The Friday night speaker at the CPH12 v9 convention in Copenhagen, Denmark

Good evening, everybody. My name is Chris. I'm an alcoholic. Good evening. On or around December 28, 1989, the grace of God separated me from alcohol.

A willingness born of desperation, and I truly was desperate, moved me once more into Alcoholics Anonymous. And I became, I became willing to, to listen to other people, to listen to their recommendations, to get involved in meetings, to work with a sponsor. And those things I believe have, have contributed to the maintenance of my spiritual condition to a point where God has been able to keep me in the sunlight of the spirit, safe and protected from, alcohol and drugs, and other things. And I'm very, very grateful for that. And I'm very, very grateful for that.

I want to start my story here tonight, going way back. I'm 5 years old. My mother says to me, it's time for you to go to school. I'm taking you to kindergarten today. And she puts me in the car and she drives me across town and she opens up the door and she says, there it is.

Go. Now, I hadn't hit I hadn't been out much, by this time. I'd pretty much been hanging out with the same woman every day. And this is a little bit new to me, this whole kindergarten thing. And I had a little bit of anxiety.

A little bit is, is an understatement. I remember standing up on the the hill looking down at all the other kindergarten kids outside before they were to go in. And they're already playing kickball and tag and running around and having a blast like they were all best friends forever. And I'm standing up on the hill looking down, feeling self centered fear, worrying about what if they don't like me? What if I do something stupid and embarrass myself?

This this isn't gonna work. This is bad. This is bad. I wanna go home. It was it was my first real bout of self centered fear.

The type of fear that I was to experience practically every day of my life from then on, until I don't know, somewhere around 8th grade. But here's the thing. I mean, here I am. I'm a 5 year old kid ready to go into kindergarten and I'm scared out of my mind. It's just I'm just not comfortable with this.

You know what I mean? Whose idea was this? And you know what would have made it go a lot easier? A half a pint of vodka. I'm telling you.

I'm serious about this. My problem was they weren't serving 5 year olds back then. I really don't know what they do in Europe. I know you're more progressive. But the drinking age was 21 back then.

So I was in some real trouble. Because you know what I had to do? I had to just pretend that everything was okay. And I marched down there and I became a kindergarten kid. You know what I mean?

And I was not happy about it. I was and from that day until somewhere around 8th grade, every single day I had to pretend it was okay. You know, Chris, how are you doing today? I'm okay. Because I learned you couldn't really be truthful.

You couldn't say, well, you know, I'm I've got a lot of depression and anxiety and self centered fear. You know, I was thinking about killing myself and I just can't deal. You know, how are you doing? You know, you can't really say that because they they look at you funny. So what would I say?

I'm okay. I'm alright. Now, one day comes and, you know, like I said, I'm in about 8th grade. And a couple of my friends and I decide that we're gonna cut school. We're gonna go back to my house because my mother worked.

And we were gonna get drunk. Okay? We'd heard about this and it sounded pretty cool. So we all decided to do it. And we went back to my house.

Now, there was no real hard drinker, hard liquor drinkers in my house. So, I had to blow the dust off of this 4 Roses Whiskey. But that's what I did. I brought a 5th of 4 Roses Whiskey down. Now, I didn't know anything about drinking alcohol at that time.

I just didn't. I didn't have any experience with it. But what I did know was the John Wayne movies that I used to see. Anybody here familiar with John Wayne movies? He'd bust through the saloon doors, he'd walk in and say, bartender whiskey.

And the bartender pour a big water glass filled with warm whiskey and he'd drink it down. He'd grab the bottle and he'd go back to the table and he'd hang out there until it was time to shoot somebody. And that's how you drink. Okay? So I take this Canadian whiskey and 3 water glasses.

1 for me and one for my 2 other buddies. Let me tell you what my 2 buddies did with their whiskey. They never became problem drinkers or alcoholics by the way. They were normal people. And what they did was they had about 2 thirds of their glass and they had enough.

