The first annual Al-anon Family Groups conference in Reykjavik, Iceland

Hi. My name is Jack. Hi, Jack. I'm very grateful, enthusiastic, and very active sent me an email, and it was in Icelandic, and I almost clicked the spam button and flushed it away, but there was a attachment on it in English. And I thought, well, it says 12 steps of recovery in the title.

So I figured either some spammers really gotten good or there's, you know so I opened it up, and I got all excited that they they'd asked me if I might be available to come and speak in Iceland. And, we corresponded back and forth and we said we were able to arrange a date and I was getting pretty full of myself. I've never spoken out of the country before. I'm going to Iceland. You know, I talked to my friend Ajit.

I says, Ajit? Ajit speaks a little bit, and I speak a little around the country. I said, Ajit, guess what? I'm going to Iceland. Ajit says, oh, you got that email too.

He's just Oh, a bunch of us got that. Apparently, I was the one that was available, so I'm here. Got my ego out of the way right away. I was hoping to, bring my beautiful wife. I'd like to give you her greetings.

My beautiful wife, Leslie, who is sober and Alcoholics Anonymous a little more than 18 years, sends her best regards, And, she wishes that she could be here. I wish that she could be here. When she's not here, I'm not all there. So I'm glad to be here and, and represent my family. And my home group is in La Canada, California in the United States, a men's stag Al Anon meeting where, 2 nights ago on Thursday night, we had an Al Anon meeting with probably 90 or 95 Al Anon men for a meeting, and that meeting has childcare.

Because we have single parents who come to that meeting, and we provide childcare so they can come to a meeting of the Al Nahyan family groups. I knew nothing about Iceland. I had to get on the Internet right away and find out how cold it was gonna be. Everybody said Iceland is green and Greenland is icy. And I thought, okay.

I'm I'm gonna be alright then. And I looked up a little as much as I could, but I really didn't know anything when I got here. I didn't know anything about your currency. I don't know what side of the road you drive on. I know nothing.

I'm relying on, you know, on on our tour who picked me up at the airport and who's, putting me up at his place. Thank you very much. They're I'm asking him questions about this and that. What is this? And what do you do?

And I now know you drive on the right side of the road, everybody except for artists. Whereas, if you're somebody's on the wrong side, it's artists coming the other way. And we we took a little 4 hour whiz around the do we go around the entire continent or just some we we took a long tour and went and saw lots of stuff and jumped in the car with R and R to come back, and he tried the wrong side of the road. You know what? They don't move over for him because it's not artists.

For artists, they move over. For for him, we had to pull back and go on the other side. So I'm I'm really excited to be here, and I'm excited to share a podium with Alicia. She did a terrific job. I won't tell you anything from here that is more important than what she talked about, which is the family disease of alcoholism and how it affects them and how it affects us.

She talked about service. She talked about a lot of things. I I could just ditto that and do an interpretive dance and sit down and we'd all be even. But I'm probably gonna have to tell you a little of my story. My beautiful wife, Leslie, when I met her, I had no idea that in in beginning that relationship that being in a relationship with her would cause me to be able to come to Iceland all of these years later.

I probably wouldn't have thought of killing her so often before, you know, When she was passed out in the bed and snoring, and I was thinking about just sliding the pillow over her face and wondering if anybody catch me, you know. I get no jury in the world would possibly convict me. I'd be doing them all a favor. You know, her parents would quit worrying about her coming home because she was always calling up. He's throwing me out.

I'm coming home now. And, it would have been alright. I, I'll tell you a little bit about my childhood. I grew up in a home that was deeply affected by alcoholism. It wasn't affected by my parents' alcoholism.

I don't believe that my parents were alcoholic. But there was a lot of exciting stuff going on. There were, there were secrets and secret alliances and gun fights and car car chases and, you know, infidelity and lots of things going on. And I couldn't I came to Al Anon. I'm sitting in Al Anon listening to people talk about growing up in alcoholic homes.

I'm going, yeah. Yeah. That's it. That's it. Did that too.

Did that too. But my parents didn't drink. And I don't know why it never occurred to me. What eventually dawned on me after a little bit of time in Al Anon is that my parents were deeply affected by alcoholic parents. That I came to you courtesy of a of a beautiful my beautiful wife, Leslie, who got sober in AA and who screwed up my plans, because I was doing fine with the drinking.

