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We hope that you enjoy today's speaker and get some idea of what you would like to have come out of this weekend. So, I live with a constant frustration. Since I awoke spiritually 35 years ago, I've been living with a sense that where I am, God is every day.

And that means that I have 35 years worth of stories to tell you of the extraordinary that occurs in the human condition when you're spiritually awake. And we've got six, eight hours of actual time on the ground here. Uh so I'd like to make it effective and my plan is always we'll just start walking through here and I'll share my experience with this with you.

But please feel free to chip in. This group is too too large to do what I normally do. If we go around and introduce each other, if that's all we do, and it never happens that way, somebody has to say something.

We're going to be here all night just making introductions. But I would like to go around if you would and get this basic information from each of you, please, for all of us. your name, whether you're alcoholic, alamman, friend, lost in the woods, or whatever it may be.

Uh, if you have a sobriety date, you might mention it. Part of that, I've already told you. The other part is that I'm conditioned to that where I come from, if you don't mention your sobriety date, you may not have one.

We just kind of like to know what's going on. And then if you have something specific you would like to see occur this weekend, why did you come here instead of being where other people are on Friday and Saturday night? Uh then I can get an idea of where we're going to go and it'll Can we do that and get it done in maybe an hour?

I'm I'm taking book. I'll give six to five odds on that. But if we start here, would you start that?

We got to know that. >> Okay, good. That I'm in the right place.

Uh, welcome, David. You know, I have problems sometimes at home when somebody won't drive 20 minutes to a meeting. David just came out from Texas.

You've been what, 28 hours on the road? >> Yeah. got stuck in Cleveland for God's sake.

So, he obviously is here to teach me something. Welcome, David. Get something to eat, take a nap, you know.

So, who are we? Uh, well, we are more than a 100 men and women who have recovered from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body. That's who we are.

Why are we here? to show other alcoholics precisely how we recovered. That's our purpose.

That's the purpose of this book and that's my purpose in life. So from the very beginning of the forward of the first edition, I have really good information to go with if I'll listen to it. When I got here, if you'd have offered me a way to learn to cope with life, I would have left you.

My my coper broke a long time ago. Uh man, coping with life killed me. It's just too tough.

Anything less than a a full new life would not have attracted me at all. Christmas night of 1967, as a result of the most thorough self-investigation I have ever subjected myself to, I discovered I had become completely useless and uh took a two-mon supply of amphetamines and shot them up my arm and drank everything in the house and laid down and died because I couldn't stand being me one more second. When I woke up the next morning, I didn't feel good.

But I believe that's when it started for me. An old way of life died. A new one started at that moment.

I didn't know it for a long time. But from that moment to this, I've not had a thought. I'm a drank or a pill or a fix.

It's over. But now I'm stuck in a very interesting place. I'm now a failure at living and a failure at dying.

I'm in a body that won't quit and has got a mind that won't work. And I'm still breathing in and out. I didn't feel very good.

The one thing my body was telling me is, "You son of a You do that again, I'll hurt you. Y'all new folks. I've been listening closely.

I'm I'm delighted we have some new folks here. Did you hear it? >> Yeah.

There's a whole new way of life here and there's the power to do it and we insist on having fun and life will not always be easy. In fact, sometimes it's a I'm really glad you're here. I need you.

>> Yeah. I'm just glad you're here. >> He won't hurt anybody.

>> If somebody back there will goep, he'll go back there and out the door. >> Now they eat bugs. >> Yeah.

This particular group has always impressed me and I get the same sense I had six years ago. We hit the ground running. I do a lot of these over the years.

I've been doing this for 27 years. And usually Friday night and part of Saturday is just trying to get gathered up into a a common purpose that's beyond thinking. And I sense already we know why we're here.

We want to be here. Uh so I've got to set aside about four hours of stuff that I usually have in my head. Let me tell you something else.

Let me plug you into the whole business here. This weekend I know of at least six of these kind of things that are going on. You are spiritual kin to hundreds and hundreds of other people.

It's going on in Seattle. It's going on in where the hell Janice go this weekend. Somewhere in the Midwest.

Uh it's going on in New York. It's going on all over the place. By this thing, I mean people are gathered together for real genuine recovery.

Now, one thing I will not offer you, I think it's the worst thing that we can offer any alcoholic is sobbriety. If that's all there is to offer, why would I stay here? The main reason I drink is because I can't stand being sober.

Meaningful sobriety, however, is a different deal. And the thing has to start with sobriety. That's where it begins.

But that is a really painful time. Have you noticed that? Ah Jesus.

Being in recovery is awful. If you're in recovery from any illness, that's a tough time. You're up moving around and you look pretty good, but everything inside hurts.

And there's new stuff. I a year ago, October, I went through some serious surgery. It wasn't supposed to be serious, but it turned out that way.

And uh the recovery period for that uh there's things I had to do very carefully for a while that I was used to just doing. Uh and so you become self-aware when you're in recovery necessarily so. And self-awareness is the major cause of psychic pain.

It causes more pain than anything I know of. And that does for me anyway. Because when I'm fully self-aware, I'm also aware that I ain't getting enough of whatever it is I'm supposed to be getting.

He's got more than I do. Where's mine? That can't be mine.

It's not big enough. It's the wrong color, wrong shape. I mean, after all, I am a prince.

Were you a prince? Yeah, I could tell. One of my early sponsors said to me, "We will assume you went insane about two seconds after birth.

Then we won't have to track all this stuff down. Good advice. He said, "We don't even think the truth's going to work for you." You take the truth into your head and your ego catches it and says something like, "Aha, I can use that later.

I can catch an edge with that somewhere down the way." Because my life from very early on was about catching an edge. Always needed an edge. So I said, "We suggest that you forget everything you think you know about anything, particularly about spiritual matters, because if any of it would have been of any use, you wouldn't be here." I was in my third penitentiary.

I only say that because that's where I was. I was never a big- time gangster. They don't ever go to the penitentiary.

They get good lawyers. I uh this is my third and it was getting to be a bad habit. Uh never did get to like it, but uh I I battled that.

I I love people who will battle with me. I said, "Come on. Surely I know some truth." He said, "It's really doubtful, but it is possible.

But I'll tell you this. If it was true before we started, it'll be true when we're through. And all of the rest of it garbage anyway.

So, set it aside. Lay it down. And by some form of grace, I was able to do that.

And to this day, I am acutely aware that if I'm willing to argue with you about something, it's my opinion because I never have to defend the truth. The truth just is. Doesn't need defended.

It just is. And uh simple little stuff. I told you that I've been doing this for 30ome years.

That doesn't mean it's because I know anything in particular that you don't. In fact, I know that I don't know anything. You don't already know.

You just don't know that. Oh, write that down. That was good.

What? Well, one of the fun things of doing this is you hear stuff you never heard before. Since I gave my will of my life to the care of God, I have been on a mission.

It's a real mission. My life work is to find people who are dying and going insane and can't find any way to stop that process. and in some way touch them in such a way that they gain enough hope that they're wanting to submit to certain simple things and as a result of that surrender they don't die and they don't go insane and their children don't go insane and their wives don't go insane.

I like that. See, I've got I've never been able to just go to work 8 to 5. Uh good lord.

I'm not the only one, am I? Can you imagine that? Get up, go someplace you don't like, spend all day with people that you don't care much for either, doing things that really you don't care much about anyway, and come home tired and cranky and go to bed.

I I I did try once. My mother came out of the depression and it was her genuine belief that a secure life would be General Motors 8 to five number of years, work your way up, get a pension and retire. And she really believed that.

And I tried to honor her once in in the middle of my alcoholism which ran about 14 active years. There were periods when I tried to break the cycle. I didn't know I was alcoholic, but I tried to break out of my behavior.

I thought the behavior was what's wrong. By the way, we're going to talk a lot about drama. Drama does not define alcoholism.

Alcohol defines alcoholism. Drama comes as a result sometimes of alcoholism, but it doesn't define it. So, anyhow, the the kids and I, we had gone through a bad time.

I had two little boys whose mother had abandoned ship a couple years before and we'd been on the road now for well the last four and a half years we were on the road. At this time we've been on the road about two years cuz I quit trying to be super straight. Just got into the subculture and ran.

I was restless, irritable, discontent. We'll get into some I love these weekends because I get to get in the details later. We had uh had the privilege of sharing the the Easter ceremony with the peyote people, the WAW in Nevada.

And I had a genuine vision. To this day, I I'll tell you it was genuine. I saw a great bird flying high and understood clearly that's me in my life flying high going nowhere.

Kept me sober four months. So, you knew people if you're thinking maybe visions might help, they're good for about four months of sobriety from my experience. Well, that's the way that was.

But it did wake me up. And we ended up in San Jose, California. And I'm really trying.

See, my my heart's desire forever more has been I want to be a good father and a good son and a good husband and a good member of my community. That's really all I want to be. I am Joe Strait in my heart and I just can't pull it off.

So I went to work for General Motors. They gave me a really important job because I am stubborn which by the way God can use. He calls it persistent.

When it's in his hands it's persistent. In my hand is stubborn. I lost his finger in a little racing accident when I was 13.

And they told me, "Oh, you'll never be able to type." Well, I can type between 60 and 90 words a minute. Just depends on because I'm stubborn. And because I could type, they gave me this really important job at General Motors.

As the line came by, the line being a bunch of cars going by, I had a little wooden cubicle with a typewriter in it, some paper. And as the car went by, I took the paper off the windshield, ran into my little office, put a piece of paper in the typewriter, and copied this paper onto this one, and then put it back on the windshield. And boy, there's a mission for you.

And by the end of the week, I'm thinking, I wonder how I could do this job if I was a little bit uh a little bit stoned. Let's slow the world down a little and see how it goes. And at that time I had access to uh some really nice marijuana.

Now understand I'm not a drug addict. I've used a lot of drugs. That does not necessarily make you a drug addict.

I liked marijuana and seldom ever used it. But this time I did. Now I was bored on that Friday.

But when I got a little bit stoned on Monday to try to do the job, I found a new dimension of bored. I mean, I was fully aware this is the most ridiculous thing I have ever done in my entire life. I wonder how it would be if I smoked a joint and had a drink.

And of course, by the end of the second week, I don't work for General Motors anymore. and we're off and running because the nature of my disease is when I start drinking, I lose control when it's over. Okay.

God bless my mother. She's still alive. She's 94 now.

Uh fine woman. My sister warned me the other day, be careful. She's got a new cane.

She has hearing aids now. And I I love her attitude. I'm gonna practice it myself.

If she's tired of listening to you, she just shuts them up. Huh? She hears better than I do.

Don't kid me. But she hears only what she wants to hear. In fact, I want to tell you a little about my family since we're going to talk a lot about alcoholism.

I'm the only alcoholic in my family as far as we know. Uh, my family drinks, but they're disgusting when they do. They leave stuff behind.

Uh, I I I'm the bartender because I'm the only one in the family that knows how to make a decent drink. So, what those few occasions when we have a party, I remember a family gathering. There were 73 people there.

Uh, because we're prolific, cut that about a half. That means there were 30 or 40 adults. We have five bottles of booze, some vodka and some whiskey and some wine and some other stuff.

And after five hours at that party, none of them was more than half empty. And a good part of the half that wasn't in the bottles anymore was still sitting on tables in half empty glasses. They're just disgusting.

Now my uncle Walt, we thought for a while he was alcoholic. He and my aunt Ruth really drank well. As I look back on it though, one thing I do recall is that Uncle Walt drunk was just Uncle Walt drunk.

There was no personality change. And he and Aunt Ruthie, they really drank. They belonged to the moose or something like that where drinking was part of it.

They just fun people. And then one day, I guess Walter must have been in his 40 or 50. Anyway, his doctor said, "Walter, if you don't stop drinking, you're going to die." And he quit.

He didn't have what it took to be an alcoholic. You got Well, you got to be tough to be an alcoholic. This isn't a game for sissies.

You got to be so tough you can sleep in gutters or on the street. You have to be tough enough to tell lies to the people you love and mean them. You got to be tough enough to steal from your children's piggy banks or do whatever is necessary to continue drinking.

It's not an easy life. You got to betray your own dreams and everybody else's dreams and live a life of terror. I mean, I'm not I did I'd never Fear is a game.

You pay 50 cents and ride a roller coaster to get scared. I like terror. lived in terror for years.

Makes you feel really alive. So, Uncle Walt quit and in his my family lives a long time. I'm stuck here for a while.

Oh, yeah. Barring some strange accident and the planet's been trying to get rid of me for years and hadn't made it yet. My uncle Walder finally died and he's I think 86 or 87, which is pretty normal.

In fact, when we buried him, I come from the kind of family that's intact. So, we have three different grave plots, graveyards, if you will, family plots for the family goes, depending on which branch of the family. And I was looking at the gravestones when we put Uncle Wald away.

85, 87, 92. Anna was 102 and there's another one at 101. My dad was 86 when he left.

Uh, mom's 94 and she isn't showing any plan signs of going anywhere. Uh, I'm stuck here. During his last year, Uncle Walt liked his whiskey and so did my mom's dad, grandpa.

And during their last year, both of them asked only one thing. They'd get a little out west. take those little jelly jars and make glasses out of when you're through and fill it up in the morning and sit all day long.

No consequences, no madness, no nothing. Just sip the whiskey all day long. That's the family I come from.

Uh we thought my youngest son was alcoholic for a while. He had this propensity for drinking a great deal and smoking a lot of marijuana. He tried very hard to be a a dealer.

He was really awful at it. He'd come home all beat up. And he's always been able to talk to me.

He'd gone down into the points to sell some dope and they beat him up and stole his wallet and his dope. Took him two or three times for he realized he's not really good at that. But he got a job one time that called for random UAS as a truck driver and he quit.

When I think of alcoholism, I think of my mother. My mother loves peppermint snobs. I mean, she really loves peppermint snobs.

And on the day when it's time, I watch her. She's cute. She gets that bottle down.

Now, I like Altoids, but can you imagine drinking that crap? She's got a tall, slim little glass that wouldn't hold enough to help anybody. And she pours it in.

I watch her little eyes dance. She's pouring it in. She's really there.

And I'm with her. That's, you know, I like people who express passion in any way whatsoever. And then she'll go like, "Ain't that disgusting?" She'll do that a couple times and then I've heard her say publicly to my embarrassment, "That's enough.

I'm beginning to feel it. My mother is not alcoholic. There's a sound that goes along with my drinking.

Also, that's the sound of relief from unbearable psychic pain. And that's what I suffer from. Incredible psychic pain.

A sense of separation. I heard some of you talk about wanting to get connected. Please don't do that.

If you get connected, you can be unconnected too. This is about coming to the awareness that where I am, God is. And it isn't about connection.

It's about consciousness. About my being aware that that is the truth. Where I am, God is.

I'm no longer a human being running around trying to have a spiritual experience. I'm a spiritual being having a human experience. And what's that's done for me is made me fully available to the human experience because it's cancels out the big fear.

I'm not going to get out of this alive anyway. Okay. Might just as well have some fun.

Okay. We are a group of people who finally we of Alcoholics Anonymous have history with each other. Apache Road man asked me one time, "Have you ever had a relationship with anyone where you just didn't burn your bridges behind you?" And he was right.

One of the reasons I felt alone is because it was just me and who I needed you to be. and I'd burn you up and run off. Well, today part of the measure of my peace is that I have history with people right there.

How long have we known each other? 20 years, something like that. >> 94.

>> Well, but we've known each other forever, but we have history since 94. And we still talk to each other. That's a big I've been married to Jackie for 26 years now.

Good grief. I didn't even do that much time. Okay.

We haven't had a fight yet, by the way. Totally unnecessary to fight with the people you love. We do not always agree.

