Alan's Journey: Inconvenient Meetings, Grief, and 32 Years Sober

- Good evening, my name is Alan, I'm an alcoholic.

Hey, and hi, I thought you were gonna be looking at the back.

Oh, zoom, it's much more confusing here than you realize.

So I thought you were gonna be looking at the back

of my head and could not remember if I saved it evenly

or not, some newcomers can be like,

I can't believe anything he said,

he can't navigate shaving his head,

but you'll never know now.

But you'll hear my story.

And I'm really glad to be here.

A whole bunch of people invited me here.

Robin was my speaker greeter,

and she was so lovely and introduced me to everybody.

And it was just really nice.

I really appreciated your 10 minute talk, Abraham.

I got a lot out of it.

And for me, one of the threads I heard

was sort of this conflict

between AA being convenient and inconvenient.

And I think I'm typical in the sense,

and I've been around for a while,

but I think I'm typical in the sense

that I really would prefer AA be convenient.

It makes intellectually a lot more sense to me

that AA ought to eventually at some point

become like one of those workouts

that you can get done in three minutes

and have the abs of like a 22 year old or something.

But my actual lived experience is that AA works best

when it's inconvenient.

And I have to say, I had a mixed relationship with Zoom.

Like there were things about it that I didn't love,

but it's hard to argue with like,

you can leave for a meeting about 45 seconds

before it starts and get there on time.

And now we're getting back to this thing

where like I'm driving on the 101,

I'm like on the 101.

And if you're new, this may sound really weird,

but I'm really grateful for the inconvenience.

I still don't like traffic.

I grumble in my head,

but this is sort of how I came up in Alcoholics Anonymous

and it works better for me.

And it's just nice to be here.

I am, I'm just gonna say right up front,

I had a strange day and I debated

whether to like talk about it or not talk about it,

but I'm sort of a fan of the,

just be like real style of speaking.

I went to a Memorial in Anaheim

and my drive down to the Memorial in Anaheim

was listening to like a Zoom telecast of a funeral in Utah.

And the Memorial was for a friend and it was sad.

And the Zoom funeral was for a family

and I have a son committed suicide.

And I don't know how to process that,

but here's what I wanna say.

And I will talk about my story in a minute, I'm sure.

I got sober on April 16th of 1990.

I just turned 32 years sober.

And I think for me, the thing that's hard

when facing like a suicide is that I totally can get it.

Like I lived most of my youth,

most of my time before arriving in AA

and if I'm gonna be completely honest and vulnerable,

even in the first few years in AA,

not entirely convinced that life had much to offer

for me at least.

And our book, "The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous,"

which is somewhere around here, I'm pretty sure,

describes the dilemma of the alcoholic

who arrives in Alcoholics Anonymous

as a choice between certain physical death

and living life on spiritual terms.

And it calls it a dilemma.

And there are many parts of our literature

that I enjoy a lot.

And particularly if you're new,

I would recommend doing what I did.

I would get a sponsor.

I would get somebody to sort of drag me

through the literature.

I think most of us who've done that would recommend that.

But that's one of my favorite parts

because to me, it really captures the insanity

of my alcoholism.

I was somebody who, if you came to me and said,

"Here's your choice, have a loving God

working effectively in your life or die,"

I would be like, "Man, can I get back to you on Tuesday?"

Like that's a lot.

And if you're new and you're going, "It is a lot,"

I wanna tell you, I don't find that choice hard today.

I am comfortable with trying my best,

my human limited best of life on spiritual terms.

I was born in 1964, I'm 57 years old.

I was born in Brooklyn, New York.

I've always wanted to be cool.

I've always believed that cooler people

are sort of safer and more protected.

Being born in Brooklyn was by far the one thing in my life

that would give me the most street cred

and everything else after that was downhill

in terms of being cool.

And I really didn't do much except sort of show up

at the hospital as it were.

And when I was a kid, I had big bushy red hair

and dad had been in the army.

He went to West Point and was doing army intelligence

for a bit and then went to work for IBM.

And the recurring theme of all that

is we sort of moved around a lot.

I grew up in the Midwest where nobody

had big bushy red hair and an East Coast accent.

It was the late '70s, I wore high-ski jeans.

