Well, hello, everybody. Good evening. And I'm Craig. I'm an alcoholic. Good evening to y'all. Thanks for uh asking me. It's an honor. What an honor to be here. I asked Ron, I said, what made you ask me? He said, You want to hear my story? He said, Yes, I do. So I was I I have a sobriety date of February 7th of 2014. I have a sponsor. His name name is Derek P. Uh, he has a sponsor. Um Derek's sobriety date is May the 8th of 2013. I am his first sponsee. Um little history. I was born in Portland, Indiana. Uh I'm the youngest of six. I have four brothers and a sister. Uh my father was in the Air Force stationed in England, and my mother sailed over on the Queen Mary to marry him, and my oldest brother was born in England. He's 10 years older than me. He stopped drinking for a while, too. He had a problem with alcohol. Um I give you a little history. Some of this it had pertains to why I drank. The first three years I grew up in school in Carmel, Indiana, we lived on a uh a pig farm. Connor Prairie Farm was owned by Eli Lilly back in the 60s. And my dad was looking at the paper and he saw a job available, and so he applied for it and they hired him. And so the six of us kids moved to Carmel, Indiana over by Connor Prairie Museum. It's across the river from the museum, the farm operated there. Hybrid hogs was a big thing back in the 50s and 60s. And so I don't remember much about my father because he had an alcohol problem as well. At around four years old, I started asking, where's dad at? I haven't seen him, and my mom sat us down and she told us what happened. She said, Your father has a disease. It's called alcoholism, and he took his own life because of it. So at five, I grew up, youngest of six, with just mother taking care of us all. She joined Al Anon right after that because she thought, you know, she had uh thought that she caused this whole thing. She told him to leave if he couldn't stop drinking. And so Al-Anon helped us so much. It it they brought us food, a lot of food. They let us uh she they helped my mother in so many ways. And so, as a kid, if you think about it, I was seven, eight, nine years old learning the serenity prayer and the Lord's Prayer in Al-Anon meetings down in the basement of a church here on on uh Connor Street in Noblesville. I've been in Noblesville all my life, other than the first three years in Carmel. When we in Carmel is in third grade, was my first hurt in my heart when uh, as I said, we we grew up on a pig farm, and the kids are cruel, you know. Uh when the when the bus came to our house, the kids would all say it stonk really bad, you know, pig stink. It's a smell of money for the pig farmer, but so I got made fun of for that. And then we moved to Noblesville after third grade. In fourth grade, we were very poor. In fourth grade, I was in school, and I noticed that uh my shoestrings had uh were tied together, and my shoe shoes were hand-me-downs, and my clothes were hand-me-downs, and and the other kids, you know, they weren't like that. I grew up on a farm, so when we moved to a town, the town kids were way different than my uh my kids that I grew up with. So they made fun of us too because we were poor. And then the word also got out that uh we were a widowed family. And back in the 70s, you know, a widowed family was uh it was pointed out. And I heard the grown-ups pointing that out. The reason I'm bringing these things up is because these layers kept stacking up to me to where I got so worried about what other people thought of me. That's why I drank. I drank because I was scared about what other people other people thought of me. I wanted people to like me. A little liquid courage. And then uh my first experience with alcohol, I was 12 years old. If any of you know what slow gin is, we I drank a whole bottle of slow gin, threw up, thought I was throwing up blood, passed out, blacked out, didn't remember. My first blackout, 12 years old, right? So then I laid off of it for a while, I didn't like that alcohol. Uh went to a drive-in with our babysitter, and they gave me a beer. I drank that whole beer, same thing happened again, blacked out at 13 years old. I'm not gonna do a drunklog, but those were the first signs, you know, a 13-year-old blacking out. Fast forward after three driving while intoxicated and many public intoxications. Um we had children. We had one child that was uh four and one that was six when my practice wife and I would take turns getting drunk. One would go out, the other would stay home. Finally, the divorce came. Uh a couple of years later, I still drank and I met somebody at work, got a good job at Roche Diagnostics, Baringer Mannheim back then, and got a good job. I found a girlfriend, and things were going good, but we were still drinking heavily. And uh one day when uh I went to pick up the kids for visitation, I found out they were living in their car. And so uh the practice wife, she she let the kids live with us. She let them move in with us because she couldn't do it. And so right then, it was around 1992, I stopped drinking. But