Understand that. But we don't have to escalate it to a fight. She's right most of the time anyway, you know.

Dave, how long have we known each other? Six years. That's a long time, you know, to actually know and be friendly with people.

That was important to me. I'm a family man. In my heart, I'm a family man.

I think most of us are. That's the human condition. And aa is like a big family.

But as in any family, there's immediate family and there's kissing cousins. And I like my kissing cousins for 15, 20 minutes at a time. But I need to spend most of my time with my immediate family.

And that applies to Alcoholics Anonymous. It's why we have so many different kinds of meetings and different meetings and every one of them is completely valid. And I have to find out where I belong.

Where do I fit in? Where am I comfortable? Where where am I of most service?

Uh it's kind of like cheers. I want to go where everybody knows my name. Okay.

Sometime because the spiritual awakening means you become a missionary and you're out there in the wilderness a whole lot. Bill tells us that God wants us to be the spearhead of his ever advancing creation. Isn't that a trip?

Hey, that's where I want to be anyway. I've always wanted to be right out there on the edge. Okay, put me on the point.

Come with me, but put me on the point. Anyway, I I like to make a few inflammatory statements early on so we have something to talk about through the weekend. I have recovered from alcoholism.

I have one of we now of Alcoholics Anonymous. I no longer suffer from any of the symptoms of alcoholism. And there's only a couple of them.

We uh live in a world, an alcoholics anonymous world where we blame everything on alcoholism. Well, the symptoms are simple. I have a body that doesn't process alcohol like my mother.

When she starts to feel it, she quits. I'm drinking for the sensation. And I never know for sure what it's going to be.

But mainly I'm drinking because I don't have any choice after the first drink. Dr. Silkworth makes it very clear.

In fact, it's because of Dr. Silkworth's stuff in the big book that I discovered why I went to the penitentiary when I was 19 years old. I was in a federal penitentiary in Tokyo, Japan when I was 19, wondering what the hell happened.

This is not what I had in mind when I left home and joined the Navy. But it seems in a simple terms when when I start drinking I get lost and I can't find my way home. That that happened to any of you?

And when you're in the Navy, that's a felony. They uh I I get a 24-hour liberty and I'd be back in 28 hours or 30. And this one time I was given a 24-hour liberty.

And 23 days later when I woke up in Persian Square in Los Angeles for 22 days, I could not have gone back to that ship. I did things and was willing to do things, anything so I could keep drinking. I had to keep drinking.

There's a lot of emotional turmoil, too. But the main thing is I needed to drink and my ship was going to leave and there wouldn't be any drinking. On day 23, the madness was gone.

I woke up and turned myself in. Uh when I got back to Long Beach, the ship was gone. I had missed a ship movement to a war zone.

And that's a pretty serious crime. Now, I ran with another alcoholic. We're not dumb.

We are resourceful if anything. This kid from Appleton, Wisconsin, another drunk I ran with, within a week had us on what they called prisoner at large status, which meant I was in charge of me and he was in charge of he. We were both prisoner and guard at the same time with orders to report to the ship's docking station in Yakusa, Japan, as soon as they arrived.

So, we got on a Panama Clipper, flew over the ship on its on its way, and we got to Japan three weeks before they showed up. So, we got away from that war zone stuff and we thought we were slick. Oh, man.

I have no idea how upset the captain was when he left Long Beach and we weren't there, but I know from the look on his face when they pulled in to Yakuza and saw us standing on the dock how pissed he was. And so, we ended up doing some time and got a bad kind of discharge and I'm out on the street at 19. Now that's where I find my definition of bottom from that experience.

That was bottom. Bottom is any morning that I wake up and understand clearly whatever I have in mind for my life isn't going to happen. Just not going to happen.

So I get a new job, new town, new car, new girl, new whatever and start over. new dreams and then they fall apart and I start that whole cycle again. And I don't understand why that's going on until I got to you people and you taught me about alcoholism.

Doc Silk says he had been working with men. Well, let me read it to you because sure as hell you're all experts and some big book fanatic's going to say I misqued it. >> Have you ever run into a big book fanatic?

I love them. I created several of them. David knows a couple of them.

I have had many men who had, for example, worked a period of months on some problem or business deal that will be settled favorable to them on a certain date. They took a date a drink a day or so prior to the date and then the phenomenon of craving became paramount to all their other interests. So the important appointment was not met.

These men were not drinking to escape. They were drinking to overcome a craving beyond their mental control. And I got my first duck feather when we got to this.

I come from a sponsorship line where they sat down, read this book to us, and then shared their experience with it and of it and gave us assignments out of here. There I am. I was given a 24-hour liberty and 23 days later got back.

And what was it that caused that? I had a drink in Long Beach. And as I look over my life, every one of those high drama deals I can point back to.

I had a drink in Denver. I had a drink in San Diego. I had a drink.

And that's set in in this cycle in motion. A craving then develops in me that's beyond my mental control. Uh I sponsor a kid who helps me get it even easier.

We were talking about this and he said, "Well, that isn't me. I'd go in to have a couple beers and I just changed my mind. Okay.

So, we go back over it again. He said, "No, I just went to have a couple beers and I changed my mind." And then I let him wait until he heard what he was saying. I had a couple beers, my mind changed.

I have a change. My body develops a craving and my mind changes. And now I'm an active alcoholic.

And what do active alcoholics do? They drink. There's no choice in the in the matter.

It's just that simple. So, y'all helped me discover that I am one of those kind. And it took a little bit of time.

And I didn't come to Alcoholics Anonymous. I would never have come to Alcoholics Anonymous because nobody knew I was alcoholic. I was certified by one government agency as a sociopath type two.

And uh I'm not clear yet what it is, but it's not good. But uh uh my federal parole officer said, you know, everybody has to have one of those. He said I was a psychopath.

And the doctor said I was a manic depressive drug addict. I was hiding my alcoholism behind some real high drama. You got four things to get past to get to my drinking.

Okay? Because as my mind cleared, one of the things that went on is that no matter what state I was in, super freak, super citizen, whatever I was doing, drinking was part of it. Very brief periods where there was no drinking.

I hated being drunk. Drunk is is a subjective term. And for me, drunk was kneewalking, puking in the gutter.

Do we have any other kneewalkers here? If you're going to drink, you might as well. That's where you're on your hands and knees crawling down the street.

And it's a good place to be because when you finally fall, you only have to fall about that fall. You know, discovered as we went through this book, it says that these are men who should have slept the day around. They're describing a phenomenon.

My sponsors insisted on this and I hope you'll do this. Bring your own memories to whatever this is. This is a report of people and their memories.

I need to bring my own to it. So, how did that fit me? Well, I find it amusing today.

It wasn't amusing then. There was a period in my life where I was also wore a badge. Uh I don't like to talk about it much.

It's kind of a sorted time in my life. I actually had to make one arrest and it was just scary. I found a in the middle of the night there was a window broken out in the service station.

I went over and me and my gun went up and he and his no gun came up and I'm looking right. He's looking into my pistol and just scared the hell out of me. I didn't like that.

But during this period of time, I lived in a chicken coupe. Uh, what's funny about that? I mean, once you clean a chicken out, it's just a room.

We moved it off the pile and moved it down 100 yards and cleaned it out. It was not a bad place. Just a little room with a slant roof and I had curtains on the walls.

Did you live in one, too? >> And I'm I'm spending about 80 hours a week in a patrol car. And I had discovered along the way, one of the best ways to drink longer when you don't get enough sleep is to take a little amphidamine.

So, make drinking easier, keep you up. Fact, you can drink faster. You can do everything faster.

didn't even clean the house three or four times in an hour. Anyhow, on on my day off, I decided to see what it was like to be a burger. And well, I'd started drinking.

My mind changed. And I knew which house was empty. I've been watching it all week.

So I went in and I spent two hours in that house and left and forgot to take anything and concluded this is not going to be my career either. I honestly believe as I look back over that prayerfully I wasn't looking for stuff in that house. I live in a chicken coop and they lived in a house and I think I was looking for whatever kind of magic might be there that would tell me how I could have a house too.

Because in my heart of hearts, I didn't want to be living in a chicken coupe. I want to live in a house like other people. But this business of they should have slept the night around got clear to me as the memories come back.

I remember a terrible terrible night in my drinking. I was not much of a bar drinker. Uh for whatever the reason, my personality was such that when a bar fight starts, it starts on me and and and I don't do anything.

I'm just sitting there minding my own business and some guy says, "Hey, it looks like a good one. Let's hit him." So, I didn't like the bar as much. And beside, they charge too much.

I want to drink. I don't want soda pop in it. And I don't want to pay a dollar and a half when for $3 I can get a whole quart.

I drink the good stuff. And the good stuff is whatever goes home. Anyway, we did use the Lighthouse Bar in Denver as kind of a message center, the group I ran with.

If you if there's going to be a party at your house and then you leave the message with him and he gets it to the White House and then we you know how it is. And we're sitting at the lighthouse around two. But I'd been looking for it all night.

You ever spent a lot of time looking for it? Just seemed to me that while I was in Denver, it was in San Francisco and I'd get to San Francisco and it had moved on to Salt Lake and this night I've been looking for it and came 2:00 and in Colorado that's the bar shut down and I can remember the horror of that night knowing I'm not going to find it. So I went home.

Now, I always had three stashes. There was one at home because I got to have that. And this is subjective.

I don't think this I know this. I got to have this bottle there. And then there's the one I carry in my car just in case.

And then there's the one that I share with you so you understand what a fine fellow I am. Okay? And I got to go home.

And now I'm so drunk. I'm also aware of another thing. I'm at that stage of being drunk where I knew and this is about 2:30 or so.

If I lay down on this bed, the bed's going to spin and it's going to throw me out on the floor and I'm going to puke on my own floor and I'd rather not do that. I also know from experience that if I drink some more then I will pass out and then it won't happen. Pass out means I can drink myself into a coma, which is just this side of death.

Okay? And I don't have to wonder about sanity and insanity. Okay?

I just want to sleep. So, I'll I'll risk that. What's a coma between friends?

Okay. Should have slept the night around and I'm up at 6 needing a drink. So, I've got a memory that fits that, too.

I began to put the pieces together that I'm alcoholic. My sponsor said, "We don't think you're a sociopath or a psychopath or a manic depressive drug addict. We think you're just a good actor." True.

I would be whoever you needed me to be so I could get from you whatever I needed from you. Good actor. We are all good actors.

Bill doesn't use that piece in the book describing the actor by mistake. That one describes me. A mixture of traits.

I can be kind and loving or mean and pushy. I mean, it just depends on what I need to get here and how bad I need to get it. I'm a manipulator.

Uh when we were in our mid- teens, 15 or 16, somewhere in there, was that first real drunk. Uh we didn't belong anywhere. We being the I ran with six other guys who didn't fit in anywhere either.

We were neither front hall or back hall. Uh we were ostracized and we were glad of it. We weren't jocks.

We weren't banned. We weren't anybody. We just we were trouble.

And we got together one night and this guy got a guy from LA Air Force Base to buy us a bottle of whiskey. Bonded bourbon. We had this arrogant idea that bonded bourbon was better than regular whiskey.

We didn't know all that means that some insurance company says yes, serums really did make this and if you can prove otherwise, we'll pay you for it. But we went out to get drunk and have some fun. And uh what happened to me is described in the book by Carl Young as a spiritual experience.

Let me read that too so I don't misquote it for you. Oh, this is my sifter, by the way. It was given to me early on and my sponsor said, "Use this as a sifter.

Whatever you hear, check it with this." And if you can't reconcile it here, you're either too dumb or it isn't true. So, just ignore it. Get up here.

Find this thing. This is what happened to me. what Carl Young calls the vital spiritual experience.

It's on page 27 of the book. To me, these occurrences are phenomena, he says. They appear to be in the nature of huge emotional displacements and rearrangements.

Ideas and emotions and attitudes which were once the guiding forces in the lives of these men are suddenly cast to one side and a completely new set of conceptions and motives begins to dominate. That's precisely what happened to me. I didn't feel better.

I was transformed. I went into the evening stupid, short, ugly, inarticulate, frightened, angry, very angry. The only honest response to feeling set apart is anger.

All these things are running with me. Cowardly. I thought I was a coward because I didn't like pain.

I've discovered since I got sane that pain is one of the best things to avoid that you can avoid. stay away from it as much as possible. Uh there's enough going around.

You don't need to go looking for any. It'll just show up. Went in with all those all that going on.

I had a psychiatrist once try to help me get in touch with my feelings and I couldn't get it across to him. That's not the problem, though. I am so in touch with my feelings, you can't stand it.

I can't sort them out. All this is going on at once. baffled.

Had a couple drinks of the bonded bourbon and I'm a different human being. I now have plans. I'm no longer a reactor in the game of life.

I have some plans. And these were good plans for a kid at that age. There was a guy who hadn't been treating me very well, a class bully.

And as soon as we got back into Bonsiv's drive-in restaurant in front of the whole school or whoever was there, I'm going to whip him, but I could have done it. Not even breathed hard, absolutely certain. And there was a little girl in our class who hadn't treated me at all.

And she and I were going to have a visit as soon as I finished whipping him in front of everybody. And I could have done that, too. That's not a bad thing for a kid that age.

If that's all whiskey did, I'd buy y'all a drink. I did not know, but began to experience that I lose control once I have a drink of alcohol. And by the time I got back to the drive-in, what they saw instead of me whipping the bully and talking to the cheerleader was my partners carrying me by the elbows while I puked in the driveway.

I nearly died of acute alcohol poisoning that first night because I drank too much. I don't have a shut off switch. That's what defines alcoholism.

If this book says if when drinking you find you have little control over the amount you drink or if when you want to stop you find you cannot stop entirely, you're probably alcoholic. It's a very simple definition. It's all about alcohol.

loss of control. If that's ever happened to you now, and I work with a lot of people who say, "Well, that happened every now and then, but not every time." You know, we got great denial systems. According to what I read here, according to the experience of the alcoholics who recovered, if that has ever happened to you, you're probably alcoholic because it never happens to the average temperate drinker.

Never. it says. So if it happened once, don't give up your seat.

Okay? Be very, very careful. If you're not convinced, go try a little control drinking and see if you can do it.

It won't take long for you to get an idea that uh I went to have two. I just changed my mind. Okay.

I don't want to go a whole lot longer because it's been a long day for y'all. Uh, but I want to kind of set the stage because what we're going to do I I can feel already is gently go through my experience of these steps so that you will also have somewhat of an experience so you come to trust this so you can go home and do it. That's really about all it's going to be.

I almost stopped doing these a few years back. I I get sometimes kind of tired. This is the the third time I've had to talk since Thursday.

And that doesn't count the people that I work with at home. I have people come over at 6:00 in the morning. By the way, if I sponsor you, you have to show up at 6:00 at my house.

Listen, you got to surrender to something. And I know you can't surrender to God yet. So, and I want you Okay.

If you want what I have, that's when I do it. And I also want you to see how a recovered alcoholic and his family get ready for the day. That's one of the hardest times alcoholics have.

So, come to my house and watch how we do it. We had two teenage girls for a while and uh you know, it made the bachelor's life look pretty easy. Freddy, can I almost quit this?

I truly do know this. I don't know anything you don't know. I just know that I've been over the road enough and God has given me an ability to paint some word pictures and I really do try to open up so that the love of God flows through me and you know I really care about you.

It matters to me whether you live or die and it really does but I get tired of this sometimes. And I was in New York about 10 years ago with a group of my youngsters, if you will, my spiritual family. And I'd said to Ruthie, "Ruthie, honey, I I think I'm going to quit." She said, "Oh, don't do that, please." She says, "Here's what happens.