That's a 1970s euphemism for being a chunky kid.

And now, of course, like you're called thick

or at least, and like, it's like a cool thing,

but like, you know, it wasn't cool back then

and I wish it had been.

And I just, everyone around me was like

sort of thin and athletic.

They had brown hair or blonde hair.

They had blue eyes.

And I just wanted to fit in.

We, in my big public middle school,

we had a lecture one time.

They brought us all into the assembly hall

and this is like, if you ever watch like any John Hughes

movie from the early '80s,

it's like a documentary of my childhood.

And they just explained basically

how the people who are gonna do best in life

were the B and C students.

Like don't fail out, but don't overachieve.

And I'm a nerd.

I'm doing well without, I just, I'm a good student.

And literally like, they're like, yep, you are doomed

because like the people who fit in and get by

are the ones who are gonna succeed in life.

And I just wanted to be comfortable.

And eventually I found drinking.

I'm Jewish.

I first found it, by the way, like Passover literally ended

like while we were reading the preamble.

So I can have pasta again and bread and doughnuts.

I'm very, I could just go on.

I'm excited.

But we would go to services on Friday night

in my faith.

And at the end of the services,

you had a reception in the social hall.

But before you do that, you say like,

you say a little prayer for the bread,

which is called challah.

And you say a little prayer over the wine.

And back then, I think probably now

you wouldn't serve kids actual wine,

but back then it was like a different,

if you were young, it was different.

And the moms, like all Jewish moms,

like all Italian moms, like all moms,

like massively over poured and over served everything.

So if there were 75 people at the services,

they poured like 150 of these little shop glasses

of Manischewitz, which I'm not recommending it,

but just for your academic knowledge,

is this like super sweet red wine that I think honestly

was cultivated for the sophisticated palette

of a nine-year-old.

And I mean, it is not like some sort of like French wine.

It's basically alcoholic grape juice.

And so we would gather and do the prayers

and then the adults and the younger kids would gravitate

down to the social hall.

And my friends and I would do shot contests

with the leftover Manischewitz.

And what I discovered as it described in our literature

is I liked the effect produced by alcohol.

It made me feel more comfortable.

I'm an anxious, nerdy, awkward, uncomfortable kid.

You know, I want approval while also wanting to not care.

Like, you know, I want to be exceptional while fitting in.

You know, the list of things that I want,

which I got to later in the steps makes no logical sense.

I had defined, my definition of succeeding in life

was unattainable and so I never succeeded,

but I drank and I felt a little bit more comfortable

on my own skin.

I learned some very important lessons

and I hope none of you need to take my knowledge

and experiment with it, but I'll tell you what I learned.

I learned that nobody cares about my drinking

if I don't curse out the rabbi

and if I don't throw up on his wife's shoes.

Like you do stuff like that and people get offended.

The trick to drinking is to not bother other people.

And I filed that away and I practiced it.

And for whatever other defects I had,

I was very good at making my drinking not bother you.

Some people, obviously, and by the way,

I don't know that I take this,

some people drink and they're loud and violent

and the police exist to stop people like that.

And that's more the kind of person who drinks and things

and eventually sort of slides into the bar stool.

And I go off to college, I go to a high school,

I join a fraternity, I'm a gay Jew from New York.

I'm not exactly like the picture of a Southern frat boy.

So fun fact, I'm a Southern frat boy

and we drank all the time and I fell madly in love with beer.

I want to say this, it's 2022

and I've been around for a while.

I'm aware that some of you probably did drugs

and I want to tell you, if I had known that drugs

are going to offend people and alcoholics anonymous,

when I got here, I was really angry.

I would have made a point of doing more

just to offend the old timers.

But I didn't know, I didn't know.

So it's just made a part of my story.

I sweeped a little bit of recreational crack in the 80s,

but mostly I love to drink beer because it works

and because I can relatively pace it out.

I want to be altered, but I want to stay altered.

And even the problem for me with harder liquors

is I tend to drink for quantity more than quality.

And so I just get there a little bit too quickly

and Budweiser in particular,

which became sort of my beer of choice,

just it was there.

I never, I lacked faith in almost every area of my life,

but I did not lack faith that we were going to run out

of Budweiser.

