The Joy of Living convention in Aspen, CO

Hi everybody, my name is Carla Rowland. I'm an alcoholic. That was quite an introduction. And I just, the way I see it is I'm just glad that somebody wants to see me again. That's it. That's a whole different deal. Will you please come to Aspen and speak at our meeting and join us for a weekend of fun and and spirituality?

Thank you for having us that my husband's here with me and you're going to hear him tomorrow. And, and I just love, we know Rich and Lauren, we've met them a few times and we met Chris a couple times and I know he's a real enthusiast for a A and I've never heard Heather. So I'm excited about that. And, and just meeting a lot of you and seeing some of you again. And, and I have a few friends here. And

so thank you, thank you for this opportunity. I love Alcoholics Anonymous and I love, I think it's a privilege to do anything in, in Alcoholics and Anonymous, whether it's stacking chairs, stacking chairs saved my life, kept me in a posture of hearing and delivering the message.

You know, they used to say there was a, there was another day of sobriety under every chair. And now I knew that that wasn't literal, you know, but, but staying there, you know, I get to hear those one liners. I get to, I get to watch the old timers. I got to see how this is done day by day by day. And so I'm just really thrilled to be here and I, I love to share. I love to share my story. When I was new, I heard a lot of speakers over tape and there were a couple of women that just knocked me out. You know, they did something for me and they showed me that some things

possible that I didn't know were possible when I got here, I was surrendered to my disease. I was surrendered even though I didn't know all of what alcoholism was. I was surrender to the fact that I was sick and tired and out of ideas. But I didn't know that this was going to be the thing. You know, I didn't know that if this was going to work. It seems so pale. You know, your 12 little thinly veiled Sunday school sentences, you know, like, how was that? They just seemed like it was just going to like, like water off a duck's back one more time. And I, they had tried to help me when I was a kid. When I was a kid, I was locked up,

mental hospital, juvenile hall, rehab. And, you know, just what's wrong with Carla? Let's find out. And and you know, I, I'd get in there and you learn to walk the walk, talk the talk. Then I'm up the wall over and out. Walk the walk, talk the talk, up the wall, over and out. And I could do that in here too. I could already tell. You have a lingo and you know, you can get out here and look real good, real good. You know, you learn, You know you're not. Yeah, I'm stacking chairs and I'm stacking twice as much as you. And I'm making coffee. And while I'm doing that, I'm driving the new

around and holding the book.

But after a while, you know, what I have to realize is mine is the head I go home with. Mine is the head I go home with. And that's where these steps came in. They said it's an inside job. And you taught me all about that too. But I had to stay real close. I had to stay real close. Like I'd get up and I'd go to work in the morning and then I'd run my meetings and I was going to two and three meetings a day. I'd go to noon, I'd run out for lunch and go to noon, noon meeting. And and then I'd get out of work at 5:00 and I'd be in the grocery store buying stir sticks and coffee stuff for the coffee.

And that that meeting didn't start till 8:00, but I was in that meeting at 5:05 because I was in the store. I was thinking to you. And that's how I learned about the absence of self centeredness as well, or how I learned about self centeredness anyway, was the absence of it for just a few minutes. He said I had to get me off my mind, you know, and I didn't know what what self centred is. Am I doing it now? Is it on me? I don't know. I had the nerve to say things like I can't be self-centered. I'm a mom,

yeah. Ask my daughter about that.

Alcoholics Anonymous saved my life. So anyway, I can contribute any way that you think it's a contribution. And I, and I know by now to my sobriety date, September 25th, 1987. And I know by now that what I say is not necessarily what you're going to hear. And that can be, you know, positive or negative. I don't know. It's just part of our journey. We're never going to be quite this way

in on on this day again. We're never going to be this age, this way,

in this moment ever again. This is it. You know, something very special happens when we all get together like this. It's the gateway, You know, what's the gateway when people start talking about steps? What's a step? What's a step? Work the steps. Traditions. What's a tradition? Sponsor. What's a sponsor?

And I just fell in. I fell in and it started work and I started to stay sober from midnight to midnight to midnight.

And I'll tell you when I got here, I thought it was I was AY girl, you know, I was a real why am I an alcoholic? I thought that was still after all of that. I was very, it was very important for me to try to figure out why I'm an alcoholic. Isn't my crazy, dark, dramatic, violent, perverted family.

