Hello and welcome to Sobercast, where we provide A.A. Speaker Meetings and workshops in podcast format.

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basket we hope you enjoyed the podcast have a great day charlie i'm an alcoholic i am terrified

um there are there are things that i don't do and one thing I don't do is I don't speak

last time I spoke was here and it was a long time ago I don't know five six years ago

and before that it was about 10 years before that and I don't even share up meetings but um you know I

when Jim told me I was a speaker it was like the worst thing I could imagine hearing I

I was really thrilled when Tom was up here and he said, hold on a second.

I said, oh, God, the speaker showed up.

Oh, don't die.

You really disappointed me, Don.

But, you know, one of the first things I had to learn in this program was that I had to be honest, and that was really hard because I've been lying and manipulating my whole life.

And it took two and a half years.

I relapsed over and over and over.

I guess I relapsed somewhere between 60 and 70 times in the first two and a half years between 1989 and 1992.

And I did get six months one time. But it's funny, the time I got six months was the time that uh i went out had a real bad

binge with uh alcohol and uh free base cocaine and i realized that i was going to die if i didn't stop

and uh so you know it was going to kill me. So since I wasn't going to use it anymore, I

couldn't do it. I would die. There was no reason to go to meetings. So I didn't go to meetings

for six months. And then things were pretty manageable manageable i was living in a condemned house so

we did have electric but there's no water heat and when we when it rained though the water went down the walls because the roof was in really bad shape and the breakers would flip.

So, you know, I was afraid the place was going to burn down.

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