The 70th Annual Roundup in Duluth, MN

My name is James. I'm an alcoholic.

It's been a great roundup so far.

You familiar with smart water here in Minnesota?

I brought some smart water. Hope it helps me with my talk.

I get sidetracked sometimes so I drink some of this. The first time somebody gave me this, one of my sponsees gave me a bottle of this and I couldn't get the lid open. There was a it's a really tricky lid. I guess you have to drink it first.

Just out of curiosity, how many people here tonight have sponsees?

All right, fantastic. How many people here tonight have sponsors who are with them here tonight?

Notice my hand is up. I brought one of my sponsors from California with me. I don't like to leave home without them.

Fantastic.

A little while ago I went to a conference and I had a problem with the plane connection and I didn't know if I was going to make it to the conference kind of what's happening with Adam, but he's he'll be OK because it's tomorrow. But this was on the I was going to speak on the day that I was flying and I called my host to ask him what I should do. I was, I was in fear, didn't know what to do,

and he said, read page 449 and go to a meeting.

I knew I was in good hands. I'm in good hands too, because I Nellie's been showing me around in my sponsee, Steve. So I felt like I've really been in good hands here in Duluth.

So I've only been talking for like a minute, maybe two. And maybe I said the two most important things that I'm going to say, if you want to stay sober, have sponsees. That's what the book says. Nothing is so much ensures immunity from drinking as active work, intensive work with other Alcoholics.

And if you have a problem, there's a spiritual solution.

So I'm going to go another hour or so, but I wanted to get those things out of the way in case in case you stop listening before I stop talking. So

I got to thinking about this smart water and I thought it would be really a good idea. I used to be an advertising a long, long time ago. It would be a really good idea if you could go into the liquor store and buy some smart whiskey.

I loved,

I love having some whiskey and try to solve my problems and, you know, taking a lot of notes and then trying to read them the next day.

But the problem is that liquor or whiskey is not labeled properly. So when you go into the liquor store, you don't know what you're going to get. You might get some of that. You might get some more whiskey. That's possible, I guess. Or you might get some of that conviviality with friends or colorful imagination. You may get some of that stuff.

Or you may get some of that dialing whiskey. You ever had that?

Well, it's about about four in the morning and you're just dialing people that don't want to hear from you.

You ever having that traveling whiskey,

you have to get up and look at a newspaper to see where you are.

I thought it was a girl. I really did. I mean, I, you know, I really did. I was very drunk.

I'm getting ahead of myself here. That's kind of a fifth step story, but

but what happened for me is, is I started getting things like quicksand whiskey and Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde whiskey and rapacious creditor whiskey

and had it could have had the skull and crossbones on it whiskey. And then I had drank a lot of that stuff called the pitiful and comprehensive demoralization. So that's kind of my drinking. That kind of covers my drinking. Never knew what I was going to get. But more and more towards the end it was not colorful imagination with friends.

So, but I that's, you know, drinking isn't my only problem.

I've got a problem called thinking as well. I don't know if you've seen the 20 questions for drinking. Have you ever asked the 20 questions for thinking?

Is thinking causing your problems at home?

You like to think alone.

I'm driving down the street having this argument with about three other people and I look around, I'm the only one in the car

and I like something that Einstein says, He says. None of your current problems can be solved by the thinking that created them.

I created my problems as a result of my thinking. I cannot fix my problems as a result of my thinking. And what I've learned in the A is to not spend time thinking about things. That thinking is not going to help so. But I need help. So I have a sponsor.

I'm on my second sponsor now that my first I had a woman sponsor to start with. I didn't know that was potentially controversial, but I had a woman sponsor and I'll tell you how I found her later on,

but her name was Donna and she died when I had 18 years of sobriety. And the last thing I remember Donna saying to me is sobriety is no fun when you can't breathe. She was a very heavy smoker. So let's all take a deep breath in, in memory of Donna and the fact that we're we are, we're here breathing and we have this wonderful gift of sobriety. So

let's bring our self present here. So there's a there's a saying in a be nice to the newcomer who may be your sponsor someday. So I was nice to Jack when he was new and now he's my sponsor.