When you come, we all get together." And uh you tell us stories. It's like having our grandpa, our uncle come around, tell us stories. and I got that sense of purpose in my life.

Again, if my being here will get you all together, and I heard a lot of you say that, that's why you're here. That's cool. If that'll get you together, that's fine.

As long as you understand that all you're going to get out of me are stories. And most of them you've already heard before. But you know what?

I'm going to give you my favorite story and then we'll go to bed and then we'll start again tomorrow. This is my favorite story because this is the one my granddad told us. Never got tired of it.

Still am not tired of it. It was in the heart of heart mountains of Germany where a band of robbers had gathered together for the purpose of robbing a train. Their leader arose and said, "Pierre, tell us a story." So Pierre began.

It was in the heart of Hart Mountains in Germany where a band of robbers had gathered together for the purpose of robbing a train. Their leader arose and said, "Pierre, tell us a story." So Pierre began. It was in the heart of Hart Mountains in Germany where a band of robbers had gathered together for the purpose of robbing.

Yeah, you got it. Never got tired of that. Cuz what the story says is you matter.

I don't know what else to say. So I'll just say this. I love you.

Was in the heart of heart mountains of Germany. Okay. And that's kind of what we'll do here.

We are a storytelling society. Our message is carried not by lectures or intellectual or any of that. It's carried through the heart, through the stories that we tell.

To be effective 12 steppers, we must tell our story in such a way that the guy who really believes nobody understands me says, "That sounds like me. I thought I was the only one that thought like that. So we get to expose not our best side.

We get to expose our goofiness. That's what works. So understand I'm goofy.

And if you expect much more out of me than that, you're goofy, too. Okay. What time do we reather in the morning?

Who's running this show? >> 6:30. That's obscene.

>> 6 o'clock family. >> Well, breakfast is 6:30. What time you all want to get back together?

>> To pursue this 8:00. >> All right. Here's the deal I'll make with you.

>> I'll be in this chair at 8:00 ready to start and we'll start start as soon as you all to quiet. Now, I do need to find out one thing. We formed a group Do you want to start when everybody gets here or do you want to start on time?

>> On time. So if you want to be here when we start, just be on time. Fair enough.

See y'all in the morning. >> Did you all sleep at all? >> Let me see the hands of the snorers.

Did you all get enough to eat? >> These these guys are something, aren't they? If my experience has taught me anything at all is that the experience of life is different for everybody.

It's a matter of perception, a matter of of attitude, a matter of viewpoint. Truth is truth, but we all come at it in different ways at different times. So, there is no right or wrong.

There's only what is. Last night, we had an interesting uh event. The bat showed up.

Now, that meant different things to different people. For some people, there's the the fear of the bat getting in the hair. There's for some people there's not knowing what the bat's going to do.

For others it has a very specific significance. And uh would you share your perception with us? >> Okay.

>> Give her a microphone >> because um >> over here. Okay. Would you mind using that?

Don't mean to embarrass her, but >> I identify with her experience. >> Well, um because um >> um well, I didn't wasn't afraid of it. It was like um I knew it was a good sign.

It was kind of like some people might see a dove or something. And so I went home and I read my book back well home last night was a ten. And um one of the ironic things was was when I went to open it up.

I keep a feather in it from the last place I was at. And a month ago I had read my cards because I like um Indian um things. And um it was on the back >> and so um it is rebirth.

Um and he um Don had talked about um psychic healing um last night and what um in the reading what it told me was um it was about a shamanistic death and the death of old ideas in the south and beliefs >> and the reemergence of new ideas and beliefs and that you must heal yourself before you can um help anybody else and go out and help heal other people. So the back kind of came from him up there. I just thought that was a nice omen.

I just got back from Calgary. I'm still talking like a Canadian. So, I came to understand that I have a body that's different than the non-alcoholic body.

Dr. Silkworth, the medical doctor, likened it to an allergy. Bill mentions whether we agree with that or not, it's a good analogy.

My body responds differently to this particular substance than does the non-alcoholic, which means it will have describable symptoms and they are described here. The the there's several of them. One is the craving that I develop after I take one drink of alcohol.

I develop a craving for more alcohol and this is physical and it also becomes mental. my mind changes. Goes on to share with us that uh that would be academic if we never took a drink.

That would never happen. So when I say I've recovered from that symptom because I don't drink alcohol, I don't exhibit that symptom. I don't get a craving for alcohol that comes after the first drink because I don't take the first drink.

Doesn't mean I'm not c that I'm cured of that. In fact, the longer I'm around, the more certain I am that that's gotten worse, not better. In the alcoholic, that seems to continue on.

And my the reason for saying that is I'm watching people with 25, 30, 35 years of sobriety drink again. Now, young relapsers keep coming back. People who start drinking after a long period of time don't get back.

They're dead within weeks. Then there's another group of AA members that I'm watching sadly with long-term sobriety who truly drinking is no longer an option. That's gone.

But they're blowing their brains out because the pain has become too much. And I'm concerned about that. And I watch and I talk and I listen.

And it seems to me the main reason that that occurs is that they stop doing the things that are necessary to remain in fit spiritual condition, which means remain in tune with other people. Uh yeah, there's a lot of some of them stop going to meetings, some don't. Some go to meetings until they shoot themselves.

And I understand that. I've been to some meetings where I left wondering Yeah. The main thing I noticed that they stopped doing, they stopped working with other people and stopped giving it away freely.

And that's consistent with my sifter from the very beginning. The second sentence in the beginning of this book is that we show others precisely how we recover. Working with others is what this is about.

And from the very beginning, we're taught in this book how to do that. Uh I still get live 12step calls. I I presume you do too.

Uh fresh meat is always available. And I like to take some fairly new people because quite often a new person will not identify with me. I'm 35 years sober.

That's not even possible. I must either be lying or it's I wasn't really an alcoholic or whatever, but somebody knew who still got a little bit of shakes. How'd you stay sober today?

So, in my continuing to try to grow in understanding and effectiveness, how can I stay today so that I can be heard by the new person? And that will be part of our challenge this weekend to grow in effectiveness and understanding. But the main problem of the alcoholic centers in the mind when it comes to alcohol and several other things I do not learn from experience.

I just don't. It's a very poor teacher in some areas because I don't learn. Uh, I have a forgetter that is on duty full-time.

Uh, there will come time, one of the one of the ways our kind of insanity is described is that I will sometimes not be able to bring into my consciousness with sufficient force the memory of the last time that this occurred. It just won't show up. One of my old mentors put it this way.

You can't solve the problem with the problem. You got to solve the problem with the answer. Well, if if my problem centers in my mind, I probably ought not try to use that uh too much, but it must be a part of things.

If things don't make sense to me, I'm not going for it. The human condition is one of a need to understand. I want to know why.

uh if my thinking is lifted to a little different plane, understanding why does not become it isn't done because if I don't understand it's a threat to me most of the time when I'm growing up I'm trying to learn things so I can protect myself against what I think is a hostile world and that's what my character defects are mainly my defenses against what I think is a hostile world this isn't a hostile world I hear funny things in a and I might as well get them out of the way so that you can either challenge me or accept it or go home, whatever. You know, I do not understand living life on life's terms. Life doesn't make any terms.

Only people make terms in my experience. I make the terms that either a danger or a good sign. Uh, people who wear white hats are either okay or they shouldn't be allowed in polite company.

You know, our prejudices are ridiculous. They they come down to stuff like that when it gets right down to it. It's a prejudgment.

That's what prejudice is. We'll cover some of that. But, so I I was brought to understand that my problem is so severe that there is no human power that can solve this.

My sponsors were very clear. You cannot have my God. I cannot even share my God with you.

All I can share are stories about how I see it play out. I can't define God. Probably ought not even use the word except it seems to be the right word.

It means so much it means nothing because of the way everybody looks at it. on the other side of that because it means nothing. It means everything.

That's Buddhist as hell, is it? I like Zen stuff because when you run out of smart things to say, you can throw one of those out and you're off the hook. I drank alcoholically from the time I started drinking, which simply means I was out of control from the beginning.

I have never had any control over the amount I drank and I quite honestly never tried to stop drinking. I did try to control the drinking. Uh when I came out of that out of the Navy when I was 19, within three months I had also drunk myself out of a good job.

I was a main frameman for what was then Mountain Bell, the telephone company. And I I really love the work. I have one of those meticulous little minds and here's these thousands of connections up here and I get to make them.

And this was fun. It was particularly fun to make a connection which was illegal and where you can listen in on what's going on. The party line, you know, nothing serious going on.

I just have one of those inquisitive natures. If I came to your house, the first place I go is your bathroom so I can look in your medicine cabinet. And it isn't that I want your stuff.

I want to know what you're taking. It tells me a whole lot about who you are. I'm just curious.

One of my favorite phrases came from a kid that I sponsored. as we went through the big book, he would say, "Why would I want to do that?" And I got it. That's my life question.

Why would I want to do that? And I'm not being belligerent. I'd like to know why.

I'm willing to try it. That's the other side of my nature. Whatever it is, let's give it a shot.

But I kind of like to know why I'd want to do that. Are you one of those out front guys? The cliff's only 40t high.

Let's see how many of us can survive this one. Me first. Off we go.

The human condition is one of duality. I don't want to get all philosophic, but it is about duality. It is about the human condition.

Little little human animals compete naturally. They're in training. uh there's upsides and there's downsides.

There's rights and there's wrongs. There's this whole duality. The spiritual life is one of unity.

So those have to be coupled here. If we're going to learn to live this way, it becomes a very interesting thing because I am in the human condition, but I'm a spiritual being. How do I learn to live with that?

And one of the things this book shows me is how to learn to live with that. What I'm leading up to is this. This book talks about the destruction of self-centerness being absolutely required.

My main problem is self-centeredness. That's the root of my trouble. It does not say the death of self.

It says death to self. In essence, I've taken the keys to the car away from the 5-year-old. Didn't get to drive anymore.

But you always want a 5-year-old on the trip with you. I mean, have you ever I've ridden with some adults. What a pain in the neck.

They just want to get there, wherever the hell there is. I I I come from the west where we have miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles. And uh we would take trips across this great expanse.

My dad would pull us out of school and take us to Carl's bed or out onto the desert. And uh I can remember we drive along one time in particular. This this one was fresh in my memory still.

We were headed for Los Angeles because he had business to do in Los Angeles. And I couldn't have been maybe 10 or 11 somewhere in there. And as we're driving across the desert, suddenly there's this big hand painted sign, 10 miles.

See the two-headed calf? Oh, yeah. A two-headed calf.

Yeah. And a mile down is another sign. Nine miles to go.

Crippled monkey. He doesn't even slow down. Now this trip's getting interesting.

At 8 miles. 8 miles. Baby rattlers.

Whoa. See the eagle at five miles. Are we there yet, Dad?

Slow down, Dad. And uh then you come to this god-awful sign. Huge big red arrow with yellow borders.

Desert museum. Two-headed calf. Half mile down this way.

Turn, Dad. Turn. You got to talk him into it.

He wants to get to LA. I want to see the two-headed calf. We got down to the end of the road and sure enough, there it was.

Old desert Scotty, who is a con man, by the way. All good people are con men. Yeah.

The most spiritual of all are con men. Did you ever see a picture of his holiness the Daly Lama? That's a eatating grin.

He said little like woke say he says you want to get serious read my book if you want to get serious. You want to have some fun come talk with me. Well, that's Anyway, there it is.

And sure enough, there is a two-headed calf. It's stuffed. >> Probably the extra head was sewn on somewhere.

I don't know, but it it may have been real at one time. And there were baby rattlers in a little box. There were some baby rattlers.

This guy is slick. Out back. He had a real rattlesnake in a pen.

old, decrepit. The eagle was molting. There was a crippled monkey.

I'll never forget the crippled monkey because I I identified with a crippled monkey. But the thing I knew for sure, absolutely without doubt, is that I needed to stay here and help Scotty with this museum. That was my destiny.

Just leave me. I'll be fine. Me and Scotty will we'll do fine.

Without that youngster, the trip would have just been a trip. The youngster makes a journey. The curious one, the one that is in no hurry to accomplish anything.

But if you don't have an adult, you end up staying out on the desert with a two-headed calf. Okay. got to have an adult to say, "This was fun.

We got to get back on the road now. We do have some things to do." And that's the balance that I see living the spiritual life in in the human condition. Never ever pass up an opportunity to see the two-headed calf.

Okay? But remember, we do have things to do and the journey must continue. And uh we can all go home now.

That's all I've got. That's all. I love that story.

Yeah. I'm going to tell that again someday. So there's this sensitivity that I brought to alcohol.

The other side was the terrible fear and the sense that I can remember laying in bed, 13 years old, crying with the covers over my head, wondering when my people were going to get back from outer space and pick me up. Because it had become obvious to me by the time I was 13 that I'd been dropped off on the wrong planet. I've been listening to human beings talk and I didn't think like they did and I didn't feel like they did.

My responses to life were not I I I tend to laugh at funerals and cry at hockey games. I'm inappropriate. It actually happened.

I I got in real trouble in Dicati, Mexico one time. We were visiting down there and a funeral went by and I don't know how to respond appropriately. I started laughing.

Many people do in those circumstances. And boy did I catch y'all for that. Which proved once again I really am a misfit, inappropriate.

I've learned since then that a lot of people lie about what they think and feel uh because they're in the same boat I am. They don't know what's appropriate. And at a certain time in our lives, we must be appropriate.

Uh I love watching adolescence. I don't want to ever raise another one. I'm I just don't have what it takes anymore.

You know, I love watching them cuz I I stayed in that state till I was just about 42 before I finally finished it. This is where the drive for I am so different. I'm the only one on the planet, but I don't want you to know that.

I want to look just like you do. So, we all wear uniforms. It's not just Catholic schools.

All schools wear uniforms. It's just the Catholic schools, the nuns decide what it's going to look like. In regular schools, the eighth graders decide.

Okay. What was your uniform in 10th grade? Me?

>> No, I'm I'm looking back. I'm going to pick on him. He's got that look in his eye.

>> Well, was it t-shirt? >> Jeans. >> Jeans and a t-shirt.

Yeah, ours was jeans and a t-shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the arm. Whether you smoked or not, that was the deal. >> Rat tails.

Rat tails. Yeah, ours was a mohawk haircut if you were really cool. See that?

The mohawk was a wonderful thing to have in junior high school and high school because it was this to the system and at the same time it was cool. I remember when I got mine, we had a little family bar next to the barber shop and my my mother likes a little beer with her friends now and then. It was no big deal.

and I saw her go in and I had my baseball cap and uh when we were finished, Tom McGonagal and I both had really gorgeous mohawks about half inch tall and peeked and I walked into the bar and she's sitting there talking with her friend and I took my hat off. She literally looked at me, looked at the beer and pushed it across the table as if this must be a hallucination. and she said, "You get home right now." And I knew I'd won me a battle.

We couldn't go to school till unless we wore caps. We weren't allowed in school unless we wore caps, which made it ultra cool. And that's important at one time.

If I carry that into adulthood, then I'm in trouble. And that's what I did because the minute I started drinking, I stopped growing. No matter what I looked like, no matter what I did from that point on, my emotional and mental response to the world is adolescence.

I'm more concerned about looking good than I am in accomplishing everything. I get into that horribly lazy state. I I am by nature incredibly lazy physically, mentally, emotionally, and particularly spiritually.

I was a spiritual thief. I've known since I was little my answer would be spiritual in nature, but I'm a spiritual thief. I'll steal it from you.

Uh then it sounds good, but I don't have to pay the price that it takes. And this is some of the stuff my sponsors help me understand. Okay?

