'd put on a lot of lemon lime cologne to cover it. And I smelled like a gimlet, you know. And then I had newcomer eyes.

Now the only other place you see eyes like that other than on a newcomer in Alcoholics Anonymous is on a dog loose on a freeway. You know, I was just like cuz I didn't know what you were going to do. You know, I didn't know.

I had, you know, despite the fact that she had explained everything that was going to go on, I I knew there was going to be a song, you know, that we probably were going to have to learn a song and there's probably going to be like uniforms, but you know, like like navy blue work shirts and navy blue work pants. and we'd we'd we'd talk about sobriety and then we'd break up into small groups with literature and go out to bars and give it out like you know I yeah I was I you know and and there might be hats too there might be hats or a secret handshake and you know I was so desperate that if that was true I'd have done it I'd have done it was so desperate alcohol and drugs had made me sweetly reasonable you Um, I was dangerous because whatever you told me to do, I did. And so he had to be real specific, real careful with me.

Uh, my sponsor I found the first night that I was sober and he started shoving the 12 steps down my throat. I didn't get to study them. I didn't go to didn't get to go to step study groups or anything.

I just took them, you know, and uh and so we started right off the bat. And uh, man, it was uh it was weird. I'd come home from a meeting and and my Alanon would say, "Okay, uh she went to Alanon 6 days after I got sober and has been there ever since." And uh she uh she would say, "What did the speaker say?" And I go, "Now, I'd just been listening to somebody for 3/4 of an hour and I couldn't remember one thing that they said." Slowly but surely, if I could remember one thing, it was a huge victory.

I could hardly wait to get home, you know. So, I got my sponsor. He started the steps and I was assigned a new best friend and my new best friend was Rich.

and Rich uh could not drive and could not talk and I had a car and couldn't shut up. So, and my sponsor sponsored him so we were now new best friends. He had 6 months of sobriety which gave him the right to say anything he wanted to me but if I commented in any way on him he would say don't take my inventory.

It was just charming. Now the first three steps were not a huge thing for me. I I mean the the the first step, you know, I could not not drink.

My life was over. I was not going to die. I mean, so the the unmanageability of it was, you know, my life was unmanageable.

My life was dribbling down my sleeve. I mean, I had the fingerprinting. You can't get that stuff off.

Have you noticed that? Am I in the right room? I always look for the head noders, you know.

I thought those were the ones with brain damage, the ones, you know, but those are the guys who would save my life cuz I'd float something like that, you know, and somebody go and I go, "Oh, thank God." You know, I'm not I'm not the only one I we had a men's we had a men's group in Hollywood that met in a park and and there was a lot of stuff going on in that park, a lot of drug deals. And and one day we were standing outside. I still smoked at that time.

We were all standing outside the room smoking. We're kind of looking into the parking lot and and this this police car was out there and they had this kid. He must have been 18 years old and doing some drug stuff, you know, and they slammed him over the back of the over the back of the the uh police car and they wrenched his hands back and they snacked on those those uh those handcuffs, you know, and you could hear it.

You could hear the snack of those things. And I look down this line and there's like 30 guys going my kind of guys. So I mean the first step please you know and uh the second step was can you believe that a power graded me could you know restore me to sanity?

that was that power graded meat kind of thing was getting kind of perilously close to God, you know, that God thing. And uh so my sponsor explained to me that somebody with 20 minutes more sobriety than me was a power greater than me. The big book was a power greater than me.

The room full of drunks was a power greater than me. You know, there were tons of powers greater than me. So just relax and uh and uh keep my mind open.

So I did. And uh restoring to sanity was a little difficult. See, I'm a nice upper middle class drunk.

We don't go to funny farms. We don't do rubber rooms and paper slippers and no doorork knobs on this side. We go to therapists and talk about stress and uh and they give us meds if you tell them the right stuff.

And uh so I you know and I was going to I was going to meeting in Hollywood. I mean, you know, I mean, if you want insanity, you know that, you know, some of those stories were incredible, you know, and I was a perer as far as that goes. But I had to pick Rich up for a for a meeting.

We used to go to a meeting on Friday night in Beverly Hills. It was a very spiffy meeting. And uh and you had to dress real nice and and look good.

You know, looking good was important. I'd rather look good than feel good usually. And uh so um so we were getting ready.

I had to go pick him up cuz he couldn't drive. And we had big hair in the 70s, really big hair. And uh and uh so and and Rich, unfortunately, was follically challenged.

He, you know, and uh so it took him a while to get the big hair look, you know, he had to he had to kind of tease it all forward and spray it and then kind of bend it back, you know, get that Peter Lford hair hat look, you know. And uh so he was doing that and he had a big old medical dictionary. And so I flipped it open.

And I decided to look up a definition of insanity. What else do you do? You know, so I looked it up and it was a huge long definition, a medical definition.

But out of the middle of it popped a phrase that enable me to take the second step. And this is it. It's a medical definition of insanity.

Quote, "A seeming inability to learn from one's mistakes." Let me run that by you one more time. a seeming inability to learn from one's mistakes. Wham!

