The Paramount Group in Paramount, CA

Good evening. I'm Alan Bernstein. I'm an alcoholic. Hi. And thank you for having me back. It's good to be here again. It's been a while, but it's good to be here. And let's just get this out of the way. I spoke at Bellflower last Saturday night and it did not occur to me that there was some overlap. So if you heard me, I don't know. Go to your happy place and and the 44 minutes remaining will be over before you know it.

I, I, I have one story. I'll, I'll try and pull out different attributes, but

there I've at least I've done a ten step, I've acknowledged it and I love this meeting place. There's a lot of enthusiasm here. If you're new. What to me that means is that I think there are two ways to practice. AA1 is begrudgingly sort of like condemned men and women. And one is to acknowledge that we are sort of condemned men and women and,

and do embrace it and to practice it with enthusiasm. And,

and

it, it may seem like a subtle difference because if you're new, it's possible. It just seems like it's all over no matter what. I can relate to that. But this is a good place to be. And I'm going to say this,

these tiles, there's one tile here that has been here for a while and it moves me. I have three children and in sort of alcoholic fashion. Oh, and before I forget any further, welcome to the new people. And Julia, thank you wherever you are for your 10 minutes. It was really wonderful. I really enjoyed it. Thank you

I3 children and sort of alcoholic fashion. They are a total of 21 months apart.

So literally I had three kids under the age of two at one point, which I didn't lie because you've taught me not to lie. But when they were all under two, I would only acknowledge they were all under three because that sounded dramatic. Like I've got three babies under three, but under 2 just sounded pathetic. Like it like, oh, like, like, had you never met a calendar or, you know, and, and now there are literally all in puberty and, and

I know and

God grant me the serenity, but you know, it is not my job to to diagnose anybody but my daughter Naomi. My children are loving my daughter. Naomi really seems like she needs a drink and she does. And there's this thing right here for Naomi B. And honestly, if you knew her, it's like her favorite colors and it looks

it's from a woman who got server in 1980. But it just, it reminds me

that part of our job in Alcoholics Anonymous is to leave Alcoholics Anonymous here for the next people who need it. And it fills me because honestly, if if you have children, I know, I mean, there are children here. Many of you do have children. There is a sort of terror when they hit puberty. Like, whoa, like there's a lot of life out there. And,

and there's a refuge here for those of us who need it. And so I feel in a way like my job is to try and carry on the traditions and respect our singleness of purpose. And

hopefully that if Naomi loves her first drink as much as I suspect she will,

if she wants a seat someday, it'll be here for her to claim it. And let's see, I I am sober. My sobriety date is April 16th of 1990. I have a Home group, the Pacific Group. I have a sponsor, Clancy I. And interestingly enough, in a week he will be turning 90. And it turns out that I asked him to sponsor me on his birthday. I'd like to think that was a birthday present. I don't know that he would agree,

but so we will have been together, as it were for 18 years come next Sunday, which is a good run. It's been very good for me. I, I was born in New York in Brooklyn, which Brooklyn is now very hip and very cool. That was honestly the last hip cool thing I did being born in Brooklyn. And I didn't plan it, but I will take credit for it. And

my dad was in the Army when I was born, and then he worked for IBM and we moved around a bit. I wound up growing up in the Midwest and

a lovely leafy suburb. The only problem in Elmer's Illinois, Chicago suburb, the only problem with Elmhurst was that I lived there and, and my discomfort and, and alcoholism. We moved there and I was 10 and I, I had a bushy red Afro. We called it an ISRO and and I had a New York accent. I had a bit of a speech impediment. I was exactly, you know, the kid you want to be when you're a 10 year old boy.

And it turned out that there is a superstition among the German people. And there were a lot of Germans in Elmhurst. And, and the superstition was that if you rub a redhead, it will bring you good luck. So if you can imagine going into puberty with a big bushy red ISRO and an East Coast accent while living in the Midwest and going to the Jewel to go grocery shopping with your mom. I have two brothers, neither of whom have red hair,

and random women just sort of walking up to you and rubbing your hair. The point is, I needed a drink and I really, I did. I was uncomfortable and

it could not come soon enough. I, I,

I first started drinking. This is so I don't know why it's funny to me, but it was I learned a lot from from my early drinking and it was this. We used to go to services. I'm Jewish. We used to go to services on Friday night

and at the end of Jewish services, if you've never been to one, it's traditional to break bread. You bless the bread and you bless the wine. It's sort of like a tradition. And the moms would pour out these little shot glasses of Manischewitz wine, which, I mean, I've not had wine in 27 years, but this is my recollection. It's like wine scientifically formulated to appeal to a 12 year old.