If you want what we have, the suggestion is that you might want to do what we do. You can't steal this one. And one of the dangers of those of us who've been around for a while is we tend these days to teach the new people our lingo without the substance behind it.

And the danger there is that when you say to them, "How are you?" they can give you the lingo and they sound pretty good. And they're not. They're really dying inside.

We got to be careful of that. I do. Okay.

So, I bring all this crap to alcohol. An alien on a strange planet. Loved girls.

Terrified of girls. I'm a pretty fair athlete. But I only weighed around 135 pounds when I went out for football and the average team weight was 180.

And they hurt me the first day of practice. So I quit. I was a Golden Gloves boxer trained with Tommy Golden in Denver years ago.

Got all the way to the finals and uh I had this fight won in the second round. They were three round fights and I had it won. So I lightened up and in the third round he just beat me to death.

He was motivated. He had two brothers up in the stands. He told me later in the locker room he had two brothers up in the stands who'd said to him, "If you lose this fight, you got another one as soon as you get home." And and he was motivated.

And I had quit early which became a pattern. I was a sprinter in the game of life, not a long-distance runner. Well, I quit boxing.

I come from a musical family. I think I told you my brother's a professor of music. Well, play instruments.

I can play the trumpet and the trombone and the harmonas. And right now, I play a lap doulamer because I don't want anybody else around when I'm making my music. And very few people can stand the sound of a lap doulamer.

In fact, my friend Tom I I said if I ever play that in his presence, he'll break it over my head. But I played in the in the school band. And I was first chair because I have I have some talent.

And then this kid came along and played better than I did right off the bat and got took my chair. So I quit. He had this ridiculous idea that you should practice two and three hours a day.

And I know that anybody with my natural talent only needs about a half hour a week. And I brought this alcohol. This is that period of time when my image was who I was.

And I got desperate one time and really needed to be somebody uh mainly to attract the blonde girls in the school. That comes along with a certain time in every boy boy's life. His genes jump up and says, "Oh, I know my life work now.

I'm to repopulate the planet. So many women, so little time." Doesn't have the slightest idea of what's going on. But so I got my dad to buy me a 49 Mercury convertible maroon with leopard skin seat covers.

Oh, that was the thing back in the late 40s. Oh, it was gorgeous. It did what it was supposed to do.

Put two blonde girls in the back seat right off the bat. Second day they it had an automatic top and they'd pull the top and they broke the top and I quit the car. let dad worry about disposing it and I brought that to alcohol.

Okay, this is kind of my MO. Anybody identify with any of that? >> Oh, I hope so cuz otherwise I'm in the wrong place.

And along that way then we got a guy to buy us some whiskey and we went out east to Denver to drink it. And my life changed forever. I was transformed for a period of time that night.

It was okay for me to be me just as I was. And it was okay for you to be you just as you were. And that felt so good because that is a spiritual attitude.

I was spiritually fit. Isn't it interesting that they've called alcohol spirits for years because that is what it produces. A sense of ease and comfort, a sense of rightness of of place.

Uh but for me, I didn't know that if one works, you take 10. That's just the nature of the beast. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.

Always. I still have not gotten over that one. I just put it in God's hands and away we go.

Now, alcohol did not solve the problem. It made me in a in a state of being where there was no problem. I believe God uses whatever is at hand.

And so, when I got into this process, that's kind of the way we went. Forget everything you think you know about anything. were not about solving your problem or problems.

Uh when the big book talks about finding a power greater than myself that will solve my problem, there's no s on the end of that. There's only one problem, me. Selfishness and self-centerness.

One of the one of the guides as you leave here, one of my guides as to whether I'm beginning to get off base a little bit is if I hear myself say, "Where's mine?" Anytime I'm wondering, "Where's mine?" I'm off base because I'm always sitting right in the middle of it. One of my fun funniest inventories came, what where's my wife? I need her to know where she There she is.

Somewhere back there. I like to look in her eyes and check to make sure I'm telling the truth. I I uh well, I generally stay with the truth, but I I do like to embellish and I like to check the timelines because I I honest to God don't have any sense of time.

It some it's gone somewhere. When you are here now, time loses its meaning. I was about 12.

Yeah. 12, 13 years silver. Sitting in the basement of my house.

My car's up there in the garage. My family's playing and cooking and doing what families do. And I'm sitting in the basement wondering where's mom?

And it was a wonderful little inventory because that's where I discovered I'm always sitting right in the middle of it. See, I these things happen to me long before I perceive them. I don't know what's happened until later.

If I know what's happening at the time, I tend to take credit for it. Uh so I usually when I have an awakening of some kind and a behavior change, it's about six weeks later that I realize you did that differently than you've ever done it before. And thank goodness for that.

So, if you're kind of new and you're looking for immediate results, you've already got them, just wait long enough and you'll be aware that you've already got it. Where's mine? You're sitting in the middle of it.

Right here, right now. You got everything you're ever going to have. You're not a That's it.

Won't get any better, but it'll always get better. The big book talks about men and women drinking for the effect produced by alcohol. All men and women drink for the effect produced by alcohol.

The effect from my mother is tastes good. She does not like the feeling that comes as the barriers go down. Uh me, I like to kick the barriers right on down.

Okay. And early on, now these are some of the things my sponsors made me bring to this deal. The effect produced by alcohol.

I can remember early on, I couldn't even smell whiskey for about four years without gagging. I'd gotten that sick from the whiskey. just oh it was awful.

But I very quickly found out what wouldn't make me gag. And then I began to find out different things did different things to me. Do you hear a little obsession here?

I'm spending a lot of time becoming conscious of alcohol since I'm going to drink it. What's this going to do? Anyway, we if we were going to go out and fight a little bit and young boys do that.

Mothers don't worry. They're they're just practicing and posturing and posing and getting a black eye here or there. If we were going to go fight, I learned to drink vodka because vodka makes me mean.

And uh if you're going to fight, you might as well be a little bit mean. If uh if we're going to go to a party and there might be some girls there, I drank dark bikardi rum. Makes me warm and sensitive.

great lover. Never did he just stood there and looked cool. Well, in my day, we weren't ever told what to do.

It was a I can remember running up and down East Kfax looking for girls. And one night, we found some bad night. We didn't know what the hell to do.

and they didn't know what to do. It was terrible. We got drunk instead.

It was awful. Early on in my drinking, I reached that place that is so devastating where I couldn't feel anything, which is just walking dead because by now things are such a tumble I can't sort them. So, I just shut them off.

But then I could drink Coo's beer and listen to Ferland Husky and Jim Reeves singing stuff like four walls and Ray Charles born to lose. Oh, I love I lived on that for months and I could just cry like a baby and once again feel okay. I began to make that mistake in judging what my condition was by how I felt.

very bad measure to judge where I'm at and how I'm doing by how I feel. Uh you can't get away from it, but it's not the best measure of the truth. Then vodka made me drunk and rub made me drunk and beer made me drunk because once I start I go past the line.

My friend Gary describes it as waking up at 82%. And so you have a drink and it takes you to 90. And then you have another and you're at 98.

And then you have another and I'm at 102. Missed the mark. First night out was wonderful.

Never caught that edge again. So we bring all this to a substance that is by its very nature shuts down all your civilized coverings. All the good manners that you've learned just go out the window.

Uh I've I've always loved drunks being one. The inconsistency of two guys in a bar go out back and beat each other bloody and then come back in. Buddy, I just love you.

You're my best thing that ever happened to me. Let me buy you a drink. And that's the way we are.

And it gets confusing, doesn't it? Yeah. The upshot of all this is after 14 years of drinking, running, they told you I'm one of the freaks that came out of Berkeley in the 60s throwing Alley's acid around screaming out where there's dope there's hope burn down city hall.

I did a lot of speed along the way. I'm not a drug addict. I just did a lot of speed along the way, but I could always start or stop with that that I love to abuse it.

If I had a drug of choice, it would be methamphetamine hydrochloride. That's what I'd choose. The one I don't have any choice over is alcohol.

That's what makes me alcoholic. I don't have any choice there. I I bring this up only because we have this thing will work for anybody as long as the foundation is truth.

Now you may be both alcoholic and drug addict. You may be primarily a drug addict who's also alcoholic. Whatever you are, find out so you can get the truth under you and then it'll go to work.

Uh, we can talk more about that later if you want to. It's not a big deal. It's just a big by God deal.

You got Well, you gota you got to have the truth. You can be 700 different things. It won't matter.

This fixes that. It takes care of it. But you got to know what they are.

The only thing this won't fix is goofiness. Stay as goofy as you can get because the most important role in life will be coming up. I'm finally in it.

Grandfather, grandfather's primary function on the planet is to be goofy and entertain the little children. And let me tell you the benefits of that, cuz I am I'm just a sucker for babies. My 5-year-old granddaughter came to me the other day and she said, "Grandpa, you're just the best grandpa in the world." And I'm curious.

I said, "Honey, Janna is her name." "Janna, why? Why do you think that?" She says, "Oh, because you love us so much." That's the message. There's no doubt in her mind.

And that is what makes me the best grandpa in the world because I do. I love her so much. And then she said, "Uh, how is it grandpa that you know everything?" Cuz that's the second part of the grandpa rule.

And that's also a requirement if you're going to be a good sponsor. You got to preserve that illusion. I said, "Honey, that's easy.

I've lived a long time and I pay attention and that's the truth. See, little ones bring the truth out of you if you'll let it. You got to get all the lies away so the truth come.

I've lived a long time and I do pay attention and that's why I seem to know everything. If you get to know me, you'll understand you don't know nothing. What was that?

What? Bob Bolson used to say, "What do you mean by that? What do you really mean by that?" That'll get your attention.

You better be able to answer that or you lose them. Anyway, so the consequences of my drinking took me to some strange places. my first federal penitentiary when I was 19 because I missed an appointment.

I couldn't find my way home in time. Uh my second federal penitentiary in 1966. I want to tell you about that.

These are the things that lead us to to this place. You're here today because somewhere along the way something occurred and you got to look at your life and said, "Oh I can't do this anymore. This has to stop or you wouldn't be here today." In Christmas week in 1967, I was on federal parole for that little beef.

We're on ADC. I'm in real serious trouble. I can't get out of bed without a shot of speed to get up and go pull some kind of scam to get enough money to get the kids some food and to get me some booze so we can come home and I can drink myself back to sleep.

This was kind of our life. And what occurred there, I had come to the place where I'd stopped trying to be a decent human being. Couldn't figure that one out.

I'm still totally devoted to my children. Part of the living pain in my heart. And make no mistake, there are some things we get to live with.

There's nothing we can do about it. It's done. And that's good because it keeps me in touch with if you come in great pain over something you've done.

I really do understand and I can feel it. What had happened in this case? We all have an ace in the hole.

Have I gone over this one before? >> Okay, because this is the third talk I've given since Thursday. And thank you.

I'm glad you haven't heard it because I love to tell the story. Uh it's a horror story. My two little boys mother split and they ended up with me at about the same time that I hit a bottom that I couldn't get up from.

This was that bottom that you just say, "Ah, to hell with it. this is how we're going to live. When the big book talked about we recognized that our lives were not normal.

We didn't live them like normal people. What I realized was that for me my life was normal. This kind of life we were on the road.

We went into the subculture. My boys grew up living in Hell's Angels hideouts and in the north woods. The North Woods was a great time.

I understand about perception from that. My young one thinks it was a great adventure. My old one is still pissed about it.

You know what are you going to do? But we all have an ace in the hole. That's the person that no matter what we've done at the end of the of this particular run at this bottom, there's a place to go.

They'll give you a place to stay and feed you and at you for a little bit and then help you heal up. so you can go out and do it all over again. And my dad was my ace in the hole.

And understand, I am desperately just trying because I I really do love my children and I wanted so badly to be a good father. And so we'd periodically try that. We're at home.

Sorry, Jerry. I did that once when he had his earphones on and watched him jump. uh cleaning up a little bit, fattening up a little bit, getting kind of settled in.

And Albert, one of the guys, one of the snakes that I ran with, called me from Albuquerque, said, "We got a problem." Uh, we got 30 kilos of good marijuana up to Warz and our driver got arrested on a traffic charge and a stuff sitting in a hotel and we need to get it across the border. Will you take the job now? I'm really trying to get straightened up.

I'm a father now trying to straighten up. And my sane response would have been, "You're out of your mind, Albert." My response was, "Of course. Of course." And I didn't do it for money.

I got two kilos. And sorry young people. At that time, we got them for 200 bucks a key.

You pay that much for a little bag these days. So was chump change. I did this for prestige.

See, I was the only one they could think of in the United States to call to go into old Mexico and rescue the stuff. Soro, you know what's funny about that? The president of Mexico is a man named Fox.

That's Zoro. He finally made it to the top. But there I go.

I'm going to go off and do this for the the prestige. And I don't know that at the time, but now I'm useful again. See, the human pain reaches its absolute bottom when you become useless.

Now I'm useful. And I knew how to do do it. And I wondered at the time I was picked up this last time when I thought I was a sociopath.

This will tell you why. I knew precisely how to do this job. Clearly, I stopped drinking and stopped using and got straightened up and got sport coat.

Became Joe Tourist. I had them rent a Volkswagen bus in somebody else's name. I let them take care of all the arrangements.

I am not stupid. I don't want any links to me whatsoever on this cuz I knew even then this is illegal. Okay?

And I don't want to go back to prison. I I'd done that once. That was enough of that.

Anyway, we got down there and and the place they they they got us the bus and I Frank had gotten us a a motel to stay in. Actually, it was just a Mexican wh house, which was fine on the surface. Uh not a bad place to hide out.

There's a lot of action. Everybody's moving and nobody worries about much. >> I did not do the transfer out of the hotel because I'm not stupid.

That's where they're going to be watching if they're watching. Now, I got my kids with me this whole time, okay? A four-year-old and a six-year-old.

They are the key to the whole damn operation. Soon as we got the stuff in the van and got to the hotel and Frank Frank split, we moved up town to a different motel that was more for the tourist trade. That's who I look like.

You want to become invisible on one of these kind of deals. In fact, the worst thing I ever did to my children was teach them how to be invisible. Supposed to teach children how to be the only one on the block.

I did the math. I've got a mind that works. I did the volume of 30 kilos of marijuana the way it was wrapped in those days.

And that volume fit perfectly in a single air mattress. So, I had an air mattress and I cut the corner and stuffed it and then resealed it. That keeps the smell down.

Then, as we made the border crossing just before we got there, I'd put dirty diapers on top of the the air mattress. I put my two little boys on top of that. And then, just before we hit the border, I turned around for no reason whatsoever, right out of nowhere, and screamed at them so that they would be crying.

I wanted them frightened and crying because they won't fool with you if you got crying kids. Now, my children weren't in any grave danger physically. Had we been caught, they'd have been better off than they were with me.

They'd have gone to a foster home somewhere and eventually back to my folks. What I did to my children is forever break their trusts. I damaged them severely by screaming at them for no reason whatsoever, deliberately frightening them.

I can never repay that. To this day, even though we get along, that piece is missing and I know it. So when I came to that, looking at that Christmas week in 1967, that brought me to the place where I came here needing to be the kind of person who could never ever do that again.

I don't want just to stop drinking. I've got to become the kind of person that could not commit those kind of acts again because I can't live with that. There's no way to reconcile that with who I really am.

It's just beyond me. And there were a number of incidents like that that I looked at Christmas week in 1967 that brought me to absolute bottom. Christmas day, we went down to my folks place to spend the day with them.

And my mother, who's a lovely lady, had sent dad to the door to say, "Your mother says, I can't let you in here anymore. She can't stand watching you die." Now, I'm here because I ran out of lies. Truth didn't bring me here.