And Jack, he retired recently as an air traffic controller. And I retired recently from the I was a teacher in a prison and it was called the Department of Corrections. So corrections and control Jack and I have issues. So,

but I heard a good outside of a meeting a little while ago, I heard a good reason to have a sponsor because somebody was asking this this guy that you appear to be relatively new what his sobriety date was. And he said which one? And that was already a clue.

He said, I haven't I got out of prison about three years ago. So my sobriety date for meth is is three years. I have three years off meth and I quit pot about six months ago. So my sobriety day from marijuana six months ago

and I celebrated yesterday. I celebrated 90 days without drinking, but I had a beer last night, so I guess I have 89 days today. So

it's called newcomer math.

So I only have one sobriety dates, the first one I've ever had and it's the only one I've ever had. And it said in around here that if either you change or your sobriety date will. So I'm here to share with you how I've changed because my sobriety has not changed. It's December the 6th, 1982 and it's the last time I smoked marijuana. Thank you.

I'm I'm coming up on 33 years

and clapping for an alcoholic who quits drinking is like clapping for a cowboy with hemorrhoids who stops riding his horse. So thank you for that recognition there.

I was smoking marijuana because I had determined myself that I was having a problem with alcohol. I'm not sure if I wanted to quit drinking or not, but I wanted to quit having the consequences of drinking. And so I didn't. I didn't really know how to quit drinking because I hadn't found you yet. So what I decided that I would do is I would smoke pot because my problem according to me was alcohol.

So as long as I wasn't drinking, I thought that I would be OK.

So I quit drinking. I tried, you know, thousands of times, like most of us have to quit drinking. But this one time, because of the availability of shopping banks full of marijuana, because I was a grower. I love this theme.

I

I'm quite a good gardener I must say.

So I quit drinking

and I smoke non addictive marijuana before I got out of bed in the morning for about a year or so. And during that time my sister came to a A and she invited me and she encouraged me to come. She knew what my drinking was like and I kept reminding her that I was not drinking. I was putting a lot of visiting in my eyes when I saw her.

I finally ended up in a a as a visitor. I actually introduced myself as an existentialist. I was not an alcoholic. I had, I hadn't even had a drink for, I don't know, a year maybe. So I'm in a A as a visitor guest and

I'm listening. I could hear what you, I was able to listen. I didn't agree with a lot of things, but I heard what you were saying and I went to meetings and, and you know, I could ask myself the question, if you're not alcoholic, why do you keep going to those meetings? And what I know now that I didn't know then is there was something very powerful going on in the rooms of a A that was very attractive to me.

And it was I felt love. I felt love here. And I, my head was telling me, don't, this is crazy. Don't, don't do this. This is no,

don't need this, that my heart kept bringing me back or my feet kept bringing me back and I kept coming back. I kept coming. And what happened for me is I caught this damn disease from you guys. It's like alcoholism is contagious and I caught it from you. I remember when I finally raised my hand, said I was alcoholic and someone said, oh, it's finally unanimous. I mean,

everybody else knew.

There's a speaker named Father Terry who says you can't change something you can name. You have to know what the name is in order to do something about it. And I knew that I was damaged goods. There was something really wrong with me. I used to like to buy a car in the Marlboro, a bottle of Scotch and a self help book and just try to try to figure out what was wrong with me.

It's like, you know,

it was such a disconnect between what I thought about myself and where my life ended up. And I know now there's a word for that. It's called alcoholism. I have alcoholism. I didn't ask for it. I didn't want it, but I have it and I'm here tonight to treat my alcoholism. I need you way more than you need me.

I remember saying early on this this a is a bunch of brainwashing and I thought, you know, my my brain needs a good scrub.

I

so I'm going to meetings and somebody says you have an allergy to alcohol and you have to go to meetings for the rest of your life. I got to thinking about that and said my dad had an allergy to bananas. He never went to a meeting in his life.

There is no such thing as BA.

But what I know is that bananas did not do for my father what alcohol did for me. There's bananas. Didn't talk to him. He got a rash from them and he quit eating them. I get these rashes from alcohol. I just keep drinking it. That's a very different thing.

