The North Dakota Northern Spring Roundup in Grand Forks, ND

Thank you, Frame, and hi everybody. My name is Don and I'm an alcoholic.

Real grateful to be here this evening and I want to thank everybody that was involved in inviting me to be here. Only has just been great following up with me and making sure I wasn't getting you wouldn't get drunk or something between tabby asked me and now and maybe it helped. I didn't get drugs, so don't knock it if you hadn't tried it, that helped. Only had. Everybody's just real real can to me and

I love AA in this part of the world.

Fact I was telling some folks and I think we got some folks here that were over there that just two weeks ago I was over in Grand Rapids, MN, which after looking map realized wasn't very far from here. So I, I hope none of you folks are getting double dipped to the point that you get bored to death with me. But I love the spirit of Alcoholics Anonymous up in this area, and I just thank you for letting me

be a part of your conference. And you know, it always really does make me feel great to be invited to come somewhere to to share my experience, strength and hope. There's several reasons for that. And the course of my drinking, I got the point where nobody ever invited me anywhere except to leave.

So I'm just grateful to be invited somewhere and

truly feel that every time I'm invited So. So thank you.

And I've had trouble with the directions all my life. You see, I've always thought I was smarter than the people that made the directions. And as a result, I've kind of had to interpret the directions, you know, because the people that make the directions are trying to manipulate really, really stone idiots into doing things. It's like if it says do not exceed 6 in 24 hours, then you can't figure that out that that really means

something like do not exceed 36 in 24 hours. So, so the directions have always been a big problem with me. But but if I'll let God Get Me Out of the way and it's going to take God to Get Me Out of the way. I used to stand up at podiums and say if I can Get Me Out of the way, I'm going to do this,

tell you some gas. If I could Get Me Out of the way, I wouldn't need to be in Alcoholics Anonymous.

Getting me out of the way literally takes divine intervention. It took divine intervention the month I got sober in April of 1981, and it takes no less divine intervention today. But if I let God Get Me Out of the way, I believe the directions for what I need to do this evening are simple enough that maybe even I can follow them. The book tells me that I need to talk in a general way about what I used to be like and what happened and what I'm like now

and something else that's really gotten important to me the last few years. The The book says that our personal stories tell in our own language and from our own point of view how we've been able to form a relationship with our God. And I really hope my story carries that message because when I first started being exposed to Alcoholics Anonymous, I was literally allergic to this whole God and how power thing. Every time it was mentioned, I guess I thought it insulted my intellect or something that

would talk about such claptrap in front of a fellow like myself. And so the talk of higher power and God would run me out of the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. And then I'm one of the ones that's been so blessed because I was allowed to live long enough for alcohol to keep running me back in here because I didn't have anywhere else to go until the miracle began to happen and that began to come to believe.

So I'm absolutely convinced it's only through the the grace of a loving God that I didn't even acknowledge was there as far as having anything to do with my life

that led me to you guys. And you guys took me by the hand and LED me through these 12 steps that are truly our only program of recovery. And those 12 steps led me back to that loving God. And that's the reason I'm alive and here this weekend instead of rotting in a pauper's grave somewhere around Nashville, TN for over 20 years. And I'm not guessing it that I know it for an absolute fact.

My body grew up at least a little bit

on a tobacco farm down in southwestern Kentucky. I live in Louisville, KY now and and before I got sober I really and truly had had just a terribly interesting and romantic childhood and subsequent rise to power. In fact, you could put me on lie detector machine and I would have passed with flying colors when I told you the saga. And it wasn't just a story, it was a saga

about how by my Aaron Will and my sterling intellect,

I had picked myself up by the bootstraps from the depths of poverty to those staggering heights I'd reached. And I was so sincere about it that I would usually have you and me both crying before I was halfway done with it. And and by the time I was sober a week, I realized that was all a bunch of crap. We weren't even poor. And, and I was 37 when I got sober in 81. And for 37 years, I was absolutely convinced that we had been poor And, and we weren't even close to poor. We were middle class farming people

that had everything we needed and a lot of the things that we wanted and, and no staggering heights were a whole lot more staggering than they were. I've had to be careful all my life, drunk and sober, not to be a legend in my own mind. You, you know, alcoholism is an illness of superlatives.

