I'm here today because I was asked to come here and since I owe my life to you I'll do absolutely anything that Alcoholics Anonymous asked me to do. That's carried me down some funny paths but I love it. Let me first of all share with you the miracle of my life. I haven't had a drink of alcohol today and there is no place on this planet that I would rather be in this room right now. And there are no people I would rather be with.

than you and there is nobody that has ever been born or ever will be born that I would rather be than me. And that's the by God miracle. I spent most of my life trying to be anywhere but where I was and I never did like the people I ran around with and every time I looked at me I found nothing so I tried to be anybody but who I was. Everything I know I've learned since I got here I had a marvelous sponsor.

Early on after he'd convinced me that my very best thinking had brought me to my third century so I better quit. He suggested that I forget everything that I thought I knew about anything particularly about God. He said if you knew anything at all you would not be here. He told me that even the truth wouldn't work for me because I'm warped. I'm rubber-minded. You give me the truth and I put it in my head and my ego works with you.

So that I can use it. By God's grace I was able to do that. Christmas early in 1967 is the one that I like to remember because it it finishes.

I'm a popular about ten centuries only because that's where I've been but please don't think that I was a big-time gangster. I was a petty thief and a crook.

And my first better history charge I went to prison because I got a lot.

Yeah, and the federal law gets getting lost if you're in the Navy. And I was.

I was baffled from the very beginning because it isn't like that and you helped me understand the sickness that I had.

She loved me. I really did. I ran away and joined the Navy because Denver got too hot for me.

And when I got there I loved it. I like being at sea or at the comradery or at the beginning end.

But I loved it. But they kept giving me these 24-hour passes and I kept coming back days later.

And it baffled them and it baffled me. And now I met you and you told me what's wrong and why that happened.

You see, I suffered from the disease of alcoholism which means that I have an allergy to alcohol.

If I got an allergy to tomatoes and I ate tomatoes, I'd break out with it.

I have an allergy to alcohol. If I take a drink of alcohol into my system, I break out with a treatment maybe it's for another drink alcohol.

And in those days, the minute I started drinking, I started to try to find it. It was out there somewhere.

And I couldn't go back to that ship until whatever was going on was over.

And the last time it was a 23-day trip and they moved the ship to Korea and I ended up in the federal penitentiary in Japan.

And threw some rain breaks and I came out of there just madder than hell.

And truly baffled. I was 19 and my life was over. I had failed and failed and failed.

But the worst of it was that all of you just drank for now is the same number of reasons that I did.

I drank the kill pain. I drank the feel pain. I drank to be somebody. I drank to be nobody.

I drank for all those reasons. The more horrible of all, there were days I drank because I had to drink.

And while I was 19 years old, just drinking alcohol didn't do for me what I needed to have done.

It didn't change me. It didn't make me bigger or smaller, faster, slower. It just got me drunk.

And I have never liked being drunk. When I get drunk, I puke. And I fall down and I make funny noises.

And I never thought that was fun. I liked everything in between the first drink and doing that.

But that could happen. For years I drank after that.

And I also did other things because they took me to a doctor at that time to work on my head because we all knew I was crazy.

And they gave me methamphetamine, hydrochloride, feed, and I was home free.

So for the number of years after that, I drank alcohol, took speed.

They'd asked, did whatever on any given day gave me five minutes of the edge that I had to have.

And when that quit working, I just did it anyway.

So I came to Christmas week of 1967 out of my second century in desperate conditions because nothing worked anymore.

And that's scary as hell. Nothing worked anymore.

I couldn't get out of bed that week until my connection got there to give me effect so I could get the straight

and get there. I used rum and wine at that time to cut all those rough edges and get us both together.

And I love that week because that's the week that I finally got to see me.

And I understand that we had somebody new here tonight and I want to welcome you to Alcoholics and Alcoholics.

And I hope to hell if you're new here today, that you've had this week.

I've parted myself on never turning on young people.

My connection was 16 years old. I had turned him on and I was using him as a runner because I couldn't do it.

And I saw that. The reasons I still don't understand my two little boys were still in my custody.

They kept taking him away and giving him back and taking away and giving him back.

And we were living at a $40 a month basement apartment underneath the lady who had cat.