So I mentioned that my sobriety date is we have when I last smoked marijuana. Do we have any other marijuana smokers here?

That's a trick questions ex marijuana smokers. OK, we don't smoke it. We don't smoke marijuana in a we don't do that so mind altering chemical. But I started hearing all these stories about people that what people did to control their drinking other things that they tried or I know a guy who's a sobriety days the last time he did Freon. I mean, that's got to be really nasty, but

I sponsor a guy. You can't make this up.

He he went to Amway one time to help him control his drinking.

Yeah. You thought it would that would help his drinking. Now, some people get divorced and get help the drink. You know, they get married to help the drinking or they go in the Army to help their drinking, or they go to Oprah or they go to Chopra or, you know, we do all kinds of things. And then hopefully we end up in a A. So I'm going to a A and I start meeting these characters and I'm thinking, how in the world are these people going to help me? There's a guy named Boxcar Bill and Dumpster Don

and SWAT team Ron.

Booger John,

Machine Gun Tony. A lot of the names have kind of weapons involved with him for some reason. Shotgun, Nancy

P. Bed Ed

Inappropriate. Dave, Dave, that's inappropriate. Oh, Dave, don't, don't say that. So all these people, I think, Oh, well, you know, maybe they can help me.

So I'm going to meetings and I'm not doing much else, just going to meetings. And this guy, this old timer, you know, you know how they are. They comes up and he kind of pokes me in the chest. I was a 39 year old bachelor at the time. I wasn't a kid

and he said you're working the steps, boy. And I said I don't really like your 12 commandments.

Are you reading the book? Said no, no, I don't even know, Mr. Brown. I'm not reading the book. Are you praying? I don't really believe in God. Are you meditating?

My heads too busy for that.

And then he asked me the kicker. He says, well, how's it going?

It wasn't going very well. It wasn't doing good because all I was doing was coming to the meetings. And as I see it, my experience and I think a lot of other people, there's only a window of time between putting down the drink and putting down the drugs and starting to work this program. And I was coming to the place where I was very close to the, to the end of being able to hold it together myself.

And then I looked at this, how it works, that part of what was read today. And I started, I asked myself, I wonder, I wonder if I have the skill set to do this. Am I not, am I clever enough? But am I,

can I do this?

And then the first thing is OK, I have to thoroughly follow a path. I got to thinking about my drinking that, well, I, I know how to follow a path. I had a rut going between me and the liquor store. I mowed a lot of the lawns in my day. And when you walk on a lawn, it pops right back up again. You look behind you, you can't even see your footsteps. In order to create a path, you have to go over that lawn over and over and over,

hundreds of times, maybe thousands of times, and you create a path.

So I know how to create a path because I've done it before in my drinking.

And this is something about

people who do not recover or people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to the symbol program.

Well, I completely gave myself to alcohol. I know how to do that. That shouldn't be too hard.

This is something about being honest, I think, Oh, that's a tough one. I because I'd lied to myself for so long, I really wasn't able to tell the truth from I believe my own stuff in my head.

And I don't remember ever reading the book to explain to me how to be honest, but I could hear it in your voice when you shared about yourself. I knew you were telling the truth about yourself. And I believe that I could learn how to do that by watching you do it. So I OK, I can learn how to be honest.

This says something about what else does it say? Half measures avail is nothing that says

and what does that mean? Well as I understand it, it means quitting drinking and not working the steps. So only doing half of what we need to do is Alcoholics. We need to do 2 things. We need to quit drinking and we need to work the steps.

Then it says something about getting rid of our old ideas. And I didn't know that I had old ideas, but I knew that the ideas that I had were killing me. I needed to change my mind

and it's not a it's more than a bumper sticker to say change your mind, change your life.

And I needed to do that.

This is something about without help. It's too much. I understood that if I get in the ring with alcohol, put your money on alcohol. Don't put your money on me because alcohol is going to kick my ass. That's what it does. So I think I need help. I cannot beat this by myself.