We don't tend to think in terms of good or bad, much less ordinary. You know, ordinary never crosses our mind, but we don't even tend to think in terms of good and bad. We think in terms of best and worst, you know, just as far away from ordinary as we get. And the truth is, the truth is that my whole life, drunk and sober, I have been just a whole lot more nearly

ordinary and mundane than my ego has ever been able to stand.

When I look back on my childhood now, the first 12 or 13 years of my life, it, it really seems like that all that was going on was selfishness and self centeredness. And you know, the book tells me that that's the root of my troubles. And my first sponsor, who was Cherry Carpenter from Nashville, TN Cherry has been dead about 12 or 13 years now.

Cherry told me real early on, he said, Don, what that means? Is that the first thing wrong with you

is that you've got a disorder of your ego?

He said. It's from that disorder of the ego that all the rest of it has flowed. The physical allergy and alcohol, the mental obsession with it, the physical, mental, emotional, spiritual illness be said it all started. The root of it is that disordered ego and said on count that disordered ego. All your life you've been so obsessed with yourself. You've been so obsessed with how you feel,

in fact, he told me, said Don. The way you feel has always been the most important thing in the universe to you,

and I am sure that I had a blank look on my face when he said that. And I'll tell you why I'm not joking about this.

To the best of my recollection, at age 37, the possibility had never drifted across my mind that there was any other basis on which a human being could live their life other than how they felt being the most important thing in the universe. And he told me that I'd been so obsessed with, with how I believe I stacked up against other people, that all that obsession with myself had created so much pain and so much emptiness down inside me that I never been able to stand the way

inside without either running as hard as I could or trying to stuff something in there to make me feel good enough that I could stand it. And, and the 1st 12 or 13 years of my life were basically just keeping all the bells ringing and the mirrors flashing and the smoke going, trying to stay a step ahead of a screaming fit and trying to keep you from seeing what was down inside me and what was missing down inside me. Because I believe a part of me felt like and knew that if you saw what I was and what I wasn't, I might have to face it. And and

something in me just felt like the earth would swallow me up through that own emptiness in my middle if I had to face that. Another couple of things. I was always an egomaniac with an inferiority complex. In fact, I remain one today, thank the good Lord. Don't have to act on it all time, but these days. But what I mean by that is real simple. I have all my life been perfectly capable of feeling too good for something and not nearly good enough for the same thing at the same time.

Too smart for something and too dumb for the same thing at the same time. The only thing that I absolutely cannot feel again without divine intervention is okay for anything on this earth. It's just not in me on my own without God's help to feel just OK for anything on this earth.

Another couple of things about what I was like on account of that ego disorder of man, I don't believe that I was ever able to give any consideration to the possibility that there might be a power greater than myself that had anything to do with running my life on a daily basis. Now, it's usually all right with the proposition of some sort of, you know, central intellect, I guess, kind of like a celestial CIA or something, or creative force. But when it got down to what I know,

religious friends today called the the idea of a personal God. When he got down to the possibility of a God that was more important in the actual conducting and the unfolding of every minute of every hour of every day of my life. Then my little old brain, my ego, vetoed that big time and said we absolutely cannot and will not consider that.

And on account of that same ego disorder, I don't believe that I had any teachability or humility in my life, not one bit until it gets sober at 37. And the reason I don't believe I had any is I've never been able to remember a single time that I voluntarily followed a suggestion that anybody made about how to run my life unless I understood it

and I agreed with it and I thought it would work.

And, you know, not only did that sound like a good idea for 37 years, it doesn't sound bad tonight. Because after all, there's a whole lot of difference in crazy and stupid. So why in world should I do something about my life voluntarily if I don't understand it or I don't agree with it or I don't think it'll work when I get honest about it? It's really simple. You see, I've got a talking illness and now my illness has been talking to me all my life. Whether you can be an alcoholic before you ever take a drink or not,

I don't know. And I could careless before I got sober. I was so interested in all of these details because I was a victim of one of the deadliest and most pervasive myths in our society. And what that myth is, is that if somehow I can just figure out what's wrong with me, it magically won't be wrong anymore. Well, I probably figured it out drunk several dozen times, but didn't do anything about it, so it didn't do me a bit of good in the world to figure it out. The truth is, if

we're sitting down in that parking lot with the foul that had all the whys and wherefores of Mao, callism, where it came from, whether you can be an alcoholic before you drink or not, and all those other things that to me seem to bad be about as important as how many angels you can get on the head of a pen today. If somebody had all that information, I wouldn't waste an hour going out there and going through it because I know I've got alcoholism.