If you had my family, you'd drink too, you know, Stayed around long enough to find out that that'll give you an inventory. Didn't make me alcoholic.

Found out that what makes me alcoholic is my relationship to alcohol. Rich said it last night. You know, when I drink, I I don't know if I'm going to have two or 22. And when I stop for any amount of time, it's all I can think about. So I end up in that torturous cycle of alcoholism. Drinking or thinking about drinking, Drinking or thinking about drinking. Drinking or thinking about drinking.

And I've been around here long enough now to see too. I mean, my husband's one of them, you know, he, he lived a charm childhood. You know, nothing happened in his family that was out of the ordinary. You know, they sang and they laughed together and loved together. Still to this day, you know, I go over and I visit their family, and nobody had to read a book to find out how to love each other, you know, or go to class how to be a parent,

you know, they just did. And yet he sits right next to me in the meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous.

So with all that, all the rest of that stuff is window dressing. You know, it's what goes on in here, my relationship with alcohol and I don't want you think my childhood was all bad, though. Anyway, I had a great time in elementary school. 4th, 5th and 6th grade were just terrific. I I was an enthusiastic kid. I was one of those kids. We were the new kids on the block a lot. My mom was a single mother of two girls. And so we go. We were in a new school sometimes twice a year. And,

and so I'd, I'd go in, you know, what are we going to do now? You know, I'd be a little sad for losing the the last one, but now we're going to go do this.

What are we doing? We're running track. I got to run around, run the track. What are we doing playing softball? I got to play softball, school politics. Okay, sign me up academics, sign me up. I wanted to do it all, you know, and then that's that ego starts to set in, you know, and this isn't necessarily alcoholic either, but boy, you put alcohol on top of this and woo. But you know, I began to be like the one that needed to be the first around the track and the best at softball and president and know all the answers. And that was a big bunch of fun. You know, by the time 6th grade was over, I was,

I needed a drink, you know,

because when you're running the world in your tent, that's a big job, you know,

and I got my first social resentment behind a game of Spin the Bottle. And I know they don't even play that game these days. They just get right down to business, don't they?

I was at my friend Leonards house and we were a few boys, a few girls, you know, right before 7th grade that summer, you know, everything is changing. You know, talk about chemical imbalance.

Prepubescent teenagers, You know, that's chemical imbalance for you. And few boys, a few girls. And we were passing around a bottle of his daddy's whiskey. And these weren't the first drinks I ever took, but these were the ones where I really started to make the connection that alcohol would do something for me I couldn't do for myself. You know, alcohol, oh for me, became a higher power, did all the feeling for me.

It did all the living for me. It did all the growing up for me

was instant cool, instant, smooth the edges off my life.

So we're playing this game and the bottle lands on me and I went off into the bedroom with one of the boys and we were both doing the same thing as far as I could tell. But when we came back out of that bedroom, they called him a player and me a slut. And I did not think that was fair. I still don't think it's fair. If you want to know the truth,

every sponsor I've ever had has told me the fair is in Pomona and it lasts 2 weeks. That's all you get. So, so much for fair

and I was just one of the

I was just one of those kids, you know, that self-centered mind. You know what never occurred to me to ask those pertinent questions like do you have a girlfriend? Why would I want to know that? You know, so I

boys my age started looking at me funny. So do the girls. And I got a reputation I didn't understand nor could I take responsibility for in junior high. And a reputation like that goes through junior high like wildfire. And again, that separation began to get deeper and wider and deeper and wider. And I'm the kind of kid who will fight for a while and then I start to let go, surrender, let it go.

And I'm also the kind of kid who had a deep wanderlust from the very, very beginning. I love to go. I want to go. All it takes really for me is a Willie Nelson song and a long, slow train whistle. And I am on the road again. You know what I mean? I just, I got to go. I feel that longing, that calling of the road. Hope is that way, you know, hope always that it getting out on the road always made me feel like I had a bottle in the glove compartment. You know, I just didn't even have to have that sucker open before. I already felt better, you know, And I get out there on the 10 freeway going east and the one O 1 going north and I

thumb out on that on ramp and I'd crawl in the car of the truck going wherever with whoever and I'd be on my way to somewhere else. And that's where I want to be. Somewhere else, somewhere other than hearing somebody other than me. And I am on my way. Well, on my way,

