Happy Joyous and Free episode 7 with Bob

SPEAKER_1 (0:14)

Good day, everybody, and welcome to Happy Joyous and Free. In the spirit of attraction, we present this week's speaker, and hope you find something in this message for your own recovery.

More information about us will be available after today's talk.

Bob (0:28)

Hello, everybody, my name is Bob, and I'm an alcoholic. And, yeah, Don's right. When I first came into the program, I weighed 149 pounds back in 1992 And then, because of this wonderful program, you know, you got to have a lot of this and that. They had a lot of eat and eats and things like that. And my home group, VA Grapevine Group, Saturday morning, 10 a.m., used to be the lead meat, but now it's a discussion group. We used to always have donuts and stuff around, you know, Krispy Kreme, Bustin, you know, and man, I became twice the man I used to be. You know, I wound up being 486 pounds. You know what I'm saying?

And thank God for this program. It taught me that, you know what, it was time for me to lose a couple of people.

Get them off my back and now, you know, lost over 250 pounds, you know, so yeah, that's what I said. And I remember asking my wife, which some of y'all know, she's in the program, I remember asking her, I said, honey, how did you do it? You know, she said, it just shows you how much I love you. And I said, boy, that wouldn't meet me. I would have said, I got me one, y'all.

SPEAKER_3 (1:52)

I shot it and stuffed it and put it on the wall, you know.

Bob (1:56)

That's what I would have said. But anyway, thank God for this program. Man, I tell you, I love coming over here and talking because I see so many people that I've known over the years, man. A lot of y'all have seen me come and go and come back. My nickname back in the day was The Gold Slipper. You know what, I took that as an honor and a privilege. I said, oh yeah, they recognize talent, you know.

But after I really got sober, I found out what they were really saying. I said, oh, them boogers, oh my God. But anyway, this thing right here, it's hard for me to get used to this because, you know, probably it's not guilty, your honor.

But yeah, my story is not different than anybody else's. I don't know what I'm going to talk about. It just comes out because the spirit will move me, you know what I'm saying. But some of y'all know, y'all don't hurt me. Some of y'all can probably tell my story. You don't hurt so much, you know. Because I grew up in a town, a hundred miles south of here called Louisville, Kentucky. You know, they used to call it Derby City. Now, they call it Bourbon City.

SPEAKER_4 (3:02)

I said, what the hell they done did now?

Bob (3:05)

But it's true, it was always Bourbon City, Derby City, you know, whatever. But I grew up in a home where my dad is a Southern Baptist minister, you know, and he's still preaching on Sundays to day. Old as he is, still driving his brand new Cadillac and all that, you know. And we went to church from sun up to sun down, seven days a week. Of course, you know, I hated it, you know what I'm saying?

I didn't want to do that. And I'm the oldest and only boy. I got, you know, my little sisters that came behind me, and I got my mom, the faithful wife, you know, and they was married for seven decades before my mom passed. You know what I'm saying?

And I remember looking at them people, I mean, good folk, you know, faithful wife, loving husband, great sisters, you know, they went to school and graduated and got good jobs and got married, had kids on homes and all that good stuff. And I remember looking at these people, I said, somebody picked up the wrong baby.

SPEAKER_3 (4:02)

Because I remember some neighbors of ours, I looked across the space, man, they were hell raisers.

Bob (4:09)

You know what I'm saying? They had about 10 or 12 barbecue grills going at the same time, loud music, you know, smoking weed and drinking and cussing, and having night fights and shoe house, and the police would be over there, and the blues would be all in there. And I used to say, that's my family.

And I remember talking to my sponsor about that. He said, yeah, that's alcoholism 101, you know. Wasn't happy with where I was at, who I was with, and why I was there. It just wasn't for me, you know. It was something about that, you know. And the day came that helped change a lot of that stuff, you know what I'm saying? Y'all know what I'm talking about, right? I had this problem and I needed a solution, and what happened was, I was in school and I got to go to this other school. Elementary, you got to go to junior high. I wanted to go to this one school where they was, you know, they was walking in the house like this, real calm and real quiet. But the school that I had to go to, they was doing all this other stuff, you know what I'm saying? And I had a lot of fear because that school was either you could fight real good or run real fast.