Bruce B. at Erlanger, KY August 15th 1999

My name is Bruce.

I warned you not to ask me here.

I got to do the next part. I see my name is Bruce

and I'm an alcoholic.

Good job. Somewhere out there in that ocean of smiley faces is a guy named Scott who just bought me this drink and said he was going to pray for me because I'm scared out of my mind. It says in the big book that, you know, what do we do with our fears? It says you write them down on paper and he asked God to remove them and ask, show you what you can be. I don't have a pencil,

and so I'm just going to tuck this one through. You know, you people here are so optimistic and so happy, and I'm really glad you invited me here. But to ask somebody at my age a year in advance to come here,

why were you shooting for the moon? You know,

now I, I, I don't want to be embarrassing anybody, but I want to tell you why I'm here, Because I'm here by mistake.

I got a telephone call last September at night. I was home and this person said, hi, is this Bob? And I said, no, my name is Bruce. And they said that they were calling South Carolina or North Carolina one of the other. And then I said, no, this is Bruce. I'm in Scranton, PA. And this voice said, are you a friend of Bill WS?

You know, what are you? What are you going to sell me if you got call up and tell me something like that, You know, and they're actually they're calling South Carolina. And I said yes, I was regardedly. And they said, well then I would do.

And I was asked to come here and speak.

I didn't think this was for real. So I called this person a week later I said, is this for real? She said don't take yourself too damn seriously.

I thought this guy, you know, so I sent her a tape because I've only done this three times and I was just telling Dick he's he's been there every time. I'm not sure whether it's getting any better. I'm not sure it's getting any worse. I, I still giving it a try, but,

and so here I am, you know, and someone else, John called me up a couple months ago. I guess it was. And he, he, he made me feel more comfortable and we talked about it a little bit. And I said to him, how do you know anything about me if you're just, you know, taking me for, you know, as a person from South Carolina who actually lives in Pennsylvania? He said.

We don't care,

I said. So you certainly must care about, you know, I must have to have some kind of qualification to be here. And we decided the only qualification was that I'd be sober here this afternoon.

And I am.

I cry a lot. And so

I don't cry over unhappy things. I cry when I'm full of joy and I have trouble when I talk if I start getting too joyous. And so I brought a friend of mine with me and we've had a 10 hour meeting on the way out here and he was to make sure I didn't drink on the way here

as Paul over here. And Paul is celebrating 12 years of sobriety in November.

That chokes me up because it makes me feel good.

Stop it, Bruce. Now, you people do things a little differently than we do in Scranton, PA. You say they took it away

Well anyway, I I I got sober. I took my last drink in out West in Rocky Mountains and there were these W Texans around the meetings that you see and when I first went to meetings and they would do this most bewildering little exercise, I'd say, but for the grace of God, the fellowship, this program and that had the reason or two stick great for the last 10,471 days.

I certainly listen to him and think jazz. This is what these people do. You know, they sit around and memorize how many days they've been sober as if that was sure that's how you're gonna get. Well, I guess. And I just showed you my sobriety date.

Now you can take the next hour if you want to. You've got to remember the leap years.

You'll figure out that I got sober at 5 minutes after 5 Rocky Mountain Time,

January 31st, 1971, a week after Bill died.

And I always use the word thankful because to me, as a child of chaos,

I was told most of my little child life that I was the most ungrateful move, You know, whatever they had, my father had words for that he had ever experienced. And they're always trying to make me feel shamed by telling me I'm ungrateful. So I don't like that word. So thankful

comes out of my heart grateful. It seems always to be a response to the people who didn't like the way I was behaving. So I'm a very grateful alcoholic now. I think I just, oh, I had a sponsor. His name was Frank and I believe Frank is still alive. But I have lived in eight different cities since I got sober. So I've had to get a new sponsor each time I moved to a new

environment. And I used the fifth step

to describe for me what a sponsor should be. Because it tells in me in that chapter that or in that step that I'm in 6th chapter, that I'm supposed to have somebody whom I can trust, somebody who is a friend, somebody who will be a partner, someone who will not try to change my plan. That describes somebody that I I would really like to share my, my experience and strength and hopefully that a very personal level.

