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My name is Chris. I'm an alcoholic. My sobriety date is February 5, 1987. My home group is the West Portland Group in Portland, Oregon.

Very grateful to be sober and very grateful to be asked to do something like this.

I don't know if anybody will get anything out of anything I have to say, but I know

that whenever I do this, when I share honestly about myself, share my experiences with the idea

of maybe helping somebody else that I enlarge my spiritual life, and I come away with something.

So for that, I'm very, very grateful. Howard had asked me, he knew, I have a brother that just moved down here,

and I just bought a house up in Scottsdale.

He plays baseball and was down here for spring training.

And just bought a house in Scottsdale.

And some of you might have seen it.

It's kind of a tan stucco house.

But Howard asked if I would talk at his meeting, and so I'm glad to do that.

And keeping with the format, I was told to share a little bit of what it used to be

like and then spend the majority of my time on what happened and what it's like now.

What it used to be like, just to kind of sum up my drinking, I became a daily oblivion

drinker and the last two years of my drink. I drank for 11 years, for whatever reason, it progressed very rapidly.

I got to, I was a daily drinker my entire career.

My last two years, I was a daily oblivion drinker.

I was arrested 14 times for alcohol-related arrests.

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