Nailed. Nailed. You know, my entire life was slamming into the same brick wall over and over and over again.

And I never bothered to look at how I got there. All I was concerned with was getting the hell out of there. My philosophy of life was a moving target is harder to hit, you know?

So, I never identified the causes and conditions that brought me to the place that I was in. And uh that clinically made me insane. So, I'm in the second step.

Bam. I was there. Then came the third step.

Made a decision to turn my will and my life over to God as I understand God. I was raised an Irish Catholic as opposed to a Roman Catholic. And uh ours our ours involves a great deal more wine, you know.

Um and uh so I went to uh St. Louis College in Victoria for 12 years. The Christian Brothers of Ireland.

Not very brotherly and not very Christian. And uh I was taught how to be a man by men who had given it up. And uh they taught us learning by strapping us regularly uh lining us up in cold places and beating the hell out of us.

It was a wonderful way to learn and u I was listening to you know today about what's going on and I was listening to some of the descriptions of conditions that that were going on in residential school. I said, "When are they going to apologize to those of us who went to Catholic schools for God's sake, you know?" So anyway, my idea of God, which they taught me, which is probably not what they taught me because I told you I don't hear stuff, right? Was this big old dude with a beard who had a book who was writing down everything that I did or was thinking of doing.

I mean, you couldn't get away with anything. If you thought about it, it went down in the book. And I was a thinker.

And uh and because of that, I was going to be condemned to eternal fires while devils flayed my skin off with whips. But he loved me. I had trouble with that concept.

You know, I I couldn't quite make it work, you know. Now, that may not be what they taught me, but that's what I heard. So I largely abandoned that you know that concept in that church by the time I by the time I arrived in Alcoholics Anonymous my spiritual life consisted of the two alcoholic prayers.

The first one is dear God get me out of this and I will never do it again. And the second alcoholic prayer is that was my spiritual life you know. So here I am faced with the third step.

you know, God as I understand God. Now, I re, you know, I thought in order to take the third step, you had to get a handle on this God thing. You know, you had to, you know, had to figure out something.

Uh, but what it was explained to me was that it was the the big word in the third step is made a decision. A decision. The third step is a decision.

And this is how I relate that decision. If I decide I want to live in a new house, I don't have the keys. What I do is I have to get a newspaper or go online and find a realtor and tell the realtor what I want and we go look at a bunch of houses and eventually we find a house that we like and we make an offer and there's a counter offer, another offer, and we eventually agree.

And then I got to go to the bank and get a loan. Then there's the deed search and there's insurance and there's all kinds of preparations, moving vans and all kinds of stuff. And what happens is I made that decision, but there's a number of steps to the point where I eventually get the key to the house.

And that's what the third step is. The third step is I made a decision not necessarily to understand God. What my search has been is to accept God, but to live my life based on spiritual principles.

What are those spiritual principles? They're the next steps. They're all those steps that follow.

Thank God they didn't tell me that was what it was because it would have scared the hell out of me. So, what I did was I said, "Okay, I'm I'm I'm going to keep it open here and I'll I'll I'll I'll buy this thing. Rich and I decided that we were going to get spiritual." And uh so uh this is this is keen alcoholic thinking.

We went to a midnight candlelight meeting in the middle of Hollywood at Lassienica and Robertson. Now, it was the craziest meeting on the face of the planet. Uh, there were about 50 people in this room and there were two candles in the center and so they would say, "George is going to read chapter 5." So, George would kind of crash to the the and get it and then he'd get down by the by the candle and go, "Rarely have we seen a person?" And I'd get the giggles.

And then as soon as I got the giggles, Rich would get the giggles. And it was like giggling in church. You know, it was that awful thing where we were really trying to be and then and then these disembodied voices would talk about spirituality in AA, you know, actresses talking about, you know, being kidnapped by aliens.

And I mean, it was nuts. And so we tried everything because we really try to get this thing. And so we wouldn't sit together and I'd sit on this side of the room and Rich would sit over there and then George would come to read chapter 5 and I'd hear him and then I'd start to go and then we we'd get everybody going cuz we you know cuz it was pretty funny.

So eventually u the secretary suggested that we find a more suitable meeting. So I'm one of the few people that's ever been asked to leave a an AA meeting for giggling. Okay.

So anyway, I I proceeded almost immediately to the fourth step because that little son of a of a sponsor of mine turned on me and said I was 3 weeks sober and said, "You have three weeks to do your fourth step." And he gave me a date when we were going to do my fifth step. No, I didn't know that you couldn't do your fourth step when you were 3 weeks sober. That it didn't have, you know, breadth and scope and would make a miniseries, you know.

Um, so I did mine and uh it was nine pages of garbage and uh um you know and I did as fearless and thorough and everything else and and and I said, "How do you start?" And he said, "You get a blank piece of paper and you sit for 20 minutes in front of it every night." And I did that, you know, I did that. And some days I'd write three or four pages. Sometimes I'd write nothing.