I'm not talking about a couple final caddies. This lady had cat.

And the other's been around cat. Her place was cleaner than mine was. And I saw that.

When I was 14 years old they showed us a movie about junkies.

And then I didn't want to be one of them. Ever.

So I've never had hell.

Because my key alcoholics mindset only hell would make junkies.

So if I don't take it I won't be done.

I woke up one morning that week and looked at the guy that was with me and I was petrified.

I said, man, we're in a junkie pad. And it was my house.

If you've been on the road you know that there's money laying in the streets of America.

It's not enough to make you rich, but it's there.

It's been on an old long enough snow. All you have to do is walk around and look down long enough.

And there's the bucks out there.

On Christmas day, the kid and I went down to see my mom and dad.

And along the way we found a dollar in the snow.

He wouldn't live on a walk there and we didn't have any money.

So that dollar by our Christmas tree.

If you're planning to go out and be a maniac against,

on Christmas day on any laps that I've ever run across,

about 4.30 in the afternoon you can buy any tree they got for dollar.

That's where we got our tree.

So I bought the biggest one in the head.

We lived in a little bitty room, so you know.

The thing that broke me, thank God,

that we got to my folks' house and my dad met us at the door and he said,

I'm sorry, you can't come in.

Your mother says she can't stand watching you die anymore.

Now I stopped for years. That was the first time that it happened.

But as my memory begins to return,

there were other times that dad had to sneak us in

because mom didn't want me wrong.

But that's the day that I saw what I had done to my mother.

And then he snuck us in anyway.

And I got hit with what I'd done to my father.

He jeopardized his home on Christmas day to see us.

And God Almighty I saw what I'd done to my kids.

And since my older boy saw that everybody lived on the road.

We did. And everybody we knew did.

And some somebody told him about school.

And I had an unmanageable child. He wanted to go to school.

You can't go to school along the road.

The fed busted me because that time he got to go to school.

But I saw what I had done to my family.

My dreams were dead. Their dreams were dead.

And we grew up with some pretty good dreams, man, we're not.

They were dead.

I think I took an inventory that day because I took an honest square look at Dom.

And what I saw made me so sick that I laid down and took a massive overdose of speed, drank everything in the house.

And chose to die rather than live one more day like that.

And if you're new here today, thanks about that.

Rather than be that person one more day, I chose to die.

That's sick as hell, but that's surrender.

That's the question.

And I tell you about the power of God from this point, because that's what I've been experiencing ever since.

I was really upset in the morning because the police came to arrest me.

And that's a hell of a deal to run into after you just killed yourself.

They had nine charges this time and they were talking three years to life on the first one.

With the promise that if I beat them on that one, they'd bring them one at a time and time me up in the Denver County jail forever rather than put me back on the street.

I was really upset with me.

And I laid there for five months and I'm convinced that just because I was going to do anything rather than be that again, things began to happen in me.

Now first of all, jail was pretty nifty the first few days as tired as I was.

If you hadn't been there yet and getting ready to go drank can plan to go there, the rules are these.

I couldn't get up to 100 bucks for the bondsmen to get out.

And neither could any of the other guys that were talking to her, they'd have been out.

So when we got out, we were going to go into the mountains of Colorado with coolers beer and dark Bacardi round, and little grass, and little dope, and we're going to get home.

And we're going to get out.

And it was always the same.

We're a big shot.

I couldn't get up to 100 bucks for the bondsmen to get out.

And neither could any of the other guys that were talking to her, they'd have been out.

And dark Bacardi round, and little grass, and little dope, and we're going to get high.

And that was it.

And I can remember saying that.

And I can also remember that didn't feel like that here anymore.

I didn't want to do that.

You know how I'm grateful to you?

I didn't know any better.

Until you came and told me that you don't have to live like that.

Isn't that weird?

The whole world comes at me and says, can't you see what you're doing to your family?

You know, I see it so well I have to go get drunk.

Yeah, I see that.

Can't you see what you're doing to your life?

Yeah, I can see that.

You're the only ones that said, hey, you don't have to drink anymore.

Ever.

If you're an alcoholic, who's just the thing it is to be drunk, you don't ever have to drink again.

