Our behavior is as absurd and incomprehensible with respect to the first drink as that of an individual with a passion, say, for jay-walking. He gets a thrill out of skipping in front of fast-moving vehicles. He enjoys himself for a few years in spite of friendly warnings. Up to this point you would label him as a foolish chap having queer ideas of fun. Luck then deserts him and he is slightly injured several times in succession. You would expect him, if he were normal, to cut it out. Presently he is hit again and this time has a fractured skull. Within a week after leaving the hospital a fast-moving trolley car breaks his arm. He tells you he has decided to stop jay-walking for good, but in a few weeks he breaks both legs.
On through the years this conduct continues, accompanied by his continual promises to be careful or to keep off the streets altogether. Finally, he can no longer work, his wife gets a divorce and he is held up to ridicule. He tries every known means to get the jaywalking idea out of his head. He shuts himself up in an asylum, hoping to mend his ways. But the day he comes out he races in front of a fire engine, which breaks his back. Such a man would be crazy, wouldn't he?
You may think our illustration is too ridiculous. But is it? We, who have been through the wringer, have to admit if we substituted alcoholism for jay-walking, the illustration would fit exactly. However intelligent we may have been in other respects, where alcohol has been involved, we have been strangely insane. It's strong language but isn't it true?
Some of you are thinking: "Yes, what you tell is true, but it doesn't fully apply. We admit we have some of these symptoms, but we have not gone to the extremes you fellows did, nor are we likely to, for we understand ourselves so well after what you have told us that such things cannot happen again. We have not lost everything in life through drinking and we certainly do not intend to. Thanks for the information."
That may be true of certain nonalcoholic people who, though drinking foolishly and heavily at the present time, are able to stop or moderate, because their brains and bodies have not been damaged as ours were. But the actual or potential alcoholic, with hardly any exception, will be absolutely unable to stop drinking on the basis of self-knowledge. This is a point we wish to emphasize and re-emphasize, to smash home upon our alcoholic readers as it has been revealed to us out of bitter experience
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it's not the change that's painful, it's the resistance to change that is painful
deadly disease.thats the way isee it and u just reminded me of it and i never want to forget.Always a special treat to read your threads.............thanks
what stands out the most for me what I. Identafied with the most is that my intellegence was not and could not get or keep me sober my smarts solved a lot of other problems like how am I gonna pay the rent I just drank up my whole pay check. Well give the boys a round I can sleep out doors tonight. Strangely insane .in other part of this book that my sponsor tells me to study .it tells me that the insane idea always run out over sound reasoning.like buying a round of drinks knowing I am gonna be sleeping out doors because I drank up my pay check. I am the one who has been puzzling you.just another point in that book that proves that the problem centers in my mind.the point would be academic if I did not pick up the first drink which always set in motionthe well known stages of a spree.let's see my mind says go to the corner store get one no wait two quarts of beer .and that's all .this is what thought always came right after I told myself .Self you really did a number last night you know the whole pee pee pants and those were the light blue jeans that showed the whole wet down your whole leg to my shoes stain .and you were hitting on your dudes wife again! But those thoughts are readily pushes a side and replaced by go get one . And I did and I emerged two days later out of a black out on top of my wife and her not so happy to see me .I figure this out right when see hit me in the head with a lamp.remorseful four dollars left six smokes smashed in the pack and always four bic lighters? Never new how I ended up with them I just knew I was smarter than that . Ugh I am the jay walker .