And you know, but I did it. And three weeks later I sat down with him and did my fifth step. Now, there's a lot of stuff in the big book that talks about, you know, going to a priest or a monk or the Daly Lama or somebody to do your fifth step.

And and that was probably true in the in the at the beginning 73 years ago. I mean, there wasn't anybody who was sober for God's sake. I mean, you know, Bill Wilson wrote wrote the big book and talked about the first 100 people.

Well, there weren't 100 people. It was 40 people that he wrote the big book about. I mean, he was a salesman.

And uh um so I mean there wasn't anybody to take a fifth step with you know when they were new. So unfortunately that's gotten kind of landlocked in some areas. And uh I have a desperate need to be known.

I have been an outlaw and an alien and an unwelcome guest and a stranger all my life, you know, and I've had this I I I I just wanted somebody to know me. And uh and so I did my fifth step with my sponsor. I wanted to take a blind nun up the Amazon and do my fifth step and shoot her.

Um you know, but I needed to be known. And so I um I um I did it with this guy. I did it with this guy that I'd known for six weeks.

And that's not my way of doing things, you know. I didn't know him at all. And here I am spilling my guts.

And uh and an almost immediate thing happened in our relationship. First of all, the phone calls went from a half an hour to 10 minutes cuz I didn't have to keep doing the backstory every time I talked to him cuz he had all the information. And he also pointed out some causes and conditions in my life.

He started connecting dots for me in my life. And I finally had somebody in my life who knew me. And almost immediately, he started using the information.

He come over to me and say, 'You got to go talk to that guy over there in the corner because he's going through a problem that you've been through. I said, 'W wait a minute, did you tell him?' He said, 'N no, you've just got the same experience. Go talk to him.

And almost immediately, I I got to see that that my deepest, darkest secrets, the things that I was going to my grave with were now valuable, that they literally could save people's lives. Just to know that there was somebody else in the room that had gone through it, who was sober, were surviving, was doing well. You know, those kind of things were the were the miracles in a for me.

So we almost we started almost immediately on the fifth on the sixth and seventh steps and uh you know I wrote down a list of you know we talked and it became fairly evident what my list of shortcomings and defects of character were and and what I do with the guys that I sponsor now is when when we get to that point and we write all those things down what I do is I make them make them sit down and do a list of the opposites of those defects of characters and shortcomings. I want a list of what what would what would be the opposite to those things. And when we got that list, we say, "Okay, now we got some life goals.

Now we got a way now we got some things to shoot for. This is who you could be. You could be the opposite of who you are." Because Suzanne said something that first day that that dragged me into AA like a carrot in front of a donkey.

She looked at me at one point and said, "You know, if you stay sober and work the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, it'll be possible for you to make a 180 degree turn as a human being." And I hated every square inch of myself. The idea of being somebody totally different was dazzling to me. And I came in here wishing to God that that would happen.

And in a lot of areas that has happened. There's still some sticky points, but um there's a lot of that stuff. So, what I do what I do for myself and what I do for the guys that I sponsor is make them look at what the opposite of those shortcomings and and defects of character are.

And then came the eighth step. Now, I had, you know, writing a list of people that I'd harmed. Now, my my my sponsor pointed out that that's people I had harmed, not people that I had annoyed, you know, because that list would be endless.

People I had actually harmed. And so we did that list and and he added some and he took some off. I mean, there's this lunacy at AA these days that I put my own name at the top of the list.

Uh-uh. No, no, no, no, no. There's a whole lot of work that goes into this thing before you get to forgive yourself.

And uh and so uh we did the list and I started on the ninth step. Oh man, did I hate the ninth step. Did I hate Oh, now the ninth step is about making amends.

It's not about apologizing because if it was about apologizing, it would have been a piece of cake. Cuz I am a world class apologizer. If there was an Olympic event for apologizing, I would be a gold medal winner.

You know, I'm the kind of apologizer that if I stole 500 bucks from you and came to do an amends to you, an apology, I'd walk out with another 500. You know, but amends is a different thing. Amens is I got to go to you and say okay I need to talk to you face to face and we get face to face emails are so much easier anyway face to face sit down and say listen as far as I remember this is what happened and this is my part in it and I want to I want to set that right somehow is there something we can do to make that right and I also want to assure you that I am never going to do that again as long as I live and you can watch me if you But I make that pledge to you that I will never do it to you or to anybody else again.

That's some heavy duty stuff. And I got to tell you, in the time that I've been sober, I've sponsored a whole lot of guys. And the ones that go out again are the ones who don't do the ninth step.

The ones who refuse to make it right. The ones who refuse to take because the ninth step is I take responsibility for my condition. It is not my parents' fault.

It's not the Christian Brothers of Ireland. It's not anything. It's not my chosen profession.

It's not the people who murdered or slighted me. I am utterly responsible for my condition. I am utterly responsible for being an alcoholic.

My father, who was an alcoholic, never suggested that I drink a quart of scotch a day. No doctor that I ever went to said, "Here's a prescription. Why don't you abuse this?" Those were my ideas.

Those were my solutions to my problems. I can blame nobody. I am not a victim in alcoholics as far as alcoholism.