And I can hear it because of the people that were saying it to me.

Okay?

You found me in the Colorado State Penitentiary Fish Tank.

And I wasn't supposed to be there.

Let me tell you a little about power.

The state and the feds, I was the fed four years at that time because I was on federal parole

when this happened.

They got together and they decided I was sick.

I was too sick.

And they all thought I was a drug addict.

So they conspired and got together and said, if you will plead guilty to this charge,

we'll drop the rest, give you a little sentence to spend it and send you to Fort Worth

to the federal drug hospital.

Now, two things happened to me when they offered me that deal.

And to this day, they're still doing me at work.

One side of me was wanting to go anywhere that there was help.

I was in desperate shape.

I couldn't live and I couldn't die.

And here I was living and breathing.

I'd have gone anywhere because I wasn't afraid of going to prison.

I knew that what they were talking about is putting me back out again in a very short period of time.

The other side of me said, if you put me in a hospital where there are books and doctors,

I'll be on the street in six months.

My whole life has been sitting quietly while you tell me who I am,

and then I play that back to you and tell you're happy with it and send me on my way.

I agreed.

The state agreed and the feds agreed.

If you know anything at all about power,

you know that I should have been in Fort Worth a week later.

And with later, I'm in the color of state's own intensity six tanks staying late a minute.

They said in the summer camp I signed up for work.

I truly believe that God knows that I've gone to Fort Worth.

I'd be dead today.

See, I'm not a drug addict.

I'm an alcoholic.

And they wouldn't have treated me right.

I got to where I had to be to hear what I had to hear.

And if you're new here today, I hope you've heard it.

I believe that any alcoholic anywhere going to that first meeting,

is in exactly the right place.

Hear exactly what they need to get them back to the second meeting.

When they were there exactly what they need to get into the third meeting,

and so on and so on, until something's clicked.

God, I love my early sponsors.

I believe in sponsorship.

If you'd put the book in my hand and said,

read this, I'd be dead.

I couldn't read it.

I couldn't put things together in a whole center.

But I had to kind of slide one of them left.

God bless you.

God, I'm Doc.

I'm an alcoholic.

That means that I'm policy or alcohol.

My life has become unmanageable.

And a very smart bastard who thinks he can still manage your lives,

look at the reward of state.

Just gave you for the messy job you've been doing.

The miracle of that is that I heard Doc.

The old guy, the guy in that fish tank didn't hear me.

I heard him.

They invited me to an A meeting when I came out of a fish tank.

They took the time to put a little slip in my brand new self

when they moved us over there, reminding me that that afternoon

there was an A meeting.

Now, it may not be important to you, but to go to that A meeting

we had to give up our yard privileges or our movie.

And on Saturday afternoon, while I was living, that was it.

And that's important when that's all there is.

And the movie doesn't even have to be good.

And here it was.

But I decided to go.

Now, at that time, this A meeting was part of what was known

as the 12 step study school.

In order to belong to the big group, which Matt on Friday night

where they let real people in from the outside,

you had to complete five weekends of the 12 step study school.

That's the first guy when we got up there.

Hold this as a little group.

Then for the next five weeks up here, you have nothing to say.

If you knew anything, you wouldn't be here.

We suggested you listen.

And it began to share powerlessness.

The first step, the unmanageability of our lives.

And they shared this, there were three of them,

and they shared by sharing themselves with us.

I'll never forget Bruce, God bless you.

He hit me with something that day.

I've always screamed out and nobody understands me.

Nobody thinks like I think.

Nobody ever felt this way.

Bruce talked about, he was in there for a natural life

because he killed some people in a shootout one afternoon.

And downtown Denver, when he was 17 years old,

because he woke up that morning with the feeling

that nobody on this planet cared whether he lived or died.

And it made him so upset that he started drinking.

And instead of killing the pain that day,

he got him involved in it.

And downtown he killed some people.

I wasn't the kind of gangster that could run off

with a pistol in my hand.

I'm a sneak.

But I had wakened in the morning knowing that nobody cared

whether I lived or died, tried to kill the pain

and got involved in it, did an old bizarre thing.

So I heard him.

One of my other sponsors was this,

Tell us in Guam.

