Stephan B. AA Male

Stephen (0:00)

My name's Stephen, I'm an alcoholic. I want to say I love Alcoholics Anonymous. Everything I have worth having, I owe to Alcoholics Anonymous. It's extended my life, embedded my life in ways I could not have imagined when I first got here, you know.

I want to thank Neil for that generous introduction and for arranging, you know, my being here.

I do live in Los Angeles, and my son moved here about five years ago. And I'm here three or four times a year, you know, to spend time with him.

And when I'm visiting him, he's, you know, often he's at work or doing other things, and I have time to come to meetings. And often they're, you know, those noon meetings, and when I think of Neil, before I get started, I want to make this comment.

Neil reminds me of, like, one of those echoed tourists, you know, the people that go places and try to make them better, you know, take their free time and then go places and try to make it better. And I remember at the last noon meeting that we were, you know, in together. He raised his hand with an announcement, because he wanted us to try the coffee. He had put together a new custom blend, and he wanted some feedback. And I was just singing, in LA, we don't have custom blends, baby.

We don't have custom blends.

I think of Los Angeles, 10 million people. I didn't grow up in Los Angeles. I grew up in Louisiana. And the county that I grew up in had about 40,000 people.

And my hometown was a county seat. We call them parishes, but the county seat, Marksville, and it had maybe 5,000 to 10,000 people. And it's that way today. There's a water tower in a small town. And it says Marksville, where everybody is somebody. That's my first exposure to propaganda, because I don't think it was true. I don't think it was true.

But it's one of those small towns where most days are just like boring and drag on. But every now and again, something happens.

And I'll name three or four just to give you a reference how it's maybe a little different from everywhere else. There was a day in the 1940s when it actually rained fishes in Marksville. That's a phenomenal, hit ChatGPT after the meeting, and you'll be able to find it. And if, I don't know, some of you have seen that movie, Twelve Years a Slave, you know, that character that Brad Pitt played was a carpenter from Marksville. And the judge that that released Solomon Northrup was, you know, was at the courthouse in my home town, one of my mom's great uncles or something like that, a point of pride for her, that somebody she was connected with had, you know, had something to do with releasing the guy.

Some of you, not all of you, are going to remember Johnny Carson. Part of his stick sometimes was to read small town news, you know, and he caught us twice. Once when we elected our sheriff while he was doing time in his own jail. And as just a side note, he won in a landslide. All my family voted for him. And his motto was, I'm not in jail for something I did. I'm in jail for something I didn't do. His job, basically, but still.

And then the other time, the other thing was not as funny. That same water tower, as it turns out, was built just maybe a hundred, 150 feet off the corner of the Catholic Cemetery. And with the water tables and stuff like that, and maybe not the best filtration, there were some problems with the water there for a while. But we've, they've corrected it decades ago. It did have a peculiar smell, though, always. So that gives you a flavor. That's a little small town. Every now and again, something would happen. We'd make the news. Now, I didn't live in town. I lived two or three miles out of town. You know, some people call it a farm. Some people would call it a ranch. You know, we had hundreds of acres. We had row crops, you know, cotton, soybeans, and corn, and we also had livestock, you know, horses and cows, and that whole list of things that you have on a farm, like we had them all, you know, we had them all. And so, my grandmother, so most people today live in a nuclear family. The way I think about it, we lived in, it was almost like more of a clan. You know, my grandmother lived in the big house, and her two sons built on either side of her, you know, on the front of the property. And we were back and forth to each other's house all the time. Like, so that's how it was. My parents desperately wanted to have children, and they had my brother and I, and they centered their life around their kids. You know, they were very social people.