You ever drink with people that have enough? No more for me, thanks. I've had enough. What? It's only 11 o'clock.

Let's go into the city. You know? What do you mean you've had enough? I mean, I never that that's just Enough was not even a concept I understood. It was a foreign language.

I knew more and I knew yours and I knew mine and I knew get some but I never knew enough. So these guys, what they did was they had their 2 thirds of a glass and they sat back and they watched the show. Because you know what Chris did? Chris drank his glass, the rest of their glasses, the rest of the bottle and Chris went into a blackout. And I'm like 13 years old.

I'm having my first blackout. I'm trashing the house. I mean, they told me all this crazy. So all the windows are broken. I mean, I woke I wake up in a field about 4 or 5 hours later not knowing how I got there.

You know, I'm going back to the house and the house is trash and my friends are gone. And I'm like, what the hell happened? And then I started to get sick. You know how sick you were the first time you got really drunk on hard liquor? You had to be like horizontal for 2 days, you know, almost emergency room sick.

And that that was me. And I I got really, really sick. Now, if I would have put anything else in my body and gotten that sick, I never would've gone near it again. If I would've ate ate a rutabaga or something and gotten that sick, I would have never gone near rutabagas again ever again. I wouldn't need a rutabaga sponsor and a list of people that also don't eat rutabagas that I could call if I feel like eating a rutabaga.

And I wouldn't have to go to a meeting where I get a chip for not eating rutabagas for a year. I wouldn't have to do any of that. I'd have a I'd have I'd have a sufficient mental defense to not eat rutabagas. But what happened with this alcohol was this, you know, that scared kindergartner that I was telling you about with all the anxiety and the not feeling comfortable? As soon as I started drinking that whiskey, you know what happened?

All that fear left me. All all that self centered repressed, you know, anxiety and not feeling good enough and self esteem, all that stuff went away. And I felt larger than life. I was the funniest guy there. I was the coolest guy there.

I wasn't afraid of anybody or anything. Hell, there were dancing lessons in that bottle. You know what I mean? That bottle offered me so it offered me escape from myself, from the bondage of self. And then I got violently sick and learned about projectile vomiting.

But the thing was, is I slowly started to forget about how sick alcohol made me. But I would never forget what alcohol did for me. It did for me what I couldn't do for myself, which was escape from the bondage of emotional unmanageability. Now, from that moment forward, I started to become preoccupied with alcohol. Where would I drink it?

Who would I drink it with? How how would I get it? Because I'm 13. The drinking age is 21. So there was logistical problems that I would have to overcome.

But I started to I started to I started to, design my life around the drinking of alcohol. Now, I didn't notice that but it happened. Now, I come from a very smart family. My brother and sister are both college professor PhDs. My mother and father were both phi beta kappa educators.

Right? You know, they all write books and all this stuff. They're they're like like, they're all burdened with minds. And, really just too smart. And I come from the Stanley and I'm doing okay in school but all of a sudden, I get drunk with my buddies.

All of a sudden, guess what? My schoolwork starts to slip. Now, I didn't say to myself, oh, no. I'm becoming preoccupied with alcohol and my grades are slipping. If I keep on like this, I may not get into the college of my choice.

I didn't say that. You know what a good alcoholic says? Who cares? Or leave me alone. Get off my back.

I'm not hurting anybody but myself. Anybody you ever use any of those? That's what I started to use. Kids just get away. I'm alright.

Just stay away from me. I had to I had to use alcohol for social situations and things like that. I was preoccupied with alcohol. Now it says in our book Alcoholics and Islands that we cross, we cross a line. And we go from preoccupation, or heavy drinking into alcoholic drinking.

And once that line is crossed, you cannot go back over it through human, unedited human will. You can't just say, okay. I'm an alcoholic. I'm not gonna be one tomorrow, and have it mean anything, without a a program of recovery. And long before you even want to get your drinking under control, you're already past that point.