I am a volunteer, an eager volunteer, you know. And so what I got to do is I got to stand up and tell you that I have done damage to you and I'm willing to make it right no matter what it takes. And the guys who don't generally drink again.

It's amazing. It's amazing what I when they come crawling back and say, "How are you doing on the ninth step? M you know and I got to tell you about halfway through it literally those promises started coming true.

You know those promises that they read those are not fairy tales that started coming true. I started feeling not better than or less than. I started feeling like I wasn't a stranger.

I started feeling like I wasn't an alien and an unwelcome guest. I was starting to feel like I belong here you know that it was okay for me to walk through this life. And uh the ninth step was miraculous for me.

And then come the 10th and 11th and 12th step. Now, the 10th step, Irish Catholic, you know, if I on a daily basis, if I go over and say, "What did I do right? And what did I do wrong?" I beat the hell out of myself for what I did wrong.

And I was doing this and I was talking to my sponsor and he finally said, "Look, we got to find another way to do this." So, what we came up with is I go through my day on on a daily basis at the end of the day and I say, "What did I do today that I approve of? And what did I do today that I don't approve of?" And the stuff that I don't approve of, I set out to change. the stuff that I approve of.

I thank God for having the insight to do that do it right and then I let it go and uh that's kept me in pretty goodstead. It's kept me in pretty goodstead. Um the 11th step is thought thought through prayer and meditation.

Now I know about meditation. I'm a child of the 60s. You know, you light up a big doobie and you listen to some satar music and meditate.

You know, Rich and I in our spiritual quest uh at one point were in danger of being crushed to death by falling book cases full of spiritual literature, you know. Oh god, we were in everything. And uh and I kept trying to meditate, but I'm a busy boy, you know.

I am a busy busy guy. I got this head full of you know, I came here. You know, the wonderful thing about us is, you know, we all they don't get us out there completely.

I mean, they think we're terrific, but they don't get us, you know, they they they they they don't want us to be just alcoholic. They want us to be some kind of medical thing that they can they can fix, you know. Well, you know, I came here with a committee talking in my head, you know.

Now, if I, you know, any doctor with any knowledge of alcoholism or any ethics, which is a rare combo, um, uh, knows that you can't double diagnose an alcoholic in the first 6 months of sobriety. I was crazier than I'd ever been in my entire life when I was 6 months sober. I was just, I mean, if I talked to a professional, they'd have put me away forever, you know, but I'd go to an a meeting and talk about it.

Somebody go, "Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, you just keep coming back, kid.

Don't drink the rest of the day. You'll be all right. Will they ever shut up?

Oh, yeah. Incredible. Six months sober, I was on six months so I would The only thing that I could think of to stop the stop the the voices was I would I would pull my car out on the on the uh on the Hollywood freeway and uh and scream.

I'd just drive at 70 mph and scream, you know, driving down the freeway, you know, to get them to shut up. You do what you can, you know. So anyway, the meditation thing has always been difficult for me until well the last several years.

I found a meditation that has really been wonderful for me and and if you're having trouble with it, maybe it'll help you. It is a it's from the other big book and uh and the ph it's a phrase that I concentrate on. I break it down word by word and it is be still and know that I am God.

And what I do is I sit in a comfortable chair. I don't lie down because that's called napping. And uh and I which I'd much rather do than meditate.

And uh and uh so I um I want you to know that I talk a better program than I work. I just want you to know that. I mean, we all give ourselves hope, you know, and sometimes we're giving ourselves hope, you know.

Um I I hope the gap isn't too big, you know, but sometimes sometimes I'm a stunning example of Alcoholics Anonymous. I mean, sometimes I just shimmer with sobriety. You know, you could introduce me to your mother, you know.

Mom, here's a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. Yeah. And other days, I don't drink.

It's about as good as it gets. You know, in those days when I'd like to check into a facility and take a lot of thorazine and make a wallet just sounds like heaven to me some days. Unfortunately, I've been stark staring sober out here for 34 years or whatever it is.

Anyway, I uh so I I take that phrase be still and know that I am God and I break it down and and and be be means just be. Just, you know, allow whatever is going on in the world, the noise from the other apartment, my stomach gurgling, the traffic, whatever. Be and then be still, which is just stop.

Just stop and allow myself to concentrate on breathing in and out. Be still and know. And what I do is I I imagine my head and my feet opening up so that I'm embracing the earth and the universe and everything around me.

Be still and know that just and just allow myself to float in that. Be still and know that I am. And what that is is that that's that's that voice.

That's that voice that sits right behind my breast bone. Oh, I got some nods on that. Right behind my breast bone.

that voice that I've been ignoring and overriding and telling to shut up my entire life. And it's that voice that has always been right. It has never told me what to do.

It has always told me, it has always cautioned me. It has always said, "Consider, think, take this easy. Let's do one day at a time.

Keep it simple. Stay where your hands are." That voice, be still and know that I am. And then it identifies itself.

Be still and know that I am God. Because I believe what we're carrying around is a little microchip of God in us. It's what the nuns used to call the soul.