I know it's incurable, progressive and fatal. And I know what to do about it.

I've got a solution that works just beautifully. So I really don't need to know one other thing about it. But but whether or not you can be an alcoholic for you to can take a drink, you can certainly be a crazy little sucker. And, and, and I always was and, and still am today as far as what goes in my man you and all that talking that my illness does to me. And by the way, if I talk about my alcoholism talking to me or my brain talking to me,

they're one and the same. I just don't want to use the same word too much.

And I've always had an old crazy picture show rolling in the back of my head, and I've still got that old crazy picture show, and I've still got my alcoholism running its mouth to me. And I'm so grateful that I was told early on that recovery did not necessarily mean that those things would go away. But what recovery meant was that I would get to the point where I could usually recognize that they were not reality and that I did not have to obey them.

That just cause little Donnie had a feeling he didn't have to build a shrine to it

now and and all my life and incidentally, some people hear my talk and get the impression that I'm saying stuff or feelings and nothing could be further from the truth. Because our steps, our programs recovery, I believe give us a marvelous vehicle for confronting our feelings. First when we go through the first NAND steps in order to reach a state of recovery. And then on a continuing day-to-day basis, as we live in on 10/11/12 every day in order to maintain our spiritual condition and get our daily,

I believe they give us a wonderful vehicle for doing that. What I have finally learned by the grace of God is that while my feelings are real and my thoughts are real, they are not reality and I don't have to build a shrine to them. See, all my life, if I had a feeling, all of my behavior had to fall in immediately behind my feeling. And I also went to work to get your behavior to fall in behind my feeling

because it had never occurred to me, as I said earlier, that a human being could live their life on any basis other than how they felt being the most important thing in the universe.

So I'm not saying Steph the feelings, but is you'll probably hear a little more over in the next few minutes. I am saying that what works for me is my action. If I keep waiting to feel like doing the right thing, to do the right thing, and that's what I always won't. I don't care what it is If I don't feel like going to work. Every Faber in my body wants to do something like get up and aggravate one of y'all on the phone say I don't feel like going to work.

What can we do to make me feel like going to work so I can go to work?

Well, I gotta go to work. What difference does it make whether I feel like going to work? But see, I want to fix the feelings. I want to get that right before I take the action. Here's what I just hate. I can't stand this, whatever it is, whether it's going to work, which I'm just using for an example, or it's making up the bed or whatever it is that I know needs to be done and I don't feel like doing what needs to be done. The only therapy, and I want to tell you in sobriety, I've worn sponsors out, I've prayed, I've used

abdominated discussion meetings, I have gotten outside counseling on not wanting to do the right thing. And the only therapy that has ever done any good at all on man, not feeling like doing the right thing was going on doing the right thing when it didn't feel like doing it. And I just absolutely hate that. But but but it integrates. I kind of got on the side there that that all my life my illness has been talking to me and I don't think it's ever tried to kill me because I don't believe my illness cares whether I live or die.

Now, I've nearly died on account of alcoholism dozens of times, but I believe my alcoholism is a perfect sociopath. I believe it's only got one reason for existing. Let's try to get itself that next drink and it'll tell me something that might kill me or might kill you. It'll tell me totally inconsistent lies back-to-back with one another without ever dropping a stitch. It doesn't care, just slings it all up against the wall, hoping some of it'll stick.

Now, if I could always recognize that that was just my illness talking to me and say, oh, I'll chuckle at that and I'll go to a meeting or I'll give somebody a call or I'll get down on my knees and pray or read the big book or whatever

and going about my business, that'd be fine. But you see, my alcoholism is truly a mini splendored thing. I mean, that thing has got more heads than a hadra. And one really big part of my alcoholism is that if it's anything at all, it is an illness of perception. And what that means is real simple. That means I don't see things right. I don't hear them right. I don't always recognize them for what they are.