Usually, if you're an alcoholic. I heard somebody say the chains of alcoholism are too soft to feel until they're too strong to break. And that's certainly the way it was for me. Now, in the early days, my alcoholic drinking, I didn't pay too high of a price. I crashed some cars.

You know, I got killed in one accident and then they revived me. You know, some some problems. But most of the time, it was fun. Most of the time, my drinking was fun. I didn't pay too high of a price.

Then, after 3 or 4 or 5 years, I started to pay a higher price. I started to pay an emotional price. I started to wake up in the morning embarrassed about what I might have done, you know. Like like like, whose girlfriend did I hit on? You know, just this horrible remembering doing stupid things.

And, you know, by this time, I crashed a lot of cars and I'd lost my driver's license and I dropped out of school. I was a good starter. Anybody in here a good starter? You just don't make it to the other side? Here's some of the things I did.

I joined the Boy Scouts. I went on 1 campout and I quit. I joined the wrestling team. I went to one practice and quit. You know what I mean?

I started to take guitar lessons. I took 2 guitar lessons and quit. I went off to college. I went to college for six and a half years. I got 4 credits.

You know, I was a good starter. Well, the tuition money, I kept that up. But, but the actual going was, was a hassle. Anyway, a lot of I started to pay the price. Now, toward the end of my drinking, I'll fast forward a little bit, all there was was problems.

I was just drinking to escape the turmoil inside myself. I mean, my I had I had chipped my life down into such a small compartment. You know, it's all I could all I could deal with was drinking and work, you know, and and very few other things. But but in the beginning, you know, drinking was fun. I mean, remember the high school parties, you know, and this is when when you first were exposed to alcohol and, you know, there was dance and fun and everybody was having fun.

You know, I was 32 years old looking for those high school parties. You know what I mean? I was trying to recapture some of that because it was so much fun. The problem was is I kept drinking. I kept drinking like crazy.

And the people, my friends, started to back away from partying. They started to, you know, to go off to college. They started to, get married and have a family or get a job and not be able to go out drinking until 4 in the morning if they had to work the next day. And I started losing I started losing a lot of the people that I drank with, my peers. I started to lose them.

And more and more, we kind of seek, seek people at our own level, you know. And, unfortunately, that's like lower common denominator people as the years go on. And I started out with some really cool people who I'm still friends with after, you know, amends and everything. I'm still friends with them. Today, I started partying with them and but toward the end, I was partying with people that didn't even have names.

They were like Bearman and Weezer and green man. And there was one guy rat with 2 t's. I mean, these are all people who didn't even give you their real name. They all had their own parole officers. I mean, and these were the these were the people that I was hanging out with toward end of my drinking.

But it but in the beginning, it was, you know, it was alright. After high school, I took a year off, you know, because just didn't wanna deal with anything. And, that's kind of when I recognized that the world was passing me by a little bit, and I I decided to go to school. But I had met a I had met a codependent by this time. And I define, the codependent as someone who thinks about me as much as I do.

And, I found her. You know what I mean? And, she was from she was from an alcoholic household. So, you know, watching me was like coming home, you know? Alright.

Just like my dad, you know, falling on his ass every 2 minutes. So, so she would, she'd pick up the pieces of the wreckage. And, you know, and we we got along. And supposedly, supposedly, 1 night in a blackout, I proposed to her after a fight. Of course, with these blackouts, you can never be sure, can you?

Any other blackout drinkers in here? You know, raise your hand. Yeah. And the rest of you liars. You know, with anybody travel in blackouts?

Come to in another country? Got to pretend that you wanted to be there. You know, you don't want to look stupid, you know. Yeah, I always go to Toledo. Somebody must have stole my shoe on the train.

Because you can't look stupid. Oh, the things I would do in blackouts, forget about it. I remember quitting a job one time in a blackout, calling my boss and threatening his life and quitting. And then because it was a blackout, I didn't remember it the next day. I go to work, going into work.

What are you doing here? Why? Why? You threatened my life and you quit. Well, what'd you do?