I trusted Anheuser-Busch more than I trusted a loving God.

And I drank and I went through school.

And at the end, I came to the end of my school years

and I had a moment of clarity in like March,

I suddenly realized what I realized was I had gone

to a good school and I'd done reasonably well.

I had taken even like some words from that grad school

programs, but I never applied.

Fun little fact, newer people,

if you have an interest in continuing your education,

it is very important to apply if you wish to be accepted.

There's a very strong correlation between people who apply

and people who get accepted.

And I didn't apply and it's March.

And I realized I'm about to graduate

and I'm gonna head back to mom and dad's house and pick up

my job from the summer before at Marshall fields,

which is kind of like Macy's selling sheets and towels,

which is a hideous,

hideous job for an alcoholic of my type,

because there are things that people will buy without input,

but anyone who's buying sheets and towels wants to know what

the sales person thinks.

And they want to tell you like what the colors are of their

bathroom.

And they want you to actually know all the weird colors,

the towels and sheets get called.

They never get called like green.

It's always like spearmender and it,

and even that's like not weird enough.

And it requires me to be interested in other people,

which is so painful.

And so I'm gonna graduate and have to go back to that.

And it's unbearable.

And so one characteristic of alcoholism is when I'm not sort

of slowly unraveling and failing,

I am capable of acts of amazing,

like passionate intense accomplishment.

And somehow or other faced with the reality that I was going

back to mom and dad's house and Marshall field,

I charmed my way into an interview for a banking job in New

York that I had no business applying for and got it.

And they moved me up to Manhattan and Manhattan is a young

alcohol, alcohol extreme.

I discovered dive bars.

I am, I am a, I'm a white kid from the suburbs.

Like there's just nothing ambiguous about that.

And I discovered this whole world of like downtown diving,

New York bars.

And it was, it was my Disneyland.

I just, I would go and get a fork at five.

I was a quick change artists until I can hold jeans

and ready Oxford shirts.

And I would, we still, I mean, we used money newcomers.

I can explain like, you know, what that is.

It's what we used before Venmo.

And I would go to the Lithuanian is in the Ukrainian.

And there was like a game station.

That's not going to be this.

I'm going to convert it into a bar, just magical.

And everything about it was just so cool and I loved it.

I really did because I could be distracted from myself.

I could be distracted from the discomfort of living

in my own skin, which didn't make any sense.

Cause I'm, I'm a kid with a loving family

and a job that pays the bills and a college degree.

And I shouldn't be this unhappy.

And I am, and it's shameful because I can't,

because I know that I have the things in life

that you make me feel better about myself,

but I don't feel better about myself.

And I don't have a vocabulary.

One thing I've been around here for a while,

and I'm sure many of you have been around here for a while.

One thing that amazes me about Alcoholics Anonymous

is that we have a capacity to talk about fears

and vulnerabilities in such a matter of fact way

to people, you know, and I admit some of you,

some of you have never met before,

and yet I'm just sort of talking about myself,

my fears, my insecurities.

I want you to know, I had no language for doing that

when I was out there.

In fact, I'm a kid of an army intelligence officer.

What I believe is that information is power.

And the best thing that you can do is keep it to yourself.

That is sort of what I think.

When I know something,

what I understand to do is hold on to it

and wait for a moment to use it to my advantage.

That is what you do with a secret.

This like, you are sick as your secrets is not,

that's not my upbringing.

And if you got here and you're like,

of course I watched Oprah for like five years,

like while nursing hangovers,

and I understand that, then good for you, I'm glad.

But I actually didn't really get this concept

until I got to AA that it might be good

to not hold onto my secrets, my shames, my insecurities.

I didn't know.

And so I drink and here's how it ends.

I'm in these dive bars,

except I'm not in the dive bars anymore.

Alcoholism in my experience is a progressive illness

and I am stealing that from the big book as well.

So they seem to agree.

And one of the things that progresses for me

is that the longer I drink, the smaller my world gets.

And when I moved to New York and I start off,

I really truly have the energy and the enthusiasm

to go everywhere until the money runs out.

And frankly, once the money runs out,

until my charm runs out.

And that does, believe me, that runs out.