It's super sweet. I mean it, you know, it has an alcoholic content, but it's mostly

just like condensed grape juice with some alcohol content. And, and because they were moms, they would pour, they would over pour like crazy. There would be dozens of extra shots. And so service, we, we all had to go to services. That was what it was like back then. And, and then we'd go and we'd bless the bread and, and bless the wine. And then the adults would retire down to the reception hall to have cookies and punch. And they would leave dozens of these shots of Manischewitz behind. And

this is really how my mind works. I took that as an invitation. I took that as permission and an invitation. And we started having shot contests and, and, and I was really good at Downing shots of Manischewitz wine. And what I learned from that was, 'cause then we would go down to the reception hall. And what I learned is you just had to remember to be polite to the rabbi that like you know that it's, it was permissible

to get drunk as long as you didn't draw attention to yourself. And that is a lesson that I carried through my drinking was that you, you can get really drunk, but just don't be rude, don't be offensive, don't draw attention. And the reason why I say that is because when I got to the end of my drinking, when I got to Alcoholics Anonymous, what I discovered was I really wanted to be drunk. I did not want anything to stop it. And I realized now

that institutionalization is a crude but at times effective way of getting stopped.

I just, I drank myself under the table and I, I try to be as polite as I could. I am, I'm going to. If you have a history of getting arrested for drunk driving, you are going to probably resent me if you don't already after I share this. But in the 80s, you didn't really get arrested for drunk driving. It didn't. It didn't mean you didn't get pulled over. I got pulled over fairly regularly for drunk driving.

I just would be like a yes, officer, I did have a little bit to drink or I think I would say things like yes, officer, I kind of had a little bit too much. I think I had three beers tonight and you know, and,

and I said it politely maybe like, son, do you want us to give you a ride home? Do you want us to follow you? I'm going to be like, well, no, officer, you can if you want to, but I don't think it's necessary. I'll drive home now, Sir. And you know,

that doesn't really work anymore. But back then

it worked.

I went off to college. I went to College in North Carolina and we had mostly drunk hard liquor. It, it was not easy

being a high school drinker in Illinois back then to get anything. And so when we could get stuff, we would get like 151 and Everclear, really high proof stuff that that's what I started off with. And then I got to College in the South in the 1980s and it was easy to get beer. There was always a keg being tapped somewhere. I'm a Southern frat boy, which is an odd little part of my story. But if you're a Southern frat boy, woo.

And I fell madly in love with beer.

My beer of choice was Budweiser. It is the king of beers. Yeah, yeah. And I loved I loved Bud long expect him. But what I really loved were pictures and kegs. I just like I'm not a quality drinker. I'm a quantity drinker. And I loved like a big red plastic cup full of keg beer. And if you had friends, what you all would sort of do is top off each other's beer before it hit the bottom. And if you worked it right, you could really kind of have a credible

claim that you were just having one drink all night and it could be 100 oz. But it was a beer, and I drank for the effect. And when I was in college, I really was sort of more or less insanely drunk all the time. But I really had two addictions. If you were one was the beer and the other was adrenaline. I realized now what I sort of loved

was the feeling of kind of coming to

at 9:45 on a Tuesday morning and realizing I had a final at 3:00. I had a paper due by 5 and you know, and that manic, like I'm going to get it done and, and, and, you know, and getting it done. And, and my favorite thing I'm, I'm a small petty person. I'm better now after 27 years of sobriety. I really liked doing better than people who were goodies, who had like respected the rules and worked hard and studied hard and had a plan and flash cards and all that. And

I it made my dark little heart happy if I did better than them. And,

and mostly it distracted me from myself. And that's really what it was about, the drinking, the adrenaline. I could not handle being myself. And look, let's be clear. I've heard your stories for over a quarter of a century. There are people in a, a who have had unspeakable things happen to them. And if you are one of them, part of the miracle of Alcoholics Anonymous is that through sobriety and through the steps, people find a level of comfort, A level of dignity, A level of joy. Like, that's all there.