They probably still do. I didn't hear it. But what it is is the thing that connects me to you and you and you and you.

And when we all connect, then it connects to a power far greater than ourselves. This enormous power. And uh and so that's what I do on a daily basis.

And then comes the 12th step. having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps. I didn't want a spiritual awakening.

I wanted a spiritual event, you know, I wanted a burning bush or the wind blowing up my ass like Bill Wilson, you know, just woo, you know, something that would slam me to my knees. Yes. You know, hasn't happened in the first 34 years.

Um but I did stumble on the spiritual experience the appendix part two in the big book that describes me precisely that mine has been a slow awakening that mine that people noticed changes in me long before I noticed them myself that I it was a slow acceptance and and the ability to do to uh to develop a god consciousness uh and and what has happened now is that I have a deep and profound uh relationship with a power greater than me that's none of your business, you know, and uh it it's that personal to me. I um I I I found it, oddly enough, in the in the in the writings of Einstein. I love throwing that out.

It sounds like I kind of regularly read Einstein. And yeah, I was thumbming through Einstein the other day. Einstein was a fairly bright fellow, as you know, and uh and he was in contact with a whole lot of other fairly bright people of his time.

And in his diaries he wrote that all the all the all the scientists and all the philosophers and all the artists and all the people that he knew were that were considered geniuses in their field. All of them would admit that at the very very very furthest extent that man could take any form of knowledge just beyond that seemed to be a benign intelligence. And I love the idea of a benign intelligence.

I just love that there's something just kind of keeping this thing rolling along, you know, and so that's that's helped me do that. Try to carry this message to alcoholics who still suffer. And uh I um I do that I we were we were talking uh at lunch.

I I haven't been on a 12step call in years, in years. In years. Um, you know, Canada with socialized medicine, everybody thinks you have to go to treatment to get sober.

You know, I'm I'm one of those ones that shook it out in the rooms. I'm one of those ones, you know, was a little quick when I arrived here. I detoxed in these rooms with you guys.

You gave me half a cup of coffee. They would never give me a full cup of coffee cuz I was lethal, you know. you know, and but I was always well-dressed, you know, and uh cuz I was always coming from work.

I went to my first day a meeting and went to work the next day, you know, and uh I was about five, four or five days sober and they asked me to read chapter 5 and I got up and read it and I sat down and the and the chair of the meeting said that that was the first time she had ever heard it read in one breath. a little speedy and uh Oh god. When I'm I hate I'm sorry.

I hate to do this. You know, it's kind kind of that old fart thing, you know. We used to walk 50 miles through the snow to go to an AA meeting, you know.

Um but people used to have grandma seizures in AA meetings. You know, they were kind of interesting. You know, somebody be like me would be up here talking away and somebody over there would go and flip down on the floor and then somebody would just stick a wallet in his mouth and call the ambulance, you know, and the guy the guy would just keep talking and you know, everybody would just keep it just kept going, you know, and uh but it was a wonderful opportunity cuz you were sitting next to your sponsor, he would go, you keep drinking, that'll happen to you, you know.

So, I'm deeply grateful to all the guys who had grandma seizures because they kept me sober one more day, you know. It was just incredible, you know. Um I I I got to go on a 12step call when I was 9 months sober and I went with Rich.

He had over a year by then, so he was qualified. He was qualified. So, the two of us in in LA, you always two guy, you always went in pairs cuz you never knew what you were going to find in those apartments.

And uh so um we were going to and we stopped by my sponsor's place and uh I said ah you and my sponsor said you know there's a difference between carrying the message and spreading the disease. So I I did what I do on on 12step calls. I I washed the guy's dishes and I vacuumed his apartment and I cleaned up and while, you know, put out the garbage while Rich was laying the the program on the poor guy, you know, and then, you know, and then I then we we we'd take those guys and we'd take them home, put them on our sofas and take them to meetings and stick with them, you know, because we detox.

I I one of the first one of the first ones I did, LA County Hospital would not take alcoholics. Um they they just would not take alcoholic. So I took this guy who was dead drunk.

I mean whoa was he drunk. And I took him to LA County and they wouldn't take him. So I took him back out in the parking lot and stomped on his foot and broke his toe and took him back in.

Said he's got a broken toe. So they had to take him. He didn't feel it, you know.

But we eagerly awaited those opportunities. One guy talking to another trying to get, you know, try to get sober. It was And I mean, your whole body is electric when you're doing that.

I mean, you and you, you know, every ounce of program that you've got is just right there, you know, just trying to keep this guy from dying on you. And uh about a couple of years ago, couple of years ago, at 3:00 in the morning, I got a phone call in Vancouver and it was the answering service from Vancouver Central Office. And the woman the the woman who who was the operator was really upset and she said, "Can you take a call?" I think her name was Mary.

Could you take a call from Mary? And I said, "Yeah." And she said, "I have called 18 people and no one would talk to her." And I said, she said, "I've got her on hold." I said, "Put her on. Put her on right now.

Put her on right now." And I waited a second and the operator came back on and said, "I've lost her." I'll never forget the sound of her voice. I've lost her. I've lost her.