Bottom line,

if I put that ultimate veto power in the universe in my brain, which incidentally I never named the ultimate veto power in the universe because it always feels like common sense, so I name it common sense. If I put that ultimate veto power in the universe in my brain that I'm not going to do it unless I understand it, I agree with it, and I think it'll work on account of the perception part of my illness

on someday or the other, I will wind up believing one of those deadly last that may illness is telling me

and I'll pick up a drink and in my case I will die. You know, not only is that ultimate veto parent the universe masquerading as common sense, all my crazy ideas do that.

In the years that have been sober, I've never had one single insane idea walk up, say good morning, Don, how are you? I'm a crazy idea and I'm here to try to kill you today. Because you see, if it did that, I probably wouldn't mess with it. I'd step around it. So they all come up grinning and say good morning, Don, how you buddy? I'm common sense. And they immediately start talking about how special I and all the pressures I've got on me are

and how different I am from the rest of y'all and whatever it is that I know in my heart just exactly what I need to do or not. Do you know that that little spark of the divine always knows that next stitch, we keep trying to get it tell us the pattern so we'd start stitching. And that's where I get messed up because I can't comprehend the patterns when when I'm trying to deal with the patterns, I'm in worse shape than the chimpanzee trying to master

quantum physics. I hadn't got the horses for that. But that little spark of the van tell me where to take that stitch if Al listened. And and when I know what the next right thing to do or not do do is or isn't. And my brain is spinning around with all that fear and telling me that if I do that next right thing, I'll lose things I don't want to lose or I won't get things I want to get that insane ideas telling me, you know, those other

people in a, a, if they had the pressures on them that you've got on you, they'd do it that way too. And then it'll tell me a lot of you probably doing it that way, it just won't admit it. You know, ads, it tells me how you know I've got to do it that way because it's just common sense. And that's why I just can't put that veto in my brain. When I do that with what I've got wrong with me, I've put myself under death sentence.

And I believe that I've made myself absolutely unteachable

because I have made my brain the God of my universe. When I'm not willing to come as a little child to spiritual things and do things simply because I am obeying and doing them, I believe that with what I've got wrong with me that I'm running the real risk of dying. One more quick thing about what I was like. I always wanted to grow up to be an alcoholic. That was my ambition,

but I didn't know that till I've been sober about a year and and looking back on it, it's real simple. But by the time I was four or five, I looked around at the decent, responsible, hard working men in the

area where I grew up. And here's what I saw. I saw the dullest looking old guys you've ever seen in your life. They were driving old, beat up, paid for pickup trucks, you know, 12 or 15 years old. And, and more often than not, they'd be married to a lady that didn't look interesting to me, even though I was a little kid in those days in the rural S, they'd wear those old dresses, look like flower sacks. And, and, and most of the time they'd have a whole house full of little snotty nosed kids. And, and those guys would get up every morning and eat breakfast

with that drab looking woman. And all those kids go getting that old beat up paid for pickup truck and go right exactly where somebody had told them to go. And all day long they would do what somebody had told them to do. And then at the end of the day, and this really did it just blew me away. I couldn't understand it all. At the end of the day, they would go back to the same people they had left that morning and they would eat supper and and go to bed with the chickens, get up next day and do the same food thing. And then maybe on Sunday you'd

load that crew in the pickup, go up the road to Julian Baptist Church or down the road to Locust Grove Baptist Church. And then on Sunday afternoon they might do something like go visit people, for heavens sake and see, part of this ego disorder, man, is that I'm not able without divine intervention to have but one knee jerk reaction to anything or anybody. And if you're an alcoholic, you can pretty quickly figure out what that is. Sure. What has this got to do with me? So I looked at those guys, made those,

had the only reaction I could have. And it came to me. Were you a little boy? And they're grown men. So maybe when you grow up, some parts of your life will be something like these decent, responsible men. Like to have scared me to death. It absolutely terrified me to think that I'd go up in anything in my life would be remotely like those decent men

now. The time I was about seven or eight years old, my older brother Dan, and Dan's 13 years older than I. As far as I know, Dan did not 'cause my alcoholism.