But I do the best I can, but my world gets smaller

and I don't even notice it as I'm drinking.

But what happens is I'm not as comfortable anymore

going to new places.

I don't know exactly where to stand,

how to get the bartender's attention,

where the bathroom is.

You know, it just all becomes a little bit overwhelming

and it becomes easier to go someplace familiar.

And then I have a disagreement with somebody

and it becomes easier not to go there.

And my world keeps shrinking

and I barely even notice it while it's happening

until basically I've moved into one bar

and I'm not going anywhere except for this one bar

called the Village Idiot.

And it's great.

It's a long, dark, narrow bar.

It's got junkies shooting up in the bathroom.

It's got parolees violating with concealed weapons.

They sell pictures of beer, which I love,

'cause then you don't have to really count your drinks at all

and I'm just there all the time.

And in 1990 in February, something weird happens

and my drinking stops working

and I just have a moment of clarity.

Bill Wilson, he's one of our co-founders in his story,

Bill's story, which is great.

If you haven't read it, please treat yourself to it.

But he talks about having a white light experience.

He talks about being in a sanitarium,

people being there visiting him, trying to help him.

And suddenly he has this impression of white light

and a feeling of the nearness of his creator.

And it's a beautiful story.

I'm not doing it full justice.

And it's transformative for him.

It really sets him on his path towards recovery.

I, in February of '90, in a dark bar and a dark night,

have the exact opposite.

I have a dark light experience.

Everything is dark already.

And somehow or other, I have a moment

where everything gets darker

and my awareness of my separation

from other people gets greater.

I just, I see the space between me and everybody else

in a physical way that I've never seen it before.

And I understand that I'm alone.

And I understand that I've been alone for a long time.

By the way, part of why I'm alone

is I've pushed people away who love me.

Because again, I don't know how to talk about fears

and insecurities.

And my life, which when I was young,

it seemed sort of promising to the people around me,

is going nowhere.

And now I do have to deal with like my mom calling

and there being a tone of concern in her voice.

Or I see my grandmother 'cause she lives in New York

and she looks a little confused.

And it's funny 'cause I'm not living on the street,

but I'm living in a very briny part of New York,

very late at night with a lot of potential physical danger.

And I feel equipped for that,

but I am completely disarmed against the concern

of a loving family member.

I don't know what to do with it.

And so I just get you the hell out of my life if you care.

I find clever, slow ways.

It's also, it's 1990.

I mean, we don't have social media and texting.

It's easier to get rid of people and I'm good at it.

And I'm alone.

And I have this dark light moment

and I realized that I've been alone for a while

and I'm always gonna be alone.

And the weird part is my drinking stops working.

Drinking has always medicated me effectively.

It's made me able to handle the discomfort

of my daily living and now it doesn't work.

And it's like being abandoned by a lover

that you never even thought once would abandon you.

Just like that shocking feeling of,

what do you mean you've left me?

You were never gonna leave me.

Like it's a crappy relationship,

but you were never gonna leave me.

And so I put up with it and now it doesn't work

and I can't drink to effect.

And I try a little bit of control drinking, which is bad.

And then Mardi Gras comes.

It's late February of 1990.

And I'm not, I'm a nice Jewish boy,

but I grew up in a really, really Catholic part

of the Chicago suburbs.

And everyone I know gives up stuff for Lent.

And so my clever intuitive leap is I'm gonna give up drinking

in any form of self-medication for Lent.

And so I do that.

I go through 40 days and 40 long nights of physical sobriety.

I get manic, but I stay sober.

It's funny to everyone.

This like nerdy Jewish kid is not drinking during Lent.

And through a series of lovely coincidences,

I wind up in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous

on Easter Sunday.

And I don't know that, I don't,

I'm too manic to focus on the speaker.

I don't remember.

I remember there was a speaker.

I remember the speaker was a woman,

but I don't remember really anything about what she said.

But somebody who I'd known from out and about

who I didn't know was sober grabbed me at the meeting

and took me out for brunch.

If you're new and you think that AA is a program

for you to show up and absorb knowledge, it's not.

It's an interactive program.

And my job, as I understand it, is to stay physically sober

and to try to give maximum service to God and God's kids.