What's my story? I suffered being raised in suburbia by parents who stayed married and gave their kids a good education even when money was tight. Like it wasn't really that hard to be me. I mean, I did have like the the big hair, the bushy red hair, and that was pretty bad. But honestly, even that all went away eventually.

But the point was, it was me. It was me waking up every day in this life, incredibly uncomfortable in my own skin with a loud, angry head, just kind of always going off telling me all of my defects of character and I really needed to drink. I,

I got through college and I, I sort of realized in March of my senior year that I had failed to either apply for any jobs or to apply to grad school, which really was sort of the two things that you do when you're a senior in college. And, and I really did not want to go back to Chicago and work again at Marshall Fields selling sheets and bedding. And, and so I, I found a way to find a job interview. I charmed my way in to getting the interview

IBS my way through it. I got flown up to New York and they gave me a job on Wall Street and and the truth is it was an amazing opportunity, but all I really used it for was to explore the dye forest of Manhattan. I I would show up at work late. I I didn't even know that you really probably shouldn't tell people when you show up late at work. I'm sorry I'm late. I was hungover like there. You're actually, I think supposed to lie about that, but

for some reason I'm like, oh, I'll tell the truth. And the thing was in the 80s they needed bodies on Wall Street. Everything was booming back then. And they needed bodies. And I was a body. And I wasn't really going to be competition for promotions or, or bonuses. So they, they put up with me and at 5:00 we were done. And I was out of that suit and into like old jeans and ratty Oxford shirts and just doing a pub crawl of all the divars. And I don't.

You don't have to love dive bars to be an alcoholic, but I'm just going to guess that a few of you are my people. And I

loved die bars. Like the dingier and darker the better. I was all over the East Village back then. There was the Lithuanian bars and the Ukrainian bars and there was this horseshoe shaped bar at 7th and B where they filmed a scene from Crocodile Dundee and it's second MB. There is a gas station that had been turned into a bar and it was like all magical to me. And I had my favorite bar of all and that was the village idiot. And it was

dark and dank. There were junkies

shooting up in the bathroom. There are parolees violating with concealed weapons. And I'm like, yes, this is real. And

I moved in and I, I just, I moved in. There was a jukebox with a lot of sad songs. And when I drink, I love sad music. It compliments my, my melancholy. And a lot of them. I mean, I don't know if you all you're, you're young people, I don't know if you'll get these references, but there was like a lot of patchy Klein on the jukebox. And there was that Band of gold song about the woman whose husband leaves her on their wedding night.

And there is my favorite of all song, Brandy. You're a fine girl. What a Good Wife you'd be. And I loved it. You know, I, I want to be clear,

my story is mostly a drinking story. If you're newer, I'm aware that you may have done drugs. And

you know, I really, I didn't accept during this period, I did smoke a little bit of recreational crack.

It was the 80s in New York and who didn't? But you know, what I want to say is this, I, I suffer from alcoholism and, and, and the way that I primarily medicated my alcoholism was with alcohol. But it has been my observation that recreational drugs don't seem to be a very effective

way of medicating alcoholism. So, you know, if you want to in a A and you're an alcoholic, whatever your history is, I'm really glad you're here.

And I think for all Alcoholics there's a solution. I think our singleness of purpose is very important,

but I don't think singleness of purpose means that we didn't do a lot of other adventures in order to arrive here. And I I found as I drank in New York that the pub crawl became overwhelming. And I don't know if anyone can relate to this, but my experience is that I just get more and more exhausted the longer I drink. And when I started it was an adventure to have like

a wallet full of cash and just go from bar to bar and and eventually just going to new places becomes overwhelming. And I don't really want to meet new people and I'm a little afraid of new situations. And so for the last two years of my drinking, I really pretty much moved into the idiot

and I just was there all the time. And what I want to tell you is this. It was the people at the Village Idiot were bar flies. They really were. But this is what I know about alcoholism. I was years sober. I mean this sincerely. I was years sober before I realized I was a barfly. And I'm telling you, you could have sent mail to me at the Village Idiot and the bartender, Fat Tommy would have gotten it to me. But

I didn't realize I was a barfly. I really thought because I had this like college degree and I'd worked on Wall Street,

I, I had created this fantasy that I was enrolled in some cultural anthropology program and I believed I was a undercover cultural anthropologist, that I was in the idiot, but not of the idiot that I was studying. I knew those people were bar flies. And I am telling you, I was a year sober before it suddenly hit me.