God bless him.

If you was asking movies about Tony's fire,

Phil would be the cadence.

Phil was the most gentle human being I've ever met.

But when Phil drank, he liked to show things out of women.

And it was usually people.

And it wasn't always on the first or second goal.

And they were all from that at hand, too.

Now Phil had been sober for seven years in that planet country

when I was his first business.

And that sweet, gentle, loving man let me know

I lived on the fourth tier.

And I was going to say sober real.

He wasn't living on me.

But Phil talks about the program,

and I've never met a man who loves his family more.

But he would stand behind that podium and in that school,

and he would talk to me about how he worked this program for Phil,

not his wife and not his kid.

So I've been trying, I've tried several times to clean up for them.

It worked.

He helped me to understand that if I don't do it for me,

I don't have them.

That's all.

Bruce told me the most important thing in the second step for me

was the word restore.

He said it indicates that you weren't always a raising maniac.

There was a time in your life when you were saying.

We will assume, he said, that you went insane about three seconds after birth

so we don't have to track it too far.

Because this isn't therapy.

But that sent a little promise.

God can restore me to a former state and I get to start all over.

Because I was terrified that it wasn't for being insane.

I knew I was insane.

On paper, they had me as a psychopath and associate pass type two.

And all I know today about either of those is that they're both untreatable.

That's why you don't send a psychopath to the hospital.

You send them to prison because you can't help.

And I was terrified of having to get sane in the only way I knew

which was to spend the rest of my life trying to unravel

who had not been possible unravels in 32 years.

He said we don't do it that way.

He said, you're not clinically insane anyway.

You have all the attention.

My God, you behave like a maniac.

He showed me that I suffer from alcoholic insanity.

And in our big book there's a definition of that that's so simple

even in my sixth state I could grasp it.

In the story about a young car salesman who's out one afternoon

because he'd been sober a while and eating.

He could have an ounce of whiskey in his milk.

And he says whatever the precise definition is,

we call that plain insanity.

The last is the portion in the ability to make straight.

That's the wrong with me.

If one will take care.

Two jobs.

Two wives.

God's on that.

I did that sober.

And I'm rubber-minded.

I can't take straight.

That's the second part of my disease.

If I never take alcohol into my system,

I will never have that insane craving for more alcohol.

But I have a mind that either cannot or will not,

or for reasons that I don't even understand,

on certain days can't remember that or will trick me

or will give me the obsessive need to have a drink.

And I'm powerless over that mind.

That's been my biggest fear anyway.

I've known that.

But I'm powerless over my mind.

And if there is no power,

honors, no human power,

be in me or outside of me among you even.

But on the day when that peace is missing,

cat function.

When I get into thinking about a drink,

beyond my capacity, nothing can stop me.

I must find a power greater than myself,

and it must be a spiritual power.

Now, that scared me a little bit.

You know, I don't beat the death.

But I still had one reservation about spiritual things,

because I tried most of them.

I was truly convinced that if I surrendered my life to God

and decided to do his work,

this was for me to go to the corner of Colfax

and Broadway in Denver and hand out watch our magazines

and ask perfect strangers that you've been saved by.

And even in that state, I wasn't ready for that.

You know why to say that?

I saw a guy doing that.

And they helped remind me.

He's already got somebody down there doing that.

He don't need you to do it.

I became willing that if that is what he wants for me,

I will do that with great joy.

If you're new here today and you're concerned

that you may not be able to take these steps right,

quit wearing a gun, because you won't.

There's no way in the world any alcoholic coming in here

is going to do this right.

And there's no way any alcoholic coming here

who tries is going to do this wrong either.

But there is a best way.

If you want maximum results,

let me suggest that you do it the way that was shared with us

in the book called Alcoholics Anonymous.

Death by Death Direction, which is what I needed.

I started hanging around because there were some things

that you had that I wanted.

Bruce had something I wanted real bad.

He got in and out of his cell any damn time he wanted.

And his back was me because I sure did.

Every time I've been locked up, I've arranged it

so that I got to be chair clerk because I don't like being locked up.

And the chair clerk gets the door tripped.

I wonder what he had.

He had something else that I wanted.

He told me that it was possible for him to thank one thought at a time.

