The Northern Plains Group of Alcoholic Anonymous in Fargo, ND

Our main speaker tonight is Bob from Las Vegas. My name is Bob Daryl, and I am an alcoholic. Hi. Hi. I tell you, I've been kind of some great lengths to get to a meeting but never like this.

And the people involved in getting me here and the expense and the trouble, and some of them are somewhere out in the middle of nowhere right now lost, all for a guy who has been convinced lately nobody even cares about him. Wrong again. I'd like to welcome anybody that's new. I'm not here to tell you about my trip up here. I'm here to talk about the disease of alcoholism, the recovery from it.

I wanna welcome anybody that's new. And tonight, Calvin's celebrating 10 years, and I want you to know something. No matter how self centered you are, no matter how sick you are, no matter how hopeless you feel, seeing him stay sober for 10 years must surely give you hope. I, I'm in love with Alcoholics Anonymous. How can you not be?

If it's done if it does anything close for you when it's done for me and the people I've come to care about, you can't help but fall in love with AA. And what it's done for my parents both went to their grave knowing their son was okay, something they never knew before. My sister has a brother today. My daughters has a father who's always been there for her. She's 19 years old.

She's never seen me drink. And Alcoholics Anonymous is this is created all of that. If you would have seen what I did with my life prior to getting here, you would know that. I I I just wanna tell you, I think I've always had the disease of alcoholism. I I I think I had it before I ever picked up a drink.

I there was before I ever drank, there was something that was a little peculiar about me. I I didn't seem to feel like other people looked. I had an awkwardness about me, and so I became a pretend kind of person. The guy that just pretends like he fits, but has this this annoying anxiety about being found out. And I was driven, and I was that I was that way before I ever picked up a drink.

I think I was like a freeze dried alcoholic waiting for alcohol, and when I took my first drink, I was 12 years old. I I didn't know anything about it. All I wanted to do was fit with a bunch of older kids, and I'd have done just about anything for their approval. And something happened to me that day that would change the course of my life, and I didn't know it. You could have asked me in the middle of it, and I wouldn't have known that it was anything that dramatic.

But what really happened is that when I drank for the first time, it made me feel so good that the way I would be on the notch without that effect from that moment on would never be enough again for me, and I live for it. But when you're 12, 13, 14 years old, you can't get drunk every day, but I got drunk every chance I could get. I'm 15 years old, now almost 16, and I'm standing before a juvenile court judge for the 3rd time. And I'm standing before this judge, basically, because there's something wrong with me that I don't understand. But every time I go out with my friends to party and we start to drink, I have an inability to shut it down when you're supposed to.

I always go too far. I always take it to the wall. I always get whacked. And some of the guys I I partied with, they like to party a lot, but they'd go right to the edge and stop. There ain't no stopping for me, because once I start, I can't stop.

I don't know that I have I have this disease called alcoholism. I I don't know that I have an allergic reaction that defines alcoholism. Then in this allergic reaction is when I drink alcohol, I break out this phenomenon of craving. And what that really is is it as the buzz, as the glow starts to hit me in my wiring, which is a 100% alcoholic, comes a yearning and a and a craving for more of that feeling, more of that effect, and I can't get enough. I have never once I just had the on the way to the airport this morning, this new guy I'm starting to work with, we're talking about the doctor's opinion, and I asked him.

I said I said it was there ever one moment in your whole drinking history where you'd been drinking for a half hour or so, and you're getting pretty you're starting to get lit up, were you ever actually sat there and honestly thought to yourself, I don't think I want anymore. This is just right. And he looked at me like, no. I said, you know, only alcoholics are like that. Normal people get they can drink enough.

They can drink to the point where, that's enough now. Not alcohol. I'm the guy. I I've drank myself till I'm laying on the ground. I'm so drunk.

I can't get up. But if you'd bring me a drink, I'd you know? I'm the guy if if I'm still conscious, I ain't done drinking. And that's been the story that was the story of my whole drinking career. So I'm I'm almost 16 years old and I'm in front of this juvenile court judge because I'm in trouble.