Running out of lies is not a bad way. There were only a few left. The lie was, "Leave me alone.

I'm not hurting anybody but me." And here's a an awareness came to me. I'm hurting everybody, particularly the people I love the most. And I'm baffled.

I don't know how to not do this. I don't know what's wrong with me. Uh, dad snuck us in the house anyway down in the basement.

Tore up another lie. Nobody cares about us. Nobody loves us.

He did. He jeopardized the the happiness of his own home that day because if she'd have caught him doing that, she'd have had a fit. But he loved us.

We got uh Oh, the drama of this. I love the drama of this particular few days cuz I'm falling apart at the seams. I would have told you we're okay had you asked me.

I'm on federal parole, by the way, and I'm a little bit pissed. Uh, one of the lonely things is that nobody would come see us. Even my parole officer wouldn't come see us.

He made me report into him. And I know today that that was an act of kindness cuz he and I became friends eventually and talked about things. He knew what he'd find in my house.

And he knew if he did that, he would have to break to bust me. It was Christmas. He was a very kind man.

See, I lived with the lie that said, "You're all no damn good. You don't care about us or anybody else. You're all liars and screw you." He was very kind.

Uh on the 24th, the kids and I took a walk. That's kind of what I did by then. restless, irritable, discontent.

When I can't stand being where I am, I move on. And we took a walk and found a dollar laying in the snow. We didn't have any presents.

We didn't have any tree. We didn't have anything cuz the welfare check hadn't gotten there yet. I was not self-supporting on my own contributions.

And my scams were running out. I didn't have the energy to pull some of them off. And I'm really glad I had one set up that was abute that would have gotten me at least 10 years cuz I'd have gotten caught.

I had gotten careless by now. Anyway, we took the the dollar to the Christmas tree place up on KFax and the guy gave us the biggest tree on the lot for a dollar. And I'm thinking, I've still got it.

I look back and I see another act of kindness. He saw this 133 lb survivor of the Alswitz concentration camp with two little boys. He'd have given us the tree, but he was kind enough to let me save face by paying for the dollar, giving him the dollar.

It's about perception. It's about how you view the world. Anyway, we took the tree home and I I keep the memory of that fresh because there's a little pinpoint stab in my heart.

We had a 7ft ceiling and a 9- ft tree. So, it didn't occur to me to cut the top off. And we decorated with with crap.

roll up some little uh aluminum foil and cut the bottom off one of these little milk cartons for bells and all that. No presents. The welfare check hadn't gotten there yet.

And I'm not up to pulling off anything. So we took another walk. Walked down to the public merchandise Martin in Denver out on East Kfax cowboy store.

Walked in. When we walked out, I had a pair of cowboy boots and a little cowboy shirt. One gift for each of my kids.

The man gave me credit. $10.95 credit. And I thought I still got it.

Another act of kindness. He saw the same thing. Knew these kids would have nothing.

Helped me save face by putting it on credit. Knowing full well he'll never be back ever. The kids when we got home rolled up everything that would fit in the blue paper towel and put it under the tree for me.

And uh wonderful time because it just broke my heart. It's breaking all my defenses and there weren't many left. I'm beginning to see you really something.

When we got home, I finally walked into the truth. And the truth that day, Christmas day of 1967, is that I had finally become completely useless. There was no reason for me to be here.

Everybody, including my children and my parents and everybody else, would be better off if I were gone. And sad to say, that was the truth. I know we've all thought that at moments.

That was the truth for me. I couldn't find a reason to stay. I knew the boys would be okay.

I know about enough about the system to know that somebody would take care of them and get them to my folks when they found my body. didn't think of what the trauma might be for the kids. You know, that's still pretty self-centered.

So, I did the only thing I knew how to do. There's no choice at that point. Run out of choices.

You either surrender or you die, which is the same thing. It's not a choice. I had nothing to surrender to.

I've tried everything along the way. I've always known there's something wrong with me. So, I came out of the Navy and turned my will and my life over the care of a science fiction writer and joined Dionetics.

Well, I I knew Hoverard, fine man. Did a good job with that stuff. But when I think about how well I know how to what to do with my life, I turned my life over to the science fiction writer and a good one.

Wrote some good stuff. That's where I discovered amphetamines. One of the things they did at that in those days, we were part of the Denver Research Society, which was looking into the effects of different kinds of chemicals on people.

I became a willing participant and discovered speed, which made it possible for me to become uninhibited and talk freely. It also made the drinking easier. So, all of this was just part of the deal.

And like I mentioned that I've had the privilege of sharing the Easter ceremony with the Washaw in Nevada, the peyote ceremony. Had a vision kept me going for four months living in the North Woods. What broke that was the simplest little thing.

Frank and the kids and I were in the woods. We lived in the Masonite tree farm. They gave us 10 acres up there to just live in for the summer.

We lived in a tree. Wonderful thing. Great way to raise kids.

Well, it was it was summer vacation. Then we heard that Lightning Hopkins was playing down in San Francisco and I love that old stuff. So, we took a hunch of deer and put it in the backpack and hitchhiked down to San Francisco to get in and see lightning.

We knew that the boys at the coffee house had take that honer and let us in. When you sit in the back room with Lightning Hopkins and the boys, you're going to drink and it was all over. Just that quick.

They tried psychiatry with me one time. That was fun. I enjoyed that.

That's It's a good game. That's one you can study up and it's better than chess. Oh, yeah.

I was on federal parole uh because you know Albert had turned us all in. By the way, the guy that hired me to bring the marijuana back, he got arrested, so he turned five of us in to take the heat. And that that's what happened on that one.

I picked good companions. My choice of people's always been good, too. Uh, somehow or another, I ended up on a five-day run, heavy drunk with enough speed to warp my mind and make me dangerous.

And I came out of a blackout in Boulder with the kids in a parking lot looking for a car. And I didn't have a car. Somebody had loaned me a car and I couldn't remember where I'd parked it.

And I saw one that was red and little and got in and this lady screamed. She and her kids were in it. I was in the wrong car.

And I finally found ours. It wasn't in a parking place. It was just sitting in the aisle.

And uh we got out of there and into another blackout. We'd started up at the top of Four Mile Canyon above Boulder up at sunset. And the next thing I know is that the police are taking me out of a stream at the bottom.

And I can remember the horror of that. There's some people in a motel watching this scene go on. And I'm saying to the police, I can still remember, won't to the people, won't someone please tell them who I am?

And they thought I was being arrogant that I was somebody. I didn't know who I was. I Somebody tell them who I am.

I don't know. And they took me over to the Boulder County Jail. And uh you know we are tough.

They put me in a holding cell cuz I I had learned some tricks about the system. I told them that I was a federal parole leave which meant I belonged to the government and they couldn't even search me. Not till my pole officer showed up.

I needed to buy some time cuz I didn't know what I had on me. And I found a fresh, brand new prescription of 15 milligram dissoxin tablets. That's uh that's a lot of speed.

And I knew I'm in trouble. So I just swallowed them all. And that got rid of that and everything else.

By the time the doctor got there, he said, "This man belongs in the hospital. Instead, they took me over to the Boulder County Jail and I just went to sleep in a cell. I woke up in a padded cell.

Didn't know how I'd gotten there." Uh, that's an experience you should try someday. Not being in a padded cell, but waking up there and not knowing how you got there. Uh, then they took me to the Denver jail for six days.

Nobody could do anything. They couldn't find anything. And the pearl officer was a kind man.

He didn't want to harm me again. That kept me sober six weeks. When they talk about my not having any choice and how devastating this illness I have is, I think anybody, even a near psychotic, having had that experience, would stop or at least examine what the hell's going on here.

Uh, six weeks, it's all it lasted. But this parole officer was pretty kind. He did not want to send me back to the penitentiary.

He'd gotten to know my dad. My dad made friends in everybody, including my parole officer. What What a nice claim to make for the family.

Look what followed me home, Dad. Can I keep it? And he knew my kids.

And he knew that deep inside of me as in you is a really decent human being. Truly. Anyway, he decided to have me evaluated by a psychiatrist to determine whether I should go into outpatient treatment or back to the penitentiary or back to a hospital or whatever.

And I knew that I needed to pass this evaluation. So, I went to the library and I studied for the rar shop because I knew they would give me that and that would be one of the keys. I can handle the rest of them.

I needed to be just sick enough that I needed some help, but on an outpatient basis. Don't tell me you haven't thought like that. And I passed.

They assigned me a psychiatrist at Denver General Hospital. Lovely man. Three weeks later, he was smoking marijuana.

because I also believe that if you if you can't beat him, get him to join you. I I'm not saying I turned him on, but he was ready. These are things that I get to examine as I look at what do you mean my life is unmanageable?

Okay. If the best I can do is get a psychiatrist that I can talk into smoking marijuana, that's a pretty manageable life, huh? Oh, yeah.

You know, this is what I had in mind for my life. I've gotten the white Bible for Sunday school. I've been saved.

done a number of things and nothing was ever a permanent solution because in each of those cases, if you've been listening, I stole the experience. I didn't have one. I stole it.

So, I had nothing left to surrender to. I'm finished. I can't live.

I couldn't stand being me one more second. That's all I can tell you. I just couldn't stand being me one more second.

So, I took a two-mon supply of speed and shoted up my arm and drank everything in the house and I laid down and I died. And I really believe I died. I've not had a thought of a drink or a pillar fix from that moment to this.

I woke up in the morning, didn't feel good. We we have gone over that. The power of God went to work.

One of my main messages is this. You don't have to have a conception of God for God to go to work. This is all about mercy.

Picking me at a time when I was nobody and had nothing to believe in. Didn't even want to be here and I'm stuck here. That's when the power of God went to work.

Because what I did do was become willing and this was not intellectual to go where anywhere anybody said and doing anything anybody said if it meant I didn't have to be that person ever again. When I look at the things that I did with my life, I I would rather die than be the kind of person that can do that. I needed to be changed totally.

And that's what was promised here. Doc Silkware says without an entire psychic change there's very little hope of recovery. My sponsor said those words are too big for you.

What that means is you're going to have to get a new mind and that we can do for you. We'll give you a new mind. See the promise I offer you new people particularly is that I am not the kind of person I am not the person that could even consider doing what I did before.

putting children on top of dirty diapers on top of a load of marijuana and screaming at them to get it across the border. It's beyond my ability to think about and yet I did that. So, uh if you need that kind of a change, here we are.

You want to stop drinking, just go to a meeting and for an hour you won't drink. And I'm not against meetings. Please don't mistake me.

But I don't believe meetings would keep me sober if that's all I did. There's got to be more to it than that. That's a necessary component.

But there better be more than that because I've been going to meetings for 35 years now and I haven't heard much new for the last 20. I mean, this thing is so simple they had to put it on big paper to get anybody to buy it. I mean, we got 170 some odd pages of redundancy.

The first 50 some odd pages are just Bill saying the same thing over and over and over in different ways so doesn't miss anybody. And then comes this tiny little section on how you clean up your life and what you do with it then and then a rather large section on how you live this way and uh then go do it again. Find somebody else to do it with.

You'll have more fun. A solitary self- appraisal is a It's pretty nice to have somebody else know what a scum I am when I'm left to myself. Okay.

Ain't that funny? We're the only organization I know where the worse you are, the better you're liked. Oh, you've been in prison 17 times.

Make him the GSR. >> Huh? That's why I have you close by.

>> Yeah, I know. >> You didn't have to tell me. I That was my next thing.

It's time for a break. But I'm glad you did tell me cuz now we'll wait an extra minute. >> You can always tell the It it is time for a bit of a break.

>> Now, I know from experience here, if I ask you how much time you want, you'll say 10 minutes. That's not possible. 15 isn't possible for the first break.

So, how about a 20m minute break and then we'll come back here. It is now by my watch, it's quarter after. By that one, it's 20 after.

>> Let's do that one about 20 till. Let's get back here. Life runs on Indian time.

Indian time is, let's say we have an appointment at 7. You got 10 minutes on either side of that and you're still on time. There's Brian.

You all know Brian. Very kind and thoughtful man. >> Yeah, I know it.

>> Well, I'm glad you noticed that. That means that you're sharp. >> I love it, man.

>> Well, you taught me. What do I say? He's very perceptive.

So they took me away. When I woke up, the police were at the door. My four-year-old let him in and I knew I wasn't dead.

Very disappointing. I am absolutely convinced that the key to everything here is simply willingness. The power of God is expressed best in willingness.

And it is so powerful that the very instant that I become willing to be changed, I have already been changed. It's that powerful. And all through our little process here that has emphasized that willingness is the key.

Willingness is a requirement. Until I'm willing, nothing happens. And once I'm willing, it has already happened.

And that's what I really brought here was willingness. Surrender is willingness expressed. Uh, I was wanting to go anywhere anyone said and do anything anyone said.

And this was not an intellectual idea. This was a state of being. I did not resist arrest.

I did not resist anything that took place since then. Uh, they had nine charges on me this time. The first one called for three years to life in the penitentiary.

The Denver District Attorney said he'd bring the other eight one at a time if I beat that one. But I was through and I didn't care because I really was through. I had died already.

Uh went through detox in the Denver County Jail. Don't ever forget it. It was wonderful.

Six weeks of cramps and pounding on my legs and my head. I was detoxing from alcohol, from speed, from terror, from self-will. It was wonderful.

I don't think it would keep me sober because I've been through worse, but it has made me a better sponsor. Uh, you can come to me at five weeks and say, "I'm going to die." And I can look you right in the eye and say, "Not yet. You got about a week to go from my own experience.

just hang on. I I do remember what I now know was a prayer. Didn't know then.

County Jail is rest camp for people like me. They feed you. There's no hassle.

Everybody's in transition. And you just do your little thing and wait, fatten up and walk to tears and lie to each other. Play a little peuckle, a little cribage.

Depends on what jail you're in. I'm a You're a cribage player. I can tell you cheat too, don't you?

By the way, I will be totally honest with you. In real life, you don't want to play games with me. Games need to be cheated at openly without any pretense.

I'm terrible at Monopoly cuz I'll tell you how I'm cheating you and still cheat you. Anyway, he understands that we will not play cribage together. I got Well, I got my I snookered my brother one time.

I reminded him that it had been a long time and I had forgotten how to count and he'd probably have to teach me how to play again. What I did was get him to play both hands. You can't lose.

Cleaned up. Then he realized what I'd done to him and went to my niece who is a cribage player and she suckered me into a game and made me feel like a fool cuz she didn't cheat. She she just played.

Anyway, glad to meet you, sir. Never trust a crimage player. It's all about counting.

Where the hell was I? We would walk the tears and talk about what we're going to do as soon as we could get out. All us big- time gangsters.

None of us could make a $100 bond. But we're all big-time gangsters. We have this bunch of comp compatriots out there.

Not one of whom is going to show up with $100 either. In fact, they won't even come out and visit or bring you cigarettes or nothing. But what we're going to do when we get out is get a keg of cooler's beer, a lid of grass.

We'll go up into the hills of Bergen Park and get stoned. That's what we're going to do. And I can remember mouthing those words and I still remember in my heart, I don't want to do that.

It's kind of a strange sensation. and and the only prayer that I can remember and it wasn't really a prayer. It was just a sense of help and admission.

I don't know what to do. I don't want to do this anymore. I I don't know what else to do.

Part of my life today is working in the penitentiies. I've worked for the Department of Corrections in North Carolina and Colorado. And my a work is in the penitentiies.

Next Tuesday night, I get to go back to prison again. uh maximum security down in the basement with a long timers, some lifers and some other long- timerrs and a kid named Shy Boy got me in the heart again last month cuz he was me. This is a sharp kid.