Dude, you were a barfly. Like, you know, nobody would have walked through the door of that bar while you were there

and look down that long, dark, narrow bar and said, wow, look at this poor lost souls and Alan Bee are undercover cultural anthropologist would not have happened. But that's what alcoholism tells my mind. It tells me that I'm different and it tells me that I'm special for really in hindsight, for all the wrong reasons

and. And I'm there. And finally the drinking stopped working And,

and that was kind of awful. It was, I mean, I want to tell you, I was pretty much drunk for about a decade and and there was always a price to pay. You know that. You're my people, you know that. But it was always worth paying the price. I did not care. I mean, I didn't like hangovers. I didn't like humiliation. I didn't like degradation. I didn't like

fear, like I didn't like those things, but you know, that's just what you put up with if you're going to drink. Like that's what you deal with in my experience. And it was absolutely worth it in order to drink. This is what I can tell you about the kind of drinker I am.

I lived in Manhattan, as I've said, and this bar was around 11th and 1st, and I lived at 40th and 2nd. And that's thirty blocks and 30 blocks when you're drunk at 4:00 in the morning is a long way to walk. And every night when I went out to drink, I would put a bus token in my pocket because I had some hope

that if I put a bus token in, I would not find a way to spend it. At the end of the night, when I needed to get home, I'd be able to take a bus.

And I can tell you I almost never at the end of the night had a bus token because when I need the next drink, I am going to do say B, whatever I need to be in order to get it. That's just my experience. And one night it stopped working. And in our literature, Bill Wilson, our founder in the big book talks about a white light experience, sort of the, the, an overwhelming sense of, of the presence of God coming into his life. And I had the opposite, for what it's worth. I had a dark light moment. I had this moment where.

Even in a dark bar, it seems like it got darker. And I had a moment of clarity

of how separated I was from everyone. I could really see the space separating me from all the other people in the bar. And I saw people in that bar in that moment holding hands. And it seemed to me that I could see that there were molecules that were separating their hands from really being connected to each other. And I think that I'd been drunk for a long time to avoid what a lonely person I was. And in that moment, the curtain fell. And what I got was I was alone. I had pushed my family away. I pushed

fragments away if you cared about. I could not stand it

for a long time. I was the kind of person who, if you assaulted me directly, I could deal with it pretty well if full frontal effect assault. But if you looked at me with concern and pity, that destroyed me. I had no defense against that. And my family is looking at me with confusion and concern and I need them gone because that's too painful and I'm alone.

But I've been able to drink it away. And suddenly there's this moment and I get that I am always going to be alone, that I am cut off from humanity and that's never going to change. And bizarrely, the drinking stopped working. And that was like being abandoned by a lover. And I didn't know what to do. And that was probably early February of 1990. I tried a brief experiment. Control drinking. I don't know why I thought maybe that would work, but I did. I should have to drink 2 drinks a day. And that's

hell. I you know,

my God, like I do not wish control drinking on an anime. Here's what you get the beer and you take a sip. And now I know that 10 minutes has to go by about before I can take the next six. So I'm waiting for the 10 minutes to go by and it's a bar. And so you're talking and it's like Charlie Browns teacher from the old peanuts cartoons and I just want to rip your tongue out and and the 10 minutes finally goes by and I can take the sip and then I discover that it does nothing except reset the clock for another

minutes. It's a nightmare. It really the flip side is it actually may have been a very effective way of learning what my relationship is with drinking because it's awful. And after about two weeks, thank God, I just wildly overshot the mark. And and yet it didn't really turn off my head, which is what it had always been the one thing that I could count on alcohol to do. And so I turned to my next plan. It was the end of February. It was Mardi Gras. I'd grown up in, in Chicago, in New York, big Catholic communities, and

all I knew is that Lent was starting the next day. And I decided I was going to give up drinking for Lent. And I'm Jewish. We're not known for our Lenten practice, but it was the best I could do. And I white knuckled it through 40 long days and even longer nights of Lent. And on Easter Sunday, I, I wound up in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous and

a woman spoke. I don't, I could not remember a word she said. I just remember, I remember the meeting was called High Noon, which I will give myself credit. What a great place to surrender. I surrender to High noon and

and I met somebody who I'd known from out and about. I didn't know they were an AA. She took me out for lunch and she told me a little bit about her alcoholism. And I do remember having a moment of identification. And then I went to an Easter dinner at a friend's parents house and I had half a glass of white wine and half a glass of red wine. I'd committed to being sober for Lent. Lent was over. And, and what I can tell you is this.