Because every time I start, I get whacked. I I get in trouble a lot, and I got sent someplace, and I was a compromise. My parents were at the God bless them. They they tried to help me. I eventually beat that out of them, and they would try to keep me from being locked up at this really bad place, and there was a compromise, and I had to go live in a different place.

And I, I'm not at this place that I'm sent to more than a week. I don't even think. I'm not there very long. And a guy, an older kid's there, and he he comes up to me. We start talking, and I'm telling him about what how the trouble I got in and everything that happened to me.

And he said to me, he says, well, he says, oh, you like to party, don't you? I said, yeah, I do. Yeah, I do. He says, but you drink that liquor. That'd make you stupid.

I said, oh, I don't know, man. I like that liquor. I like the time I was drinking. 151 rum was my favorite at the time. He said he says, what if I told you that I could give you something and make you feel about as good as that, maybe even better?

Can't smell it on your breath, will not make you slur your words. You will not stagger, and you keep a whole week's supply in your shirt pocket when you're high. Most people won't even know it. What would you say to that? Sign me up.

And he introduced me to drugs and I I am an alcoholic and I gotta tell you something, alcoholics should not do drugs. We are pigs. And I we do I did drugs alcoholically. I mean, I just, oh, man. Everything I picked up, I just took it to the wall and took it to the wall and burnt my life down with it.

Every single thing I ever picked up. In no time at all, I'm I'm doing methamphetamines to the point where where speed freaks who would have been doing speed for 10 years were saying, hey, you better cool it. You know, I I I I'm the guy that if you left me alone in your car to go in to get a pack of cigarettes, by the time you've come out, I've taken your radio apart looking for microphones from the FBI. I mean, what? I I've, like, whacked myself with this stuff.

I can't even but it got to a point where I couldn't even put 2 sentences together. It would be, wow. Look at that tree in the sky. Where's the bicycle? I just crazy.

I just like, I was I was spitting in my head. It was like a whirlwind, and I'm nuts. And a guy came along and said, try some of this. And when the throwing up stopped, man, my whole being just went, and I could think straight, and the spinning slowed down introduced me to heroin, but I'm an alcoholic. I'll tell you.

We shouldn't do drugs, and I took that to the wall and methadone maintenance, and my dance with drugs was several years to come full circle back to alcohol. I I think I did drugs for the same reason that doctor Bob did drugs in his story. Doctor Bob was an alcoholic of my type. Every time he drank, he couldn't he gets so whacked. I mean, when he the day he Bill tried to meet with him, it was Mother's Day, and he went out to have a couple drinks.

And the end result, he's taking a nap under the dining room table. I mean, you gotta love a guy who takes a nap under a dining room table. I mean, because that's the kind of drunk I am. So doctor Bob started doing sedatives, high barbiturates and high powered sedatives, and he did them for 17 years of his life every day because it enabled him to buy himself periods of abstinence because he'd gotten so much trouble when he started to drink. And that's my whole dance of death with drugs was for that.

And, plus, there was the facade of the, you know, being a a hippie and a head and all that stuff. But I came full circle back to alcohol because I am the guy who needs the effect. Doctor doctor Carl Jung, in a letter to Bill Wilson in early 9 the early 19 sixties, said something to Bill in this letter. He said that he was afraid to tell Roland Hazard. He said he always suspected that this was true of alcoholics, that their thirst for alcohol was a low level thirst of their being for unity, for connectedness, for wholeness, or as expressed in medieval terms or religious terms, a union with God.

And I I drank because I thirsted for the effect, not for the alcohol, but for the effect. Because, see, alcohol was a magic thing for me, and then a guy who, on the notch, doesn't fit very well anywhere. I'm the guy that I walk into a party, and I can't seem to talk to people the way other people seem to talk to each other. I have an inability and an awkwardness around me, a difficulty integrating myself into groups of people. A lot of my life when I'm sober in groups of people, I have a feeling like it's all of you, and then there's me.