What'd you do to me to make me do that? You know, you gotta like, you gotta like shift the, you know, shift the responsibility really quickly because it's inconvenient to be responsible. But you know, they'd look at you like, hey, man, I need a ride. What for? I need to find my car.

You ever do that? You have to go on a car search? Nonalcoholics don't understand that one. What do you mean you lost your car? Yeah.

It's somewhere. It's somewhere in Copenhagen. You know, well, where'd you leave it? I don't remember. How do you not remember?

You know, well well, you drink a quart and a half of whiskey and you tell you I mean, they just don't understand. So anyway, supposedly, I, I proposed and, you know, I come out of this blackout, you know, the next day, and I and the wedding invitations are being printed. Okay? Now, also being an alcoholic, I don't wanna cause a scene, you know. That's that's inconvenient too to have, like, a scene.

And it was gonna be like 6 months off so I just played along, you know, and ended up walking down the aisle. Oh, man. That that poor woman. You know? I've I've made my amends, but, boy.

I groped every single woman at the reception except her, you know, in a drunken blackout. Can you imagine? She was humiliated. Come get your husband off of me. You know, can you imagine?

Then I wondered why she was mad the next day. What's the matter? It's our honeymoon. God. Now, the the the the the thing I mean, she was a beautiful codependent.

Even codependents can only take so much. Now, I'm I'm down in Florida at this point in time and, I'm drinking whiskey and doing quaaludes. I don't know if anybody in here is familiar with those but, they were pretty powerful sedatives. And, people on Lewd should not drive. That was, from, one of the classic, California movies.

What was that? What? Fast Times at Richmond High. Anyway, it's quite true. People on lude should not drive.

I'm on a a major road. It's like a highway, but it's limited access. So I've got a I'm taking a left through traffic to make a left hand corner. And I misjudged the trajectory of 1 of the oncoming cars. These things will happen.

And he t boned me. Go he's he's going about 60 miles an hour and he hit me right in the side and flipped the car over 4 or 5 or 6 times. I just remember being a 100 yards down the road and I come to and the car is upside down. And I'm laying on the what's now the roof of the car. And I remember people looking in like this, is he dead?

Is he dead? And I'm like, no, I'm not dead. What's the matter with you? And I get out of the car now. I had been thrown through the passenger, door window because, you know, real men didn't wear seat belts back then.

So and I had glass just sticking all out of my head. Just glass everywhere. I'm bleeding like a stuck pick. I get out of the car. And now if you're ever in a really bad accident, you can sometimes lose your shoes.

Your shoes will come right off your feet. Now that's an important warning. If you've if you're in an accident and all of a sudden you've got no shoes, it's probably a bad accident. So I'm standing out there in my socks on the road, looking like a jerk in my socks. So I've gotta go back into the car to get my shoes.

Now, there's gasoline all over the place. I'm what an idiot I am. Now, I go climbing back into the car. So I get my shoes. I put my shoes on.

By this time, the cops have gotten there. And they're looking at me. You know how they sniff at you and they shine a flashlight in your eyes and everything? And, he goes, you know, you really you really I think I'm gonna I I think we're gonna take your blood sample when we get you to the hospital. So I think you've been drinking.

And what does an alcoholic say? I just had 1, right? Just had 1. I mean, if you say, well, I had 7 and a half. You're not an alcoholic if you say something like that.

If you say 1 or 2, you know, welcome. You you you've got you've earned your seat there. But so anyway, I give my phone number to 1 of the, one of the, people that are there, watch, you know, seeing what's going on. I say, Call my wife and tell her I'm in the hospital and to come meet me. So they put me in the ambulance and they they take me to the hospital.

Now remember, I've got glass all the side of my head. I mean, it's a pretty bad head wound. It's a good thing it wasn't an organ I was using much at that time. But I I mean, I'm bleeding like a stuck pain. I'm covered with blood.