Then it says something about finding God. Oh, does it have to come to that? I studied philosophy in college and again, one of my old ideas, I had some ideas about that and they were not serving me well. And

then it says something about going to any lengths. And I thought that one bothered me because I wasn't sure what that was going to mean. Are you going to splash water on my face? Are you going to have me go to the airport and hand out literature and a white robe? I didn't know what was going to happen. I just had these crazy thoughts in my head. But I think I know what it means. I know what it means today for me. It means today. I will go to any lengths to not have a drink today.

Today's the day that counts

and I'm not going to take a drink today.

So I and I also knew that I've been to, I was a bar drinker and I never went into a bar and watched somebody else drink and think that I'm going to cop a buzz off of it. I knew you had to drink it yourself to have it to get the buzz. And that's kind of what a a is too. I can't watch you be sober and it's going to rub off on me. I've got to do it myself. So

with all this kind of reflection, I was ready to, to, to start doing something, but I wasn't too sure what.

And what ended up happening for me is I went to a counselor, His name was Howard and he was a, he's a member of a A, but he also had a family practice. And for the first time that I could ever recall, I told somebody else the truth about me. I've never done that before. I'd gone to shrinks and psychiatrists and stuff, but I was lied to them. Or somebody say that a people in a really ought to go to veterinarians instead of psychiatrists because the veterinarians always have to.

What's wrong with their patients?

Because we never, we never say. But I told Howard the truth. I cried. It's not raining down my face. And my drinking, did I characterize it? I'll describe my drinking as being sleazy and secretive. I had this. I'm in the book. If you're new, find yourself in that book. I'm in that book all over that book. But the Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the one kind of personality here and then the kind of personality here, and the two of them don't get together. That was very me. I wore a tie in the daytime and I had these

sleazy places I went to at night. So I was very secretive and I pushed people away from me. So after an hour of being in Howard's office, he got out a piece of paper and he wrote prescription at the top. Get on your knees and pray. And I paid him $50.00 for that. It was like a $50 fifth step, I guess, no four step. But it was, it was, you know,

I did that. And I think for some reason I was going to, I started to do that.

It's like the menu is not the meal and the map is not the journey and the prescription is not the medicine. OK, this, this how it works is like the menu or more like the map, but I have to take the journey. And I started to take the journey by asking God that I didn't believe in to help me. I said, God, what do you want me to do? And give me the power to do it, which is what the literature says.

And at night I say thank you for another day of sobriety. And through Howard, I got a phone number of a woman, Donna, and I called Donna and asked her to be my sponsor. I've never met her before, never seen her before, knew nothing about her. And she agreed to do that as long as I would go to four meetings a week writing a journal and work the steps with her and then see her once a week and share my journal.

And I started to do that and about that same time

I bought a new car.

I had a alcoholic truck prior to that

seen those I didn't look in the parking lot too carefully, but usually there's one at an A club. It's windshields cracked springs are coming through the upholstery, tires are bald doors are different panel, you know the panels are different color somebody else's tags are on the back. A lot of a lot of rust on it and a lot of bumps, a lot of drunk bumps on it. And

this truck was so ugly that I I had a date in about 5 years

because I would not have wanted to go out with any woman to get in that truck with me. That's how bad it was.

So I was really lonely and I bought this nice new sports car and I called this my sobriety car because it was really a gift for starting to get my life on track again. And so I started to go to a lot of meetings. I was trolling.

I I didn't know how lonely I was till I stopped being so lonely.

But

I don't know if anybody's planning on using a as a dating service. But I will say this about it, that the, the, the odds are very good, but the goods are very odd.

So

it was one of my, this is one of my early, I guess if you call it a little bit of a miniature spiritual awakening where I had this realization that I was doing a lot of things that didn't make a lot of sense to me that I really didn't believe in. And my life was getting a lot better.