And so that takes care of the what you say at the beginning.

So you do one other thing. It's different. And I discovered that I finally figured it out. When you say the Lord's Prayer, you do it a little different than I we do in Scranton. You say, give us this day, Our Daily Bread. Then you pause

and I'm like the guy said, Marty said last night, I'm OK. I don't wait for my daily threat, obviously. And I so that both times you caught me, I said, give us this day Our Daily Bread. And I said Our Daily Bread immediately. And I was talking all by myself because you were all standing here listening to me saying Our Daily Bread. And and you got to me because my doctor told me I weigh too much too. But that's that's but you know, Alcoholics Anonymous is very much the same everywhere that I've ever gone. There's there's

places back in the 70s that didn't say hi when you announce yourself. And I remember I went to a meeting once in Nebraska

early on, and the chairman said, my name is Bill, I'm an alcoholic. And I said hi, Bill from the back of the room. And they all looked at me like I was the strangest person that I've ever lived. But I think that most of us now say hi. And that's fun because that was the only way I could get this machine oil today is by telling you high twice as well. They knocked the table off.

I got to get started on this pretty soon, don't I?

I'm catching my breath. May I may get into this in a minute or two. I want to make one statement that when I'm talking,

and this happened to me years ago, I joined Alcoholics and I had my last drink in Boulder, Co and the meat I never, I was almost I think about four years before I went to a speaker meeting. You call it a lead

in the beginning of the book. In the forward is my book. It says that recovery begins when one alcoholic talks with another.

And I've always done Alcoholics Anonymous very much one-on-one. And I'm not accustomed to speaking, you know, obviously, but I do it. And what happens to me? And you can. I hope you all have this experience because you deserve it.

Come up here to look at these faces and be scared out of your mind.

When, when, when I'm speaking, I, I do try to invoke the presence of God.

But what happened? I do try to talk from my heart, but my heart's not the same as your heart. And I'm going to say some things because I'm talking, I'm not talking from script. I just talk. And I may say some things you disagree with and they say some things you don't buy at all. But they're my approach to this book. The wonderful part about the big book is that I have seen literally hundreds of people read what's in that big book and have totally different experiences

and they all get well, sober, happy and live good, productive lives the way I do. It may not be the way you do it,

but I think do it is the important thing. And

I where I live there are 5 Bruces and I notice a lot of you people have strange names too, because nobody can use the last name in Alcoholics Anonymous. So we get these really weird nicknames to distinguish between all the different times and all the different, all the other people. And you've got them around here because I've met about 10 of you that have really weird names.

Well, in my community, we have a one Bruce is called Dumpster Bruce

Oz used to say he ate out of the dumpster when he was on the street. Now he's sober eight years and he's trying to shake that name.

But you know, since my names Bruce, I don't want that type because I didn't out of dumpsters. But when I first got to Scranton, I came there with about 22 years sobriety and

there are a lot of skeptics around who had 18 years surviving. I wonder if we don't know he's got 22 years. And I also, I ever since I went through the steps with my sponsor in Denver years ago,

I've always taken the attitude that if I go to any meeting anywhere in the world, whatever, I hear you can raise any subject you want to at the beginning of the meeting. But I will relate that subject into the text of the big book. And I will always talk out of this book. So my props are I have a little big book now. I got the next little big book and I got my

regular big book, and then I got this one for people who can't see when they get older.

I like big books, and so my nickname in Scranton is Big Bruce

and I, they didn't like me very well when I got there because Big Boob Bruce whenever I'd speak to a very big group. But I've been there for seven years now and they say it with a lot more affection. And,

and

recently he said we have a lot of big book thumpers in Cincinnati. And if you stop to think of it, because I know of the people who don't like the big book, there's a lot of people don't like big books

called people who read the big book, big book thumpers in a derogatory sense, but they are not old enough to remember the movie Bambi.