As if there's some invisible yet impenetrable barrier between me and every and the rest of life that I can't seem to surmount. And when it says in our book that the alcoholic will know a loneliness such as few do, they're not kidding. 1978, I stood on a bridge on on my last drunk trying to take my own life. I didn't think I was dying of alcoholism. I felt like I was dying of loneliness.

Because the one thing, the magic effect that I had once found from partying had turned on me, and I can't get it back, And I spent the last 3 years of my drinking frantically, futilely trying to recapture a magic that I could not recapture. And those were the worst, worst years of my life. I remember sick I I there there was a time in my early drinking when it was so magical in the last 3 years, I would, if I I most of the time, I would hole up somewhere with a half gallon of vodka and just seek oblivion. The glory days of of being the guy that's dancing with the girls at the bar and shooting pool and laughing with the guys, those days are over. I can't recapture them, and I'm dying here.

I don't know what's wrong with me. And I I started I went to started going to psychiatrists. I went to some of the great psychiatrists in the country. I went to I was therapy with Albert Ellis for god's sakes. She had my dad was so he got me connect he got me hooked up with that.

Another one of the contemporaries of Fritz Perls, one of the founders of Gestalt Therapy. I I did all that stuff. I primal screamed for God's sakes. I mean, laying on the ground, hitting my hands and feet, going, mommy, daddy. Mommy, daddy.

I mean, I mean, I tried some wacko stuff. I haven't tried it. I haven't tried every that that thing in chapter 3 about all the crazy stuff we tried to control. Imagine if they read wrote that today. I mean, you could do chapters on that stuff.

The weirdest one I heard was a couple years ago. A guy was talking about coffee enemas. I thought, oh, man. Is that is that with cream and sugar? It does.

I hope it's not whole bean. Oh my god. But I don't know what's wrong with me, and all I really want is I don't want much. I want one thing. I want one thing more than I want anything, and it's the one thing I can't have.

I wanna be able to party like I partied when I was 18 years old again, And I want I will do anything to do that, and I can't do it. And I'm killing myself chasing this illusion. It's the book the book talks about self delusion that we're driven by it. And if you don't know what self delusion is, it's psychotic wishful thinking. It's all the reality and the evidence is that the party's over and has been over and is not you can't recapture it.

That's reality. But this wishful thinking, this this self delusion is that I don't want that to be true. I want the party to be still going, and I want it so desperately that I will start to imagine that it's I can drink again like I drank when I was 18 years old when the evidence and the reality is overwhelming that the party's over. I think a lot of us die and drink ourselves to death because we think we can. We drink again because we think we can.

I and over the years, the last 28 years, I've seen a lot of people relapse. I've seen guys to go through the steps and do a really good job in relapse, and they do it for 1 of 2 reasons, either they never really smash the deluge, the 2 delusions it talks about in the beginning of chapter 3. The idea that somehow, someday, some way will control and enjoy it, and I'll jump start the party and be able to get away with it. And I, as long as I had that, I was, I was in and out of AA because I'm not gonna be in here a 100%, not really. I can you I can look like because for your approval, I can look like I'm in here a 100%, but I'm not in my innermost self where I really live.

I'm not in here a 100% because I don't have to be, because I got a backdoor that if life ever gets painful enough, boring enough, lonely enough, frustrating enough, depressing enough, I'll go get high. Because I think I can. And I think I can in the face of overwhelming evidence that I can't. You know what it was here's what my drinking was like the last couple years. I would hole up somewhere.

I would drink. I would go on crying Jags. I would feel sorry for myself. I don't bathe anymore because I don't care. This is not a party.

This is pathetic. I'm the whiny, crybaby, depressed, drunk that that that I couldn't even stand. Nobody even wants to drink with me anymore. You drink with me once or twice, and that's it. Because you don't know what I'm gonna do.

I might be in a good mood, or I might put my fist through a plate glass window and sever an artery, and you're gonna spend the rest of your night in the emergency room with me. Or I might just start whining about my father and mother and all that much I hurt them. Or I might you don't know what I'm gonna do. Right? But it ain't good.