Let me give you a picture of him. These guys are in a maximum security pod unit pen penitentiary. That means no more than 16 people in any one place at any one time.

single cells, tight security, count every hour, every camera, everything's being monitored. Well, the ordinary is changing it over to a supermax. They're going to bring all the bad guys in from around the system and put them in there and run some sort of stupid program they think will work that has already failed 20 times.

But that's his plan. So, Shy Boy and Freddy and the lifers who were permanent party there needed to be moved around to make room for the bad guys. Uh, Shy Boy didn't like his cell.

It was kind of dirty. His new one was kind of dirty and it hadn't been kept up well. So, uh, he moved in with Freddy for the week and they got some paint and redecorated it.

The mattresses weren't good. So, they got new mattresses, each of them, and in a maximum security, 24-hour day surveillance. This is resourceful as hell.

Okay, just thinking about it boggles my mind. These guys are really good. They call it their little weekend vacation to Bermuda or the Bahamas or whatever they're saying.

This is resourceful. These are guys who are not stupid. Shy Boy gets out in 90 days.

and he's gotten very honest. He's been going through this process. He said, "I'm terrified.

I've been here 17 years. All I know how to do is drink, sell dope, and do time, and I'm terrified. And I remember that.

I don't know how to live." And if you can bring that to this, it's wonderful because now I'm really willing to learn something. So anyway, they uh I believe the power of God went to work. The suggestion here isn't that I believe so much that I believe in God.

It was that I believe in the power of God, which makes me an observer to life. I want to see demonstrations of this power. Don't just talk to me.

I'm going to watch you for a while. People watch us. We can sound real good at the at the podium.

People watch us. How do they really live? And I'm watching.

I didn't see much in the jail that interested me. And I'd begun to heal up, which is a very dangerous thing for an alcoholic to do. Unaded.

Uh, I can go from death to pretty good operation in about 3 days. Okay. Anyway, they took me in a room with my attorney the day of my trial and the district attorney and he and I had a little discussion and he said, "We've been talking to the federal people because I owed them five years.

They were part of my wife." He said, "The the feds and I have agreed. We think you're really sick. Okay.

Not a fancy. I know that. So, what's new?

He said, "We we really don't want to have this big trial. It's going to be a messy one. If you'll plead guilty to a reduced charge.

What we'll do, the deal is we'll give you a year, one and a half to three year sentence, suspend that, and turn you back over to the feds, and they've agreed to take you to Fort Worth, Texas, to the federal hospital, and fix what's wrong with you. I signed the papers right there. I'm not stupid.

Two of me made that decision. I was wanting to go anywhere anyone said. I also had healed up enough to know that if you put me in a hospital with doctors and books, I'll be on the street in six months because they'll tell me what's wrong with me.

They'll tell me about how long it's going to take to fix that. And then they'll give me all the symptoms I have to show to prove I'm getting better. And that's my very best game.

I can play that one on my hands and knees. Well, I signed the papers. They kept the deal.

took me into court and judge changed my age to 17 so I could qualify for it. I'm the only one in Colorado that's been convicted of this crime for 25 or 30 years. It just lays there on the books.

Gave me a one and a half to three. Turn me over to the feds. And if you know about power, you know in 5 days I should have been in Fort Worth, Texas.

Five days later, I'm in the fish tank in the Colorado State Penitentiary because the federal man had checked with the hospital and the hospital said, "There's nothing we can do for this one anyway. Just get him off the street." So, I went down to Canyon City. Now, I don't believe that God will interrupt anyone else's life to make mine better, but God uses whatever's at hand.

and what he had in hand because I had surrendered totally was my solution. I didn't know I was alcoholic. I would not have come looking for a I went to Annie in the federal penitentiary one meeting didn't hear a thing I identified with because I'm not a drug addict.

Just looked like that. Didn't hear a thing. Uh so I was taken where you could come and find me.

Alcoholics Anonymous did not get me sober. God got me sober. Then brought me to Alcoholics Anonymous because just plain sobriety is not adequate.

Brought me here so I could learn how as an active alcoh as an alcoholic how to become useful and purposeful and live a life that would really mean something. Everybody I have ever talked to ever at the bottom of their heart just wants their life to mean something somewhere along the way. And that's what we tap here.

The great promise of Alcoholics Anonymous is that you can become useful. No matter how far down the scale you've gone, you can be useful. One of my favorite stories is from old Jack Brennan.

He's long dead now. Jack was a wheelman for the New York mob. He got fired.

Uh well, Jack drank too much. And uh he'd be in a blackout and they'd go rob some things and then he'd call him the next morning and we'll know say, "Guy, did we have fun last night? What' we do?" And the boy says, "You make us really nervous, Jack.

you're a good driver, but goodbye. And in his drinking, he uh he was a violent man. His wife called the cops one time, six of them, drug him out of his apartment and took him to jail.

And he developed a free flowing resentment for the New York Police Department. And every time he drank, he would find six of them and see how many of you he could whip. So by the time he got to AA, Jack only had one eye left.

Uh he talked funny because he his mouth had been beat up and he chewed his tongue so bad he couldn't hardly talk. Was in a tenement downtown New York, actually an empty building. And God's got a sense of humor.

Jack is an Irish Catholic drunk and they sent a little Jewish fell out to pick him up on a 12step call. Gentle, sweet little Jewish fellow who became his sponsor. And Jack has said at the time he couldn't use utensils, he couldn't tie his own shoes.

He really was a mess. And he'd been around a for about six months. And his sponsor kept telling him, "You're really important, Jack.

We need you here. You're really important. He said six months he was tying his shoes in the meeting room, the old sobriety and beyond group and it made him angry.

So he went and complained about it, which I hardly recommend. If you do something your sponsor tells you and you don't get the results you think you ought to get, go about it. It's it's wonderful.

How do how could I be important? And he said, "Oh, Jack, you have no idea how important you've been to this group." When new people come here, we sit them next to you and we tell them, "You keep drinking. That's what you're going to be like." This is absolute truth.

Everyone is as important as everyone. And sometimes my only purpose in life is to simply be in the room. Because if I am in the room, the person who thinks they're alone can't think that.

It makes a lie out of it. There's somebody else here. And other days I'm to climb to the mountaintop and I don't want to be up there, but that's the job I get assigned today.

Everybody here is useful. You're so important. So important.

Somebody can hear you that can't hear me. But it's mainly we're just here together. Was in the heart of Heart Mountains in Germany.

We're a band of robbers and gathered together. That's what it's about. It's no more complicated than that really.

Anyway, I was taken where I had the opportunity to hear what you had to say. I truly believe I was already spiritually awake when I got here or I wouldn't have heard it. I believe anybody here today is already awakened spiritually or you wouldn't be here.

You'd be doing something else. May not know what to do with it, but we're awake. Isn't that lovely?

And Smith gave us a guide for that. Bill stole it and put it in the big book. Dr.

Bob's wife. We must walk day by day with a new person. We're going to wake them up.

And we are responsible if we wake them up to walk with them until they learn how to walk this way. This is a very scary way of life. If you're self-centered and you suddenly stop being self-centered, I don't know what to do here.

I'm going to bungle this job. My first inclination always after I woke up and with people I work with is to save the world. I mean, I feel that much power.

I can do that. And you got to hold them back. Just give them a little part of the world to work on for a while.

A home group. Let them have the new people as long as want to use around to make sure they don't hurt them too bad. But but I was taken down there and my cellmate Jim as we were fish tank is a at that time it was a four-week orientation where you're isolated from the rest of the community while they thump you and bump you and test you and decide where they're going to put you to work and teach you how to live in the community you're about to get into.

Because if you don't learn that real quick, you may not live through the deal. You got you got to know there's protocols in whatever community you live in. And this one has serious consequences.

And all that's going on. Well, in the third week, I can still hear it. The guard said, "You people will come down and you will listen." No clue was what's going on.

Social calendar was not full. So Jim and I went on down and I did the most important thing I've ever done in my life. Now listen, there were three of them in prison uniforms with numbers on their chests.

Now I love drama. While it doesn't define alcoholism, I love drama. So let me throw some drama in.

My state of being at that time was a willingness to do anything and listen to anything. But I also was fully aware now because I'm conscious. I'm almost well five and a half months sober.

On my own efforts, I have reduced myself to a number. I am no longer qualified as a human being. I don't even have a name.

I'm a number. I was 38 984 and I was living in a cage with another number who was unfit for human consumption. And this was just something we knew.

No guilt trip, no heavy duty deal. I was in the right place and I knew I was right where I was supposed to be. And these three guys came in.

Ugly little man except for Bruce. Bruce was really kind of cute. He really was.

Tall, handsome young man. just filled with himself. But Doc was ugly, nasty looking little man.

Looked like a convict. My name's Doc. He says, "I'm an alcoholic." And that means that I'm powerless over alcohol and guards and drugs and all of the other circumstances of my life.

And my life has become unmanageable. And if any of you smart bastards think you can still manage your life, look at the reward the state just gave you for the nifty job you've been doing. Your very best thinking got you the penitentiary.

You're not doing too good, are you? I believe that truth without love is cruelty and confrontation without a real answer is brutality. But they loved us and they had a real message and so they could use the truth because the truth will set you free.

It piss you off first, but it'll set you free. And they followed it up. That would be brutality if they hadn't followed it up.

And Doc followed it up with this. He says, "We can show you a new way of thinking. We can show you how to learn to live a way of life that will make sense to you." And I got my first new idea.

I'd been trying to live my life so it made sense to you. My life never made sense to anybody. Today, my life's sake makes sense to me.

And it still doesn't make sense to a whole lot of people. But I much don't care. When you put bread on my table, then you can tell me how to live my life.

It doesn't make sense to a lot of people because I live in absolute reliance upon guidance and direction from God. I know I'm going to get it. I also know I'm not always going to follow it.

And I know what the consequences of that will be and it'll be severe enough to bring me back in line, but not severe enough to kill me. There's a price to pay for everything. Freedom has a price.

a big price. If you want to be free, you have to give up whatever it is you want. Then you're free.

Whatever it is you're attached to. When I needed a house, a home, I got a chicken coupe. When I desperately wanted to be a family man in a home, I got an 8 by10 cage and my children lived with a deputy sheriff from the Denver Sheriff's Office instead of with me.

Since I just don't care anymore, I've been living in the same house with the same woman for 26 years. And I'm a great grandfather. I am a great grandfather, but I'm also a great grandfather.

Oh, I'm a wonderful grandfather. I know what the role is. Be a fool.

One of you guys talked about magic. I do magic for the little ones. In fact, my granddaughter Gianna is learning magic.

She thinks that's great. You know how you do that? You take a quarter and it's gone and then all of a sudden it's behind their ear.

Oh, how'd you do that, Grandpa? All right. And you do it over and over and over again till they catch you at it.

And then if you're like me, you've already got a second way to do it. When they think they caught you at it, that ain't where it is at all. Magic is about misdirection.

And I believe in magic because it's fun. One of the funniest acts I have ever seen was a magician that screwed up everything he did. Didn't get a single one of them right.

Anyway, they went through a number of things that were just meant to plant some seeds if we wanted what they had. They invited us to come to their 12step study school on Saturday. I hadn't been invited anywhere for a long time.

Jim and I talked. Now, understand Jim and I had an interesting relationship. We were cellmates.

I was doing a one and a half to three for a crime I had committed. Jim was doing a three to five for a crime he couldn't remember. in a blackout driving a car.

He'd killed some people. He was not a criminal in the same sense of the word I was. And he didn't know why he was there.

No matter what they told him, he didn't know. He'd done what I'd always been terrified of. Maybe killed somebody.

He actually died. So, I had a an a feel for Jim. I didn't know till much later what it was.

I was experiencing compassion. I didn't even know it. Most of us wouldn't know the good things if they hit us in the face until later.

Somebody has to describe what that is. There was an empathy there. I was actually identifying with another human being.

Big big thing. That's what our whole basis of our program is to get an identification first. Until that happens, very little else can be done.

So, the identification can't be in drama. Bruce became one of my early sponsors. He was doing a natural life sentence for a double murder he'd committed one morning in the middle of an alcoholic rage in a stickup.

I've never done anything like that. I'm a bandit. I like to work with paper and with this thing.

I Even today, I still do the same thing. I was in uh Virginia last weekend. The young fella showed up with great blue suits and gold everywhere and this gorgeous white derby.

It's now in my house. He was wearing my hat and all I had to do was give him enough time to become aware of that and he gave me the hat. Some things don't change.

We made a deal. He is a black black and he came over Sunday morning with a white hat for me wearing a white suit covered with gold and a black hat. So we made a deal.

See, we're playing together. We I'm learn how to play with you. I said, "Here's the deal." Cuz his little black girlfriend was there.

And I said, "Next time I come here, I will wear a black suit and the white derby with the little feather in it, and you wear this white outfit with the black hat, and we'll walk down Madison Street with me between the two of you, and we'll make a Oreo sandwich." Cracked up. He's in the midst of God's work. They're trying to get a club started in the worst part of Richmond, Virginia.

where black and white don't matter, where alcoholics help each other and they're they're it's a mission and they're really working hard on this and their bravery just tickled me to death. They're being very brave because they're meeting resistance everywhere and it just doesn't bother them a bit. They just want to know how do we get past this one?

How do we do this? So every time I wear that hat, I will tell that story so that you will understand this is about working with each other and making play out of it while we do it. This is way too serious to get serious about.

It's only life or death. Lighten up. But when I started the journey, I was just a number in a cage, right where I was supposed to be.

And they invited us to their 12step study school. And it's since it was the only invitation I had, that's where I went. When life gets real simple, that's how it works.

What should I do today? What's in front of you? What are your options?

Which job should I take? first one that'll pay you. But it isn't enough.

Of course not. I I know clearly when I sponsor you that you are destined to be the CEO of General Motors, but you might learn want to learn to work before you get there. So just get a job.

That's that's what Bruce said. He said, "You he he gave me two things that you'll enjoy." He said, "Are you tired of getting busted?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "We want to quit going where there's cops." That's pretty simple. We discussed where they show up.

Okay. And if I avoid those places, they probably won't bother me. And and it's true.

They haven't for quite a while. He said, "You want money?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "Well, then get a job, and once you get it, show up for it on time. While you're there, you might even want to consider doing some work.

And if you'll do all of that at the end of a particular period of time, they'll give you money. And it'll never be enough, but it'll always be enough. Thank God for that kind of simplicity because I was burned to a crisp.

If I had to do this intellectually and do it right and be precise, I'd have never made it. But they were very precise. What they'd invited us to was a 12step study school.

We were not allowed to be members of Alcoholics Anonymous and go to the real meeting on Friday night until we'd completed a fiveweek intensive walk through the book Alcoholics Anonymous. Every Saturday and every Sunday afternoon, we gave up our yard privileges and our movies for that five weeks and spent three to four hours Saturday and Sunday up in this school. And the first thing they said when we got there was, "You new guys for the next five weeks have nothing to say.

If you knew anything at all, you wouldn't be here." Okay. We all worked in the dish room. New people need to talk a lot.

You know, they just didn't want to hear that crap. They would talk to us after the school and we would talk to each other down there in the dish room. But we weren't allowed to talk.

We were supposed to listen. And they just read this book to us, kind of do what I'm doing here. Uh sharing their experience of it with it, showing us where to find it, guiding us slowly through because this is a process of awakening, becoming conscious of getting rid of things.

This is not a process of acquiring anything. For me, it's been a process of getting rid of things. The more I get rid of, the more I understand I already have everything I need and most of what I want.

I'm in a terrible time right now. I can't give things away fast enough to clear out my office. We've been working at it, my wife and I.

We finally got rid of all of our kids. We tried throwing them out and that didn't work. We tried letting them move out on their own.