I remember standing at the train station waiting for the train to take us back into the city after that dinner. And I remember how tired I felt.

I was 25 and I was bone tired. I'm a single parent. I raised those three kids. I raised them on my own. So I know tired. I, I had three children in diapers under the age of two. I know tired. And I'm, I'm not kidding, I don't remember ever feeling as bone tired as on that night, Easter of 1990, waiting for that train to go in to the city because I knew what the next indicated action was. The next indicated action was to go on a huge Bender. I knew it and

I turned myself back into you the next day. And that was April 16th of 1990. And one day at a time, ever since then, I have been sober from everything and I am grateful for that. I truly understand that I did have a relapse, that I went to a meeting and that I made a decision to drink. And I also know that God gave me a huge gift, by the way, that's how I view it. If you're new and this God thing is overwhelming, we do ask you to believe in something bigger than yourself. And I think that's important

for me, that's God. And if I talk about it that way and that rubs you the wrong way, please just substitute whatever you need to substitute to make it work for you.

But I think that was the intervention of a loving God is not characteristic of my drinking that I have half a glass of white wine and half a glass of red wine. And then I stay sober for over a quarter of a century. I, I think that was a gift. And, and I think like any gift, I can throw it away, but I, I don't have any expectation that it will come back that easily. And I arrived in a A and I was young and I was angry

in no small measure because you were very clear that you expected me not to drink,

and I didn't know how to function without drinking. I had been drunk for a long time and I didn't know how to deal with people. And you wanted me to deal with people. I felt that I could have handled one or two of you at a time, but this was really overwhelming. I sat on the aisle every meeting for the first month or two of sobriety because I was really scared that I was going to get nauseous because I felt so anxious all the time and and I didn't know whether I wanted to go on or not. I got a bike

three or four days before I got sober in New York. And I do not mean like a cool vroom vroom Harley. I mean like,

and I like, biked around Manhattan for the first couple of years in my sobriety. But in those early weeks, I had a real bike problem. I kept on getting hit by things. I got hit by a van. I got hit by a cab door. I like went into a pothole at least one time to the best of my recollection. I just sort of spontaneously went over my own handlebars.

And I'll tell you this, I didn't wear a helmet because you may not have discerned this, but let me tell you, I am super tough in my head and I thought helmets were for wusses. So I'm biking around. What I like to do when I bike around the island of Manhattan, by the way, is a newcomer. I like to have arguments with you. I don't really like to argue with you in person because you have a chance of winning then. But I've learned that if I argue with you in my head, if you start to get an advantage, I can wind the argument back up and come back with an even better response. So that's my thing. I bike around the island

hat and I argue with people in my head and I don't wear a helmet and I'm brand new in AA and I keep getting hit by things. And at about 5 weeks of sobriety, I I had this moment of clarity. I really do. And it's that I, I

in part am riding the way that I'm riding and having the experiences that I'm having because I don't care. I don't care what happens. I am sober. I am hanging by a thread and in our literature, and I'm not the one who's going to give you a huge step study up here and tell you a lot about the literature. But I'm going to recommend it because it's a great source. And I'm going to recommend that you might approach it with a sponsor. Those are just some suggestions for for fun and for free or whatever they're worth. But what it says in our literature

is that the alcoholic who arrives in AA is faced with the dilemma of choosing between certain physical death and living life on spiritual terms. And it's maybe my favorite little thing because it's saying that we are people who don't know given the option of dying or having a loving God work in our life, what the right answer is.

That's me. And I think it's probably some of you. And I love that. I love it in part because and I have great fondness and respect for our all anons. That's a great program. But I imagine the Al Anon, this is my head, that the Al Anon newcomer like highlights this part and they bring it to their sponsor and they're like,

wait, is this really saying what I'm thinking is saying that this fool that I love can't figure out whether death or God, Like what the right aunt, Like I've been loving them and worrying about them and that and like, yeah, that's exactly who I was. I didn't know what I wanted except that on that day when I had that realization about the bike and the accidents,

I think what you had done for me through your love, through your honesty, through your willingness to reach out.