So it started giving me some encouragement

and some hope of me being able to change. So I launched that on this I'm doing what you did and I went back to step one

and I look back over my life and it was real clear to me that when I took a drink, I couldn't stop. And when I wasn't doing that, I didn't know, I forgot that which is very what alcoholism is. And I had done an experiment. I didn't want to be alcoholic. So I had, I did this experiments to prove to myself that I was an alcoholic. And so I thought, okay, I didn't even know what alcoholic was, but an alcoholic could not not drink for 30 days. I know that for fact, if a person is alcoholic they couldn't not drink for 30 days.

So I decided to do that. So I didn't drink for 30 days and I had a glass of wine to celebrate not drinking for 30 days

at lunch time.

And I was in jail at midnight that night.

And I thought that that was proof that I wasn't alcoholic, turn out proof I am alcoholic. So I, you know, I had a completely backwards, that's a real good sign of being alcoholic.

So that's kind of the first part of step one, but I call it step one, Part B that because I did not understand that I was, that I didn't have the power over alcohol, my life became unmanageable. So I could see clearly that I was a very poor manager of my own life because I didn't understand what powers over alcohol meant.

And what I've come to understand about it now is that

that I'm not in charge. I need a new manager. My life looks pretty good today's because I'm not trying to manage it. I've got a new manager and forsake of simplicity in a we call that manager God. One of the things that I do to remind myself that I'm not in management because I don't ask the question why? Why is a management question? I'm in footwork. So the question that I ask myself is, what am I going to do about it?

I used to get really hung up on things like, you know, why am I alcoholic?

Not a good question. It's asking for an argument with God. The question I ask is what am I going to do about it? And I ask that in all questions rather than why questions. And it really suits me well. And a visual that I like to remind myself that I'm not in management is that I'm at a circus and I got a bucket and a shovel and I'm not in charge of how many elephants are in the parade.

OK. I just, I just do my job is I'm not in charge of that stuff

because, and what I also found out

is that when I

fight reality, when I, when I'm not accepting something that's going on, I lose,

but only 100% of the time.

So I make a real effort to not fight that, not fight reality. And in the mess in the, in the biggest thing I could fight or the most obvious thing I could fight is being alcoholic. I accept that and then I can move on when I do that. So I'm at Step 2 already, only been in a A for probably nine months by now, moving right along.

And we all have crazy stories of stuff we've done. When we're drinking, I'm sure we go around the room, everybody's got a crazy story. At least 1-2, maybe 10.

But I realized that the craziest thing I ever did, I get sober. I picked up another drink.

For a guy like me to pick up a drink is crazy, so I'm insane. I need to be restored to sanity.

I mentioned that I worked in the prison system for quite a while. I worked as a teacher. I taught landscaping. Back to our theme again here, Pot grower teaching landscaping in a prison. God's got a sense of humor, I can assure you.

And I got the job doing H and I at at Folsom Prison, and we should probably heard of it out here.

So anyway, I asked my students in this prison where I worked, and I had the same student for quite a while. Usually they didn't turn over that fast. I had like a lot of, yeah, a lot of there for quite a while.

Maybe out of 30, maybe 20 haven't committed murder, and maybe the rest were drug addicts and burglars and that kind of stuff. But I asked them if they'd ever heard of a A and if you can well, imagine, most of them had. And then I asked him some more questions. I said, have you ever had a sponsor in a A? Have you ever worked the steps in a A? If you ever had a service commitment in a A, if you ever had more than a year of sobriety in a A, and in 15 years, probably 25 guys answered yes to all those questions.

I ask him one more question.

What are you doing in prison? You know what the answer was? Everybody has what the answer was. They stopped going to meetings. So the way that I see it is if you stop going to meetings, you go crazy because you have to go crazy first to have a drink if you've been restored to sanity. So I go to meetings so I won't go crazy, and I get to see what happens to people that don't go to the meetings. They go crazy.

So I'm already up at step three and I go to my sponsor and say

that's about as far as I can go. I don't, I don't believe in God still. And I said a, A is just full of these these silly contradictions. It doesn't make any sense. I was trying to make sense out of it. And she said, what are you talking about?

I said, well, you know, you go to the meeting and on the wall there's a sign that says think, think, think. You look at the book. It says the problem with the Alcoholics in his mind. I don't know that's a good idea. Or someone says you have to surrender to win. Tell that to your military friends. Give it a way to keep it. Sure. The bank manager would like to hear that.