I have no idea what a dysfunctional family is, I'll tell you that. The reason I don't have any idea what a dysfunctional family is

is that Abner met anybody that claimed that they came from a functional family. So unless I can identify a functional family, I sure don't know what a dysfunctional family is. But what I'm pretty sure of is that that was the most dysfunctional thing in my family. And by the time I was saying right, I had aggravated brother Dan until to shut me up, He would occasionally take me over to the wet county. We had all these dry counties in Kentucky where they had the beer joints and he had let me sit around, drink big oranges and he pickled eggs while he drank beer and

observe and listen. And first thing observe was allow those honky tonk heroes had the big flashy cars that they couldn't afford, but they had them. And then we'd walk on in there and and I, I couldn't be more sincere. It's still just burned into my brain what those guys looked like sitting at those bars. Man, I'd never seen anything like it in my life. They they were doing things like sitting there and gazing down into that beer. You could tell that they were just plumbing its depths. And I look at it looked at them and

new immediately that those guys were deep and intelligent and romantic and they were so much more interested than those old drones out there on the farm doing what people told them to do. And, and then I'd look over in the booth and I'd see one of them with his arm draped around some lady looked whole lot more interesting to me than those old gals in the flour sack dresses. And and these fellas didn't care if they were married somebody else. They didn't care if those women were married somebody else.

But the most magic thing of all? I didn't get to finish the first Big Orange until I had overheard enough of those fellas conversations

to know that nearly everyone of them was only about that far from being rich and famous.

Everyone I'm had at least one great big deal going that was gonna pop maybe a flat gonna be somebody that was usually a good big deal, but not always important word was big. If they had a bad deal, it was a big bad deal. And and and I was told early and surprised said, Don, what's wrong with you? You got a disease a big deal said your whole life's been one big deal right after another. Good big deals and bad big deals all stumbling, falling over one another. Said there's no mystery to that said on account of you're terribly disordered ego. Anything that you can imagine has

thing to do with you, you blow up into a great big deal. Same thing be happening. Somebody say, oh, that's nothing. He can handle that, you know, but it happens to you. Oh my God. Or if you think it's happening to you and, and, and he said, went on to say said you are far too sick, I'm sure to ever get to the point where you will be able to feel this way.

But he said, if you're ever going to have any comfortable sobriety, you're not going to have to get to the point where you're going to have to act like you feel and believe that anytime you make a big deal out of anything. And over the next few years, he got it through my head that anything includes my health, it includes my freedom, it includes my kids. It includes those things that we're pretty well in unanimous agreement are far too important to turn over to God, money and sex.

It includes all of those things that anytime I make a big deal out of anything that is not God and not these 12 steps, what I'm really making a big deal out of is me. And when I do that, I'm back into ego and I'm back into alcoholism. But 50 years ago, sitting in those beer joints in Kentucky, I didn't know there was a thing wrong with big deals. And what happened is obvious. I took one look, one good long look

at self will run right, at total lack of consideration for other people, at total disregard for honesty on any level,

and I fell in love with everything about it from the first time I got a good look at those guys. The only true ambition I ever had was to grow up to be just like them. Looked like them, sound like them, put off the very vibrations that they put off Treat people the way they talked about treating people. That was so cool. You could just listen. They didn't take anything off anybody. And I got my ambition. I just didn't know what the right name for it was

and I got drunk first time when I was either 12 or 13. That first night I got an awful lot of trouble. A puke, blacked out, passed out,

woke up next morning, had a terrible hangover, swore all those Baptists around there were right and I would never do it again. And I was sincere. And it was nearly a week until I got drunk the second time because the magic had happened. And at the time I didn't know the magic had happened at the time. All I knew was that for a few minutes, on my way to puking and getting in all that trouble, I had passed through a right pleasant neighborhood. But looking back on it, I know the magic. It happened when I got enough of that stuff in me that for the first time

it did something about that pain and that emptiness that that obsession with myself had created all my life. It made me, for the first time feel good enough that I could stand the way I felt inside without either running as hard as I could or trying to stuff something else in there to make me feel OK. And since, remember, the way I feel has always been the most important thing in the universe to me. For the next 25 years, when I wanted to change the way I felt badly enough, it didn't matter what it

and it didn't matter who it cost, because how I felt was the most important thing in this universe. And I believe with all my heart that that's at the very core of my powerlessness over alcohol and the things like it.