I dry stopped for quite a long time. Uh then some things started stacking up again on me. I don't suggest just stopping. Other things that happened, I had a lot of deaths in my family. I lost a son. My uh my oldest son died in a car crash uh at uh in 2009. He was 25. Many people don't know that he was at 0.46 alcohol level when when uh they did the autopsy on him. Even his little brother doesn't know that. And so those things started stacking up on me. I lost my mom when I was 31. All this time I wasn't drinking, but I wasn't in AA. My first AA meeting was on Maple Street. A lot of you don't rem don't even, probably not even sober long enough to or have there used to be a the first AA house was right across the street from Marathon or Clark's gas station. My first AA meeting, I was 17 years old. My mom asked me if I would go, and I went, but I was like this, didn't want anybody to see me going in, you know. And uh so I I continued to stay dry. As I said, I lost my son. All these things were stacking up, and something really minor caused me to break that dry after a couple of decades of not drinking, but without Alcoholics Anonymous. So eventually I drank again because I didn't have these tools. Um after that, it got out of hand, and um I did it for six months. I managed to relapse. I call it a relapse, but I never was truly sober because I didn't go through the steps. So I did that. I re I drank for six months and very few people knew it. A couple of bartenders. I managed to keep it from my wife for the whole six months, and it was hard, damn hard work, very hard work to stay away from her, not let her smell, you know. And one time she uh thought that I had she smelled something on me, and she said, Have you been using rubbing alcohol? I smell said, Yeah, that's it, that's what I was doing. Yeah, that was rubbing alcohol. So eventually she intervened. She would cleaned houses, and uh, I I had gotten hurt. I've had a spine issue, got a lot of surgeries, four or five spine neck surgeries, took some bicodins, but I didn't like that stuff. Alcohol was mine. Um so eventually she called our church pastor and she intervened. She caught me. She came back one morning about 10, and they come and made a pot of coffee and sobered me up and tried to find my hiding places, and they didn't find them, and we drank the pot of coffee, and they let me go, and I went, found my hiding place, and drank the rest of that vodka, and then I went to my counselor the next morning, and then I knew right where to go. I wanted to go to AA to find out what the heck was so bad after a couple of decades of not drinking that made me choose to drink again. And so for me, after we did our inventory, self-esteem was my biggest character trait. I call them character traits, I don't call them defects until they're defective in my life. Uh self-esteem. So I I was so worried about what other people thought of me, and one of the first meetings I heard was somebody say what other people think of me is none of my business. And I went, oh my god, that would be awesome if I could live that way. And so um we did that inventory, we finished the steps, and um I I text him every day still. I do a gratitude list now. Um but the you know six months of hiding, lying, cheating, stealing, just like Hiram said, you know, to get that drink and to hide that from everybody else. I thought it was smarter than everybody else. But the higher power, you know, you point the finger, the higher power's right up there looking down at me. I couldn't fool my God. I had God before I came to AA. God wasn't the issue. I put God on the shelf and let and drank and just let him stay there on the shelf. But when uh, you know, the gift of desperation was not so much getting intervened by my by my wife, and it wasn't the pastors, it was my son. I told my son that I was drinking again, the one that's still alive, the youngest one. And he said, Dad, you can do anything you want. You're an adult. He said, just don't put me through another death. That sunk in, and then uh I got to the point where vodka, I thought I was the first person to put vodka in a water bottle. I mentioned that at a meeting once, and they laughed just like you did. Um, it got so bad to where I was drinking moonshine without a chaser, and I started craving that moonshine. And then I was on my way home with a lot of moonshine in my belly, and I almost hit somebody on 37. So those two things, my son asking me not to put him through a death, and then coming close to death. Those two things, I couldn't put my son through another death. That was hard. Him losing his brother, his best friend. And I couldn't disrespect my wife that way either. She threatened me to leave. That's why I quit the first time. Second time, she intervened because she loves me. And uh I found people in AA that loved me until I could love myself. There's so many things I learned about AA. I didn't know that I didn't love myself, and I didn't know that I couldn't love anybody else. You people, there's a lot of people in this room right here that