Recovered, recovering, taking a trip, not taking a trip.

Someone will say,

keep it simple, stupid. This isn't rocket science. Someone else says, yeah, it's way more complicated than that,

or someone says don't make any major decisions in the first year. I said I think quitting drinking is a pretty major decision.

Are you? If you haven't, if you don't remember your last drink, you haven't had it, the book says. You can't remember the misery and suffering of a couple of weeks ago.

And you know, we're not bad people trying to get good. We're sick people trying to get well. What do we have to do? A moral inventory. People with cancer don't do moral inventory.

Oh I'm so glad it's only suggestions. How come there's 100 musts in the book?

Oh, don't you? Don't worry. You just hurt yourself. Welcome. I have to make so many amends.

Don't don't get in a relationship the first year but get a sponsor and tell them all your shit.

Don't make any major decisions in the first year but turn your role in your life over to the care of God. That's a major decision. My favorite one is half measures of failure is nothing. You'd be amazed before you're halfway through.

So

So I go to my sponsor, I'm telling her all this and she says how? How about you? You got any contradictions in your life?

I thought back of a time, not that, not that distant future in the past rather were I just graduated from UCLA and I took this trip to Europe and somebody had loaned me $200.00, a friend of mine and

they, they, they wired me the money. I was out of money. And I asked them and they wired it to me. I was in Germany someplace. I got the money. I got noon and I woke up the next morning and it was gone. And $200.00 in the 60s was a lot of money.

I don't know what happened, but all the money was gone. And that's a little bit of a disconnect from from the life that I thought I was living. I thought I was just traveling through Europe. I was actually homeless that night. I went into a mission and I got sprayed with all this lice spray and stuff. And I still had 10 more years of drinking. And there's a line in the literature about, in a lot of ways, were normal, except when it comes to alcohol.

And I thought, you know, I've never gone into a grocery store and say, hey, can I buy everybody a loaf of bread?

But I was doing that. I was always a big shot when I was drinking.

So what I decided, and this for step three, this was key to me, is I focused on that word decision. I made a decision to try to stop changing AA and let a change me, and I made a decision to work steps 4 through 9. I still had a very unclear concept of this power and I was praying to the power, but I wasn't really chummy with the power.

But I was able to take step three to move forward

and say, OK, I'm going to work this program. I'm going to believe that you're not all lying to me at the same time and that you're my life will get better when I do the things that you said that you did. And I see, I can look back at and I see it's a lot like it's all like gravity. Gravity doesn't just let some people down. Gravity let's everybody down. And a, a, these principles, spiritual in nature, work for everybody that works them. It's not that I got lucky and they work for me and they won't work for you. They work for everybody

works. So our job is just to get willing enough to do it. And so I got to that point where I was willing to do that.

So I got out a piece of paper and

I I have a bad memory and, and my wife calls it purposeful forgetting, but I can barely remember being in high school and I don't want to remember. I guess I don't know what it is. And I didn't think I had a lot of resentments, but I I knew I had a lot of hate in my heart from my father.

I hated him and

I spent years not even talking to him and he was an alcoholic. So anyway, I, I started, I put his name at the top of the paper and I started to write about the hurt that I felt and I started to cry and I called my sister and I called and work. I couldn't work that day. And I just cried and talked and cried. And something happened that day. Those tears just washed away that that anger that I had towards him and I could see how spiritually sick he was from where he came from

and my relationship healed that day. It's the weirdest thing and the literature says something about that. And

my fears list I I had God and women on my fears left, which is 2, two key relationships in my life and that if they're based on fear, they can't be good relationships. And then all my secrets were around my sexual inventory and I and then I went and did my fifth step with my sponsor. It was kind of a rainy day in November when I did it and we drove out into the country where I used to raise pot and

she saw a lot of trash along the side of the road.

It must have been the day that you put the garbage cans by the street and gets picked up and maybe some dogs have gotten into or not. But she was talking about having to change her focus because she was focused on this trash. And I do my fifth step and we're driving back to her house and there's a rainbow. It just touched me deeply that that I had my my life to me was like a garbage can. And I tip this garbage can out and I just, I felt wonderful.