consequently, because I was so young and I was out there where I wasn't supposed to be, I started getting picked up and landed in some of the Southern California hotspots like Indio Jail and Riverside Juvenile Hall and LA Central Juvenile Hall. You know that whole dance For a while we did and send me home to mom and home to dad and, and when I was 14, I found myself in a place called North Beach with a friend of mine. We got one long ride all the way from Santa Barbara all the way up to San Francisco. One ride the guy dropped us off right in the middle of this party town. Party town called North Beach,

right in the middle of San Francisco. And to my left was the Condor Club with Carol Dota on the marquee. To my right there were hookers and dealers and pimps. Oh my,

we weren't on that street 10 minutes before a couple of guys approached us, offered us money for sex and we said yes and did the next indicated thing and boom, a whole new career path open up for us. And I started living today at a time and we have not had to live in a very, very long time.

And our book talks about our alcoholic life seeming the only normal one. And I got to tell you that a more aggressively, progressively, I began to trade away any sign of potential or gift, God-given gifts that I had had anything, any potential that I'd had traded willingly for the effect that alcohol would produce.

And my alcoholic life seemed the only normal one. And it was a year later that I was admitted to a mental hospital.

I was supposed to be there for two weeks observation and I ended up being there for a year, just sort of made myself at home and moved in.

They were not talking to me a lot about alcoholism. They were talking to me about disorders. I was very disordered looking child. I was alternately violent and withdrawn and living with the level of frustration down in my gut I didn't know how to talk about.

It wasn't until I got to AA that I heard someone talk, someone say that they felt like a scream looking for a mouth.

Oh my God, you know, You know,

I didn't know back then. And they were treating me with daily nutritional supplements, a thorazine, malaria, Valium, dalmaine sleepers. I suppose they were concerned I wouldn't sleep

and I'd become intimately familiar with five point restraints. And that's what I look like at 15.

I didn't know I got here. Almost 15 years later, I got to Alcoholics Anonymous finally sick enough and out of ideas enough and tired enough to pick up the tools you handed me. And I started to apply them to my life and I started to get better. That's how I know I'm alcoholic. But Father Tom Weston always says you got to be pretty sick and twisted to find us interesting

because again, seems weak, seems weak, You know that? Happy birthday song, boy? That'll that'll keep you coming, won't it?

So I didn't know

if you don't want to go crazy in the nut house. And this was a, this was not a treatment center. It was a mental hospital. And I called in that house because that's I, I know what it was like in there. And I'm, I'm sorry, I'm at that age where I, you know, sweater on, sweater off, you just never know how it's going to go. But

wasn't a treatment center, was a mental hospital. And some of my roommates had real schizophrenia, real manic depression, real stuff. And untreated, I look a lot like them. They don't know, we don't know. So where I'm in this hospital and and if you don't want to go crazy in the nut house, you got to get busy. And one of my favorite ways to be busy, I've already told you, was the boys. I loved all the boys, but my favorites were those sexy smoldering types. You know the kind. They just sit back there and simmer

and you, you just never really knew when they were going to blow,

you know?

God, I found them so exciting. And today I know that feeling is fear.

Trouble with guys like that in the nuthouse, though, is that they're all, you know, they're, they're always or usually hiding out from a junior prison sentence. They don't want to go to California Youth Authority. That's where they're going next. If they screw up, they're gone, you know, and that's like junior prison for people under 18. And, and it's bad in there, you know, so they're in the nut house and they're trying to lay low, but you, you know, they can't. Eventually they blow. And like my first boyfriend, he blew and he threw a big chair through the big plate glass window, the boys unit. And then my next boyfriend, he blew and he threw a, a nurse for the big plate glass window, the boys unit.

No, this is what I'm attracted to. And, and oh God, I remember one afternoon sitting outside on the smoke break bench watching my boyfriend Terry being cuffed and escorted off by security. And he's, he's the one who threw the chair through the window and he's gone. He's gone. And I'm just, I'm heartbroken, you know, I'm heart, I can't, I mean, this was a relationship of, I don't know, 2-3 weeks.

I'm smoking my tragic cigarettes and I'm watching him go

channeling Greta Garbo.

We used to play those sentimental jailhouse songs like Who? When will I See You Again?

Press our little faces up against the big Bay window and long for what we couldn't have across the way. Boys leaning up against their big Bay window. Long and for what they couldn't have. In that, where we live too. In the longing. In that where we want it. Right there in the longing. Never in the getting. You get it. You got to get another one. That's not enough,

right? It's in that longing

right there, right M

So I'm sitting there, I'm smoking my tragic cigarettes and just inside the Girls Unit I can hear Diana Ross singing at top decibel. Touch me in the morning, then just walk away.