And they put me on a gurney and they they wheel me into the emergency room. And then the ambulance people leave and the cops haven't gotten there yet. So I go, I'm getting out of here, you know, because I can leave before they give me a blood test. So I go running through the waiting room, the looks on the people's faces with, you know, glass sticking out of my head, and just covered with blood. And I go, I'm heading for the woods.

I'm I'm running out in the parking lot. And meanwhile, here comes my here comes my wife with her sister and her sister's boyfriend driving in, and I spot him, and I start heading toward him. And they've got the windows open, I dive through the window, land on their lap. Now, you got a glass sticking out of my head covered with blood, and I'm saying, you gotta get me out of here. They they wanna take my blood.

Now I talk her into I talk her into going back to the party I was at where a couple of biker women yanked the glass out of my head with pliers. Now, you know, this isn't the type of thing my wife was really okay with. You know what I mean? I mean, unbelievable. Unbelievable.

You know why Al Anon's have that big crease on their forehead? It's from going like this. You want me to do what? It's like a permanent crease. And she can only do this stuff so long.

She can only do this stuff so long. So, you know, she she left me. She left me. Can you imagine? And, and here's the thing, she left.

And so I start really drinking now, not like I really needed a reason, but I now had a reason. I could belly up to the bar and say, she left me when I needed her most. You know what I mean? Here, here's one on the house, kid. You know?

I mean, and I used this for 7 years. I used this as excuse to drink, you know what I mean? My first inventory, you know what I found out? Ex wife, resentment, ex wife, reason, left me when I needed her most. Okay.

You know what I found out when I got to the end of that inventory was? She would have been nuts not to leave me. I was crazy. She would ask some simple things like, could you please like come home at night or not, you know, not not play with your guns in a blackout or, you know, could you put insurance on the cars or, you know, could you put insurance on the cars or could you get a job, you know, at least. And, I was just, get off my back.

So she'd have been crazy not to leave me. So anyway, these kind of things kept happening. Another car accident I had in Florida was, I had to piece this together, you know, by finding witnesses afterward. But I was really drunk. I was, it's like 1 in the afternoon and I'm really drunk and I'm heading home from a party.

And I'm driving a 1963 Buick, one of those gigantic Detroit cars that they made back in the early sixties with 42 tons of metal. And I'm driving down the road and I must have fallen asleep. And, there's this guy who is outside pruning these rose bushes. He's one of these guys that, like, cares about his lawn. Have you ever met those?

They, like, pull weeds and, like, plant flowers and stuff. Like, what's what's with that? Anyway, I like drive up on his lawn while he's out there snipping his rose bushes. And I run over his a perimeter tree and with this big car. It's a 15 foot tall tree.

I knock it over. It gets stuck on my car. It wakes me up and I take back off on the street with this tree under my car. And because he's one of these guys that care about his lawn, he calls the police on me. And the police get there and they follow the dirt from the from the roots of the tree like about 16 blocks down the road and here I am in I'm like sleeping on the side of the road in the car still with the tree under it.

And I know that because it cost me extra for the tow truck. The tree was extra. Anyway, I come to in jail not knowing why I'm here. Bloop. You know, you look around, you see the bars, you start to get a little worried because you don't know why you're there.

I found out one thing important. Never wake up your bunkmate and ask him. You know what I mean? Because because sometimes they don't care why you're there. It's amazing the indifference some of these people have.

So I found out why I was there when I was in front of the judge is when I found why I found how I found out. But anyway, you know, this kind of stuff is happening, and it's getting worse and worse. And I'm having this last the last DWI I had, I got pulled over. I I actually didn't crash this car, so I was really indignant. Why'd you pull me over?

And he pulls me over. I'm about 6 blocks from my house, rolled down a window, and he goes, License registration insurance card. So I reach over and I start it's in the glove compartment. I start looking. I start looking.

It's about 5 minutes goes by. Compartment. I start looking, I start looking, it's about 5 minutes goes by, you know, having trouble with this. I, you know, so finally, I just get frustrated. So, I grabbed the whole contents of the glove compartment and I hand it to the cup.