And the book talks about that and page 75, there's some wonderful promises that happened when we do a fifth step.

And why did I wait so long to do it? Because I just felt a closeness to my creator. And I felt that I was a solid member of AA. Like I was doing what you were doing, like I'm a member and the 5th step was crucial to me. So I go to do six and seven. In the meantime, this, this, this sobriety car thing worked out really well. I go to a meeting and this woman says you want to step outside and I'll see if I can work you into my story.

And I end up getting married to her and, you know,

I take her. I do have a date when we go to a meeting and I take her home. And I don't know whether to kiss her or say the Lords Prayer, you know, but we got married and

I had about two years of sobriety at the time. And she had a couple of children. So I got to be a father and a husband on the same day. And she had her sister had children nearby. So I got to be a father and an uncle and a husband on the same day. And I didn't know how to do any of this stuff. Just prior to getting sober. I was living on this property and my best thinking was to put barbed wire around the outside of it

to protect my marijuana from the teenagers in the neighborhood. And

I had a case of vitamin C and some Brewers yeast, and I was just going to drink and smoke myself to death, but be healthy when I was doing it.

And I realize much later that the worst punishment we have in America is solitary confinement. It's the worst thing we do to anybody in this country. And I was doing that to myself in my disease. That's where I ended up. And now I'm getting sober. I'm working this program, and I'm a husband and a father and an uncle. And I don't know how to do it, but I'm doing six and seven. And what I find out

is that I'm a fault Finder,

that you're not going to do it right. I'm going to point it out to you because I know all the internationally accepted standards way of doing things. And then you're going to, I'm going to push you out of my life. And so I can drink the way that I like to drink. And that doesn't work when you're when you have those relationships. And I want it so much to be better at it. And one of the problems was that nobody knew how to do the dishes properly.

So I thought, well,

what's the solution to this? I thought, well, I'll start doing the dishes.

So I would get to the the sink and I would. I didn't want to do the dishes angrily. I wanted to do the dishes peacefully and I'd stand at the sink until I get peaceful enough to just do the dishes during the dishes. Very spiritual when you're just doing the dishes.

And then Angela, my 727, when I became her stepdad, she starts off saying, well, you're not the boss of me. And

she had a Dalmatian, which is like a dog from hell

and

just couldn't be trained. And I'd be driving home from work and I get, I could see myself getting madder and madder and madder as I got closer to home, knowing that I have to step over that stuff when I got home. Sometimes I turn around, go back to my sponsors house and just say just step over it. And I, I,

what I started to do with Angela is I started to treat her like a newcomer, like you treated me like. Be kind to her, encourage her, don't, don't criticize her all the time. The very things that you did to me be loving and kind and supportive.

And I started writing her notes telling how happy it was to be her, her stepdad. And the relationships are starting to get a whole lot better. And many years later, she asked me to walk her down the aisle. I'm the stepdad. And her father was at the wedding. And he thanked me for raising his daughter. You taught me how to do that. I don't know how to do that. I'm a fault Finder, push people away. I learned how to do that

by treating her the way you treated me. Thank you for that. You taught me how to do that,

so. And I got to pay for that wedding too. I got to write the checks for that wedding.

I had a good job and I went to work every day. I was thankful for that.

I made a list 8. I moved around a lot. I was sober a couple years before I realized you could move in the daytime.

So a lot of people I, you know, I was drinking. They were drinking. I mean, I'm more than willing to make amends wherever possible. But the when I got to 9, the main damage I did was to my mother and my father. I have two sisters. But I didn't, I don't think I did

any detrimental things to them that that I required, you know, formal, a nice step work on. But my father definitely. And

many years later, I invited my father to come and live with us. He moved into our house and I had a lot of love in my heart for him. He hadn't changed, but I had a lot of love for him. He was there about 30 days and somebody said something he didn't like and he said I'm out of here and he left. He was a fault Finder. He's buried someplace about 50 or 60 miles from here, I think,