I'm not going to give you much of A Drunkalog tonight. I want to want to get on and talk about getting sober and living sober a little bit. But I'll tell you that from that first drunk until I got sober was about 25 years. And from that first drunk until I got sober, alcohol dominated everything in my life, not just alcoholism. Alcohol did because I was not an occasional drinker. I was not a binge drinker for that 25 years. I'm real confident that I went to be a drunk more than 80% of the nights.

Everything that happened in my life happened around alcoholism, around alcohol, because of alcohol, in spite of alcohol. But alcohol was the center of everything. By the time I was 15 or 16 years old, I had figured out that if you stayed close enough to me in any capacity whatsoever for long enough, you'd wind up blowing the whistle on my drinking. You'd wind up saying way me Don. You know, being around you is nice in some ways, and it really does get exciting from time to time. But

something wrong here, there's something wrong with the way you drink and there's wrong with the way you live. And we need to look at that. We need to talk about that. And when you did, if I couldn't change your mind, you had just punched your ticket out of my life. And as a result, I really didn't have people in my life. I had positions, and whatever your position was in my life,

I probably had your replacement interviewed at any time, and I'm not proud of that. I believe it's a pretty good partial description of a sociopath, and I've had to make a lot of amends based on that. But that's simply the way it was for about 25 years in my life.

School for me was very easy. By the time I was 16, I felt like I'd gotten in enough trouble with my drinking that I had to get away from that farming community where I had been born and grown up. So I left school and took a Greyhound bus 200 miles to Louisville, the big city in Kentucky. And I wound up on the doorstep of the University of Louisville after a little while. And they gave me a bunch of tests and let me in as an early admission student. And over the next eight years, I drank and worked my way through undergraduate and law school and

very few memories of that. That's just a drunken blur. And in the spring of 1968, I graduated from law school and Dana, who was my only child for for over 20 years, was born. I started practicing law in downtown Louisville 68. I practiced until 78 with some degree of material success. You know, our stories change after we've been sober for a while. And, and the first several years I was given talks. In fact, the bunch of tapes out there, me in the early years

proclaiming my fantastic material success during those ten years of my law practice and, and I couldn't have been more honest.

The truth is now if I stay sober and live to stay sober 35 years, I may have been a total failure. I don't really know. But but the best I do right now is I had some some moderate financial material success. And and that's what I would stick in your face when you suggested there was something wrong with somebody who lived the way I did during that 10 years. Easily 1/3 of the nights in that 10 years, I made no attempt to go to bed like a normal human being. I passed out in some circumstance

going to bed. I've tried many occasions in front of a jury without laying my head down. Just take a handful of something, try to offset the booze and get in there and try the case. It was totally and absolutely insane. I not only didn't have any, I didn't have any relationships with any people in my life that had any reality to them. Honesty was totally out of the question. I began during that 10 years to use some things other than the alcohol, and during that period, just like they were with Bill Wilson and Doctor Bob,

they were sideshows to the booze. The booze was the big tent. There were things to change the effect of the booze, to increase it to good, to decrease it, to help me try to function with the hangovers, but the booze was at the core of everything. February 10th 1978 I got full of Scotch, cocaine, quaaludes, vodka and speed and I drove a sports car off the road at over 130 miles an hour.

Now since the roads where I see that probably was not real good judgment to be driving 130 but

I drove it off the road and it did an awful lot of bad things in my body. I broke both legs, crushed both knees lost the main artery in one lower leg head to a Backpage, take a vein out of the upper leg, graft it in to replace the artery and it separated my pelvis and pulled my plumbing into so it didn't have a urinary function for over a year. I had what they call a suprapubic catheter which is just a plastic tube with a flange on it where they bore a hole in your abdomen. Pop that sucker into your bladder to carry your urine out to a bag. And

I was in hospital for about 6 months of that first year and I had a half dozen major surgeries. It was 2 1/2 months before they stood me up on an electric tilt table for the first time. Early on, the doctors gave me the prognosis that I would probably never walk again without at least braces on both legs and one or two canes, and that they doubted that we could find a surgeon anywhere that would ever attempt to put my plumbing back together so that I would have a urinary function.