You know, 'cause I always thought I should have a soundtrack to my life. It just seemed like the music would swell whenever at all the appropriate times, you know? It took me a long time to realize I was broken hearted and blue before I ever had a real date.

Because it's the way I see my life. It's what I'm looking with. You guys told me what I seek is within me. What I seek is within me. What I came looking for, I came looking with and I didn't know it. I was always looking out there, looking to you, looking for it, looking out there,

you know, And the trouble with that was the eyes I was looking through, you know, I'd, I'd, I was always about half a bubble off what it was I thought I was seeing anyway, You know what I mean? I mistake arrogance for confidence. I mistake sex for love. I'd mistake brute strength for strength of character. I'd get it up in my hot little hands and it would dissolve where I stood. Because it wasn't it, wasn't it? I had to come to a A to learn that what it's when I'm thinking of you, that gaping hole in my soul gets smaller. When I'm thinking of you.

Get me off my mind.

Constant thought of others and how we may help meet their needs.

I didn't know that

going about it the best way I know how.

Like I said, I told you I was supposed to be there two weeks. I ended up being there for a year. I went from the girls unit to the Coed unit to the unit where they put the patients. They just don't know what to do with anymore. And somewhere along the line, I had begun to surrender to to the thought that perhaps maybe I'm just one of those little nut house lifers that ends up I get to get outside every once in a while. I am always, always going to end up back inside. Always, always,

every now and then I'd get thirsty enough and I'd find my way over the wall or under the gate or out that, out that door, stay out for a week or two and then come back in the front door because that's where I live. I live in the nut house.

By the time I got to this unit a year later, I was a vision for you. I was no longer bathing or getting dressed because you don't have to do that to date in the net house, and was cutting my arms. I had casts on my both, both arms up to my shoulders because I've been cutting. And that was just a different way to change my reality. It wasn't about suicide. It was just about changing the reality. Emotional release,

no balance, nothing. Nothing going on inside.

I ended up going over the wall with a man of my dreams that I met there on that unit, and we lasted about 2 1/2 weeks. And I just have to tell you that the rest of my adolescence went just like that. I was always sitting in front of a judge, waiting for placement, waiting for placement, waiting for placement. But how do we fix Carla? How do we help her? How do we help her?

And I get into a new program and I'd learn the lingo and I get there and I'd walk the walk and talk the talk and be up the wall over and out again.

At the end of that, I ended up in a girls home. I'm 17 years old and now we're in this girls home. It's kind of like a halfway house. They're trying to teach us how to live out in the world, grocery shop, make our beds and all that stuff. And I wasn't, I wasn't a terrible bed maker or any of that stuff. I didn't mind doing that. It was all right, you know, but but God, I couldn't stop drinking, you know? I didn't know how to settle this thing inside me.

And everything I put into my body trying to access that power greater than myself because I believed in God,

were the very things that were blocking me. Then I got to AA all those years later, and now I find out it's me that's blocking me. That's enough. That's enough.

But here's where I want to tell you that I've always believed in a power greater than myself since I was a small child. Had those awakenings Rich talked about last night. You know, I knew that there was a God. God doesn't. We don't, we don't it, it does. It doesn't have to be. There's no official meeting ground for God. God meets us where we are sometimes,

and I could feel it, but I didn't know how to maintain it. It seemed like I'd get right up in there and feel it, and it would be snatched away. Fear. Worship of other things. Worldly clamors, mostly those inside myself.

And I tried. I saw it. I'm a seeker. I told you I'm proactive. I was born into a Southern Baptist family. That religion worked very well for my mother till the day she died four years ago. Worked very well for her, but I couldn't hear it. I couldn't hear it. Tried being a Catholic for a couple of weeks in the 4th grade.

I'm about as deep as a mud puddle though there. You know, if it doesn't work right away, I got to go, got to go, got to go. You know, those little girls in white dresses and burning candles and beads and all that stuff wasn't working.

Tried burning black candles and praying to the other guy for a couple of years.

You know, just head to my bets. Really. I just want to be on the side that's winning, you know? I don't care.

Then the television series Kung Fu came out. Some of you might remember that show.