I don't think he would convince me overwhelmingly, but I think you'd help me shift to be like 5149 in favor of staying around and staying alive. I don't think it was a big, big difference. I will say this in the third step in our 12:00 and 12:00, it talks about faith and willingness. It says faith is like a door and willingness is the key. And if you have the least amount of willingness, it's like this locked doors magically opened. And I think that's what I experienced that day. I had just a little bit of willingness, a little bit more willingness to to go on

than to quit. And I bought a helmet

and I don't know how what it is about the delivery. People always laugh when I say that and I love our laughter. Like laugh away. I mean it. But

I stopped having accidents immediately and I immediately stopped having accidents when I got that helmet. And this is what I want to tell you. I love our eleven step. Our eleven step challenges us to work on developing a, a bigger relationship with our higher power through prayer and meditation. I love it. I I recommend it highly and I'll for just, for whatever it's worth, I think that I've actually gotten pretty good at meditation and I didn't get good at meditation until I accepted that nobody is perfect at meditation, that it's not accounting. Like you can't make the

all add up and just go, yeah, they add up. I must be done. It's not like reconciling a checkbook, but it's a practice and, and I have practiced it slowly and haltingly and I've gotten comfortable with it. And,

and what I believe to this day is that prayer is great, but if I can tie my prayer to an action,

I seem to get a much quicker response from my higher power. And that helmet, it was like a sign that I was willing to surrender a little bit here and, and wanted to stick around. And it was like magic. I stopped having accidents. I, I got a little more active. I, I wrote a four step for literally the dumbest reason I've ever heard anyone write a four step. I was a few months sober and I was riding, I was wearing that helmet, but I was riding that bike in the sketch to your neighborhoods later at night. And I knew that I was

trouble and I, I did something that is counterintuitive. I'm the son of a military intelligence officer. I believe that information is power. I believe that what you do with information is you do not share information, that you keep it to yourself. It gives you leverage and power. That is what my experience in life had taught me. And I worked, I lived in a family and grew up in a family that was loving in many ways, but there was not a lot of advantage to volunteering stuff. And so this whole thing in a a you're as sick as your secrets was that was challenging for me, Like,

and I had to sort of just, OK, I'll try that feels a little weird. It feels a little unsafe. I don't really like being vulnerable. I'd rather kind of just solve it and then come back and tell you a pithy little story about how I solved it. But on that night when I realized I was in trouble and riding that bike into bad neighborhoods, I raised my hand in a meeting when I was called on, I shared what was going on. And there was this woman, Karen W, who had five years of sobriety and she had moved from

LA to New York to be the vixen on one of the soap operas, and she looked like a goddess. Blonde hair, blue eyes.

She had the best rack in Alcoholics Anonymous in 1990. There's power there. And,

and she swore like a truck driver and she, she called me. She had like she had my phone number and, and this is before a cell phone. So I'm like home and it's like ring, ring. And it was Karen and she was so bossy and it was like scary and a little exciting. And she made me go get my big look and she explained to me how to write an inventory. And, and so I immediately concluded that there was a celebrity outreach program in a A

and that if I pleased or I'd have a cool celebrity friend, I believed that. And that is a really, really dumb reason to write your inventory.

I'm going to tell you a little secret right now. It didn't matter. It was a good action. If I'm an alcoholic and I'm an AA and I need to write the steps, it doesn't matter why I take the good action. It just matters that I take it. And so I wrote my inventory and God apparently does not care that I did it for a really goofy reason because I got all the benefits that I think I needed to get from doing it. And I shared it with her. And, and what I expected was that if I did it right, because I am a little bit dramatic,

I thought that like the roof of the apartment building would blow off like in Ghostbusters at the end of the movie and that the glory of God would reign in triumphant upon us because I had shared my inventory and that didn't happen. And I was a little underwhelmed and I went back to my apartment incident and back to my apartment. And there's that thing in the book where it tells us now we spend an hour like considering the bricks and the mortar and, and, and just like nothing. It's like 2 paragraphs in the book. And, and so I go back to do it and I'm going to lately

sharing this and feels incredibly liberating. I for years, I still don't know, I think I might have fallen asleep during that hour. It's a lot like you, you, you have this inventory and you read it and then like you're back in your bed thinking about the, the bricks and the mortar and, and, and there's nothing in there that tells you what you do if you screw up that hour. Like, you know, there's like no, like you're supposed to spend an hour and then you're supposed to be done. And, and,

and here's what I can tell you. For years,

it worried me that I had done it wrong. And now what I can tell you 27 years of sobriety is I don't understand God perfectly. I don't think I'm ever going to understand God perfectly, but I understand God better than I did when I was a newcomer. And God's actions sometimes upset me and confused me. Bad things happen, people get hurt, people die. Like bad things happen. And, and that's part of God's path. But God is not petty.