Sobriety, I didn't do good with that. That, that my family was sick and crazy the same reason that I was. And I'll give you a couple examples of that. I'm not a drinker. I've never successfully drink the few occasions that I did, I drank because I liked the flavor of alcohol.

The AA big book says that alcoholics drink principally for the effect unfortunate byproduct of The effect of alcohol was an unfortunate byproduct of consuming alcohol for me. I liked a margarita because I liked the taste, or I liked a bloody Mary because I liked the taste. But but when I began to feel it, I would stop. They used to make my wife crazy. I would say, well, I need to stop now because I'm starting to feel it.

And she would look at me and go, honey, that's the point. She when she first came to live me, she I we'd pour a glass of wine. I'd pour a little little tiny goblet, about half the size of one of those. And I might drink half of that and leave some. And my wife will tell you that that is alcohol abuse.

Not what she did. It's what I did to alcohol. It was alcohol abuse. And, here's here's what I came out of that family. These are what my values were like.

I'm the guy that when I was a young man, I'm the go to guy in my family. My family surrounded by alcohol and my grandparents and my aunts and uncles and later in all of my brothers and sisters, I believe. I'm the go to guy. I'm the one that they know will answer the phone at 2 o'clock in the morning and come and fix whatever it is. And, one night, it's just another night in my family.

I get the call. It's 2:30 in the morning. My stepmother has called, and my brother has been in a fight at the bar with about 7 or 8 young men who broke the windows out of his van and tried to drag his girlfriend out the window. And he drove off dragging a couple of them. And he'd gone home and gotten a shotgun and had gone back to the bar, which precipitated a phone call from my my stepmom to me to tell me what I already knew, which is it is my duty to go find him and to fix it.

And of course, she had called the right person. I jumped up, jumped in my clothes, got in my car, and I went and found my brother. It took me 5 minutes. I still have tracking skills. I can find an alcoholic like that.

Tell me what you want. I get the scent. I'm gone. I go get them. He was at a place where he normally drank quite often.

It was a pizza place and a big shopping center in California. And I pulled up there, and it's about 2:30 in the morning, almost 3 o'clock, and the bars, all the drinking establishments in California, much of the United States close at 2 o'clock in the morning. There is nobody. It's 3 AM. The party's over.

They've all gone home. Brother's in the parking lot with a shotgun prop against the window. And I pulled up and looked around. I said, so what you doing? He says, I'm waiting for him to come back.

I think it's gonna be an easy night in the hero business tonight. I says, give me the shotgun. I took the shotgun away, and I took the shells out, and I put it in the trunk of my car. My mission is accomplished for the night. Nobody will get shot, and I head home.

We all had radios on our car, two way radios. And my brother says to me as we're going out the driveway, I'm going to go find them. I said, well, you go with God. And I'm heading home to get back in bed. And as I'm almost out of the parking lot, my radio pipes up and he says, I found them.

They're around the back. So I turned my little car around. I went back, and there's a big shopping center, and he'd gone around that end. So I went around this end and popped around behind this place, and there's 4 or 5 acres of flat asphalt with a light post in the middle. And there's 3 cars parked in the middle, parked relatively close together.

There's 7 or 8 young men there sitting around the car, sitting on the hoods, leaning on the cars, talking and having a couple of beers. At 3 o'clock in the morning, bars are closed, beer. And my radio says, I'm going in. Are there any newcomers to Al Anon here tonight? Anybody new?

I'll translate for you. That's we're going in. So brother's coming from that side. I'm coming from this side. We got all 8 of them surrounded.

Nobody gets away. And I'm going in there. I've just gotten out of bed. I haven't been drinking. I'm not intoxicated, and I'm not anesthetized.

If something happens tonight and I get beat up or hurt, I'm gonna feel it and remember all of it. Brother's been in the bar till it closed. He will feel nothing, and I will have to tell him tomorrow what happened and how he got all those bruises or broken parts that he's got. And I start off in there trying to figure out a way that I might survive the evening. And the plan that I came up with was that I would get going in there fast enough, turn that little car sideways and slide it in sideways.

I'd been racing cars since I was 4 years old. And see if I could pin 3 or 4 of those guys between the cars and give me a chance to get out before the ruckus started. And I put that plan into motion. I never gave it a second thought. I didn't think about consequences.