It's got like maps and hairbrushes and, you know, pens and tissue paper. And he wasn't he didn't really appreciate that. So out of the car, I went and off to, off to off to jail. Now I was I was really upset about this one. You wanna know why?

Because I did the ABCs. I remember doing the ABCs. Now, they used to video. I don't know if they video you guys when you get your DWs, but they they video me when I got back to the police station when I did the sobriety test. They videoed me now.

So I hire a lawyer for $1500, and I say, we're gonna fight this. I did the ABCs. So I go walking into the police station with my $1500 lawyer and, you know, the cop that handed us the the tape, the videotape was laughing while he was saying he was going. And he hand he hands my lawyer the tape, and I'm thinking, oh, that's not good. We sit in this video room, and we put it in, and we start watching it.

And I did the I did the ABC's okay. You know how I did the ABC's? Like, I was horrified. I started watching something like, Now, I've got I've got this $1500 lawyer who's like, you know, $1500. You just gotta remain a little bit calm, you know.

Now, you know, there's pieces of this where they're asking me to walk the line and I'm walking the line but I'm hanging onto the wall. They're like they're like, Excuse me, sir. You're not to hold the wall while you walk the line. I mean, they're video. This is beautiful.

And at the end, at the end, now, this whole time, my lawyer's been no, sir. At the end, they go, Okay. We're gonna turn the camera off. Is there anything further you'd like to say before we turn the camera off? And I look at the camera like this and I go, And I mean, I'm so drunk.

My tongue is slapping back and forth like this. I go, and my lawyer who's been who's been calm up to this point, right, goes, blah. He just starts he just starts laughing. He can't take it anymore. He goes, if there was any chance of us, any chance at all of us ever getting off, You just blew it right there.

So I'm like, okay, I guess we'll plea, you know, and one more one more plea. And I walked for 4 years after that. I was afraid there was gonna be jets and mobiles by the time I can get my license license back. So so, anyway, I mean, this was happening. Toward the end, I could I could lose my license.

I could lose a wife here, there. You know? I mean, I could lose a family. You know, I had a daughter. I could I could lose places to live, and I could I could I could be forced out of state to go, you know, try it somewhere else.

And I could lose a lot of friends and all this stuff. It was it wasn't that big of a price to pay for my alcohol. You know how we are. You know, anything but but taking our booze away. It's either the booze or me.

See it? I mean, you know, I mean, that's the way we are. So so, but toward the end, I started to think I was losing my mind. I mean, my hangovers and detoxes were so bad. I mean, my eyes would be yelling.

I'd be shaking. I'd have I'd have all this anxiety, and it'd be really bad. And I really thought I was losing my mind. And this one day, this one day, I'm an electrician by this time. I don't know how that happened.

Wasn't my fault. I, like, I came to in sobriety being an electrician. I I I don't know how it happened. And I wasn't a real good one. You know what I mean?

I remember I'll tell you a couple of electricians' stories. Remember this one time drilling down in the wrong section up in an attic and having to get the homeowner out saying could you please take me up into your bedroom and he does. And we open up his closet and there's about 8 suits covered with plaster and one of them is coiled up into the ceiling where my drill bit caught it, you know. He wasn't real happy about that. There was another time when, when I was I was with, I was with this guy that, used to used to not really care too much for me.

He was a a guy a partner I was working with on the job and I'm outside putting in an electrical pad electrical meter panel, and he's right over by the truck, and I've been partying like crazy the night before. You know how you get really dehydrated when you drink a lot of hard liquor? You gotta, like, get a half a gallon of something to hydrate back up. Well, I picked grape drink that morning, you know, I drank a half a gallon of grape drink. And I'm standing there and all of a sudden Now, I've got experience that tells me I've got 7.3 seconds to find somewhere because I'm gonna be sick.

And I don't want my partner to see me. So I decide, I know what I'll do. I'll run around the back of the house. So I run around the back and I just make it around the back of the house. I go, like like like a like a fire hydrant.