This I'm a party buster, man. I'm a it's pathetic. That's why I like to just hole up somewhere and get as out of it as I can. Just trying to blot it all out. In 1970 78, I was sober quite a while, and I was sober quite a while because a judge had sentenced me to 2 years in a state penitentiary and cut me a break and told me if I went into this place to live, it's called the Arc House on the north side of Pittsburgh, and if I could stay in there a year and get good UAs and good PO report, make the restitution that, I wouldn't have to do the 2 years.

So I'm in there, and I'm toughing it out, and I'm not drinking day in and day out and week in and week out, and I ain't taking no medications because I've done all that. And I know it always eventually sets me off to go back to drinking. I ain't even smoking any pot because I've tried that too, and that always brought me back to drinking. I've tried it all, and I'm just not drinking, and it's bleak. And I don't understand something that that that makes this a deadly disease.

If you're a real alcoholic, and I'm not talking about a problem drinker, if you're a real alcoholic, your alcoholism really starts where the bottle in the bag ends. It's in abstinence that a guy like me suffers from depression, feelings of restlessness, irritability, chronic chronic malcontent. Nothing really satisfies me. Whatever I can bring into my life, the shine of it wears off so quickly. And it's as if there's some huge vacancy right in the center of who I am, and I frantically try to fill it up.

I try to fill it up with sex and jobs and money and motorcycles and everything I can. No matter what I bring to me, it ain't it. Now I don't know what it is. It just ain't this. And what it really is is an effect that I'd once found in drinking when I was about 16 years old, where I could go to a high school dance and a guy who couldn't dance or talk to anybody or talk to the girls or be a part of could drink a half bottle of rum, and I could come out and play, and I could laugh, and I could talk to the girls, and and I was a part of I could I could I could play guitar and sit in with bands and sing, and I was, man, I was I was the guy I always yearned to be.

The end of my drinking, I was the guy I hated. I hated myself. That's why I'm standing on a bridge trying to take my own life. I I I can't fit anywhere, and I can't endure this loneliness anymore, And I, I didn't I I came I came out of that ark house on this last run, trying to take my own life, and couldn't at the last second when it came time to jump, I couldn't jump and cursed myself for being a coward. Little did I know that I would end up about 10 days 7 to 10 days later, I'm not sure exactly how many days, it was so foggy then, in a hospital detox in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Little did I know that I was about to enter into the only really good life of any value I've ever had. Little did I know that I was finally gonna get to a place where I was willing to buy the whole package of Alcoholics Anonymous, a program I had been around for seven and a half years as a slipper, but I never bought the whole package. I would buy whatever was convenient or ever whatever I felt like doing. I still, narcissistically, was at the helm of my own ship running my life on what I felt like doing and what made sense to me. Now, the crazy thing about that is if if you're anything like me, whoever's watched you the last year of your drinking is gonna easily come to the conclusion whoever's making decisions for this person is out to kill them.

But yet in here, in this psychotic, wishful thinking, it all makes sense. I never intended to do that to my parents. I never intended to end up in jail. I never intended to break her heart. I never intended to do that to my kid's sister.

I never intended to lose this incredible job opportunity. All I ever intended to do was to feel good, or at least to feel a little better, but in this process of trying to fix myself, I burnt my life to the ground over and over and over again. And I'm not even talking of this isn't all when drinking. I did some of this in periods of abstinence. In 1978, I, came off this drunk in this hospital, and I was so demoralized.

You know, I guess I was finally ready for a because, you know, when you can't drinks when you can't jump start the party and drinking is terrible and abstinence is depressing and vacant and bleak and you can't even kill yourself, What the hell is left except AA? Really? I mean, you know, I mean, there's no fraternal organization look trying to recruit people like me. I mean, there's, you know, there's nowhere else to go. I mean, this is it.