I started in there and I started in pretty fast with my little Mustang. And I got it to the point of no return doing about 70 miles an hour and I actually had the back end coming around. I pulled the emergency brake and was going in there sideways when my radio piped up one more time and said, I don't think that's them. I'm a I'm a pretty good driver but that windows in that little car filled up full elbows. I was driving pretty hard to keep from running over anybody, and I managed to go by without hitting anybody.

And I kept going. I didn't slow down, and I exited the parking lot because I did not think it would be advisable to discuss my behavior with these young men. I don't think I could have answered their questions direct or otherwise. And I went home. And I and it's a very funny story, and it is true, and it was just one of many, many things that I did that were along those same lines.

But the reason I tell it is this, when I got out of that bed in that house, I wasn't a 17 year old kid who doesn't know anything who's dumb and making bad decisions. I was 22 years old. I was a veteran of the United States Armed Forces, the Marine Corps for 4 years. I had a wife and 2 little children at home. And when I crawled out of that bed and walked to the front door, I'd walked around a crib next to my bed more than likely.

I'm not I'm still not sure about the time frame, but it's more than likely that I walked around my daughter's crib where she lay in a coma from a drowning accident, from an accident she had when she was 1 year old. And we had brought her home to take care of her. And I'd walked past her and out of that house. Her and my son and my wife at that time were completely dependent on me for the income for that family, for my medical insurance, for all the things I needed to survive. And I went out and made those decisions and was going to go in there and take that action because I believe that's what I was supposed to do.

I know now that what put what probably would have happened is if I had gone in there and did what I was going to do and I had hit that car, that 1 or 2 of those young men would have run or tripped or ducked and I would have gone in there and I would have killed them instantly. And I knew that going in and it didn't change it, because my priorities have been turned upside down by the disease of alcoholism. I believe that my obligation to the family is such that I don't have any choice when I'm asked. When I'm told I need to help, I have no choice. When I'm told what the price will be, I have no choice.

I have to take the action. And there it was only one night. There were many more, and I won't bore you with them all. Some of them involved police. I the police went to arrest him 1 night, and I knew they were taking him in to beat him up, and I told him no.

You know, police hate that. They hate it when you tell them you can't arrest somebody, and they asked me what I was gonna do if they take him anyway. And I said, well, I guess we're gonna break a lot of this furniture. I was gonna wrestle with 2 police fully armed police officers over a fight that my brother had been in at the bar, and I wasn't drinking and I wasn't there. But I thought it was my duty to do that and get arrested or get beat up or get killed along with him.

And those were the things that I did. The other part of that story is the biggest guilt and shame I've ever carried in my life. I carried through the doors of Al Anon. I told you that that daughter came home for us to take care of her. Us did not take care of my daughter.

I'm a guy who I grew up racing cars when I was 4. I was riding rodeo when I was 8. I got my nose broken. I was doing a lot of things that on the outside looked like I was a very macho, very brave man. I could not be in the room with my daughter in a coma with tubes sticking out of her body and function.

I would get to that point where the feelings would get up to just below my eyeballs and they might get loose and I would flee the house. And that wife did all of the care for that child because I could not. There's a there's a there's a load to carry. There's no way to fix that. Go to the library and ask them if they got a book for fixing that.

They don't have one. There's no way to get to there from here to live comfortably in my skin. There's one. We're gonna talk about it tomorrow. It's the 12 steps.

I had no idea that that would be able to work on all of these areas of my life, including that one. I brought that package to the doors of Al Anon. I, I stayed gone from that relationship. That child died after a year in a coma, and I stayed gone. I couldn't come home.

I didn't wanna be home. I didn't wanna be with her. I went out in the world. I worked in the movie business, and I would travel for months at a time on the road. And out there, I acted like I was a single man.

I went out, and I dated, and I did things. And my dad didn't have an affair with the pastor's wife only probably because we didn't know any pastors. My dad had affairs with everybody. It was part of secret life that we had as kids. And I judged him harshly for treating my mom like that, for treating his other wives like that, and I went out and did the same thing.

I just didn't tell anybody. Somehow that makes me better, but it doesn't. And, in the course of doing that, I was to meet the lady who who I've already identified to you as my beautiful wife, Leslie. I was on a movie in Arizona. Leslie had had, was well into her drinking career and she was in a series of geographical moves where she would go someplace for a while and it would be better.