And if you remember who Bambis best friend was, he was the cutest little rabbit and sat on the logging, he was called Thumper Thumper. And there's nothing wrong with Thumper. He was a good kid. You know, he's a nice little rabbit and there's nothing wrong with the big book. It's curious to me,

you know, and I like to use these because there's things, I don't want to mistake what it says in here, but on the very first page of the big book, I want to read this because it's where I come from. It says we of Alcoholics Anonymous are more than 100 men and women,

both sexes, who have recovered from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body. And then in italics to make it, I think us to emphasize the point. It says to show other Alcoholics precisely how we have recovered is the main purpose of this book. That's pretty exact precisely. Then I hear over the years there's no lose or don'ts. It's just a suggested program. And I don't think that's the way it was written. I think that

for me, every step in that book has a prayer. Every step in that book has action. And if I know what the prayers are and if I know what the actions are, I don't look at a as 12 steps to climb and jump off the top. I look at it like a clock face. There's 12 numbers on the clock. And the 12th step says I'm supposed to practice the principles which are the steps

in all my affairs. That means if I keep this level and keep myself level headed,

I have access to all these steps for any problem that I've got through any part of my day and any part of my life. That makes a lot more sense to me because climbing up a bunch of steps and parachuting off the top as you get to be my ages. And that's that's the stupid thing to do.

All right, So I'm Big Book Bruce, and here I am in Cincinnati. Or no, not either. I'm in Kentucky,

and I'm talking to a whole lot of happy people.

And so I should tell you about, you know, my sister. I have a sister and a brother. I'm the only one in the family that joined this organization. In fact, I have been here now for all these years, and my older brother is glad I go to that, whatever that place is. But recently at church, he, his minister, preached the sermon on two people called Bill and Bob and said that they had started the most significant spiritual event of the 20th century.

So he called me up. He said do you belong to that group?

I thought after 28 years he might have guessed what group I belong to. But,

but I think that was a pretty that convinced him that I'm in the right place. Probably my sister has no idea what this is about. So I, she lives in Ithaca, NY and I, she, we talked last week and she said, where are you going? I said, I'm going to Cincinnati. She said, what are you going to do there? And I said, I'm going to an, a, a convention and they've asked me to speak. And she said, what in the world would you talk about?

Have you ever thought of that? What did they talk about Last night? I heard one guy say he had bisexual

relationships with a zebra

and a lady told me about some friend she had that ate the heads off frogs.

Well, what's left for me?

A friend of mine before I came here told me what you do is you go and you tell them how you puked and then you found God.

And

I think,

you know, I'm not trying to be smart. I think that's the truth of it. That's exactly the truth of it. I still have vivid memories of every time I vomited because they were so much the same. I know what it feels like. I vomit on the size of cars in the winter time. I vomited in my, you know, and my bedroom floor. I vomited all over the place. I was sick and I was a sick alcoholic and had no idea what was wrong with me because I started out drinking when I was just a 14.

I got drunk on a New Year's Eve when parents are gone and I was with four friends from school. And when I was drunk, they looked at me and they said, Bruce, you're drunk. And the attention that I got, the rush that I got of being recognized as somebody who is doing something important stuck with me.

Here's finally something that I could distinguish myself with. And so I did.

And my father was a coach of the military school and because of his position there, I was able to, if I worked in the kitchen, go to this school and wash dishes and spend 4 years with every rich delinquent child in America. And I learned how to drink more. And then I drank enough in my senior year where they threw me out. This is my father worked there. They got me right back in again. And I followed this pattern. I don't know about the rest of you, but my adolescence I can remember,

I think Marty last night talked a lot about the way I felt as an adolescent, and there was no one that I could express it to. My brain was on fire. I had no idea, no idea how to be a human being. And yet I had to pretend every day that I was one. People were always telling me to do this, do that and and become something that I wasn't and I wasn't sure who I was in the first place.

But it was a horrible nightmare. And I certainly was a a candidate for Alcoholics Anonymous by the time I was 18.

I was, you know, I mean, no, no, I'm not. I'm in Kentucky. The first time I went to jail was in Toledo when I was 18. I was picked up for vaguer C and being drunk. And it didn't mean a thing to me. It was something that I could brag and boast on to my friends and was right. Right back to the Monopoly game. You did what was. Wow. Yeah, that's great. And and that that was what defined me because I couldn't do anything else. And I went to the University of Michigan and and they kicked me out for drinking. And it it what a a comfort it was to

years later, so did Doctor Bob.