That didn't work. They kept moving back. We finally got them married off.

Our oldest daughter just found a rich, nice guy. I love him. Oh yeah.

She not only moved, she took most of her stuff with her, which is a good sign. She doesn't plan to come back. So, we got to finish our basement.

Now, they can't come back. Oh, they me. I was taught first about what is alcoholism.

I I truly believe my main job as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous and particularly with newer people is to help you find out, do you have this? And the only way I can do that is to share my stories and their stories. There's a lot of stories in here.

This whole first part of this book is stories about alcoholics and how they discovered they were This is for the new people mainly. I'm going to give you some good news here over on in the doctor's opinion in the second, third, and fourth edition. It's on Roman numeral page 28.

In the first edition, it's page one. I don't know why we changed it, but we did. Doc Silk was talking about alcoholics and down the bottom of that page he has described the different kinds of alcoholics personality types.

Alcoholism has some symptoms but there's different personalities. He said all these and many others have one symptom in common. They cannot start drinking without developing the phenomenon of craving.

This phenomenon as we have suggested may be the manifestation of an allergy which differentiates these people and sets them apart as a distinct entity. I've always thought I'm different. I said to Bruce, I feel different.

He said, that's because you're different. Here's how I'm different. I am set apart.

I'm different than my mother in a very real way. But I'm not alone in that difference because you're different the same way. What happens to you after the first drink?

>> Yeah. >> Pretty intense. >> Pretty intense.

>> Intense enough that you do. >> Ah, that's pretty intense. >> Me, too.

I lose count after one. I drink until I don't need to drink anymore, which may be weeks, it may be overnight. Yeah.

So after the first drink, what happens to me is the same thing that happens to you, the second drink. That's alcoholism. What happens to me after the first drink is the second drink.

Well, I don't have any choice in that matter. And it may not occur this afternoon, but it will occur in a very short period of time. And following that will become well, Bill calls us all spray drinkers.

I will drink until that condition is no longer present. And I'll stop for a while and wonder what the hell happened. I'm never going to do that again.

And I'll lock on all the drama. So I don't do that again. But I go have another drink.

And then somebody will say to me, "Don't you see what you're doing to yourself?" Yeah. How do I not do that? Don't you see what you're doing to your family?

Oh, yeah. That hurts so bad I better have a drink. An allergy is worth thinking about.

If I were allergic to tomatoes, for instance, and I ate tomatoes, I'd break out with an itch. It's a definable symptom. If I If this is true, and it's like an allergy, when I take a drink, what happens?

I break out in an itch for another drink. It's describable. If I have this, it only happens to al alcoholics and we're going to be different than anybody else.

So, whatever treatments available for other people that may also have emotional problems because that goes along with alcoholism probably won't work for me. 19 years old in therapy, they used a very valid technique to help me get over my anger toward my dad. Uh, I had one of those mixed things.

I love my dad dearly and I hoped he'd die on his trips and never come home all at the same time. Just very confusing. What we did was put up a punching bag and then picture dad's face there and then punch it.

It's supposed to help me express my anger. I got involved in it. I really like this.

Express hell. This gives me that won't work for me. uh standard measures won't work for me.

If they had psychiatry and church and all of that would have worked for me, but we never addressed my problem. Do you feel kind of set apart once in a while? Yeah, I'm talking to him because I found him walking on the street in Camden.

literally just there he was and uh Brian seemed to know him. Brian's a very astute man. He stopped him, very compassionate.

Okay, I'll get you later. Well, the reason you feel different is because you're different. And I'm going to give you some really good news here.

It has never been by any treatment with which we are familiar permanently eradicated. The only relief we have to suggest is entire absence. If you have this disease, the best news I have for you is you are doomed.

And that's really good news. There's no treatment for this. Don't waste your time.

The only solution to this problem is the consciousness and the presence of God. A spiritual answer. It's the only thing we found that works.

However you conceive that. So, isn't that good news? No.

Because I'm either mad at God, don't believe in God, or I'm terrified of God. I've got all these images as to what God is that stand in the way of my ever having a relationship. H how many of you along the way picked up if you thought it, you've already done it?

And about the time they told me that was about the time I was thinking it. It's already too late. My spirit knows about love.

Deep within every man, woman, and child is the fundamental idea of God. And the stuff I'm I'm hearing, whether they're teaching it to me or not, what I'm hearing is he's going to kick your ass one of these days. And why?

Because of who you are. That's the message that I got, not what it was being put out. I am by nature this way.

And this is the way that the world says you're going to be punished forever more. Well, screw it. Why bother?

I can't How could I have a relationship with something I I'm afraid of or can't trust? And we face all that when we come to here. And my sponsors are very simple with that, very clear with that.

He asked me one day, describe to me God as you understand him. And I started talking about Santa Claus because that was that was kind of my, you know, what's he going to do for me? My real attitude when we got down to it was uh God created the heaven and the earth in six days and on the seventh he rested and as far as I was concerned he was still resting.

My basic conception is that God is out here somewhere, unreachable by me, judgmental, unknowable. But I was going through a new experience cuz what I came here for, as I said, wasn't sobbriety. I came here to be changed.

And here's Bruce, a man who had killed some people in a shootout on the street in a violent alcoholic rage I couldn't identify with. But he talked about the morning he did that. He said, "I woke up that morning and he was 17 years old feeling that nobody cared whether I lived or died.

Complete failure. And the pain of that was so great." He said, "I started drinking to kill the pain because it always had before. But this morning it didn't kill the pain.

It intensified the pain. And that kind of pain is also called rage. There is no honest response to being outcast beyond rage.

The spirit knows I'm as good as you are and as bad as I am. I'm as good as you are, as bad as I am. I belong here.

So I'm outraged. And in that rage, she said, "Screw it. I'm just going to go get mine and went down to rob a jewelry store.

And in the middle of that, the police were called and in the shootout, he killed some people on the street. The man telling me the story was not capable of committing the act. And I knew that.

I've been watching him. People watch us. I've been watching him.

I came here a complete cynic. I am now a healthy skeptic. Oh yeah.

I'll believe anything you tell me. What I believe is that you really believe that in whatever world you live in and that's fine with me. Roy Nichols, one of my other one of the other guys was a stickup man.

Like to take a gun and go rob places. And he didn't do it for the money either. He liked to rob supermarkets because there were two adrenaline rushes.

I mean, in a bank, you hit one teller and you scoop. He's going down line by line by line. Every one of them puts him at greater and greater risk.

And he liked the charge. What he really liked was the look on your face when he put a gun to your head. That's what he really liked.

The man telling me the story was incapable of committing that act. And I could see it. That's why I think I was already awake.

I could see it. Phil Guteras, who is to this day in my heart one of my heroes. Phil came from Guam.

Phil looked like a Chinese pirate captain. Yeah. And when he smiled, it was terrifying.

And Phil smiled a lot. Phil was in the penitentiary because when he was 17, they kicked him off of Guam because he was too violent. When Phil drank, he got really violent.

Sent him to family in Denver. Several years later, they wanted to send him back to Guam and Guam wouldn't take him, so they put him in a penitentiary because on his last drunk, he threw some people out of a three-story window. It's kind of fell as Phil was.

He came to me one day. He said, "I just realized something. I've been in this penitentiary for seven years, and you're the first person I've ever sponsored.

You will stay sober." And I lived up on the fourth tier. Of course, whatever Phil wants, Phil gets. Phil Gutteras was the softest, kindest, most loving human being I have yet to meet.

Taught me how to touch physically in a penitentiary and no one ever questioned it with Phil. Somehow even the worst of the worst understood what Phil was doing. We need touched.

The great master knew that. It's something that we do intuitively here. He'd be walking along the road and come on some guy who was sitting by the side of the road all crippled up and blind and with running sores and the guy thought that he was alone because he had running so was blind and crippled.

The master knew that he had those because he thought he was alone. And so the first thing he did, the way I read it, is he touched him and said, "Anybody home?" That simple touch makes a lie out of I'm alone. Whether you like it or not, it doesn't matter.

It's now a lie. There is something else here. And what do we do when they come here?

We shake their hand. We pat them on the shoulder. We touch them.

We move them around so they're not alone anymore. exhibit that sense of you are here and you are important. Then he would say to him, you know, you don't have to do this anymore.

They didn't know that. I didn't know that when you told me that. And he said it was such conviction that you got their attention.

And he would ask him, "You want to get up?" And he'd wait. And that's what we're supposed to do. First of all, do you want to stop drinking?

If you don't, see me later. I'll wait. Do you want to get up?

He'd say. And if they said, well, yeah, they always did because now they're not alone anymore. He'd say, okay, here comes the magic.

Get up. Oh, okay. With such conviction that they could get up.

And isn't that what we do? You don't have to drink anymore. Would you like to stop?

Okay. If you would, let me give you the secret. You ready?

Don't drink. Oh, okay. But now, how do I do that on a continuous basis?

I'll make that decision right now. That's cool. How do I not do that?

Well, that's what we can show you. Once I fully understood that I could not not drink, I had a drink. That weird since I understand I cannot not drink.

I don't drink. I love it. I've got a warped mind and it says that's good.

I can use that. Did you get it? Okay.

Now that you can no longer not drink, you don't ever have to drink again. Isn't that fun? So, I'm doomed.

I came to believe that there was a power greater than myself because I watched it walk. It name was Bruce and Roy and Phil. There were a couple other guys.

We had a group of about a hundred. And it's very clear to me that maybe 10 or 15 of them meant business, but that 10 or 15 walked this way. And I watched them.

Our 12step study school was one of 23 self-help groups in the penitentiary at that time. This was during the phase when the convicts ran the prisons. And we had our Saturday and Sunday afternoon room.

And it was really important. And I watched Bruce display a characteristic that I wished I'd had at one time. I saw him display and and live out real courage.

One of the other groups had decided they wanted our room and they prison politicians are pretty good. They'd convinced the associate warden treatment that what we were doing was pretty meaningless that they should give them our room. I'd never seen Bruce upset by anything, but the word came that we this was our last meeting that we were it was over.

And I watched his feathers. You ever watch a male bird? The feathers plumemed up.

And he said, "I'll take care of this." In a tonal voice that was just scary. Stomped out of there down the steps around the midways headed for the associate warden treatment's office. Puffed out.

And I'm thinking he's going to the hole. You don't stomp into the associate warden of treatments office and take care of anything. Not if you're wearing a number.

We're not going to see Bruce for several weeks. Okay. I don't know.

A period of time passed and he came back and the feathers were all in place and so was our school. What I saw was real courage. Now, if he'd left it alone for selfish reasons, he'd have had the weekends free.

Now, he could have done whatever he wanted. He didn't do this for him. He did it for us.

He put his own life in jeopardy for us. That's real cou. That's what they give medals for.

That's genuine courage. And he did it because he was a spiritual being. and this had to be done for us.

So I began to see some of the things that I wished I could be and you had already promised we can show you how to do this. Today I'm a man of great courage and there's no ego in that. I'm on God's business and I'll do whatever is required of me, which is generally just show up and uh don't eat too much and only piss off half the room, you know.

Courage is the ability to let go of the familiar. Okay. Yeah, write that one down.

I stole it. You can write that one down. I got that from someone else, so don't give credit here.

I've forgotten who, so I won't give credit either. Courage is the ability to let go of the familiar, which puts me in some place where I begin to understand just a touch of the the process we're looking at here. This is a process not of acquiring more knowledge and more attitudes.

It's about letting go of old ones. is becoming detached. If I am my car and when I'm not in my car, I'm nobody.

If I am my job, when I'm not at work, I'm nobody. I must detach from those things so that who I am is who I am wherever I am. And that I'm okay with that.

And this process we're here helps that. See, once I understand the where I am, God is. It's over.

I like black vests. I think I really look cute in black vests. And if I don't, don't care.

I like them. But there's a whimsical side to my nature. Uh because I come from a place where black mess sent another message.

I want to get a Schwin patch and put it on the back of this. Yeah. My wife won't let me yet.

Don't you think that'd be cool? >> Yeah. I'll walk into Putin sober some night when they're still going boom boom boom with my Schwin patch on someday.

Brian's brave enough to do that, but I'm not. >> You still back there, Brian? >> Mighty brave.

>> Mighty brave. Yeah, I can see that. I've watched.

He is brave. He really believes he can do anything. And he's right.

So if there's no treatment for this condition, what the hell are we doing here? You ever ask yourself that, why am I here? Does anybody here really believe that going to meetings will keep you sober?

If that's all you do, no. They are a very important component to sobriety. But if if meetings alone kept alcoholics sober, everybody who came here would stay sober.

If this book could keep you sober, everybody who used it or read it would stay sober. And that doesn't happen. Bill makes a statement in here that just caught my attention.

After I've done all this work, preparing myself, learning to pray, writing inventory, doing a fist, beginning to make amends, he says, "My new attitude toward alcoholism came without any effort at all on my part." Isn't that funny? Apparently, all this is to keep me busy while God does his work so I don't interfere. And it's mainly to help me locate who I've hurt so I can get square.

The whole purpose of inventory is to face and be rid of the things in myself that are blocking me and to help me identify the wrongs I have done so I can set them straight. All right, we'll get to that because I was certified and on paper and and I say that because I was shown the paper. One of the guys in the group was a clerk and he said, "I thought you were full of crap." Called me over one day at meetings and he says, "But look." And there I was certified sociopath type two manic depressive drug addict.

And some of us have grave emotional and mental disorders, but they too can get sober if they have the capacity to be honest. And I was afraid of that. I went to Bruce or not Bruce, it was Phil that I asked.

I said, 'You know, I'm I'm truly afraid I may be one of those people that's incapable of being constitutionally incapable of being honest.' He said, 'Well, that's probably the most honest thing you've ever said, so you're capable. And walked off. I've got this head that wants to label everything and measure it and get rid of that.

How long have I been sober? for now and for a lot of now but mainly for now. So we get to start square.

I was really a little afraid of this insanity business. The last time I had looked within myself what I found I had to kill. Couldn't live with it.

And I got an image a while back. God is so gentle and merciful to me. Since you put me in this chair, I must find easy, gentle ways to share the truth with you.

And here's the image of God. The first time I looked into the darkness within me, I was looking from the darkness. And now that I've come here, we go back in and look into the darkness from the light.

That's a different deal. All of the dragons turn into worms when the light's thrown on them. But there's one that I challenge you to use on a regular basis.

And the best way to do it is when you're working with new people. Underneath a rock in my head is a worm called I ain't got it. I'm not one of those.

And it thrives in the darkness. And it eats fear and it eats complacency and it gets fat in the darkness. So every now and then take the rock off and with new people.

I just did it with you. Why do you think you're alcoholic? Is it possible I may not be an alcoholic?

Yeah, it's possible. So let's look at the symptoms. 10 seconds.

I know I'm an alcoholic. The rock goes back and the worm's small. Take it off once in a while.

Same thing happens to me that happens to you. I don't ever remember two beers. What kind of a stupid thing is that?

Couldn't make any sense. Unless you're my father who was in an airplane accident and couldn't sleep well. So, the doctor prescribed two beers at night so he could sleep.

And that's all he had for him. That wasn't stupid. Two beers and I am now awake.

We drink a a seditive to wake up and take speed to go to sleep. Isn't that dumb? And I wonder why am I different?

I ran with an old heroin addict, poet Jimmy Morris. And during the time when we were in our artsy fartsy phase doing Jack Carowak and all that stuff, we couldn't stand you young people and what you were doing with the drugs. I mean, we were after spiritual enlightenment and you want to go dancing and looking at colors just and and you brought all this heat down.