And after a couple of months, it would be worse and then she would get fired or get asked to leave and she would move on. I met her in Page, Arizona. She was very attracted to me because I was married, and I was talking nice about my wife, the saint back home. And I was dating her best friend. She thought that was unbelievably attractive.

And I was on a date with her best friend, and she kinda put the moves on me in a bar that we were in that night. And, I thought that showed initiative. So I tracked her down, her phone number, and called her up, and we started dating and seeing each other. And I said about a series of of actions which resulted in my getting here. I we a bunch of things happened.

I changed location. She came with me at the next location. I took her to the airport to fly her back to Nebraska to see her father, and my wife was flying in for a visit. And I went to the airport and dropped off the girlfriend and picked up the wife and went back to the hotel. I think gas was 50¢ a gallon, but I just couldn't justify 2 trips to the airport.

I figured I could do it all I want. No no insanity here. I had to I had no problems whatsoever with the second step when those things were pointed out to be by my sponsor. And, I eventually went back to California and Leslie was on her way to California and she called me up for a date. And I went to go meet her for a date and couldn't find her.

And I called her again and went back, still couldn't find her. And I'm doubling back to the house and I came across a a traffic accident, a severe accident. And there's a Honda car in an intersection that's gone head on with a full size American Oldsmobile at a pretty good rate of speed. And the lady in it is not breathing. The paramedics and the police and the fire department are there trying to get her out because she's dying in the car.

And that is my beautiful wife, Leslie. And they cut her out of the car, and they got her breathing again. They took her off to the hospital. I hear I overheard them saying they didn't know who she was. She had Nebraska plates, another state.

Nobody knows who she is. And I said, I know who she is. And I went off with her to the hospital and she died in the hospital again. I was sitting in a room with her waiting for them to come and see her, and she stopped breathing. And I ran out into the hallway and I called the nurse.

I remember pushing through the curtains to get out. And the nurse came in, they called a code, and they brought the crash carts carts in, and they got her breathing again. And my wife did something that didn't mean anything to me really until years later is that when they got her heart started again, she overhead over on the gurney where she was laying and looked at me, big eyes, looked at, it always had those big loosey eyes, you know. And she said, let me go. And I had did not have the tools to understand what I saw.

I I absolutely couldn't wrap my mind around that. I pretty much dismissed it until years later. What I understand today, I'm not an alcoholic, but what I got to see for just a blink of time was how painful and frightening and scary it was to be an alcoholic caught up in your disease. Then my wife, after that accident, she was very drunk, knew that there would be a price to pay, knew that the police would be waiting in the lobby of the hospital to arrest her. Dying looked far preferable to her.

She would rather have died. My wife shares about walking into the great white light. She's she's going down the tunnel and never coming back. And she had an argument with God who said, oh, honey, we're not done. You gotta go back.

She argued. She didn't wanna come back. So when she opened her eyes on a table and saw me, I wasn't who she really wanted to see there. That was to be a theme in our relationship for a while after that. And then they threw her out of the hospital.

She did not have insurance. And they didn't think they would get paid and they loaded her in my car. She's died twice. She's got a broken arm. She's got her her windpipe is crushed.

She can't speak. She's got massive. She took the steering wheel on the windshield. She ate a lot of the dashboard of the car. She can't move.

She can't pick her arm off the pillow. And they put a neck brace on her and wheeled her out to my car. And they put her in my car and the nurse says, I hope you live near a hospital because she's not doing very well. I thought that was a brilliant bit of insight myself. And I thanked her for that information and I Now we've got to decide what to do, because, you know, I never found where she was staying.

She was staying with some phantom uncle that I had never met before and I have not met since. We still debate his existence. And, she doesn't know how to find him anymore either. And we're deciding what to do. And she whispers because she cannot talk.

Well, I I guess you can take me to a hotel. And I thought about that for about 10 seconds. I knew she would die. I knew I'd find her I'd be looking in the paper tomorrow, some unknown blonde is found dead in a hotel out in Palmdale, California. And I patted her on hand.

They were on the shift knob there. And I said, it's alright, honey. I I've got a better idea. I'll just take you home. Did you all forget I got a wife and family at home?

