Sandy B. AA Male

**Sandy** (0:00)
Wow, hi everybody, my name is Sandy, and I'm an alcoholic. How y'all doing? My sobriety dates December 7th, 1964, and I got sober in Washington, DC at my home group, the Saturday Night Fever Group in Tampa, Florida.
And right now, my answering machine says, Hi, I'm Sandy. Sorry I'm not here. But several totally unacceptable things occurred in Cincinnati, Ohio.
And I'm up there changing them. I'll be back Sunday, so leave me a message.
And next week, it will be a different city that's on there, so we're not picking on Cincinnati. I want to start by just saying hi to my sponsor. I had the same sponsor for 42 years, two months, and two years. And he died this year, a few months ago. His name was Bill, and we had the greatest run together that you can imagine. All we did as he was getting near the end, we just celebrated all the fun we had and swapped stories. And it was just a joyful experience. And it was a very complete experience. And I hope you are just as blessed with that type of relationship with your sponsor, which starts out as that guide out of the murkiness. You haven't got a clue where you are going. And someone asked Bill one time, he said AA is kind of like the blind leading the blind. Because you guys are all drunks. And he said, no, it's the semi-blind leading the blind.
And what that meant was that as I grew over these 42 years, so did my sponsor.
He was working the path the same way that he taught me to work it. And so neither one of us was the same person as the day we met. And that is the wonderful, continuous process in Alcoholics Anonymous.
If you've had breakthroughs and you think it's exciting, like the first time you realize that you're an alcoholic and they really had the answer here, and you just go, Oh my God, this is so wonderful. And I feel welcome and all that. It never stops. It's one after another of discovering, discover, discover, discover. And you have no idea the magnificence of yourself. And as it is revealed, which it is, in the spiritual program, we don't learn anything, things are revealed. So there's no sense trying to know anything. When the time comes, I just thought you'd like this. And it arrives. And you suddenly look and go, Oh my God, this is amazing how I see the world now. So you can understand that the point of AA and why it's so unique is it changes our view of the world so there's nothing for alcohol to fix. And when there's nothing for alcohol to fix, it's pretty easy to not drink. Because we weren't drinking for the taste. We were drinking because we couldn't stand reality the way it was, and we were in a great deal of pain. And alcohol changed everything so that we were, it was very nice and pleasant to be alive in our own skin. And just not drinking doesn't help that. I tell people when you're new, you have this terrible situation. It's two horrible situations. One, you have learned that you're drinking is getting worse and worse and worse and worse. So that even you are being frightened by your own drinking. If you follow what I mean. You're not telling anybody. If somebody asks you, no, fine, fine, fine. But you know, please, I never had one of those before. What is that? Seizure. Gee, this is almost serious.
But secretly, you know, and you're going, gee, whiz. If I keep drinking, this is, oh, ooh. So there's the one. So then somebody suggests AA, and they go, what are you doing AA? You just don't drink a day at a time. So that means, choice number two, you're sober all the time.
24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 12 months a year, you are in your own sober skin, which you are very familiar with, with no break, ever.
As we contemplate that, we consider going back, I wonder how bad the drink is going to get, because...
So that's the dilemma of every alcoholic, as they see it. Which is why when some tells them to stop drinking, they go, you don't understand, and they don't. They don't. They don't know what pain would be there, if we just stayed sober. So what does AA do? And that's why it's so important to understand that what AA does, it changes everything so that we're absolutely happy with not drinking. Something we never dreamed could happen. Inside our deepest selves, we go, yay, it's Saturday night and I won't be drinking, oh boy, oh boy. See, I mean, did you ever think you would be saying that to yourself? No. But that is a routine event in AA. Just so routine, we forget it's a miracle. We forget that there's no other way that that could have been caused in any fashion. There's no psychological process, there's no nothing that could ever have caused the world to be flipped over for you, the individual. And so, I don't know where I got going. I was talking about my sponsor and I start rambling off on, let's see, I'm going to really give you the short version of my story. I've told it so many times, just sick of it. It's a, it's a, the only thing that's good about it is I'm the star of the story.