You'd have to be a really petty person.

I was a really petty person. I was the kind of person who believed that falling asleep during the six and seven step after doing a sincere 4th and 5th step could somehow other invalidate the whole thing. But God, as I understand God today, God's not petty. God loves me more than that. And I went on with my life. I moved out to California when I was 3 1/2 years sober and I immediately screwed up. I, you know, those people in New York had taught me good basic A, a, the kind of things that I think you

learn here. And I know that many of you are affiliated with other really active meetings around this part of LA County. And you will learn those things that I learned. And I got to LA and I decided I was ready to graduate into like Advanced Placement, Alcoholics Anonymous. It didn't exist. So I was happy to kind of create the core syllabus. I knew, I knew that it didn't require as much chair stacking and coffee pot cleaning. It was going to be more spiritual and,

and those are my decisions. And I,

I was still on our lifeboat, but I moved myself from the center of the AAA lifeboat, which by the way, is where I would suggest we want to find ourselves to the edge of the lifeboat. And on the edge of the lifeboat, I was with the people who were on the edge of the lifeboat and the seas would swell up from time to time during storms and people would get swept overboard. And that's what happens on the edge of the lifeboat and Alcoholics Anonymous. But here's what I can tell you. At a certain point, I realized I didn't really like the, the, the,

the edge of the lifeboat and I wanted to get back to the center. And I didn't know where it was.

I'm not kidding. I didn't know where it was. And at that moment, I knew that I was on my way to getting drunk. I knew it. And I was sort of bummed because a, A had been something very good for me for a number of years. And then I'd made a bunch of bad choices and move myself away from it and I was lost. And then again, I did something that is not my instinctive nature, but that I recommend if you're in a, in a bad situation. I shared about it. I told the truth that I was on my way out and this guy came up to me

and what he said was great because I believe you. I was eight years sober

because I believe you, Alan, because. But honestly, have you not noticed after eight years that everyone who gets loaded comes back? Not everyone sticks around. I'm going to be honest with you. Not everyone sticks around, but everyone comes back. Because if you're getting ready to be a newcomer anyway, why don't you just start acting like a newcomer now? Why wait? And it was like magic, like it was just magical permission to go back to the very basic things that I had worked. And, you know, I'm 27 years sober. I'm I'm a grown up. I drive a minivan.

You know, I, I was just secretary of my Home group, the Pacific group. I am like a grown up and I can tell you this, my life has gotten bigger and probably some of my insights have gotten a little bit more profound, but the fundamentals of AA have not changed at all in the 27 years that I've been here. One day at a time. I need to not drink. I need to have a sponsor. I need to be of service to God and God's kids. I need to like do a 10th, 11th and 12th step. These are super basic things for me. That means practical stuff. I need to have a commitment.

I need to, in order to have a commitment, I have to have a regular meeting. I need to honor my commitment. I just, these are super basic things and we call them scrums. The foundation and what I can tell you is my A, a house is really a much bigger and lovelier house than I ever would have imagined I would get in sobriety. But it is predicated on having a solid foundation. And I can undermine the foundation of my own house or I can take daily actions to make that foundation solid.

And I mean this, I really was the kind of person when I was new, I thought he was lovely. Like your stories of like, how like you're becoming lawyers and you're becoming like in relationships and like, like, yay, that's really lovely. I knew that wasn't for me. I knew that I was, I was just a defective person. I, I didn't think God was ever going to do for me what he was doing for you. But you sort of tricked me into doing the things that you do. And now at 27 years, like, you know,

I have a business, I have a house,

I have these kids, they're healthy, they're all in puberty. And so I do get my inventory told on a fairly regular basis, but they're good kids. I mean, I, I think I'm fortunate. And