That's the key part of the story here. Called that wife up, said I'm bringing a friend home. She medicine the driveway. She got Lizzie's ankles and I got her armpits and we carried her in. And my wife has shared from podiums in AA for over 18 years that I dropped her coming through the door.

Might have been a little nervous bringing a girlfriend home to meet the wife and kids for the first time. Later in the bed You like that way too much. I don't know. Put her in the bed and really waited for her to die. She was very, very badly hurt and she didn't die and she began to get better and it set up 6 months of some very interesting living.

This is the point of my talk when I'm at an AA conference where people in the back who come in late think they've accidentally come into the AA meeting, and I did all of this sober. So she begins to get better. She's hobbling around the house. One night, I'm having a little bit of wine, and she says, I'll be having some of that. Now she hadn't had a drink since the accident, but she'd had a lot of meds.

And I said, no, you won't. She said, what do you mean no, I won't? I said, it says right here on your medication, which I have read top to bottom, that you may not drink while you're consuming these drugs. And my girlfriend had such a tantrum and embarrassed me in front of my wife so much that I gave her the whole bottle. And she was so well behaved after that, that we made sure she had her own bottle every night, and she began drinking again.

It got a little too complicated when that wife began to, number 1, start to confide in my girlfriends that she thought there might be some problems in her marriage. And my girlfriend began to instruct my wife on the things, actions to take to put her marriage back together and was was vouching for my true blue husband dumb and all. It was way too complicated, but it got better than that. We began to go on double blind dates. That wife decided that she needed to have a man in her life.

Clearly, she did. She did my wife just didn't know it was gonna be her husband. And, she started setting us up on double blind dates. And we would go out to dinner, some nice restaurant, just the 4 of us. The waiter is there taking our order.

We're sitting around the table having a little wine, wine, and somebody has their shoe off and their foot up my pant leg rubbing my leg. And my the only thing I can hope is it's not the other guy because I've got no idea which one's doing it. Just wink and smile at everybody knowingly. Drink your wine and don't say anything. That was too complicated.

And Leslie got it she finally got well enough to get a job, and she got offered a job in Texas about 2,000 miles away in Houston. And we thought that'd be a great idea and probably just far enough away and packed her in a car. And, after she left, that wife and I finally dissolved the marriage which had not been well for a long time. And Leslie and I kept in touch. And she got in trouble in Houston.

It was about 6 months. And she said, can I come back to California? And I said, oh, yeah. I'd got in a truck with my foster brother and we drove straight through to Houston about 1800 miles or something and packed her in a trailer and brought her home to live happily ever after. Yeah.

Not. The I was with my wife during the last year and a half of her drinking. My wife had been a bar drinker prior to that and a blackout drinker. She was still a blackout drinker. This is why the disease of alcoholism worked for me is because she blacked out every night.

She was drunk every night, blacked out every night. And when we woke up in morning and I was pissed off, it didn't matter what it was about, she had to assume that it was her. This went on for a very long time. She would say she'd call over to my side of the bed and pull my head around to get a look at my face to see how her day was gonna go. You know, if I was happy and smiling, it had been a good night.

If I was not, she'd obviously done something wrong. It was well under her sobriety when she realized that I woke up pissed off most every morning, that it wasn't her. She stopped me one day. She just fresh out of bed, and I'm scowling my way down the hallway because I'm a very angry man. That was what the disease did to me.

I'm a very angry man, rageful man. She stopped me. Wouldn't let me get by her. She looked me in the eyes and she said, you know, I haven't been up long enough to make you this mad. This isn't about me.

I could have killed her. That almost cost her her life right there, being cheerful to me in the morning. A lot of stuff happened there. She the last year and a half of her drinking was pretty crazy, but I was a you know, I'm ahead on points all the time. She blacks out every night.

I've got the TV clicker. I've got the checkbook. I've got complete control of our social calendar, what's left of it. I'm in control of every aspect of our life, and I'm ahead on points every day. My wife goes to AA and gets sober.

An act of desperation after an attempted suicide did not work. She went to AA. She went to a treatment center and then to AA and got sober and messed up all my plans. Alcoholism in its active form of my home could not have gotten me to Al Anon. I could deal with that.

I'm I'm a reactor. That happens, I'm over here. I'm watching for what's going on over there, what she's doing before I take any action. It requires no original thought whatsoever, no creativity whatsoever. It's a carrot and stick approach.