And now I've got my heroes, but that my heroes today are quite different than they were when I was 18I continued to drink

through college. I got in another college and my college experience was all centered around alcohol. And I lived. I lived in an era and I realized I'm getting older than other people are now. But drinking was different, as it seems to me as I observe new people coming into alcohol are synonymous. I used to love to sing and get raunchy when I was drunk and so did all the people I was with.

There was a

there was a National College drinking fraternity. You were tapped there. What a wonderful word. In the middle of the night, they would pick the three or the 13 most distinguished drinkers on the Syracuse University campus to belong to the senior men's honorary of Kappa Beta Phi. And the greatest achievement of my life. And it was in the paper when I got married years later that I was the president.

Paul Paul Keg of Kappa Beta Phi and Sirius University

and my mother used to wonder why I bragged about that. So did a whole lot of other people. I'm sure al Anon people would understand that. I don't to this day why the destruction of my soul, of destruction of my being was the most the thing that I most celebrated. And it went on. I I met a woman. I got in a fight with my father. When I graduated from college,

I went in the Army and got the GI Bill so I could go to college. And in the Army I drank a lot too. And then in our argument, I went out.

My father drank a lot. He never joined Alcoholics Anonymous. So in the book it says I can't designate that he's an alcoholic, He has to decide for himself. But in this argument, I said I was going to leave the East Coast and we were up in Syracuse and I was going to the West Coast as far as way as I could get from him. And I was never going to come back here to the East Coast again. And he told me that I could not make it, which challenged me. And that's what caused was my motivation to do something is have somebody tell me I couldn't.

So I went out to Portland, OR and he was quite right. I only had $100 when they left. And I, I slept in the car on the way out and I had $10.00 left when I got out there. And I looked up a woman that I had met in the Army. I knew she taught school out in Portland, OR and she did, she invited me to dinner because I, I had expected she would because I didn't know how I was going to eat dinner that night. And

she took me to dinner the next night and next night and then we got married a month later.

She was from Manhattan, KS and didn't look too good. I was had graduated as an architect and it didn't look too good in Manhattan, KS and I didn't want to live in the same town with her father and mother. So we moved to Denver, Co so that her mother and father could come visit us from time to time and see their grandchildren. And I continued to drink.

Her mother and father and my wife were all all of the thought that I was a very funny person because it was always drunk.

And we went out to dinner one night in Denver into Brown Palace Hotel, which is a very nice hotel in Denver. And I was passed out cold in the in the men's room. And they thought that was one of the great stories that they could tell. At Christmas time when we all got together,

my father-in-law found me in the men's room at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver. And it went on that way. And it was really pretty disgusting by any terms that I could see it now. But that was the pattern of my life. I was in an architectural practice that three other guys who since have become very successful.

I soup one night in the drawer and found out that all the rest of them were forming a partnership and my name wasn't on the stationary. So I asked them why and they said because I drank too much. So I fixed them. I opened my own office. I had no idea what I was doing. I was motivated totally by revenge, by resentment. Everything in my life was was organized around such thoughts. I was developing into a real full blown alcoholic

and then I started doing ski resorts and I was away from home a lot and I thought it was part of my work to become drunk with all the people that I was working for.

And I did and I was successful being drunk. If any of you have ever experienced that, it's it happens to a lot of people that alcohol doesn't know, that you can't notice the alcoholism because everybody that you surround yourself with is drinking. And that's part of the environment of meeting people and networking, whatever they call it. And that's what I did and I and I got a lot of money for being absolutely stupid.

I don't want to tell you the buildings that I designed because you wouldn't dare go into them

anyway. Kept on going and I got lonelier and lonelier. And I think we heard a little about that this weekend. And I started drinking in bar. There was an Albany Hotel bar in Denver, and the bartender knew that about the 15 of us that sat in there. We're all businessmen, didn't want to talk to anybody, and we didn't talk about anything to each other. We didn't discuss

fall scores or anything. We just sat there to get wasted. And we did. And that was the last year I drank and I, I had some personal troubles at home and I had to go see a psychiatrist because of my two daughters. And that was the end of my drinking because he just thought that I was manic depressive and that what I really needed was some Valium. And so I started taking Valium. And I don't know if any of you have ever done that, but I kept it in my pocket

and I didn't watch a couple like Tic Tacs and say,

am I depressed? Have another one.