Just for the record and purely by the grace of God, because we've already discussed the fact that it didn't have anything to do with me following directions,

but but just for the record, I've been sober a little over 21 years and have an own to brace hurricane for over 22 years. And about a year after that wreck, the head of urology down at Duke University did reconnect my plumbing and restored my urinary function. But I didn't know that was going to happen. And my reaction to that prognosis, I didn't go broke after that wreck immediately right away because little law firm of 7-8 lawyers had built up around this other guy myself. So some money kept coming in for a while.

My reaction to that prognosis is that I would lay in my hospital bed every day, not occasionally every day. And I would have my friends bring me in booze and more dope than the doctors were giving me. And I would lay in that bed and say really intelligent things. Like fellas, anybody can quit drinking when the going gets a little tough, but it takes a man to land there with it when the bills start coming in.

And then I'd give them my talk about a man ought not be out there doing the crime if he's not prepared to do the time.

And they weren't going to hear me whining and give me another drink. And that's real insanity and it's real powerlessness.

When I had that wreck, I was remarried to my daughter's Mama and justice on the side. I've been making an observation of this over the years. I believe that proves my alcoholism without further authentication, because nobody ever does that but us. Not ever. And we do it all time. If a normie even considered going back and remarrying somebody and jumping back in a frying pan they just got out of,

they tear the door off the asylum to protect themselves. And we do it all time drunk and sober, and it seems to work for us a pretty good percentage of the time. It's just a different sentence. But at any rate, I was really, next time you see that happening, look, and I will guarantee you that at least one, and very frequently both, is alcoholic dopamine or so alanine sick they can not crawl it just it just doesn't happen to normally. But at any rate, my daughter's mother, understandably, was

with the circumstances of the recons, had another lady with me. And so we wound up divorcing shortly after the wreck, and I wound up married to the to the other young lady who was hurt, but not as badly as I. About a year after that wreck, I made my first trip to the asylum. And I don't use that word to be cute. Bill Wilson uses that word in the big book, and my momma used that word. And by the time I made that first trip to the asylum sometime around the first of the year 79, I still had my braces and my crutches and my catheter bag,

my tube in my belly and the phenomenon of craving that the big book talks about. And that's a simple thing all the world. It is, is the physical addiction to ethyl alcohol that once you once that thing is set in, when you get some ethyl alcohol in your body, not only does your man and your soul want another drink, body needs it. And is that thing progresses that the body needs to begin to need it really bad For 25 years of drinking and I had the phenomenon of craving first drink I ever took.

To my knowledge, I have never set out intentionally to have a couple of three drinks.

I have never wanted a couple of three drinks. A couple of three drinks has never done anything for me except make my mouth totteny and make my head feel like somebody stuck a basketball pump and hit it about a pump and a half. I've I've never set out to have two or three. Never even told myself I was going to do that. And nobody ever had to tell me that drinking the next morning would cure a hangover. I was born intuitively knowing that. Somewhere in the mirror of my bones, I knew that. But for over 20 years, the terror. See what

me one ambition, what motivated me was terror. The terror that if I didn't lay there in that bed and smoke 3 or 4 cigarettes, then jump up scared to death to try to remember things that happened the night before, be afraid of what I had to deal with that day. Stick a toothbrush in my mouth and half the mornings of my life for 1/4 of a century puke. And by the way, did not know that was abnormal. I started doing it at about 12 or 13 when I started getting drunk all time. So I vaguely associated it with puberty. And I thought everybody

did it. And you know, you don't talk about that much. You didn't stand around a cocktail party and say hi, sweetie, Did you puke when you brushed your teeth this morning? You know, you just don't talk about that a lot. But I want to report that to my knowledge, I'm not thrown up when I brush my teeth one single time since April of 1981.

But. But at any rate, that fear would motivate me to do that. And then I'd throw on the clothes that I thought I was supposed to throw on and try to go where I thought I was supposed to go and make the noise that I thought I was supposed to make. Not because I had ambition, not because I had emotional health or responsibility, but because I was terrified that if I didn't do that, that you would see what I was and I'd have to face what I was. And I knew I couldn't stand that.

Excuse me, needed a little water there. But at any rate,

the scales tipped a little bit, and that phenomenon of craving progressed until it was greater than the fear. It progressed until there wasn't any force that I knew of inside me that could stop that thing. I have never felt a physical force of any kind. And I've had a dozen major surgeries altogether. I've come off a lot of hard drugs. I've never felt a physical force even in the league