But God did I want that.

It was noisy up here.

You see, being nobody,

I had taken on the character of every human being

I'd ever seen or met or read about,

and it was noisy up here.

I tried for years to get something to hook up right.

And he said he could thank one thought at a time he had me hooked.

I want to know how you do that.

I can tell you today that it is possible

at times for me to thank one thought at a time.

And there are blessed moments in my life

when I sit quietly somewhere, I don't think at all.

I'm beginning to be a little bit unsociable again,

because I like that so much that I just spent the rest of my life

sitting quietly somewhere, making nothing at all.

I took the third step because I wanted to be instantly,

saintly and saved and quiet.

Now I'm an alcoholic.

If it goes boom, it's real to me, and if it doesn't, it is.

And I took that third step and had the worst experience

that I've ever had in my life, because nothing happened.

Good or bad, nothing happened.

And that scared me there.

And I went off to my sponsor because I'd learned by then

that you've got to sponsor and suggest you do something,

and you do it, and you don't get to resolve,

so think you ought to get your bit there.

I did.

And he said, you done me?

He gave me back my name.

He took me from 38, 984 to dummy.

He said, you'd be grateful that you didn't have a flash of life.

He killed you all your life.

And then he did the thing that alcoholic synonymous

does better than anybody.

Each one of us has a lot of a certain amount of time,

and that's it.

He took some of his time, which I know is precious to him,

and he gave it to me as he shared what he had found.

And I knew he didn't tell him the truth because this guy was the guy that had killed people,

and I could look in his eyes and say he couldn't kill anybody.

He said, you know, God probably knows that you can't stand one more big shock anyway.

And he'd probably come to you like he came to me,

and he talked about this gentle, unfolding awakening and taking place.

I wanted them.

I said, how will I make it real?

And he sent me off to do an inventory.

He said, God will reveal himself to you, and you reveal yourself to you.

Until I was later when I finished it, he came back to an offense that he destroyed me.

He said, you wrote that to impress me.

That's garbage.

Get away from me.

I was the first time in my life I had risked being honest to belong.

He told me he was garbage.

And I ran off quickly and took that fist up with another fellow that by God I knew would listen.

And I had one of those awakenings at the end of that.

He spent that two hours.

Every time I faced something, he convinced me I wasn't all that bad.

He justified my behavior.

I lost away from there with a certain insurance knowledge that I was back in my trash.

I spent my whole life picking people to justify my behavior to me.

And if I had kept doing that, I was a dead man.

I called out a spiritual awakening because I'm convinced any time any alcoholic has any comprehension

of truth that's a spiritual awakening.

And I was frightened because I knew I'm doomed.

So I went back and I did some more crying.

And then I tried to do this thing the way they had been showing us in the school on the way the big book shows.

If you don't want to know the truth with God's sake, don't do that.

We've got a whole system that'll get the truth after before you know it's there.

I'm going to share one little piece of you because I love the process.

1936 federal narcotics agents came into my house.

They do not come gently.

They literally came through the front door and the back door and the side window.

It knocked me to the ground and handcuffed me and stood on my neck.

A mother of your old son out on the street and his big cop put a gun to his head.

I went from resentment to hate about thirty seconds.

He was on my list when I finally made it.

It said what I was supposed to do is make a list of all the people I was mad at.

Or I had a grudge against him.

And I got he was there and there were 22 reasons I was mad at him.

And I figured this was all one short little bus and I got 22 reasons I'm mad at him.

I just cooked up a great scheme to get back at him earlier on.

Because I came out of that one and was free to avoid.

I suggested I take a look at what that was affecting in my life.

And it was everything.

And I tried very hard to take the attitude that that book suggests

that he write myself was perhaps firstly sick and I can grant that.

Takes next reason to do that kind of thing.

And I still hate it.

Then you split it. You got it.

Because the next sentence that I was doing it before I knew that I was doing it till the last.

Then I started to round the others and down and resolute were looked at my own self.

And it burst upon me that I had invited him into my house.

I just loved him go found Mexico and not paying the tax.

And that is illegal.

And any time I do anything I'll care again for whoever it is.

The last little people who do this kind of thing.

I am responsible for my own action.