And by the time that I started drinking around 3:00 in the afternoon over at the Albany Hotel,

the mixture of the two Sunnah started swelling my tongue. And I, I had clients that I could talk to on the telephone I used. I used to be able to fake it and talk to them drunk and sound sober. But with that mixed up in there. And I'm so hungry, right? They'd say. On the other end of the telephone, they'd say, Bruce, you're drunk.

And I was and I lost a lot of my work and things didn't look too good. But I, my wife went into the hospital. We I tried it a a new home for our environment, for ourselves with a, a do it yourself get fixing up an old house. And she stepped on a nail and had to go into the hospital for a week with the phlebitis going through her system. And I invited all my very worst alcoholic friends to a party.

And the one who stayed with me for three days

and I drank everything we could. We passed in and out of the blackouts. He got on the telephone and started calling up people, saying we're had just killed people and doing all the kinds of dumb things. He told his wife he's going to kill himself. And we were getting all this attention, but we wouldn't let anybody in the house. So when this fiasco was over, I had my last drink. I drank a glass of Scotch, walked out of the house and got arrested for public intoxication. And they took me to jail. And I'd been to jail before

I'd been in the Toledo jail. I thought, yeah, that was funny. And I'd been a couple of others too, but for things. But

that last, that was my last drink, that dirty Jelly jar full of Scotch. And I went into a jail. And I believe and I, I, I don't know how to express this to it publicly, but there was something that came into my consciousness. I was there for two days

and I believe today in my heart and soul that it was God speaking to me that said, Bruce, don't drink.

I call that a spiritual experience. A man came in minister that I didn't know who had been offended by. My friend came in to talk to me and said, what do you want Bruce? And I broke down and cried

in which I've talked to several people that those kind of tears when you when you're finally making this the end of the over, I think God's cheers and I said I want to live like other people. I didn't know what I was talking about because I've come to realize I don't want to live like other people.

But I thought that's what I wanted at the time. And so I had the message from God. I believe this. They told me not to drink and I didn't take a drink for six weeks

and I was in a guy's house. I haven't had a drink since, but I was in a guy's house. I didn't go to any Amy's. I wasn't went to visit. A friend of mine,

an insurance salesman came to his house and the two of them were talking and we were talking about alcohol because I was so into this thing for the first time in my life, not having had a drink for six weeks, I was shaking and I was going through withdrawal symptoms. Boulder, at that time, 71, didn't have a detoxification center. And this is before the American Medical Association had called alcohol a disease, alcoholism a disease. So there wasn't any place to go. And unless you want to pay for it,

and I certainly didn't have any money left to pay for anything. This man heard us talking about alcohol and he looked at me when my friend got up to go in the John to relieve himself. And he said, look at me. And he said, are you an alcoholic and a stranger asking you that question when you don't have any idea whether you are not because you don't even know what an alcoholic is really disarm me. And I thought it was very disturbing question. And I said, why do you ask me that? And he looked into my eyes and I've, I've,

I've learned that eyes are very important to all of us. It shows what we feel, the despair and joy. And he said that I had the most hysterical eyes he'd ever seen in my life. And he said, if you got some time, and I said sure, it was in the morning. And so he, he got me in his car and said we pick up my car later. He drove me down to Denver and I went to my first aid maybe at York Street, which is a if any of you have ever been there, it's a great big old mansion in downtown Denver, Brownstone. It sounds like the building this guy here was building. They played cards in the

they serve coffee on the 1st floor. They got a meeting every two hours on the 2nd floor. And I never did find out what they do up in the third floor.

And I went there and I went to this meeting, there were about 20 people sitting around a table. And

they they do this all over the country. And they said, who is there anyone here for their first meeting? They don't quite separate or visiting from out of town. Well, OK,

yeah, I'm from Boulder and I'm visiting.

