Because our prison was so overpopulated, a third guy was added to our two-man cell. Imagine no room to walk, and the third inmate’s bed touching the toilet.

“This is hardcore AA!”

For 20 years I was a regular in jails, courtrooms and counselors’ offices. Most of the AA meetings I attended were mandatory.

I am now residing at a halfway house, my final step before freedom. I was imprisoned for 20 years.

Today I‘m trusted to bring an AA meeting into a maximum security correctional facility.

A while back, I got some unfortunate medical news and found myself uncharacteristically disconnected from my AA program. I just didn’t feel the same.

In 2019, when I was sober 18 months, I got my July Grapevine prison issue.

I started working for the Department of Corrections in February of 2004. I was 43.

I got sober in April of 2015. I had gone to rehab four years earlier, but I wasn’t ready to quit.

For a very long time in sobriety I was frustrated because I didn’t really understand Step Seven. I was getting resentful at God, so much so that he was showing up on my inventory.

When I came to AA I was utterly without resource. I had demoralized myself to the point where I hid, ashamed from God in all forms. I was also penniless.

Back in 1986, I was at my end, that jumping off place our Big Book talks about. Fortunately, my boss at the time took me into a back room and shared his story with me.

One morning in the fall of 1968, I woke up in an armchair in someone’s living room.

I woke up this morning bone-tired, worn thin from a week of racing toward fiscal year-end deadlines, averaging maybe three hours of sleep a night.

I came to with the sound of my own heartbeat pounding in my ears.

I often say I shouldn’t be here. Not in some dramatic, self-pitying way, but in the quiet recognition that alcoholism doesn’t run in my family.

Last weekend I had the opportunity to go fishing with four women AA friends. We had various sober times in the program, ranging from about four months to 34 years.

Before entering AA, I lived in depression and fear. In the last two years of my drinking I just wanted to die.

When I first heard about the upside-down triangle in AA, I didn’t fully grasp what it meant. I was new to general service, still figuring out acronyms like GSR and DCMC.

Recently, a longtime member of our AA community was hospitalized with dementia. His name isn’t Roger, but Roger is the name I will use.

The elevator doors opened to a magnificent and alluring display of booze. “Oh, no!” I gasped and promptly froze.

Today I went to a creek in the neighborhood I grew up in to complete my Sixth and Seventh Steps. There’s a small waterfall that empties into a wading pool.