I mean, I'm a seeker, you know, 6th grade watching David Carradine in his in in his starring role in this movie. I mean, still to this day I some of my most spiritual lessons. I remember

killing of a man. Does no one honor OK

but this David Carradine, his character, Cain, he was a Buddhist priest, and he had walked the Wild West in bare feet. He was amazing. You know, he was tough.

What tattoos on his wrist? I didn't know that. Yeah. But he had a little bag of herbs right here. And I always wanted to know what was in that bag, you know.

But he'd walk from town to town and I'd watch him. He'd walk from town to town. And sometimes he'd be, and he looked Chinese and kind of Asian looking. And so he'd look different than everybody else. And those Cowboys, they'd meet him and then and they'd meet him with great hostility, sometimes whole groups of them. And they'd come up to him and they just hostily assault him verbally, you know, And then and he'd just stand there like he did, and pearls, just a few Buddhist pearls just rolled off his tongue. And you'd see the change come over their face and they'd go off to help people.

That's power.

There's something going on there.

Then he'd walk to another town and they'd meet him with great hostility one more time, Whole group of guys. This time they'd assault him physically. And when they did that, he kicked their butts. And I wanted what he had. I thought he was strength and serenity epitomized, you know, that's it personified,

you know, So I'm chasing this and I'm reading all I can get and I'm, I'm trying to figure out what be here now means exactly. Started meditating at 17 years old. You know what, it's there, it's there. There's, you know, when the student is ready, the teacher appears and all this stuff. But I couldn't touch it. Couldn't touch it because I kept drinking,

because I was drinking and putting that that layer of cellophane between me and anything good, anything good that I could want my in, in my, in my life in me that I could learn. I kept putting that layer between us

and I met my roommate and she was on the same page, you know, she was on the same page spiritually as I was. We were seekers, you know, and we saw it through. I, I, by that time, I, my idea of a higher power had developed into something like

a, a combination of what I thought the 60s might have been, had I been out there in them. But I was 12 in 1969. So they were over by the time I got out there. And, but I, but you know, I used to watch TV and I watched them. I mean, they marched, those people marched. They didn't take crap. They stood up. They stood up, they sang songs and we will overcome. And, and, and they, you know, it was, it was powerful.

There was music of the 60s, the Grateful Dead, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Blind Faith, Traffic, you know, those songs that filled your heart and soul with you knew there was something bigger going on.

So my roommate and I were talking to our friends and they said you got to go to Oregon. They're all up there. We said, OK, out the second, out the second story window, that girl's home, down the tree and into Randy's truck and off to Oregon where God might be. And

you know, little by little, you know, we see things, but I can't bring them into my life. I can't, I can't, I can't implement them completely because I just, I see them. They sound like good ideas, but I can't do it. I can't do it.

So we get up there and we plant a little garden in the front yard. We're going to go back to the earth. That's where I learned that in Oregon. When they talk about HO and they met with a tool, it was just a whole different way of relating

play.

Two things happened while I was up there that I couldn't see certainly. And our book talks about that to most of us showing signs and symptoms of alcoholism before long before we're ready, willing or able to do anything about it. And it was certainly happening for me. Two things would happen. One was we couldn't always drink the way I needed a drink. And when we can't, I've got no steps or fellowship or God and my understanding I'm restless, irritable and discontent, very hard to get along with. My life quickly becomes your fault

and when we could drink the way I needed a drink, I was always overshooting the mark. And that was happening again. And still, at 17,

my friends had to ask me to leave. And I was asked to leave a lot, you know, just back down to my father's house, against his better judgment. We hadn't been together in a while. And he let me stay. We'd get up at the same time every morning, and he'd take off for work, and I'd go sit in his den and drink from his liquor cabinet. He never drank a drop, and it was full. I mean, he was a businessman, so he had just this liquor cabinet was divine. It was like church

and I'd sit there and I'd drink Chevis Regal and all those, all those, I mean, I didn't really know understand what I was drinking. I didn't know I had the best. But I drink it. And he'd come home in the afternoon and see me sitting in the very spot where he left me that morning. And I'd see that broken hearted look in his eyes and I'd have nothing to say for myself. You know when we feel that? I feel that

when it happens, heart breaks just a little bit and there's nothing I can do. I don't know how to tell them. I'm afraid I don't even know that's what I am. I don't know how to tell them. I don't know how to go out in the world and make a living. I don't know how to tell them. I don't know where the last few years of my life had gone.