They call it the last house on the block. In the book, it says we get to a place where there was nothing left. Nothing left. No more plans, no more good ideas, no more hope, no more hope. I was finally an alcoholic of the hopeless variety.

I was in a trap. I could not spring, and I couldn't get out. And I'm I'm sick sober, and I'm sick drunk and I'm sick medicated, and I can't change any of it. And I was finally ready for Alcoholics Anonymous. And some the the Buddhists say when the student's ready, the teachers appear.

And I was sat in that detox in 1978, members of Alcoholics Anonymous came in there. And I don't know anything about AA really, even though I'd gone to 100 of meetings, I didn't know that always in every city in the world, it's the cream of the crop in AA that goes into those institutions because it's the people, the only people that goes that will give of their time and go into these deal with these hopeless people are the people who buy the primary purpose, that understand that that's why they're alive, that their purpose is to try to help other alcoholics. I didn't know I was hooking up to the cream of the crop in of a in Las Vegas. I just was desperate, and I met these guys, and I I started hanging around with them, and I got this guy to be my sponsor, and I I started calling him every day, and I started doing peculiar things I would have never done. The people in Alcoholics Anonymous took advantage of my weakness and brokenness and got me to do some things if I if I was in my right self, I'd had never done, and I will owe them my life for that forever.

And they started to introduce me to a process and a credit fellowship that I never thought I could be a part of, and I I never thought 2 things that I was wrong about. 1 is I never thought I could fit anywhere with people and be a part of sober because I never could. I had the only time I ever felt a part of anything or be connected to people was in the early days of my drinking when I was half lit up. I had just resided and raised myself to a life of that kind of separation loneliness, and I lived in my head a lot, and I just was that way and that's the way it was gonna be. But the people in Alcoholics Anonymous didn't care about that.

And they also I I resolved myself to the person that if if I do find a way not to drink, it's not gonna be good. To me, AA had good news and bad news. The good news that maybe if I went to 1,000 of these stupid meetings, I'll stay sober the rest of my life, and the bad news, I'm gonna live a long time. Because I can't imagine life like this because I feel like I'm doing time. Abstinence feels like I'm doing time.

I feel like a mule in a hailstorm. I just hunkered down and take it until I can't take it no more. And I can't believe that I could ever be a part of, and I can't believe I could ever be comfortable sober. But the funny thing about the actions in the fellowship and the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous is that they don't care. The actions don't care about your opinion of what you're gonna do.

And the actions of Alcoholics Anonymous work regardless. Matter of fact, I think they work better if you don't believe they're gonna work. It's a lot like, you know, not so much today because we we live in a world economy today and things have changed, but I remember little as a little kid, seeing things on TV about these guys, these aborigines in New Zealand who grew up their whole lifetime and they never knew anything about technology or modern conveniences. And you could bring a guy like that into this room with all the lights off, dark, and show him the light switches and you could tell him, you push those buttons, buttons, this room will light up like daylight. And, you know, he's not gonna believe you.

He's not gonna believe you. And you know something, it doesn't matter whether he believes you or not because if he pushes the buttons, the same thing's gonna happen for the guy who believes it's gonna work. Because the cause and effect in the realm of the spirit is independent of anybody's opinion or judgment. It just is what it is. Alcoholics Anonymous is not some kind of ethereal mystic thing.

It's like spiritual physics. You do certain things, you get certain results, and you get them every time. We don't know what happens to guys like me. I I can tell you today that that I have a a a relationship in my life with a power greater than my self, a power that I call God because for basically, because I haven't found a better word. But I don't know that my experience with that is is the same as yours.

And we don't and Alcoholics Exonomous isn't gonna tell you that you're gonna have the same experience I have. All we're gonna tell you is we're gonna promise you something. We're gonna promise you what I believe is the single most important promise of all alcoholics on him. And there's there's a couple hundred promises in that book, but the single most important is that is that something's gonna wake up inside of you, something's gonna come alive that's never been alive before. And maybe for some of us, we had a glimpse of it being alive when you were 15 years old, you got lit up for the 1st or second time, and something woke up inside you.