I'm the punishment and the reward. Obviously, that had very little effect. And when I was trying to help her with her drinking, the punishment reward system worked not at all. And she gets sober and all of that ends. We're no longer joined to the hip.

She's not joined to me. I'm joined to everything. At 8 months of her sobriety we had a fight. We fought. The 1st year of sobriety was no picnic.

I I I told her a couple of times during that year to just drink and leave me alone. She was terribly miserable to be around sober. She came up to me after a meeting. She about a month sober and she was just seething angry. She said, you know, she poked me in my chest, you have no idea how lucky you are that you can drink if you want to.

Because being an alcoholic was not good news for her. At 8 months of her sobriety, she picked a fight with me and she told me that the reason she did that was if I got mad enough, she could drink and it would be my fault. That's the way the alcoholic's mind works. If I ask her if she's drinking, she can go, well, you bastard. I'm getting drunk.

She can make any action about me as long as I pick up the other end of the rope. And she told me that, and then she picked another fight with me the next week. And I went in my kitchen and I pulled out 40 bottles of alcohol out of my cabinet, which had been there for years and I don't care about it and she didn't seem to at the time either. And I got a claw hammer, a big old where where's where's Tore? A big 28 ounce waffle claw hammer framing hammer and a 33 gallon trash can.

And I set it in the kitchen, and I threw those up in the air. And I swung at them as hard as I could with both hands and smashed 40 bottles of booze. My wife hadn't had a drop of alcohol in 8 months. To my knowledge, she hasn't had one since then. She was in the bedroom talking to her sponsor on the phone.

A conversation I'm glad I don't know they were talk what they were talking about. And I'm smashing up my house because I'm crazy. Her and her sponsor worked on me to go to Al Anon. I told them the pat answer. You may have heard this before.

I'm not the one with the problem. She's the one with the problem. Leave me alone. Clearly, I was the one with a much bigger problem. She had an excuse for her behavior.

You know, I I met her. You know what attracted me to her? Couple of things. One of them was it seemed to me that when you poured in alcohol, her clothes seem to fall right off. I'm deep, aren't I?

She's been sober 18 years. I still can't keep close on her. It had nothing to do with the booze. And the other one was this, I'm fresh out of that other marriage. I'm not big on commitment or marriage, and I don't wanna do this again.

And she tells me that she's been very ill. This is why she's still drinking. I think I can last that long. Come on in. That was 21 years ago.

She's still there. I think she was lying to me. Finally, after a year and a half, I go to Al Anon. I went in desperation. My wife had taken me to AA where I heard the music of recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous from sober alcoholics, where I began to learn about the disease of alcoholism, which I do not have the only way that I can from people who do have it.

I began to have enough understanding to begin to have compassion and understanding for the alcoholic and compassion and sympathy for the families, which was to be a critical component later. I wasn't gonna let them know I went to Al Anon. I snuck out to my first meeting. I called our central office and had them send me a directory, and I snuck out. And I snuck into that meeting.

And it was my worst nightmare come true. It was 8 little blue haired ladies sitting in a circle. I have come I'm in hell. And I sat in that chair, and those 8 little blue haired ladies saved my life and probably my wife's too and changed everything. I started staying there.

That weekend, I went to my first meeting. It was to become my home group. I'm an avid road cyclist. I picked a meeting I could ride to and I would show up there. Now, I wanna be anonymous.

I've been to AA. Newcomers didn't look too good to me in AA, so I don't wanna be new. I don't want you to know I'm even here. I wanna be completely anonymous. My problem is I'm going to meetings where there's 40 women and me.

And I'm showing up on a bicycle wearing a spandex bicycle suit, A brightly colored spandex bicycle suit. So I would change in street clothes. I'd carry a backpack. I'd get in street clothes. I'd sneak into the meeting first, and I'd be happy and well adjusted.

How are you? I'm fine. I'm fine. We got some words that go with that now and I won't share them with you. I'd set up the chairs and I've been sitting in chairs up now for 16 and a half years because I'm the only one that does it right.

After 2 months of going to that meeting, it occurred to me for the first time that that was my meeting, and that was my seat right there. I sat in the front row. That was my seat. I did you weren't gonna tell me to leave because she was sober. You weren't gonna tell me to leave because she was a guy.