Right before my 18th birthday, he came to me and he said what I know were the hardest words he ever had to say to his oldest daughter. And that's I'm not going to watch you die and I'm not going to help you do it. You got to go. And on my way out the door, all I could remember is at one of the counselors at the rehab and told me I was a great actress. I know today I must have misunderstood because because I ended up on Hollywood Blvd. and there's not a lot of auditioning going on out there. And I was 18 years old, starting my days off with a pint of pop-up vodka. And I would go wherever the day took me. And some days it was a party and some days it was surviving.

Not a lot of hope about it getting any different.

A few months into that, I met a man walking down Hollywood Blvd. and I saw the light in his eyes and I didn't realize it was orange sunshine. But we hit it off and I moved in with him that night and I didn't even know his last name. And six weeks later he's asking me to leave and I still don't know his last name. But I like to bring him up because years later he was on my eight step list. He was someone who came to mind very quickly and clearly that I owed him amends, that there was something to go see him about. And sometimes we just barely get done riding. We don't even have to finish sometimes before we know. Oh yeah, Ready, willing and able.

I wanted to make those events. I wanted to make that right.

I spent the last part of my first year of sobriety looking for him. I had been that tornado, that proverbial tornado that went through his life spiritually, physically, mentally, emotionally, every in every way, materially. Six weeks.

So I spent the last part of my first year looking for him of, of year of sobriety looking for him. And, and I went everywhere I knew to look. And then my sponsor finally said, you know, you got to let that go. You know, if you're supposed to find that guy, you'll find him. But in God's time, you know, now you're starting to spin your wheels, you know, you're chasing your own tail and you got to leave that alone. Let God breathe. Let let God work

and but in the meantime, there are some things that you can do to change your own behavior, you know, start heading in that direction. There's nothing wrong, nothing wrong with that.

Like you can try being a friend to a man in a vertical fashion. Why don't you start there?

Little actions,

you know, and I got it. And I have to clarify a little bit too. I wasn't like chasing men all over in a a in my first year, but I because I was surrendered that I needed to stop, but I didn't know what to do next. You know, I needed somebody to be here to tell me what to do next.

Right before my 13th a a birthday, I had to go give a talk on the other side of town. It was a hot Sunday afternoon and I didn't feel like going. And thank God, you guys have taught me. It's not how I feel. It's what I do that matters. And I went out and I gave that talk and of course I felt better. I mean, you know, showing up is one of the most simple things you guys taught me to do and one of the most, the biggest payouts. You know, I'm usually wrong about what I think is going to happen or how it's going to be or whatever. It's, you know, who's going to say what or any of that stuff. So that's all wasted energy. I still try to practice it once in a while, but I remember,

yeah, you know, that doesn't feel good. But I mean, I used to think I could blow off a dinner for two and not be missed, really. You know what I mean,

But don't dare not invite me. Don't not invite me. I just don't want to go.

So I went to this meeting, I gave that talk and of course I felt better. And when the thank you line came through at the end of that, this man stopped and said where were you in 1976? It was a guy from Hollywood Blvd. standing in front of me with 8 1/2 years of sobriety and I with almost 13. Now for me only a a very well organized loving God could have made that happen when I and all my efforts to get that done couldn't get it done in my time, in my time. And I just like to tell that story because sometimes a road seems a long time. My sobriety date September 25th, 1987. So for 26 years I've been on this path

and I got to tell you, thank God I don't have to do it perfectly. I have been, you know, I want to, I want to, I mean, right around 1516, seventeen years sober, boy did I want to. And nobody else wanted to do it with me.

Get a little stiff and brittle around the edges. There's like Sponsee's going, I don't want to call her, you call her. I don't want to call her. I love her, but I don't want to talk to her,

you know? I don't know. Have you ever been a member of the correct A, A you know.

Yeah, me too.

And.

I like to tell that story because it reminds me when I can't see that far ahead of me and it gets the little block, you know, a little blurry, a little foggy. And I can't remember the last time something came together. It just seems so, you know, there's something big going on. You know, it is. And my friend Rachel used to say you're in the middle of a miracle, so big you can't see the sides of it. And I think please,

but it was true. You know, we can't we don't we don't know what God has in mind. We get one piece of the puzzle everyday sort of and when and we get up and do what looks like we think, you know, God told us to to do what's your list for me today, God reporting for duty and get out there and do the best we can. But it doesn't mean I'm not going to make a mistake, you know, thank God.

