January 6

January 6 – AM          Page 2, Bill’s Story, Chapter 1

      I took a night law course, and obtained employment as investigator for a surety company.  The drive for success was on.  I’d prove to the world I was important.  My work took me about Wall Street and little by little I became interested in the market.  Many people lost money—but some became very rich.  Why not I?  I studied economics and business as well as law.  Potential alcoholic that I was, I nearly failed my law course.  At one of the finals I was too drunk to think or write.  Though my drinking was not yet continuous, it disturbed my wife.  We had long talks when I would still her forebodings by telling her that men of genius conceived their best projects when drunk; that the most majestic constructions of philosophic thought were so derived.

January 6 – PM          Page 151, A Vision For You, Chapter 11

      FOR MOST normal folks, drinking means conviviality, companionship and colorful imagination.  It means release from care, boredom and worry.  It is joyous intimacy with friends and a feeling that life is good.  But not so with us in those last days of heavy drinking.  The old pleasures were gone.  They were but memories.  Never could we recapture the great moments of the past.  There was an insistent yearning to enjoy life as we once did and a heartbreaking obsession that some new miracle of control would enable us to do it.  There was always one more attempt—and one more failure.