And then they told me I was the most important person in the rule. And have you ever been told that? Yeah, we, we all have been told that. And we are. And don't ever argue with any alcoholic about who's the most important. But

I thought they meant it, you know, and so,

so I there was a discussion meeting and there was a chairman up there and I interrupted their meeting quite a few times until they finally told me to shut up. They said, Bruce, there are other people at this meeting that would like to share.

The thought had never dawned on me. I thought that they probably all got together. I'm the most important person in the room, and this guy brought me all the way down from Boulder. So what are they doing here? You know,

and they were weird looking people because this is 1971 at a time where Colorado was just full of hippies and all those strange cults. Were they going to shave my head and put a, a pink bathroom on me and send me out to the airport and sell flowers with a thought that certainly came by me. I had no idea what they were doing. And I went home and I, my wife said, where have you been? And I said I was at an, a, a meeting. Oh, she said, that sounds pretty interesting. What's that all about? And I said,

I tried to describe it to. I said, I really can't describe it. They'll sit there and they say I'm Mary Ann. And then everybody says hi, Mary Ann. And she says, oh,

and this is going to be good for you. And

she was not a good big fan of Alcoholics Anonymous. She really believed in her heart that my association with a group like that was tearing us apart socially and that I had just demeaned myself beyond all recognition.

And I heard her once tell her mother in the kitchen when she was visiting that right after I started going to a meetings that, you know, Bruce and his sense of drama. This week he's decided to be an alcoholic

and he's doing it just to embarrass me. And they both agreed that that's probably what I was doing. And I went to my first meeting in Boulder and it was this is the truth. I, I went up there that night and a woman named Ruth,

I was scared to go in it because I was home character right now and I was going to run into some people that I knew and I did. There were a couple of people in there that I knew and there was a woman named Ruth that was crying and she said I don't understand. I don't understand. She was new. So as I but I wasn't going to tell him this time because I didn't want to be the most important person in this room.

And then they, there were a lot of people whining and complaining and telling all that stuff, typically a meeting. And there were people that were giving good solutions, but I didn't know what a good solution was.

And so they told me if I didn't like that meeting to come back on Thursday night. We only had two meetings in town then. And

we had one on Tuesday, one on Thursday. And so I came back on Thursday night and Ruth had had overdosed on pills and killed herself. And I thought, wow, this is heavy duty stuff. And a guy at the second meeting said his name was Joe and his wife is cheating on him. And he was all upset and everybody counseled him. And I went back on Tuesday night and Joe had blown his brains off.

And this is a group of people, there's only twenty of them there. And it scared me. It really did scare me. And I know I've been in a long enough now to know this happens. It happens a lot. We're a group of people who have to deal with tragedy all around us. And we have to recognize and celebrate the people who who stay sober, who do the steps, who who put it together because there is help here.

Some people aren't going to make it. And I think it,

I do believe God, Providence does work on you. And I think that that's was set up for me to get my attention,

but it didn't get my attention enough because I the years I spent in military school had made me a terrible cynic. I didn't want to be there. And so I grew up it through my adolescence hating everybody and everything and, and getting a sense of humor that's really kind of sick. And I still got that sense of humor. But Doctor Bob's last talks said

that if we're going to, he only mentioned three things, but one of them that all struck me as being important. If we're going to use that, I don't remember the tongue. Use it with love and compassion toward other people.

And he also has talked there in Detroit, made the comment that the big book is based to a large extent on the book of James, which is biblical Sermon on the Mount, which is Emmet Fox's book, and then First Corinthians 13. So I went in the home and I read that book of James and there's a lot in there. It says faithful works is dead. That's very important part of the program. There's another thing that says in there that this strongest weapon, greatest weapon a man is given by God is an attribute, is his tongue.

And that you can slash people. A tongue can do more damage than any other weapon you got. And that's me, you know, and here I am born and well developed with a sense of humor that's, you know, a little bit sick. And what am I going to do about it? And I, I've had to use the program to use humor, but to use it with kindness, love and tolerance. Every chapter in the book talks about that,

how love and tolerance of other people is the most important thing that we're supposed to. All is overriding all else.