My seat, I'd earned it. My actions earned me that seat, not hers. I am my own qualifier for this program. My insanity is my qualifier for this program. I'm lucky enough to have an alcoholic in my life that gives me the price of admission.

But But the things I learned in here teach helped me in every area of my life. I got very involved in service. I hope we're gonna talk a little bit about that tomorrow. I was talking to somebody during the break about the fact that I've been around for a while, and, there are people in Al Anon that think that if the newcomer comes in, we should make sure they get all the jobs so they keep coming back. Not me.

They can all get a job right after I get mine. I have to stay committed in Al Anon or I'm not gonna come back. I gotta have a commitment that gets me here every week and I do. And then I'll drag my sponsees with me and then I'll make sure the newcomers get a job or they can give themselves a job. I gave myself the chair setup job.

I've had that one for 16 years. So, you know, that's how it works. And I started going places in service within our service structure. I got very busy with that. They put me in positions I had absolutely no skills and no knowledge how to do.

I found out later that was on purpose because if I knew how it worked, I would have fixed it when I got there. When you're in it long enough to figure out how it works, they say time for you to rotate out, and they put somebody new in. So Al Anon works just fine. I'm gonna tell you a couple of things that have happened since then that are very important to bring you up to date. One of them is that, my son ran off when he was 16.

My wife was sober. I was new in Al Anon. He was a bit of a problem. We know now that it had a little bit to do with drugs and alcohol. We weren't sure for a long time.

And they had a fight. I was gone on the road, and she called me up and she said he'd been abusive. He'd stolen some stuff. He left the house. And she said, I don't know what to do.

What do I do? And I said, that's easy. You call the locksmith and you change the locks on the house. That was a hard decision to make to put my 15, then 16 year old son on the street, but it was where he needed to be. He went on a 7 or 8 state terror in Cal in in the United States.

He had warrants and warrants in 7 states and he wound up in Oregon. And we wound up where we didn't really contact each other because he was homeless a lot. And it had a lot to do, we know now, with his drinking. The long and the short of that is that, two and a half years ago, he got sober in Alcoholics Anonymous. I had the great gift of being in town.

He lives about a 100 miles from me the day they got sober. And the circumstances, I don't have time to tell you. But I got to I got to watch. I'm an observer in that disease. I'm not a participant.

I'm not equipped to do AA 12 step work, but I can watch with some interest those who are equipped to do it. And when him and his fiance told me they had a problem, I directed them to people in Alcoholics Anonymous who had the solutions for them because I clearly don't. And, And, he had been calling me every night drunk for a long time. He'd call me up, and she's throwing his clothes out of the second story window again. You know?

You're out of here, and how does clothes go? And he'd call me up drunk. And I never pointed out to him that he was calling me drunk or that that might be the problem. I just listened to him because I'm not equipped to help him with that. And it killed me to have the information and not be be the only one who cannot share that with him until he was done.

And he, I'm I'm proud to tell you that he's 2 and a half years sober in Alcoholics Anonymous. And he's very active in AA. And he's a terrific dad. He's a single dad with a couple of kids and he's a good dad and he's got a job and he takes care of business. And he goes to AA and he has a sponsor and he sponsors other guys.

And every time we go to a conference somewhere, he's the first one with a commitment when we get there. And I couldn't do that for him. But you know what? He watched my wife and I do that. We couldn't tell him how to do it, but we can show him what it looked like and we did that for a long time.

The bigger part of the story is this. My wife and I sponsored a woman in AA. And in the 5 years, she was in and out of AA, drunk, sober, drunk, sober, drunk, sober. My wife has never turned away a phone call. They'd call her in the call her in the morning and get drunk at night, and she'd take their call the next day.

For years, this would happen. And this woman wound up on the street with 4 kids at 29. She has no home, no house, no car, no him, no money, no job. And she calls up and says, you know, I I think I'm done now. I need some help.

Can you get me some help? My wife said, she called around and got her a bed in a halfway house where she could stay for up to 6 6 months and she was on her way out of town to speak at a conference. And she asked me if I would go pick her up and take her to this place. And I said, homie don't do AA 12 step work. I will drive, but you send one of your, a woman alcoholic, with me and I will make sure that they all get there in one piece.

So she sent our friend Kit. Kit and I went to go get her. We farmed the kids out to neighbors and relatives and packed her in the car. When we got there, we're knocking on the door. Nobody's answering the door.