My troubles truly were of my own making.

And I could finally, for the first time in my life, see that.

To this day as I look back over my life regularly.

I've never been in any kind of space that I didn't get to on my own.

I've never been drug off anywhere to get in trouble.

You open the door for me.

I don't know about fear.

I will start to live here because that's what I feel.

Fearless here for me.

Our main fears.

Cares.

God, I live with fear.

I can never tell you how I was afraid it just was.

The booze got me.

They made me make a lesson.

All fingers are afraid of me.

It became funny.

I'm afraid of being alone.

I'm afraid of doing this.

I'm afraid of living.

I'm afraid of dying.

I'm afraid to think.

I'm afraid to go insane.

I'm afraid to be sane.

I'm afraid of dogs, cats, people.

And it was through that pyramid, Troy, that I learned about God's mercy.

The rest of the world has to have always fancy tools to deal with fear.

You and I are tall and in my experience is true.

And what I'm afraid all I have to do is ask God to kindly remove that from me.

And direct my attention to what he wants me to be.

He obviously doesn't want me afraid.

And it was over.

I was two and a half years before I could take a sex inventory.

I had to buy my haters and shop speed and play one magazine.

Now I finally did take it.

It's sit on the back of that card.

You live out there for over a minute.

And I learned another thing about mercy.

Time healed me.

God used that two and a half years to heal a very sexually sick young man.

And after I was healed, then I could do and examine what I've been doing.

Tim was a big bucksumper and a stepped sponsor.

But I worry about becoming too technical because it's a spiritual exercise, not a technical exercise.

Without love and mercy, none of it would make any sense to me.

I was back to my cell after I finally finished a test after it.

It was the test that I had a magnificent experience.

I'm doing a long run on my life.

I've always felt alone.

The closest thing I ever got to is that dog who used to sit and listen to me and not talk back.

In the next of the first step, and I take the kid who's been in the program at the same time I had

because he said to somebody who won't be overly affected.

And he was crazy when I was.

He was not like he was able to bother with him.

He took that afternoon out of his life and sat and listened to me.

And did not justify anything.

He simply listened to me.

And somehow that afternoon, instead of being along, there became two people on the road.

It was me and there was Jim.

And I didn't understand it that day, but I understand it today.

I was alone because I had never ever.

It meant that any of you were real all by yourself.

It was me and who I needed you to be.

And I thought I was on this planet.

That day there was me and Jim.

And he was there all by himself.

He had nothing to do with me.

And I had not been alone since.

Even in my cell, too, that I'm now alone.

And I do love the cell, too.

I am in my evangelical stage about, yeah.

I love the cells, too.

I have to think that we'll suddenly get out of the chair and run out to save every alcoholic

on the planet.

I know they're okay.

There comes a time after you have waited until it's still a job.

When you can't sit still, you have to run around the world by me.

You don't have to get it.

Come here.

Come here.

Come there.

Do this.

Do that.

I ask God in his mercy to please not let the things that I hadn't found yet kill me before I get through him.

And I found some more yesterday.

And I'm still here.

I'm still sober.

We must be working.

I got free, locked up for the night, in the Colorado State Penitentiary, working on my eight steps.

My sponsor knew me pretty good.

He said, dummy, now we got all this done.

You know what you've done to all these people?

But you have no idea what that did to them.

So I want you to go back to yourself and take those names off of this list.

And I want you to add every other name you can thank them, because we're going to just assume that if you met and you heard them, somehow.

I want you to take those names and take each one for our separate sheet of paper,

then I want you to close your eyes and picture that person right in front of you.

And seeing if you can look them in the eye and say to them,

if I've done to your arm, will you please tell me what I have to do so that we can get the best of them?

And see if you can see a woman to do that with everybody.

There was no great way taken from me, but I was listed that night.

And set free.

Because I want to look anybody in the eye and say, if I have crossed you harm,

you tell me what I have to do so that you and I can get the book from now on here.

One of my biggest problems was that I was always either better than you, or worse than you were.

And how the hell you didn't talk to anybody in that state?

Now, they let me last up for another eight months because they didn't know I was free.

And about that time I found out there was a broom head that got him in and out of his cell.

