August 18

August 18 – AM

Page 5-6, Bill’s Story, Chapter 1

I woke up.  This had to be stopped.  I saw I could not take so much as one drink.  I was through forever.  Before then, I had written lots of sweet promises, but my wife happily observed that this time I meant business.  And so I did.

Shortly afterward I came home drunk.  There had been no fight.  Where had been my high resolve?  I simply didn’t know.  It hadn’t even come to mind.  Someone had pushed a drink my way, and I had taken it.  Was I crazy?  I began to wonder, for such an appalling lack of perspective seemed near being just that.

Renewing my resolve, I tried again.  Some time passed, and confidence began to be replaced by cocksureness.  I could laugh at the gin mills.  Now I had what it takes!  One day I walked into a cafe to telephone.  In no time I was beating on the bar asking myself how it happened.  As the whisky rose to my head I told myself I would manage better next time, but I might as well get good and drunk then.  And I did.

August 18 – PM

Page 33, More About Alcoholism, Chapter 3

This case contains a powerful lesson.  Most of us have believed that if we remained sober for a long stretch, we could thereafter drink normally.  But here is a man who at fifty-five years found he was just where he had left off at thirty.  We have seen the truth demonstrated again and again:  “Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic.”  Commencing to drink after a period of sobriety, we are in a short time as bad as ever.  If we are planning to stop drinking, there must be no reservation of any kind, nor any lurking notion that someday we will be immune to alcohol.

Young people may be encouraged by this man’s experience to think that they can stop, as he did, on their own will power.  We doubt if many of them can do it, because none will really want to stop, and hardly one of them, because of the peculiar mental twist already acquired, will find he can win out.  Several of our crowd, men of thirty or less, had been drinking only a few years, but they found themselves as helpless as those who had been drinking twenty years.