But I got to make those direct amends to him. And and he said, Oh my God, Carla, that's long forgiven, long forgotten. I just can't believe you're still alive.

And he's right. You know, if we're in this room this morning, we're the lucky ones.

We're the lucky ones. Somehow, some way, we've managed to slip through that window of grace. One more day to come in here and sit together and recharge and regroup and see what we can go back out there and pack into the stream of life, what we can give instead of take. At some point, I had to start taking actions on my own behalf. I don't know how long you can stay sober on fellowship alone. I don't know how we were talking about that earlier today. I don't know how long I can stay sober. On your share, on your sobriety, on your experience.

At some point, I've got to pick this up and do it myself.

It is going to be messy. God, I loved it, Vince, you all used to say you can't. You can't be afraid to look bad in Alcoholics Anonymous.

The more fun way is to you know, you can't save your ass in your face at the same time. That's better. I mean, I identified with that,

but but then I found, you know, making the effort, coming in here, taking these steps and, and, and heading in the direction of being willing to have my mind change, being willing to be changed,

getting comfortable with the idea of being uncomfortable, with the reality of being uncomfortable.

And I couldn't schedule AA into my life like some aerobics class. I couldn't do that. It wasn't optional for me, not for this alcoholic.

I wanted to be so many things and I'd be drinking and I'd see people doing simple things, riding bikes or or living, just living their life, mowing their lawn. Moral and philosophical convictions galore. I can't live up to them. However much I like, however much I'd want to. I want to be that. Got to be this.

Wanna be there? Stuck here?

I left Hollywood and I I'm the kind of a drunk who sleeps by the side of the road and calls it camping.

I've got that soundtrack going on in my life. I mean, I, I,

you know, Jackson Browne and Bob Dylan singing some of the saddest songs you ever heard, you know, and poor me and, and I hooked up with a guy and, and we're going to travel the Rowdy Rd. together. And we've got that, you know, we've got that idea of the 60s again, flying on the coattails of the 60s. We love the idea of peace and love and all that stuff. We just couldn't stop knocking the hell out of each other really long enough to implement the principles fully of peace and love.

So we beat each other up and down the California coast and pitched a tent in the mountains in Southern Oregon. Live there till the rains came. And then we moved into a roofless cabin just north of Grants Pass, 5 miles in, off the highway, 5 miles up a mountain. Found this old burnout cabin, you know, holes in it and everything. No roof. Patched it up with some sheetrock mortar we bought with food stamps, I think, and put some wood on the floor and found an old box spring and threw a plastic tarp over the top of this cab and called it a skylight. And then the baby came

and we learned to make moonshine up there. You know, we're drinking herbal things, you know, moonshine, organic things, moonshine, homemade homemade wine, homemade beer

and the baby was supposed to be the priority. I'm going to be the parent I never was. I'm going to be the parent I never had, not was parent I never had.

We all know that alcoholism doesn't care who you love. Quickly, priorities change. Alcohol, then the kid, everything else. She got in the way of one of our fights when she was about 10 months old and I had to take her on the road where it's going to be better somewhere else. Now we're up in Idaho. I'm tending bar on cocktail waitressing. My first legitimate work never occurred to me not to drink on the job. Why else would you have that job?

Just seemed to me to be most efficient.

My kid was one of those kids that you see in her T-shirt and underwear in yesterday's lunch down the front of it because her mom's not paying attention.

I can't bring home enough money to pay rent for more than a week at a time. So we live in the rent by the week motels up there, and they're not bad places to work. Not bad places to work at all. Two and three jobs at a time. Normal people were doing their deal.

So of course we have to leave. We're back down in LA. I'm renting a room for my Aunt Kavina. I've got a job in Hollywood. Tendon bar

one more time. Great job me, I'm the common denominator. My daughter was almost four years old by then. And every afternoon I'd kiss her goodbye and I'd take off for the bar in Hollywood, stop at the halfway point, which was a bar in Arcadia about halfway there called the first cabin stop in there and I'd have my primer drink. So shots of Korva Gold and Bud backs got me ready to go do my shift and drink with everybody at the bar till the wee hours of the morning, crawl home and start all over again. And one afternoon I kissed my girl goodbye and I took off for that bar in Hollywood. And I stopped at that same place in Arcadia, had