And that person was fairly new and they saved my life

because they took me out and they told me a little bit

about their alcoholism and I identified.

And identification is very important in my experience,

but it's not enough.

I went to an Easter dinner up in Westchester County.

I'd been committed to being physically sober for Lent.

Easter had arrived, Lent was over.

I had half a glass of white wine

and half a glass of red wine.

And I did that on 40 days of physical sobriety.

And I still remember the feeling it was like,

it was like lighting kindling.

It was so clear to me what I needed to do next.

It was like, and by the way,

I feel like literally if it was like a sing along,

you guys could like say the words of the chorus with me.

But basically I needed to get to the train station.

I needed to get back into the city.

I needed to lose my friends.

I needed to get back to my apartment,

get out of my nice Easter clothing

and into my grungy downtown clothing.

I needed to scrape up whatever kind of money I could find.

And then I just needed to get downtown

and get drunk and stay drunk for as long as I could.

And it was not complicated.

Like it was very obvious,

even with 40 days of physical sobriety,

just after the equivalent of a glass of wine,

what I needed to do next.

And what I can tell you feeling that feeling

is standing at the train station, waiting for the train.

I felt profoundly exhausted

in a way that I can barely describe.

I'm a single dad.

I have three kids.

They're pretty much grown up now,

but like I've raised them as a single dad

and they're all less than two years apart.

So there was a period of time where I had three babies

under the age of two.

And that is obviously a kind of physically exhausting

experience that I've been through.

And I did want to like nap for about five years,

but the actual exhaustion of standing there

and knowing that I needed to get properly drunk

after being sober for awhile was worse.

It was more intense.

And the miracle is I made it back to my boyfriend

and I went to bed.

I don't know why it wasn't logical for me,

but I went to bed and the next day I turned myself back

into alcoholics and onerous.

And that became my sobriety date, April 16th of 1998.

I was not the happiest newcomer.

You know, I guess we all have a career in AA if we stay sober.

My career has been a very conventional AA career.

And I mean, it's a pleasure to be at Quality of Life.

Thank you, I just wanted to get that.

(laughing)

My name is the Pacific group.

My sponsor for 21 years was (indistinct)

He passed away during COVID in August of 20.

My sponsor now is Matt Johnson.

He's 48 or 49 years sober.

(indistinct)

I was secretary of the Pacific group.

I sponsor people.

I'm like a very conventional AA person.

I did not reek of like he's gonna be like, you know,

class president of alcoholics and onerous when I got here.

I was angry and disconnected and couldn't believe.

I just couldn't believe anything.

And except for one thing, it was not an important.

I knew that they were telling the truth.

I'm a bar drunk.

I hustle drinks because I always run out of money.

I bring as much money as I can.

I'll tell you, this is the kind of drunk I am,

if it's a thing you can relate.

I'm in New York when I'm at the end.

I put a bus joke in my pants when I go out.

And it's like a primitive alcoholic prayer.

I know that the money will be all gone.

I know there's no chance of any broke hat.

But I think maybe if I can hold on to this bus token,

I won't have to walk the 30 blocks back to my apartment,

you know, at two or three in the morning.

And I can never hold on to a bus token like that.

That is beyond my ability.

I will find some way to trade away from drinks

and I will hustle drinks.

And if any of you have spent time

in dive parks hustling drinks,

please know that if you tell me

that you don't understand the idea of taking an inventory,

I may laugh not super politely at you

because I know of no way to effectively hustle drinks

without doing a pretty crude inventory

of what I can sell and what I can't sell.

And that's my experience.

And so I know that you're telling the truth when I get here.

And it's the most amazing thing.

I believe this to this day, 32 years later,

I think that in AA, we alcoholics

have an almost magical ability to know

when people are telling us the truth

and when they're laying it on too thick.

I also think sometimes we love it

when people lay it on too thick.

They're telling us what we wanna hear,

but I really feel like we know

when people are being honest with each other

and when we're not being honest with each other.

And I would go to those meetings

and I would hear these crazy New Yorkers

get up and tell the truth.

And again, I just don't come from a background

where people tell the truth.

It's just not my story.

And I was so fascinated.

And I think honestly, more than any,

I think it was sort of that and the cookies

that kept me coming back in the first few weeks.