I stucco the back of this house with purple vomit. Just like this. And I thought I was alone. Now, what happened was I turn around and not not from here to the black curtain was a family on a deck adjoining the back property. And it was a mother, a father, and 3 kids having iced tea.

You could tell they were all related because they all had the same expression on their face. You know? Mommy, mommy, the purple puke monster for Belle, mommy. Now, you know, so I got out the hose because you don't wanna look stupid. You can't look stupid.

So washing down the the yeah. This always happens on a Tuesday. But this kind of stuff, you know, this is this this was just it was just getting really bad. But but anyway, this one time I'm trying to put, a screw, a ground screw in a ceiling fixture box, and I'm shaking so bad because I've got the d t's. I'm shaking so bad.

I I I can't do it. I can't do it. I can't put the screw on the end of the screwdriver and get it into the hole. There's no way. I'm shaking too bad.

And the guy that was working with me was looking at me like, you pathetic. Good for nothing, no account loser you. Because when you're alcoholic, you can hear people thinking at you. Can't you? I know what you're thinking because we know.

And I couldn't take that I could take losing the families I could take everything but having somebody look look at me like I'm that small, it was just too much. So I signed myself in. I went to the 28 day program. Anybody in here go to 28 day program? There you go, a couple of people.

Well, what it was like for me was, you know, not good. I mean, it was voluntarily committing myself to the asylum. It talks about that in this book. Many of us voluntarily commit ourselves to the asylum. And, and that's what I did.

I signed myself in. And, you know, I was that desperate to separate from, from alcohol. You know, and there were some experiences in there that were helpful. There were some experiences in there that wasn't. But when I got out of there, I decided that, you know, I was gonna go to AA.

They suggested go to Alcoholics Anonymous. So I started going to Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, I was going to 2 AA meetings a week and 2 outpatient. So that's 4 nights a week and I swear I don't ever wanna drink again. You gotta under you gotta understand, I wanted to separate from alcohol in the worst way.

They were saying, the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. And I was translating that into, you have a desire to stop drinking, you're gonna be okay. That's what I was translating it into because that's that's the membership in AA is a desire to non serve. Okay. Okay.

I've got a desire to stop drinking. I'm going to AA meetings. I'm going to outpatient meetings. On the way to an AA meeting, I have almost 90 days, the thought crosses my mind that I should buy a gallon of vodka and drink it. Now, why?

Why? I mean, I really don't wanna drink. You gotta understand that if if I would've made it to that AA meeting that day, there would've been nobody in that meeting that wanted to not drink more than I did. But the obsession of the mind doesn't care what you think. You know, if you're powerless, you're powerless.

If you haven't recovered from alcoholism, you haven't recovered from alcoholism. If God hasn't relieved you of the obsession to drink, God hasn't relieved you of the obsession And I hadn't participated in the recovery process enough at that time or the fellowship at that time to be able to stay abstent. So alcohol was gonna go back into my body and what my mind told me was, if you drink, you'll remember how terrible it was and you'll go back to AA stronger than you're going now. So I drank to improve my recovery. You know, run that one past your sponsor.

Okay? It's one of the reasons why we get sponsors. Anybody in here sponsor other people? Do your people come to you with their plans every once in a while? I've got a plan.

Oh, no. Oh, no. They've always got a plan. The plans are scary but you know what the worst the worst thing to hear is? I've met somebody.

Oh, no. No. And, they they want you to be happy for them, you know. You're like, oh, no. And, because you're thinking, that means it's going to be 5 phone calls a day for the next 2 years, you know, with issues.

But you also know you can't break them up, you know, because because they've met each other, you know, boy meets girl on AA campus, trouble soon as follows. You know, if you break them up, they're just gonna mess up 2 other people, you know. So you kind of, you know, you kind of have to leave well enough alone. And, you know, you have to just oh no. And, you know, hopefully, hopefully, the pain of that initial, tragic, dysfunctional relationship will be enough to send them flying into the steps.