That's our responsibility. I hope Mary got sober, but 18 people were too busy or too tired or had no experience with doing it. You know, who passed it off?

Who passed it off and the responsibility statement I am responsible? And then to practice these principles in all our affairs. O H.

It's real easy to look good and talk good and act good in these rooms, but you got to take it out of these rooms. We got to take it back to our bedrooms. We got to take it back to our living rooms.

We got to take it back to our workplace. We got to take it back to our community. We got to take it back to our kids.

We got to take it out there because that's the best 12step work there is. I got to be president of the Chamber of Commerce in West Vancouver for a while. And uh you know I'd be sitting at some nice dinner party, you know, the guy next to me be belting back his sixth glass of wine and this happened.

Guy said, "Man, wish I could quit doing this." I said, "Oh, yeah. I know how you feel." He said, "Well, you don't drink." See, I'm in my community, I'm known as a guy who doesn't drink. I'm not known as a guy who can't drink.

I'm known as a guy who doesn't drink. He said, "Well, you don't drink." I said, "No, I don't." He said, "Well, did you?" Oh, yeah. a lot.

Oh, yeah. For a long time. Oh, yeah.

So, well, how how'd you stop? I said, "Well, I'm an alcoholic. I go to AA.

You want to go?" And the wonderful thing is the guy's jaw drops. He goes, "You're an alcoholic?" Whoa. Whoa.

That's the best thing we've done when they when they have no idea that we're drunk. when they have no idea. That's fabulous.

You got them. You know, it's fantastic. Now, I want to tell you how terrific I am at working this program.

I don't know how many of you have been to Vancouver, but when you're going through central going through uh Stanley Park, four lanes of traffic merge into like one or two lanes. It's a wonder to watch. people from California come and take pictures of it.

They can't believe it, you know, but they we're Canadians. We know how to line up, you know, and you merge, you know, you you go, you know, one car in front of the other. Everybody knows, you know, now I have I I have to tell you that I um I have a problem with with small, skinny blonde ladies in large black SUVs.

I don't know why. I don't know. They just make me crazy.

I don't know why. And uh so I'm I'm going I'm going through Stanley Park and I'm you know and I'm driving my little car, my little it was a Honda at that time driving my little Honda and right next to me is this giant SUV with a little skinny blonde lady and she's talking on the cell phone. She's got a latte in one hand.

I don't know how the hell she's driving this thing, you know, with her skinny little knees, I guess. And uh and so she's driving away and you know we're coming up to merge time. No, it's my turn.

And I want to tell you, there's nothing more terrifying than an alcoholic who's right coming up. And she's talking to her manicurist, I guess, and and she won't move. And I'm right.

It's my turn. So, I roll down my window. I give her the international sign, you know, have to reach up so she can see me because she's and finally she went, you know, and let me go in.

And that's when I said, "Thank God I took the honk if you're a friend of Bill W bumper sticker off, you know, cuz I was a stunning example of alcoholic synonyms at that moment, you know. Man, such a jerk. So, I mean, I am stunned at my amount of sobriety that I can be instantly a jerk.

I mean, just boom, you know, it's just incredible to me. I thought by the, you know, I keep hoping that, you know, you go to enough meetings, you sponsor enough guys, you mop enough floors, you make enough coffee, you, you know, you serve as a gsr long enough, you do all that stuff that you get to reach a plateau, you know, like kind of pull out a lawn chair and quit trying so hard, you know, kick back. Well, no plateaus in the first 34 years.

That's all I can tell you. I still need to go. Honest to God, if I don't go to a couple of meetings a week, you know what happens is I just shift.

I just get over here. Nothing that you'll notice if you don't know me, but I just You start to bother me. you know, you just you just start to annoy me, you know.

So, I keep going, you know, I keep going. I keep going to hear stuff. I keep going to hear like this 15-year-old kid got up to take her first year cake and said, "My sponsor told me to be where my hands are." Now, I've been talking to guys for years about staying in the now.

Staying in the now. And I found a phrase that said it like that. Boom.

Just you can't get in trouble if you're any if if you stay where your hands are. I mean, if you're right here, you can't get into trouble, you know. Um, so anyway, my life has been up and down.

I want you to tell I want you to know that I got sober and life has just been a piece of cake since then. It's been a series of miracles and I just love it. I've been rich and I've been poor.

I prefer the problems of being rich, the problems of being poor. They all got problems, you know. Being rich doesn't fix you or protect you.

Being poor still sucks. Um, I've had business failures and huge successes and done incredibly creative stuff and just had financial disasters and I mean it has just been what it is. It's been a real life.

I mean, I've I've skin cancer, heart attack, you know, all all the all this stuff, you know, every everything and and and great times and and you know, just just unbelievable. But it's I'm tiring. I wear people out.

I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm exhausting. And uh so a couple of years ago, me and the Allen got a divorce. And uh we uh we decided not to wait until the children were dead.

And uh we just kind of looked at each other at one point and said, you know, >> why are we doing this? I mean, we don't need to do this anymore. And I said, yeah, you're right.