So Jimmy and I'd go up to the upstairs room and he'd shoot heroin and I'd shoot speed until we both got to the same place, which is a very calm, quiet place. And we spend the evening visiting quietly with each other. Yeah, I'm different.

I've had to learn that about a lot of things in life. Uh my wife has gotten to watch some of my awakenings and they were not always comfortable. B vitamins are stress vitamins, right?

They help normal people relieve stress. Well, they're stress vitamins for me, too. Within five days of taking B vitamins, I am stressed beyond belief.

My body goes bonkers on them. I don't dare take them. very minute amounts.

Uh we heard one time, we being the Denver Young People's Group, incredible group by the way, almost all of us are still sober and all of us are still active. The group has produced two trustees from that one little group of about 14 15 people. But we heard about Bill and his NASIN experiment.

nascin being one of the vitamins because Bill was willing to try anything that might help an alcoholic. He even tried acid once, found out it had no more to offer than the spiritual awaken he'd already had and put it away. But that was based on the fact that the peyote people had discovered hallucinogens taken ceremonially helped Indian alcoholics stop drinking.

>> So Bill thought he'd try it. Anyway, he threw it away. But we tried the nascin.

Now, have any of you taken nasin? Yeah. >> Gives you a flush.

The the blood carriers open up and there's a flush that goes with it. We stopped. It didn't cause any great harm, but all of us together realized within a couple weeks we really like this flush.

Warm flowing. And we better not do that because that'll get us in trouble. Okay.

I took some B12 one time because it's kind of run down. One tablet a day, first week, two tablets a day the second week, three tablets a day the third week I'm going to quit because I can see the progression. It's my nature when I take it from the outside and put it in.

I have to be careful. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. Boy, you guys are drawing a lot of stuff out of me.

Not not that I I don't mind. I was genuinely afraid to go back in and look again with good reason. Uh I find horrendous things in there and they're not acts that I committed that destroyed whole towns.

They're yelling at kids for no reason. It's that kind of shabby that I can't live with. And Bruce's compassion and love for me came out.

He said, "Look, there is nothing in there that you haven't hasn't already killed you. And if you'll follow this process and go in with God, then you'll be able to get rid of it." And that promise, and it's part of the promise at the beginning of the fourstep to face and be rid of allowed me to look at these things and say, "Yeah, I really object to being this way. I'm willing to let it go.

Not the incident, but the self-centerness that says I will get this stuff across no matter what I have to do or who I put at risk. Me and everybody else. No consideration for anybody.

Just a self-centered drive to do the job. God gets to use that. You know, on the other side of that, that kind of stubbornness and obsession is called commitment.

Same old stuff, just a different direction. Which makes us very dangerous. Have you ever you've been around many spiritual people?

They're a pain in the neck. They really are. They say what they're going to do and then they go do it.

They tell you what you what they won't do and you can't get them to do it. They have this unnerving habit of being on time and very few of them wear watches. They just happen to be on time.

They uh the ones I follow, my my spiritual heroes are going about a mission. They're they're headed somewhere. They're doing things and it's important enough that they will not be distracted from it, but they're always willing to stop and have lunch, cup of coffee, visit for a day or two.

Always invite me to come along with them. Don't insist. Just invite me.

Perfectly okay if I don't go, but if you'd like to ride for a while, come on. We're have And they have fun. They really have fun.

and they disappear for a while. I've noticed that about them. I think it's very funny.

I'm one of them. Doesn't make me any better. It's just that I'm one of them.

And the reason I know that is cuz they tell me that they're all pretty, what would you call public? They sit in this chair a lot and share a lot. Very people know their names and uh almost without exception we are very private people.

If you never asked me out again I would be absolutely delighted. I love being at home. I don't need to come out, but as long as you ask, I'll come because I really have a good time here.

You know what I'll do here? I'll go home and tell my home group about you, particularly about you. How we found you, a desperate soul on the streets of Kim with a smile that said, "I'm okay." and a look in his eyes that says, "I'm jumping in front of the next car.

I don't care." He couldn't make it. You know that? Couldn't make it, right?

You couldn't make it this weekend. >> This weekend? >> Yeah.

>> No way in the world you could make it this weekend. Here he is. You know what?

It's already happened. You might as well relax. It's too late.

You're going to get well. Yeah. Oh What does that mean?

I needed to find a working description of sanity and insanity. I've got to participate in this all of me. And I found it in the story of the carcinom named Jim because he is me.

Now, there's a lot in this story. First of all, Jim had been to AA six times. Worked with the people who put all this together, our founders.

Worked with Dr. Silk, got the information straight. It wasn't fuzzy at all and drank anyway.

So, apparently the information by itself is not enough. So we come to a day when Jim now who had owned this car agency now after his sixth relapse is working for the agency he used to own and I try to get into their head in these stories. I want to I want to be them and see and I can get that comes to work one morning with a little lowgrade resentment that just kind of tick that he has to work for the company that he used to own.

has a few words with his boss. Poured some gasoline on the fire is what he did. You know, lowgrade resentment needs fuel.

So, you have a few words with the person. You punch the bag and really start getting involved in it. And then he decided, I think I'll go out in the country and look for a prospect for a car.

And I think, wait now, wait a minute. I've been a salesman. If I want to sell cars, I ought to go where there's people, not cows.

Okay. And there may have been a prospect out there, but interestingly enough, he stops at a roadhouse that he's been to many times before. He knew what was there to have lunch.

A roadhouse out is just a place that serves food and booze. Has a sandwich and a glass of milk. Something in his head said, "Well, Jim, you've been sober long enough.

You can have an ounce of whiskey if you just put it in the milk. I'm thinking, wait a minute. You know what whiskey does to milk?

It curdles it right there on the spot. Without hesitation, down it goes. Then he did the thing that's the clue for the alcoholic.

He said, "I think I'll have another sandwich and another glass of milk and might as well have another shot of whiskey while I'm at it." This the experiment was so successful, meaning he didn't tear the bar apart. Didn't go instantly insane in a dramatic way. He was instantly insane.

I think I'll have another. Ends up back in the nut ward again. The boys go to see him and they ask him what happened.

Tell us what happened. We're interested in relapse. When I say you don't have to drink again, I mean it.

But I'm very interested in relapse because it happens so often. What happened? And he told him the story.

And then Bill says, "Whatever the precise definition of the word may be, we call this plane insanity. How can such lack of proportion and of the ability to think straight be called anything else?" And I got it. That's what's wrong with me.

I don't understand proportion and I can't think straight. I am rubberminded. I cannot think my way out of this deal.

And I get to look at proportion. I I don't seldom ever got angry. I go from calm to killer rage just like that over really important stuff.

like getting cut off on the freeway. Stupid stuff. No proportion in that.

I heard myself tell a line one time, as a matter of fact, 10 years or so sober. We were in LA and they were talking about these freeway killings where somebody cuts you off and the guy comes in behind you and shoots you in the head. I said, "I just don't understand that." And he answered, "Yes, I do." Clearly, fear is a game you play.

Pay 50 cents, ride the roller coaster, get scared. I like terror. Terror makes me feel alive and useful.

I can take on the world when I'm terrified. No proportion. I got a little family and there's not enough money, so I'll take on a second job.

want to be a good father, a good husband. Now I'm working two jobs so I'm selling them home and then some of that money has to go for the babysitter and the money gets used up. So I need to get a third job and I think all this is going to work and before long all I can see is screw up and go get drunk.

No proportion. Simple lies are for amateurs. You You make good lies.

Really important lies. >> Yeah. Yeah.

The ones I do are really good. They have to be. I've got to engage you in them uh long enough to get you the hell out of my life while I figure out what's going on up here.

I remember my dad one time, God bless him, somebody had told him I was now shooting speed and it just broke his heart and he uh challenged me in the kitchen one day. He said, "I understand you're injecting that stuff now." And I had tracks here. So I took my coat and pulled it up here and looked him in the eye and said, "How dare you?

Look, I'm clean." And threw it back. That's a lie. That's dishonest.

make him feel bad so that I don't have to get to it. And we do sh stuff like that. Uh lack of proportion in the ability to think straight.

So maybe maybe sanity is proportion and I will be able to think straight. Meaning I can say if I do this this will probably occur. How will this affect you?

And later on our principles talk about that. I'm to ask that question. Is this selfish or not?

What kind of an effect is this action going to have on you? If I say yes to something, how will it affect Jackie? She's part of my life.

Everything every decision I make affects her. She needs to be consulted. And it it we'll talk more about that later.

Bruce also said, "We will assume you went insane about two seconds after birth, so we don't have to psychologically track all of it. Just forget what you think you know about anything, and we'll start from scratch." And uh somehow was able to do that. What time you guys want to have lunch?

I smell psych smoker psychosis now. I'm I'm beginning to get a direction. Is this what you were looking for?

Cuz I'm beginning to get a direction from you that we're going to go through these steps here. We will sometime today if you wish take a third step together once we're prepared for it. We'll go through some inventory.

We'll talk about amends and how you live this way if that's what you want to do. Uh so the kind of insanity I suffer from is alcoholic insanity. Selfishness, self-centerness, lack of proportion, and I'm unable to think straight.

So if I can't think straight, I won't use my mind to think with. What am I going to use? Because I'm damn sure not going to use yours either.

I've been to meetings with you. You're going to be my advisor? I don't think so.

Not unless you have changed. The kind of sponsors that I got never ever told me what to do, nor will I do that for you. They made strong suggestions, but they were mainly to help me find out what what do you want to do?

What do you I'd go, what do you think of this? He'd say, well, what do you think of this? I think one of the most profound experiences of my life was watching freedom occur because I wanted that too.

I worked in the dishroom in the penitentiary and except for yard and work, we were maximum security. We were just locked down, which was fine with me. I've always send me to my room, please.

That's where I want to go. I've got Louis Lamore and a nice soft bed and I'm perfectly content. Put me in the hole.

I don't care. I've got a mind that I can get out of this. In fact, Jackie and I had the experience a while back.

I have a lot to do with our local penitentiary where I did the last time and they have a big museum there and they had taken some of the cells from the old cell block and they have them on display. And I've said for years that I lived in an 8×10 toilet. Well, one of the cells I lived in was there.

It's 7 by9. We checked it. >> I made it larger so I could fit it.

If that doesn't tell something about your world, we can make it larger or smaller. And it all happens right up here. Okay.

Uh so I'd be locked down for the night and Bruce would come by and visit with me. And I'm slow. It took a few times for me to realize he's getting out of his cell when he wants to.

I want what he has. He was free. He was absolutely free.

He told me on one of those visits, he gave me this. Do you know that it's possible for me to think one thought at a time? And that hooked me and drew me in all the way.

There's my answer. I was having trouble with serenity, so he made me look it up. I, you know, I've been to the first day before the first day of creation on acid where it's really quiet because there's nothing happening.

That's serene. And I know that is not what we're talking about here with serenity. Have me look it up.

And the definition that works for me is clarity of thought. Serenity is clarity of thought. One thought at a time.

It also helps me understand that my feelings are the product of my thinking, not the other way around. If I have too much going on up here, then I become agitated. And the feeling will be agitation.

I do a little trick. I make a what's on my mind list to this day. They suggest in the 10th and 11th step that in the evening you might want to make plans for the next day.

And that's what I do. I get to sleep good because my biggest concern, my anxiety is usually that I'm afraid I'm going to forget something important. Well, put it on paper then you're not going to forget it.

Really just kind of clears the decks. Clarity of thought. One thought at a time.

I'm able not to think one thought at a time. Not always. There's a certain joy in being confused.

I'm also able now and then, I must tell you, to not think at all. And it is my fervent hope that when my time comes that I'm there. And that's where I'd like to leave this planet from.

From utter silence. Can you imagine that being quiet? Good lord.

We'll go there. The way to learn to think one thought at a time is to get rid of all the other thoughts. You can't learn how to think one thought at a time.

You just get rid of everything that isn't one thought. And the process will show us that and I'll show you precisely how I work that so that that occurs. It says we're supposed to to talk to God about in every circumstance in our life.

And I I practice that coming out. I would go to the Safeway store to the bread rack and I don't know what happened while I was away, but they started having 15 of everything. 15 kinds of peas, 15 kinds of bread, 15 kinds of meat.

So, I'd stand in front of this bread counter and I don't know what to do. And I would pray. I might as well practice.

And the way I would pray would be to ask and and I pray in here, not out here. For my present state of physical being, which of these should I be eating? Then I'd let everything go out of focus.

And whether he either stayed in focus or came back into focus, that's the one I took. Now, whether that was valid or not doesn't make the slightest bit of difference. It was the practice.

Okay. Uh I've made some bad choices. I'm about 15 20 pounds overweight, but that doesn't seem to hurt my spiritual sense.

It kind of says, "Go for it, kid. What the hell? you're on bar time anyway.

When my dad was getting ready to die, he had problems with his stomach. So all the people were trying to help him took him off of his favorite foods and he loved chili. Loved it.

86 years old, getting ready to go. And he asked the doctor, "Can I just have some chili?" She was very wise. She says, "Of course, whatever you want." She and I had a talk to him.

What's he going to do? Kill him. And he had a sense of humor.

After that, we all went, this was at a time, it was a family consultation with the doctor cuz things were going kind of bad for him. We all went over to Denny's. And uh they also, the family believed that he was involved in some dementia.

I knew better. He wasn't. He was just losing his memory.

And for my dad, that was a critical thing. He was an unmeasured genius. They every test they tried, they couldn't measure him.

So losing his memory was important to him. He said to me one time, "You know, this memory loss thing, Don, has uh some real benefits. I only have to rent one movie for the rest of my life." But we took him over to Denny's and he's got his chili.

And I'd been gone. I'd been down to North Carolina. So I hadn't seen what they saw that they called dementia.

They thought it might even be Alzheimer's. So I'm watching for some signs. And he's got the chili and he had some toast with some jelly on it.

and he brings it over here and he reaches down with a spoon and it looks like he's gonna put chili on the jelly and I'm watching and he looked up at me and went, "Gotcha." Okay, it's the same man that gave me the I'm giving you these because they work. He gave me a truth for life. All you really need to live a decent and good life is honor and wisdom.

You must have enough honor to keep every promise you ever make, no matter what the personal consequences, and enough wisdom not to make too many promises like that, which is consistent with us. We make promises we can't keep. So, if that's my problem and that's causing me guilt, what I need to do is not learn how to keep promises.

It's to learn how to quit making so damn many promises, which is based on what will you think of me when I long no longer care. I no longer have to you. Okay?

Thing gets really simple. They want to do noon. How long do you want to go on?

I I don't want to bore you to death. I'd like you to stay all day. We can take it in pieces.

And there's at least two smokers getting ready to hurt me. It's now 11:15. We're going to eat at noon.

Part of what I'm postponing for is that during our next session, I've got a feeling from this group that we can move right up to and into the third step. It'll take about an hour. And if if you'd like to do that, we can fool around here.

We can take a break. I don't want to go any further in the process that that I'm building. But I'll tell you what I like to do.

If if you want to sit Well, nobody's getting up, so I assume you want to sit for a little bit. What's on your mind? I'd love to ask you have you ask me anything you want and we'll visit about that.

Nobody has anything at all on their mind. Well, good. We're all saying that, aren't we?

>> Absolutely. >> I like him. Did you see what he what he's learned to do?

He's a carver. >> God's gift. >> Absolutely.

Do you ever watch a carver? It's like Michelangelo. You take a block of wood and he wants a face and you just carve away everything that doesn't look like what the face looks like and there it is.

Kind of what you do. >> Yeah. >> Just take away what doesn't look right and there it is.

And that's the spiritual life, huh? >> We can all do it. >> Yeah.

That's what this program is about. taking away the things that aren't me so I can show up. >> 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.