(Transcribed from a tape)
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Here’s one of those lies that kills. ‘I used to drink, but I came to Alcoholics Anonymous, and they gave me a choice about whether I would drink or not. And I thought, gee, that looks really good on the days you don’t wanna drink. But what are you gonna do on the day you want to drink so bad your teeth are grinding, you think you’re gonna die if you don’t get it, and you don’t care what’s gonna happen when you do it. It’s like you know you’re an alcoholic and you just don’t give a shit anymore. You have created such chaos in every single area of your life that you’ll pay any price to get twenty minutes off from what is happening. That’s the day I don’t want to choose. I’ll take grace from God, thank you. I will take a daily reprieve contingent on my spiritual condition. I will take intervention from a Higher Power. It’s why I don’t keep liquor in my house. When I came, they said, ‘Powerless over alcohol’. Except when you cook with it? Somehow, we think, if we chew it, it doesn’t count. You know, I don’t know what that is. Funny group we are, though. But how can you cook without wine? Easy. Leave it out. Call a Seventh Day Adventist. They know how. They can cook without meat. They can cook without anything, you know. But I don’t have a choice about drinking today. I’m sober by the grace of God, by the grace of a Higher Power. Left to my own devices, I’d drink, so I’ve decided to put my drinking problem in the hands of another. I’ve put my drinking in the hands of God. He’s not thirsty.
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Have you ever had the compulsion to drink alcohol? The answer was ‘absolutely not’. One more way I’m not like those people in AA. I never had a compulsion to drink. I’m like two or three years sober and somebody in a meeting says, in order to have a compulsion to drink alcohol, you have to not drink it. He continued to explain that phrase, cos I’m like, I get the question-mark face. ‘What does he mean by that? This rings a bell.’ If every time you think, ‘Gee, I’d like a drink’, you take one ... or two, you will never experience a compulsion to drink. Long before you have a compulsion, it just sounds like a helluva good idea. Oh, we’re gonna mow the lawn, let’s have a couple of beers. OK!
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One of the deadliest lies I’ve ever heard in AA is, ‘If I can’t be happy, I might as well be drunk.’ If that is a condition of your sobriety, you will drink, you will drink. Because nobody’s happy all the time. It’s just not ... the universe wasn’t built that way. I don’t know why. They wouldn’t let me build it.
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Yet another thing that pisses me off in AA meetings. ‘Why, you’re right on schedule’. Let me tell you new people, you do not have to put up with that shit. You know, I fucking hate to be put in a box and categorised. And if I’m having a fucking problem, it is unique. It is special. It is mine. And you do not know where I am at. Save it for group therapy. What I’ve noticed is that that, to me, has been, like, a really discounting thing, that I hear happen a lot. Somebody says, ‘I’m having this experience’. Some old-timer, which is anybody with more time than you have, turns to you and asks, ‘How long have you been sober?’ Don’t answer that question, because, whatever the answer is, they’ll go. ‘Tsk, you’re right on schedule’. ‘Well, I have ninety days.’ ‘I have two years.’ ‘Well, it’s the second year surrender.’ ‘It’s the third year, whatever.’ ‘You’ve finally taken the Third Step, honey.’ Well, you know, you motherfucker, I took it seven fucking times. How do you know I didn’t take it? Does that piss anybody else off?
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When we come here, most of us are not adults. We’re just very tall. So, they tell me, ‘you have to grow up here.’ I said, ‘I’m looking for a role model.’ Show me an adult, here. I don’t see any. You come to AA, everyone knows you’re not an adult. They don’t expect you to act like an adult. They do expect you, a lot of times to, like, be quiet during the meeting so that it’s not disruptive to others. That’s, like, about as far as we go. And then, if anybody asks you to leave, after you leave, the entire group attacks the person who asked you to leave. ‘How dare you do that to a newcomer!’ ‘I AM RESPONSIBLE ...!’ Fine, you throw the asshole out. I go to a group on Friday nights that’s on Skid Row. They understand that the purpose of the meeting is for the alcoholic who still suffers, and sometimes that’s a sober person who brought their ass to a meeting. We’re entitled to have a meeting without disruption.
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I don’t like labels, as I said earlier, and I still don’t like them. I don’t like ‘adult children of alcoholics’. I don’t like ‘co-alcoholics’. I don’t like ‘co-dependency’. I don’t like ‘dysfunctional’. I don’t like none of that shit. If you’re fucked up, you’re fucked up, you know what I mean?
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Self-help books won’t work. ... All we get is more labels and more ability to say, ‘At least I’m not the only one.’ But we really don’t get too much about going forward. ... What we get there, I believe, in those books, and there’s nothing wrong with them, is an affirmation and an understanding that maybe we’re not alone, but we don’t really learn anything that we can go forward with. And that’s what Alcoholics Anonymous gives us. When I have learned these things about myself in therapy, I have understood there’s a spiritual base and a loving God, a foundation underneath me that allows me to accept this information and go forward.
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I heard a story in AA, thank God for meetings. A man said that he had chaired a meeting in Santa Clara County, and he had left that meeting, he had cleaned up and swept up and put the coffee pots away and went outside, to go to his car, and there was a man outside the meeting hall, with a baseball bat, who literally beat him to the ground with the baseball bat. He dragged himself to the car, got home, found out he really didn’t have any broken bones, patched himself together and went on. The next week, he went to the meeting, and he closed it up and he was going out to his car, and the man was there again, with the baseball bat, and beat him. He couldn’t figure out what was going on. This happened four weeks in a row. The fifth week, he went to the meeting, he cleaned up the meeting hall, he went outside, the man wasn’t there, so he sat down and waited for him.
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What I know today is that God’s love is perfect. It is unconditional. It is always available. All we have to do is see where it is. We seek to improve our conscious contact with God. Not to act better so God will notice us. God is watching. God doesn’t care what you’re doing. He just would like to notice you. He would like to be noticed by you. It isn’t a requirement. We can choose God. God cannot decide against us. It’s like a door with a knob on only one side, you know. We can open it or close it ourselves, but he doesn’t get a vote. Try and conceive of this. It is so simple. It is so simple. The only thing that changes when I believe in God is me. God’s power never changes. It’s like gravity. It either is, or it isn’t. Now, if I don’t believe in it, I’m going to hurt myself. If I do believe in it, there’s a real good chance I am not going to walk off a ten-storey building, you know. But the gravity is going to be the same whether I believe in gravity or not. Now, you want something to meditate on, if you can hold still that long? Think about that one, how many of us believe that God only has power in our life when we believe he does. Oh, that’s powerlessness on our part, right. ‘I’m powerless except I’m going to decide there’s a God, ha ha ha ha. And I’m going to let him handle these twelve things, and see how he does with them. If he does OK, I may give him two or three more. But then again, maybe not.’ ... The idea of creating a God of your own understanding. Substitute the word ‘limitations’. I mean, give yourself a God that’s as dumb as you are. It’s like, they take me, right, the sceptic of the universe, I’m to come in here and create a God that I can understand.
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