So, uh so we split up and uh I we had been together 37 years. And uh so it's um it's been um a new thing for me. It's uh been incredible.

I uh I thought it was going to be um really kind of awful. I mean, you know, here I am, a newcomer's worst nightmare, you know, old, sober, and alone. Yeah.

And I'm loving it. I'm having a great time. I was just It's fantastic.

I mean, you know, we did it with incredible dignity. Me talking to my sponsor, her talking to her sponsor. We uh we negotiated it all, you know, with a with a an arbitrator.

We we managed to get through it with, you know, with pretty much our dignity intact and and and we certainly wish each other the very best in our lives. Uh do we have lunch frequently? No.

Um but um so I have a sponsor. I have a I have an incredible sponsor. His name is Milt.

And Milt is uh Milt Milts has Alzheimer's and uh he um uh I never get away with saying that. Um he um he was at my first meeting and he moved to to uh Vancouver uh 16 years ago and uh and he's been my sponsor ever since. And uh he's he's the man.

He's the go-to guy. And uh and now when I go there, he's he's not there. Um and it's it's tough.

We have these we have these we I take him out for a drive and we go eat lunch and we we meet for an hour and a half and we have like this looping conversation that goes you know it keeps coming back every 15 minutes it's made a complete circle but we we have you know this program is miraculous and he knows what's happening and I know you know and he's got this incredible you know I can't remember anybody's name you know I never could and uh so we'd we'd see somebody and he'd say, "I can't remember the name." I said, "I can't either." You know, and I say, "You got an excuse. You got Alzheimer's. I'm just stupid." You know, so we we laugh a lot about it.

But, uh, he and he decided a little while ago that I should date. Oh, yeah. Now, I thought, you know, he's got Alzheimer's.

He'll forget about this, you know, date. So, uh, but he gets stuck on things. He gets stuck on things.

So, he got stuck on me dating. So, he drove me crazy about it. He said, "You got to get out there and you got to, you know, you just got to, you know, start again." I said, "But, you know, but I want to be an old fart in AA.

That's what I want to be." You know, I want to be one of those old dudes. I don't know. When I when I first got somebody, you know, if you said, "Well, you know, I was watching Oprah the other day and somebody back there would say outside issue." You remember those guys?

They used Yeah, I love those. They used to scare the hell, you know, outside issue. You had to be really talk about the big book or that was it.

You know, maybe a pamphlet or two, but and then you know those old part. I spilled more of my tie than you ever drank. You know, and I've always wanted to say, "Madam, that is the ugliest baby I've ever seen." You know, I just, you know, I I just want to be one of those contankerous old farts in AA.

You know, just you know, goddamn whippers snapper new cover don't know goddamn thing. You know, so I was telling Milt that I that's what I want to do. That's what I've decided to do is become an old farta.

And he said, "No, you're going to date." So, so I was doing this project and there was this, you know, very nice lady. She was in her 50s, you know, age appropriate. And uh and uh you know, she had she was divorced and had a grown daughter and I'm divorced and have a grown daughter and and we had some business stuff that we had to discuss.

So I said, "Well, why don't we grab a sandwich?" So we grabbed a sandwich and we talked about the business stuff and then you know I walked her to her car and that you know we split the bill and ah this qualifies this qualifies. So I called Milton said I did it. I had a lunch date and I thought that would do it.

You know that and uh at 3:00 next morning she called me dead drunk >> to find out if I was interested in her. And I said, "Not at this moment, but uh but um why don't we talk in the morning?" Well, we had some business stuff in the morning. She didn't remember making the phone call, you know.

So, uh so we got to skate over that, but uh I said I said, you know, I haven't dated since 1969. You know, there was Chapa quitic, the moonwalk, and my last date. You know, that was it.

I have no idea how to date. I mean, what the hell is that? I mean, I have never dated anybody unless I was dead drunk.

My idea of a great date is somebody who drink like a pig until 3:00 in the morning and then turn into a pizza, you know? Yeah. I mean, in my ideas of dates are you come to and you're laying next to it and you don't know who it is or what it is or what you promised it or what you did with it or whether you're at its house or your house and you got to get out of there without waking it up.

You know, that's hard on a humid summer morning with a cheap vodka hangover. You know, you got to get out of there, you know, and one day you come too and it's awake and it's looking at you and you look into its eyes and realize you become it's it. So that's my dating experience, you know.

And I mean, dating these days is complicated. I mean, it is comp. I mean, you got to have doctor's reports and legal waiverss, you know, you know, who's going to get the distribution funds from the sex tape, you know, I mean, there's, you know, there's all kinds of, you know, it's complicated, you know, and uh and you know, and and I got to tell you, I mean, you know, there hasn't been a party in my pants for a long time.

I got to, you know, you know, come on. I'm I'm I'm six I'm almost 66 years old for God's sake, you know, and you know, it's kind of like Tiara Dwell Fuego. It's down there, but who cares, you know?

So, I mean, you know, if it gets up close and personal, I'm I'm in trouble, you know. Now, I haven't had any mindaltering chemicals that affect me from the neck up. So, I'm not going to mess with anything that affects me from the belt down.