And everybody.

She was 12th up and I was able to sit and get out.

The people in that kind of country so believed in this program,

that those who finished the 12th study school and wanted to talk that the new ones coming in

were allowed to get out of their cell.

It was free access to the cell.

I'll sit out on that series and talk about it to them.

And I found that out because I volunteered to dance.

I couldn't get in and out of my cell just like Bruce did.

They gave me my first service job at the end of the first week.

They gave me a big book.

They said, the next group of guys are here.

And I'm sure glad I had that big book.

Because this day I sponsored the same way.

If I sponsored you, you share it with my house at least once a week.

And we read that big book and do what it says.

I don't know any other way to do it.

I don't know what you do these things going over and over again.

I do because I believe that if I'm going to sponsor you,

I've got to be doing the same thing you're doing.

This can't stop.

I get all the stuff that I have to associate with.

I got sand.

God love you.

I can spend two hours telling you about my amends because that's where I came to life.

And I'm going to take a little time and tell you about amends

because it's so vile.

I damaged my family.

I damaged my children.

I damaged everybody I came and touched with.

But particularly the family.

After what I've done to my mother, there was no way I could just go to her and say,

I'm sorry, Mark.

I knew that.

That isn't what amends mean.

It means to change.

It's like restitution.

How the hell do you make restitution?

Well, they taught me.

After I had said, if I wanted you, what am I?

Will you please tell me what I'm supposed to do to get the books about?

I'm supposed to shut up and listen.

Why are you telling me?

I found a way to say that to my mother.

And she told me.

She said, I don't know.

I never wanted for you.

It was to be happy.

To want a ring of regular maintenance.

I'll show up, but my mother sounds happy.

It was six years before she thought I was going to say it's over.

She told me that.

But since I had no right to ever expect her to believe anything I had to say, that was

just fine.

You see, I wasn't saying so much for her.

I'm saying so much for me.

I'm making restitution for her.

She and I have a ball today.

We have a lot of fun.

How about my dad?

I think so.

I tried to be him.

My father has an IQ that cannot be major.

He lives in a 48 room house, but it'll stop.

And that's his mind.

I can't be that.

I live in a nine room house.

Okay.

Keep us open.

He taught me a very important thing about making him in.

I started to go over the list of things I had done to him.

And he said, please stop.

I know all that.

All you can do by telling me that is to hurt me again.

Let's you and I just go from here.

And when's the one from there?

We have a ball.

There's some direct things I have to do for him.

I know how much money I sold from him.

I don't.

He doesn't.

So once in a while I just go by.

It's one of all, but I don't give it to him.

Or buy him some taste or something.

And I sell him a walk.

I used to sell him a walk every time I'd leave money for two bucks.

Today I just go sell him a walk.

And if he needs a report done, I'll do that.

If he needs a report done, I'll do that.

If he needs a report done, I'll do that.

If he needs a report done, I'll do that.

Because I like spending time with my dad.

He is a kick.

Do you ever know who's been around a person who's got 48 room house full of stuff?

Who's gone?

How about the kid?

I drive my kids in and out of credit cards and foster homes and police stations.

And there's a damn thing in the world I can do to ever change the fact that I did that.

And I get some great damage to my children.

There came a time when I almost had to walk my whole day up.

Because he was running back out.

Long back out.

And he was in the violent behavior.

And he was hiding in our basement.

And destroying our homes.

And I'd spend a year and a half trying to rescue him.

We had eating genes, eating genes, blood tests, everything you can imagine.

And the day came I had to say,

there's nothing more I can do for you.

You're going to have to find your answer like I saw mine inside yourself.

And I asked him, did you still believe in God?

And he said, Dad, I don't think so.

But because you do, I will keep praying.

Do his pleasure.

He came up on our basement and said, Dad, let's shut my eyes.

And you know what I said it was, get a stranger I can make him.

And he doesn't see the world like the rest of him did.

And he and I began to understand each other,

because I was like that all my life.

We're strange and left out not seeing the world right.

And we got glasses on him.

And so he could see that the world the same way everybody else did.

And then he and I got to talk a lot.

All of a sudden he started talking with me.

He's a computer accountant with the Air Force now.

He was just fine.