And I will tell you this, it wasn't that I belonged.

I did not understand immediately

that I belong in alcoholics and alcoholics.

I knew drinking hadn't worked,

but I couldn't figure out what it meant to me in alcoholics.

Here's when I figured out what it meant to me in alcoholics.

When I was a few months sober,

I found it to be a surprise that I was physically sober

and getting more active in AA,

having regular meetings, having commitments,

and I was getting worse.

I was clearly getting worse.

And I knew I was getting worse 'cause I had a bite,

not like a cool of room for a bike, but like a dun, dun, dun,

dun, dun, dun, like a- (all laughing)

Victorine Manhattan on.

And I found that I was taking my bike later and later

and I had more sketchy neighborhoods.

And that's a pretty clear indication

that I was not exactly heading off path to success.

And I couldn't figure it out because I'm sober.

I'm physically sober and I'm showing up at meetings

and I'm fellowshipping and I'm getting worse.

And I did something that I would recommend to anybody.

And it was very hard character.

Here's what I like to do with a problem.

If I have a problem,

I like to go off on my own and solve my problem.

And then I like to sort of put it in a package

and maybe like wrap it with paper and put it on a bow on it

and show you how I solved my problem.

What I really don't wanna do is be vulnerable.

And in the middle of my problem,

acknowledge that I have a problem.

That seems like a bad idea.

And for some reason on a Sunday night, I raised my hand

and I admitted that I was getting worse.

And I described it a little bit.

And that allowed God to work through another alcoholic.

And somebody called me up and they said, "I believe you.

I believe that you're not getting better.

You're not working your steps."

And the person sort of ordered me to get a big book.

I had a big book.

'Cause you know, you go to AA, you get a big book.

I didn't really do much with it, but I had it.

And the person didn't like explain to me how to open the book

and how to find, how to write an inventory.

And that was the inventory.

The person who called me was the vixen on a sofa.

She was really, really hot

and had fantastic boobs.

And I don't care if you're gay or straight.

There's power there.

I thought I was going to get a celebrity friend.

It was the stupidest reason I've ever heard

of running an inventory.

I didn't believe in the process.

I didn't believe that I was really

like an alcoholic like you.

But I believe that I might get like a cool friend

if I did what she told me.

And I wrote my inventory and I read it.

And that was the gift of the fistic for me.

More than anything,

somewhere there in reading the fistic I understood

in a way that I hadn't before,

that I drink like you and I think like you

and I'll react like you.

And shortly after I read my fistic,

I had an understanding, something shifted in me.

And I understood that I had my seat in alcoholics.

Up until that point,

I thought you were very nice earnest people

who told heavy stories truthfully,

but I really believe that I was auditing your class

and that if the real alcoholics showed up

and they ran out of seats 'cause you were very polite,

you would come to me politely and go,

"Alan, it's been really nice having you here,

"but you're not really a part of this.

"We need the seat for a real member."

And then I did my fistic and I understood

that I earned my seat and I own my seat.

And that's not gone away.

I moved out here in '93.

I've been out here for coming up on 30 years

and I love California serenity.

I wanna also say I didn't love it when I first got here.

It was too organized, you had too many traditions

and things and people, names that,

no one gave you a cheat sheet of the names.

You were supposed to know these people, blah, blah, blah.

And now I love it.

And by which I say, for many of us,

if we stay sober long enough,

we're gonna wind up somewhere else.

And I think my experience is actually fairly common

that as much as I could take inventory

of where I got sober, the moment I left it,

it was perfect and everything else fell short.

And it took me a while to understand how great we have it

here in Los Angeles.

I feel like we have wonderful, wonderful recovery

and wonderful meetings.

And it's just been a real blessing.

I got sober in 1990 in the, here's what I'll say,

this recent experience we've all been going through,

it's not my first pandemic in sobriety.

When I got sober, AIDS was really active in New York

and to my great shame, I was trying so many really noble

people who were trying so hard to be sober and stay alive

and they were failing.

And I couldn't care less about being alive.

And I was healthy as an ox.

I didn't have it, don't have it.

I knew they were better than I was.

I would have fought with you if you had said

that AIDS was like a judgment or like this,

but I treated it like it was a judgment.