And I tell people who go to meetings, There was a young woman that I met recently who had been going to meetings for a year and she called me up and she said I can't stand it anymore. Everybody says the same thing at every meeting I go to. It's the same people saying the same thing. And I said you've got to learn how to be tolerant, why not have fun with it? I told her to pretend that she was going to a gratitude meeting and write a 2 minute speech on a piece of paper and say exactly that

at every meeting for a week and see if anybody noticed. And she did. Nobody noticed,

but you know, the alcohol Alcoholics Anonymous is is, and Bill has said this over and over and over again. But it's the message from your heart. I lived in New Mexico for seven years sober. And we had a man there who drove cats. His name is Make it up this Smitty. And he never changed what he said. Every meeting he would say, hi, everybody, my name is Smitty. And I had a pretty good day today. And I'm just going to pass and let you people talk instead of me.

And he said that every meeting,

but I could tell by the way he said it how Smitty was doing. And all of us could. And and so it's it's who you are, how you're responding, who you're dealing with, how you live your life. That's the important thing, what you say at a meeting. Just to amuse myself about secure does. About three years ago, I sat in meetings, wrote down every cliche that I heard said, and I got up to 500 of them and published them and passed them around Scranton. And I titled it 500 Things to Say at a Meeting to make it sound like you know what you're talking

and avoid reading the big book.

Now, you probably got different cliches here in Cincinnati than we got in Scranton, but here's a couple that just for as an example, think, think, think. You ever heard that one? Have you ever heard? Don't think, don't drink, go to meetings.

If those two signs are hanging next to each other in a meeting, which one are you going to take?

But there's some of them that you know, they're all funny, but there's, there's a lot of them going around right now that I think are demeaning. I think one of the great things that we have in our, that God has given us that other animals on this planet don't have is a brain

is a gift. And Alcoholics, I have discovered, are probably the smartest people in the world. Because the con you have to go through the last five years of your drinking is something that other human beings out there don't have to do. So rather than say at a meeting that when I get up in my head I'm in Disneyland, or when I get up in my head I'm in Jurassic Park, I got up in my head, I'm behind enemy lines without ammunition.

Why not give credit to the brain that God gave you? And there's things in the big book that tell me that I'm supposed to

there's a whole cult going around today of think one of them is you better learn to live life on life's terms. You better learn to live in the real world. My big book says just the opposite. And if I put God in my life, it says this on page 47 of the of the chapter to the agnostics. If I put, if I'm even willing to believe in a power greater than myself, God,

once I have made that commitment, I must accept things

I never before thought were possible.

In other words, if you come here and you've done a good job on yourself for 25 years, there's not one among us that's going to be surprised that you're depressed.

If you did what I did, the things an alcoholic does are very depressing. Now, if you beat yourself up to the total submission to alcohol, you're going to come in here very depressed. People don't want to talk to you. Your wife doesn't like you. You probably lost your job, you lost your car. You probably have a thing around your foot to report to the police.

This stuff is all kind of depressing,

so don't be surprised about it.

And so put God in your life and you got to start accepting things you didn't think were possible, like a good life, happiness, freedom, joy.

That sounds pretty good. You know, it says in the, in that 4th chapter, which I think is probably if, if you only had one chapter in the big book to read, that's the chapter to read. It says once you get in involved with a, a, a God in your life, you can take spiritual flight out of this world.

You can enter into the 4th dimension. And if you want to find out what the 4th dimension is, read the book Emmet Foxes sermon on the mount. It tells it's beyond intelligence. If you, you know, the regular, the rest of the world is out there competing with their intelligence. They're taking tests all day long to see who's the smartest. You know, Alcoholics don't do that.

Once you are in God's world, you were born with everything you need. It was given to you by God. It says that in in the book of Sermon on the Mountain when it talks about the Lord's purses, Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. It suggests there that we were given a talent by God that we're supposed to bring into the world. Mozart found out what it was when he was five years old.

And I'm 68 and I'm still looking, but I'm getting closer to it.