My own son is going to walk through that door someday.

Again, he killed him too, trying to rescue him.

In fact, the last time I was at Scott's block we got a call in the middle of the night

that he had a head-on collision and fed himself and a bunch of other people in the hospital

told him, drunk out of his mind.

After a year and a half of that, and a lot of players, on a night with 17 below zero,

somehow I found the courage to say, you have to go now.

Not in the morning now.

You see, the unit in the structure of my family is more important than any individual in it.

I learned that it without unity none of us can make it.

And I had to put him up on the snow that night and trust that he was one of God's kids too

and would be walked over because he had to do what he had to do.

And if I kept last year in him, it was guaranteed he was dead.

But if I turned him over to God, at least there was one chance and a thousand he might make it.

Oh, he hated me for a while.

I was given the strength not to sing where he stayed.

I found out later he was sleeping on an old mattress and he was concerned.

He told me since to us the only thing I could have done.

We'll get along fine today.

He worked with me.

My grandson is a joy on my wife and my revenge on that young son.

He was beautiful.

As I began to make amends, I realized that I have what to do.

We have what to do.

You know what we belong to?

God, what we belong to.

Because of you, I've gotten to see a view of A that I never saw before.

This is the first generation on this earth that I know of where alcohols do not have to die alcohol at death.

And my research is taking me back to old Moa.

That's the case.

God gave him a pretty big job to do.

And the first thing he did was argue about how much snakebite medicine he got to take.

Sounds like land and plant a drink.

And as soon as they became so great, he stomped them in the wine.

He got along and dropped.

Beat his family up and threw them up.

That is not social drinking.

And from that doing to death.

So I drunk and stuck.

Woken up.

Drunken doctors got together.

Except for brief birth.

Alcoholics have died.

It's ugly death.

And your families have done the same.

We belong to the organization that God put here that knows they don't have to do that.

What a marvelous thing for a real kid like mine to know that the only value of this thing I have is my garbage.

You and I get to go into homes where people are dying and going crazy.

Because of this damn disease.

And our very presence in the willingness to share the wretchedness of our lives.

But God in God's hands means they don't have to do that.

Maybe that's nothing to belong to something like that.

That doesn't get enough in the morning going to do something.

That's just my need to have a cause.

And I never get to take the credit for it.

Because on my own the best I can do is get locked up in the penitentiary.

We got this book.

I got to see a picture of this book this year.

You think about it.

You think about it.

That's been on the market now in Ireland since 1939.

Now you get any other pieces of literature to just many alcoholics over that period of time.

At least one of us would be able to rewrite the damn thing and make it better.

And none of us would be able to do that.

Think about that book.

Here's me.

The drunken doctor.

I've been talking about this.

I cannot move this on a regular basis.

They got something going and they know it.

And our count knows it.

And one night the most count comes up to 40.

And that is so momentous that there are 40 people out of 200 million staying sober

that they say, we better write a book about that.

And I belong to that.

I don't know about how.

Some of the last time in the injection case you were in a room with this many alcoholics

for an hour.

Nobody interrupts.

Nobody hits anybody.

Nobody's done drunk.

That's a lot of power.

And I belong to that.

I have no way of telling you how much I love you.

Except to tell you how much I love you.

I will walk to the gates of hell with you if you want to get sober.

If you want to drink, you're going to have to go to hell on your own.

I'd smell that meat cooker.

I'm going to wrap this up.

When the gator was giving me.

I spent my whole life trying to find out who I was.

I had become like all lesions in the Bible.

Everybody I'd ever met.

And I was tired.

And then you came to me.

And the way you came to me was like the fellow that had seen the statue of David

for the first time.

I don't know if you've seen it or even pictures of it, but this thing breathed.

And you went to my client's home and he said, how long old did you do that?

And my client said, well, I took a box of stone and I took away everything that

looked like David.

And that's what I've got left.

That's this thing I belong to.

With God as a sculptor.

A new paper.

And the fellowship and the things we do as a chisel.

One day at a time we're chipping away.

Everything that doesn't look like dawn.

And so far this is where we got it.

Thank you.

Hey, hey, hey.

Don, thank you so much for sharing with us.

Now we'll learn.