You know, the little blue pills. I mean, I'm an alcoholic. You know, if one of those little blue pills works, wonder what five will do.

Woo! They find me two weeks later dead in a gutter underneath my own tent. Have to be an open casket of failure cuz I couldn't get the lid shut.

So, I've decided to become an old fart in AA. So, I discussed this with my sponsor and he thought it was probably a good idea, too. Yeah.

That's what I'm a outside issue. I like that. I'm liking that.

I'm liking that. But did you hear that? Did you hear what we just did?

Did you hear what we just did? We laugh at the bad stuff and we cry at the good stuff and we call it AA. I tell you my deepest, darkest secrets.

I tell you the stuff that I'm scared of. I tell you the stuff that I got that are reasons to drink. And you say, "I know how you feel." You laugh with me, not at me.

And some of you will probably come up and tell me what you've been doing. And that's why this thing is so attractive to me that I keep coming back. I keep coming back because this room and all the rooms like it are filled with healing, are filled with people that share their experiences absolutely from the bone and from the gristle and from the gut and from the soul and from the heart and it is intoxicating.

I'm as addicted to Alcoholics Anonymous as I ever was to anything. I keep coming back because it's worth it. I keep coming back because I give a damn and you give a damn.

I keep coming back because life doesn't stop. I keep coming back because I got problems that are probably as complicated as ones that I came in with. Different ones.

As I grow older, they get different. But life still has got challenges and hurdles and stuff we got to do together. And so it makes it worth it.

I uh there's a there's a pamphlet called a member's eye view of alcoholic synonymous. If you're new, get this pamphlet. It is an extraordinary piece of literature.

It's probably the best piece that I've ever read. It was written by a man named Alan McInness. Alan McInness died just before I got sober in Southern California.

He had a huge influence over the kind of sobriety there was in Alcoholics Anonymous at that time in 1974. what were emerging where there were three people that that that coalesed and and and and kind of affected western western uh sobriety. Uh there was Chuck C.

Chuck Chamberlain had had an extraordinary way of of easing you into the spirituality of the program. He way had a way of explaining a spiritual life that saved thousands of lives. Get his tapes, get his book, read them.

He's incredible. The other man who has the most incredible understanding of the dynamics of the disease and also the dynamics and the actions to take as far as sobriety goes is Clancy. Now Clancy is still around and you can hear him and uh he he is extraordinarily intelligent and articulate and knows exactly what he's talking about.

And the other man who understood the emotional content of sobriety was Alan McInness. And Alan McInness wrote this pamphlet. If you get a chance, read it.

I want to read something to you. You know, if you're new and you don't understand what this thing is, how it works in in southern in in the southern states in uh in Alcoholics Anonymous and you know the the like Texas and Oklahoma and all those the southern states, when somebody gets up to a podium to identify themselves, what they do is they say something like this. My name is Sean and I'm an alcoholic and by the grace of God uh the by the grace of a loving God, the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous, the 12 steps, the 12 traditions, strong sponsorship, sponsoring other people, being of service, uh it has not been necessary for me to have a drink of alcohol or to ingest any mindaltering chemicals that affect me from the neck up since April 24th, 1974.

And for that, I'm deeply grateful. And that's got the whole thing. That's the whole package.

Um, now I I just want to read you something that I like to end with because it's it's really I think it's a beautiful piece of writing and I am not a Christian. I have never uh I have never returned to uh to uh the church that I was born with. I've never returned to any kind of organized religion.

I've I've set out on a spiritual path that was largely mapped out by men and women like you. And I have found I found an enormous peace and enormous comfort and and for the an enormous acceptance of of a a power that I don't understand at all. But this this has some Christian references and if that puts your teeth on edge just uh listen with your heart.

This coming Sunday in the churches of many of us, there will be read that portion of the Gospel of Matthew, which recounts the time when John the Baptist was languishing in the prison of Herod. And hearing of the works of his cousin Jesus, he sent two of his disciples to say to him, "Art thou he who is to come, or shall we look for another?" And Christ did as he so often did. He did not answer them directly, but wanted John to decide for himself.

And so he said to the disciples, "Go and report to John what you have heard and what you have seen. The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead rise. The poor have the gospel preached to them." Back in my childhood catechism days, I was taught that the poor in this instance did not mean only the poor in a material sense, but also meant the poor in spirit.

those who burned with an inner hunger and an inner thirst and that the word gospel meant quite literally the good news. More than 34 years ago, Suzanne maneuvered me into AA. And tonight, if she were to ask me, "Tell me what did you find?" I would say to her what I say to you now.

I can tell you only what I have heard and seen. It seems the blind do see, the lame do walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead rise, and over and over again in the middle of the longest day or the darkest night, the poor in spirit have the good news told to them. God grant that it may always be so.

Thank you for my sobriety. >> Thank you for listening to Sober Sunrise. If you enjoyed today's episode, please give it a thumbs up as it will help share the message.

Until next time, have a great day.