A vitality, an essence of somebody that you've always wanted to be. And I think that what happens in Alcoholics Anonymous is it's we have an awakening. Something wakes up inside us, and with that awakening comes a lot of responsibility and a lot of awareness. Because one of the things that started happening to me as a result of the steps and a result of joining the fellowship and being a greeter and a coffee maker and a secretary and all the things we do in AA, is it I started waking up to the fact that there were other people here. Now now that sounds weird, but I think for my first 6 months of sobriety, I didn't even realize there's anybody else here.

I mean, you were like cardboard cutouts for my entertainment or something. And then I started realizing there's actually people here that and some of them are a lot like me, and some of them have feelings like me, and some of them are struggle. And my consciousness was awakening. You know, when I wake up in the morning, I I I open my the phone will ring, and I open my eyes to answer the phone. I'm kind of a little awake.

And then, 5 minutes later, I might be going to the bathroom. I'm a little more awake. Another 5 minutes later, I'm getting a cup of tea. I'm a little more awake, and I'm in the process of awakening. And that's really been the last 28 years of my life has been a process of awakening.

Awakening to to God's grace in my life, to how much like you I am. I I've been privileged to to sponsor and work with a lot of guys and work with a lot of newcomers over the years and and and take a lot of guys through the steps and listen to a lot of 5th steps. Not all of them were as bizarre as Calvin's, but but but but but you know what? What you if you and those of you who sponsor people that have listened to 5th Steps will understand exactly what I'm talking about, and those that haven't done this and are still locked into being unique will not. But after a while of listening to 5th steps, you start to get a truth that is overwhelming and very comforting.

And the truth is it's the same person. Every it's the same person. It's the same person. It's the same person. I haven't heard anything new in a 5th step in 27 years.

I'd like to hear something new. You know, a chunky peanut butter and a vibrating lawn rake or something. I mean, something interesting. Yeah. But it's never anything like that.

It's always the same vacant, insecure, self centered guy, full of fear, driven, and he steps on the toes of everybody around him in the process of just trying to make myself a little better. It's the same pathetic story over and over and over and over again, Over and over again. And maybe what Einstein said was right. Maybe the great illusion of mankind is that there's more than one of us here because it's the same guy. And I'll tell you why that's a comforting thing for a guy who always suspected and believed he was unique and separate and apart from, is that the sense of myself and the sense of you that I got especially through that 4th step in doing that, this was our course, I started to awaken to a sense of community.

I am a part of. Not I I can walk in. I just came from meetings in in a couple other countries. I I can walk into a meeting in any place in the world and have a sense of connectedness because the people I'm listening to in the meeting are me. Now some of them are the and there is no difference.

And the the separation is an illusion. If you're new, I wanna welcome you to Alcoholics Anonymous. There's a lot of work to do here, but if you're real lucky, you don't have anywhere to go. You don't have any and you can you can think in all our newcomers, they go out. They they think they can go out again and like they're gonna find a new life.

They always they're either dead or they end up back here. So if you go out again, just remember, you're everybody that you've you're just gonna be in the room again raising your head because there's nowhere else to go. You're gonna end up back here if you're an alcoholic, or you're gonna end up dead. So if you're real lucky and you know that and you have nowhere else to go, dig in, get a sponsor, follow this process in this book, ignore all the psychobabble and all the crap that tries to come in here from treatment centers and everywhere else. Just ignore it.

Do the fundamentals of Alcoholics Anonymous. By your primary purpose, that you are alive not to gratify yourself, but you're alive for one reason and one reason only. Because your pain and suffering is divinely crafted you to help a guy that's gonna come through those doors that's just like you, maybe 6 months down the road. Realize that in God's hands, even the worst things about you will become vital and useful tools. And claim your sense of community and your inheritance.

And we will see each other on the road a happy destiny because you're gonna be an example of of something. And I would like to be an example of Alcoholics Anonymous. Thank you for my life. Thank you, Bob.