were at my very first meetings. I went to two meetings a day, every day for the first 90 days. Tough Love was my Wednesday night meeting. Sunday night I came in here for 90 days. Um the noon meeting was the one I got sober in. I forgot to mention my home group. Step Ashore, 9 a.m. is my home group, and it's a fantastic group. We're not a glum lot. We have a blast in there. Uh I go every Thursday. When uh back up to COVID, there's a gal named Melinda that was, she had just got out of rehab. She was chairing, she was reading the preamble, she was doing the secretary's report with her and two other people in there. I almost quit going during COVID. I almost thought I was healed. And I saw that girl doing all that work fresh out of Fairbanks. And so I started helping her because she needed to help. She was new. And so that group, that home group, has grown quite a bit since then. I mean, you go from we used to be in the old paneled room, if you know, from Suburban North Club to the bigger room because we got bigger with more people. And so it's it's a fantastic home group. Um I have done GSR for a year. I love Secretarian for the year. I love to uh sponsor, I got a few sponsees. I got one that's my very first sponsee, still sober. Uh me and a guy named New York Timmy. We s we kind of sponsor each other or just talk to each other. And then Derek, he he moved away, but I didn't fire him. He's asked me to get new sponsors, but I told him no. So uh can you tell your sponsor no? Um, but I guess uh to fast forward to now, the tools I have, like I say, what other people think of me is none of my business. That is so fantastic because I drank over that for so many years. And doing right things, I can if I'm doing the right thing, I can lay my head down at night and sleep fine. When I was in the grips, I couldn't sleep. I couldn't sleep, but I would black out, pass out, and not remember. And I got tired of that. Sick and tired of being sick and tired. Um I'll say that um losing my son was the the hardest thing I've ever been through. But uh after doing the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, I was a black and white guy. It was all black and white. I don't know if there's some few alcoholics that have had said the same thing. This is um I think of the steps as the black and white for all the gray errors. It's the process I go through. Anything that comes through my life now, I have the faith that I can go through those steps and practice these principles and I can make it through anything without at the thought of a drink. The desire has been removed. I can't say when. I would say in the first year the desire had been removed. The only time I think about it is when I go to meetings. But I think it's so important. I'm I'm thankful that this meeting was here for me. And I thank you all for loving me until I could love myself. And it's an honor to talk to when I see a new person at a meeting, I love to go and just shake their hand and just welcome them because somebody did that for me. It was a guy named Child of God. Some of you know him. He told me at my very first meeting, he said, take the steps, the elevator's broken, and I'm looking upstairs. Is there an upstairs to this place? I sat in the ejector's chair at my first meeting, you know, crying my eyes out. But um, everyone in the room was laughing and carrying on, having a good time. I still remember the first two people that I sat by in my first meeting, and I wanted what was in that room. I didn't want the life I had. I wanted what was in that room. Laughter and joy and true sobriety. You know, I used to hear people say when I first go to meetings, they they were grateful to be a recovering alcoholic. Now I'm grateful to be a recovering alcoholic. When I was uh in the grips, somebody told me one time he had he had nothing to fear, nothing to hide, nothing to prove. When I was drinking, I had something to prove. I went to an AA meeting at 11 years dry at Suburban North. And, you know, can you imagine? Some guy they'd never seen for 11 years all of a sudden walk in and won an 11-year coin. And then there was somebody that had a six-month birth birthday and they had a cake and punch and all that stuff. I don't blame them, you know. I wasn't sober then. I took the coin. I wound up giving that coin to Robert on his real sober 11th birthday. 11th year birthday. Now it's it's second home to me. I don't go as much as I used to. I used to go every day at 9 o'clock, every single day for a long, long time, for a couple, good couple of years. Now I go on Saturday. Saturday is a wonderful meeting. It's not my home group, but uh it's a second home group. My I asked my wife just the other day, I said, Do you notice, am I doing better now since I've been in A? Am I a little better? She said, You're a lot better in AM. Uh she may be watching right now, but uh I just can't thank you enough for it's an honor for you to ask me to do this. And I hope I didn't bore you all. I'm glad it's a uh you're not a glum lot either, and I'm glad I know most of you. Any questions?