I treated it like, how could I not have it?

'Cause I'm so bad and they're so good.

And it took me a long time to work through that.

And it took me a long time, frankly mostly just by learning

that in A, I can be of service to other people.

I don't need to figure it all out, I just need to be helpful

and a lot of things sort of themselves out.

But what I really came to believe was that I was gonna have

a very small life, that I was just gonna be like a noble

example of suffering.

And there are people in AA who like, they tell great, funny

stories about life not amounting to much.

And that was what I was gonna aspire to.

Here's what I wanna tell you if you're new.

We don't get to pick in my experience, the lives that we get

in AA, God, higher power, whatever it is, something bigger

than us sort of maps the course of our lives.

And for all of my determination to be a brilliant example

of cleverly and gracefully like living a very small life,

God has seen fit to give me a very big life.

I got these children, they're mine.

And I've raised a family in sobriety and my son turned 18

in March and he's going off to college in August.

And it's not even just that, I've been in the Pacific group

the whole time, there are people who came to the baby show

who now are like watching my son go off to college.

It is my victory to a certain degree, but it's really,

it's like my home group's victory.

I've gotten to be a part of something amazing.

I started a company and I don't get to have a story

about how it failed and like, you know, how funny I am.

Like it worked, I don't, it's crazy.

I've always loved the stories, the Clint Hodges stories

of like starting off in a garage

and winding up being a lawyer.

I never thought I would have that.

My kids going to deep, my daughters are at Marlboro.

Like I'm like a conventional boring middle-class,

middle-aged person having an amazing life in recovery.

I don't know how that happened.

I literally know that I didn't sign up for that.

I know what I signed up for.

It was much like smaller and I was going to show

how the steps could work through adversity.

And by the way, maybe that's the next chapter.

There's, I mean, it's a kind of a Ferris wheel

on my observation.

So if I come back in a year or two

maybe I'll have a great story about when I was flying high.

But, you know, and we laugh because it's funny

but I'll tell you something else.

You won't throw me away.

Like that's the amazing thing.

We can live whatever lives we're living in alcohol.

It's anonymous and we don't throw each other away.

That's beautiful.

That's not, in my observation, how a lot of life works.

I got involved in politics

because I was somebody who was always complaining

about politics and when I said, I've never run for office

but if you don't lie and get busted and stuff like that

for like a couple of decades

you become appointable to things.

And so I keep getting appointed to things

and I've been a planning commissioner

and I've been a pension fund trustee.

These are positions of trust in the community.

And in every situation, I just, I don't know

if I'll close this, but I'm close to closing.

I have maintained an element of surprise

because as a Midwesterner, I do it in a low deadpan way

but I tell the truth.

And in politics, literally to my observation

no one is ever expecting you to tell the truth.

So I will literally say exactly what I'm going to be doing

and then still surprise people when I do it

because they don't think like anyone would ever

actually really reveal what they are.

You've taught me.

You've taught me to just live life honestly

and to trust God, clean house, help others.

It is time for me to wrap up.

I occasionally have a very snappy closing.

I'm just not feeling it tonight.

- You've been a wonderful, listen, it's a weird day.

You know, I watched your friend bury a child today.

You know, I wish that I could tell you after 32 years

that I'm not capable of spending way too much time

thinking about little petty problems in my life

even though that I know how much I have to be grateful for

and how there are people having real problems in life.

It's just been a weird day

but it would have been a weird day no matter what.

And because I'm sober, I can be more helpful to my friend

because I'm sober.

I don't have to run away and go, sorry, you lost your kid.

But now I need to pretend that you don't exist

because it just hurts too much to be around you.

I'm very capable of that.

What I can do now is I can, you know, I can show up

and I can send a note and I can send a text

and next week I can send a meal over, you know,

like it's crappy and what a crappy thing to have happen.

But I also want to tell you like my son's going to college.

You know, I got some goats on my farm this week.

Like literally, I have that sense of euphemism.

As we said, you know, life's in session.

Next time, give me a cheat sheet, folks.

I'm really grateful for the opportunity to speak.

We've been a wonderful audience.

I hope we all wake up sober tomorrow and have a good day.

Thanks for listening.