So, you know, it may be, it may be. And so that certainly happened to me. I I I went to my sponsor and I said, I found somebody. And he's like, you know, he goes, okay, Chris. I gotta explain something to you.

And because we're in a gymnasium, this this works. He goes, let's say there's a gymnasium and it's filled with women and somewhere, one of those woman is an axe murderers. Okay? What the cops will do is they'll push you in there and then they'll observe until you become attracted to somebody and then they'll throw the cuffs on her. They'll have her.

I'm like, me? You know? Because you just can't believe it. You really think that that everything's gonna be fine. But the problem is, the problem is is unrecovered, 2 unrecovered people getting together.

It's like 2 dinglings trying to make a bell. It just doesn't work. You know what I mean? So, so I got involved in it, and and I survived that. And, now this guy this guy, Radio Shack Mike, had, he was one of those guys that would go to the bookstores, you know, the recovery bookstores, the new age bookstores, and he was a tape guy.

He would listen to tapes. And, and he he handed me these 8 tapes, 8 90 minute tapes. And, you know, I'm thinking, oh, man. Now, I was a little bit leery because he had given me tapes before to listen to. This is a guy I met in AA.

He was my new buddy. And, you know, I thought, I really don't know if I should because he gave me these affirmation tapes about a month earlier. And what you're supposed to do is put them in and play them in front of a mirror and you're supposed to affirm something positive about yourself. So I tried it, you know, I'm like, Chris, you're a wonderful guy. Chris, you're a wonderful guy.

You're supposed to do this like a 100 times or until you believe it. And as the tape player flies out the window, you know, because I can you know. And I look back on it and I realize that trying to treat alcoholism with affirmations is like trying to stop a tractor trailer with a cobweb. It's just it's just not sufficient, you know. But but anyway, so, you know, I was kinda leery when he gave me he gave me these tapes Now but I I had a long ride to work and nothing better to do.

So I started listening to them. And they were, they were they were also from a couple of guys from Arkansas. Like Arkansas, you know, I had no contempt prior to investigation at all, right? Like Arkansas, us people in New Jersey do more thinking by 9 o'clock than you're gonna get done in Arkansas all day. What are they gonna teach me?

You know? Well, let me tell you what they taught me. It was the first time that the program of recovery was ever explained to me in a way that I could explain. Now, I've been going to step meetings until the cows would come home. I knew we were in a 12 step fellowship.

So I knew the importance of the 12 steps had to be there somewhere. So I went to a whole bunch of step meetings. I mean, just a lot. I went to 4 step meetings a week. And I learned to talk about the steps, and share about the steps, and read about the steps, and think about the steps, and discuss the steps with other people, and then listen to other people discussing the stuff.

I just never did them, you know. And you'll find step meetings that are that way, certainly back in the United States where a lot of people know a lot of stuff about the steps. They've just never experienced them. So what these set these sets of tapes by the guys Joe and Charlie, told me was this, Chris, you're really involved in the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, but you don't have a program. If you're not taking the instructions, practicing the the principles out of this book, following the spiritual exercises, and actually doing them out of this book, you don't have program.

So when you go back out, please don't tell people out there that AA didn't work because AA is the 12 steps to set a spiritual, principles spiritual in their nature. That if when practiced as a way of life can expel the obsession to drink and allow the user to become happily and usefully whole. That's Alcoholics Anonymous and here's how here's how we do the steps. And that's basically what these 8 tapes were about. So I listened to them and I got real resentful.

You want to know why? Because I was back from a relapse and I was really trying. This last relapse I was on was not good. I went I I was like a 6 month drunk. And it culminated in Christmas 1989 at my mother's house where my sister, brother, mother, nieces, nephews, cats, everybody is there and I threaten everybody with a 38 caliber handgun and a drunken blackout.

I'm gonna kill all of you. I'm gonna kill you. Now, it was Christmas, you know? This wasn't the festive atmosphere everybody was looking for. So they picked up their Christmas and they moved it elsewhere, thank you.