NEW RECOVERY GROUP

We have a new thirteen-step program to help you recover from the evil influences of too many twelve-step recovery group meetings:

1. Admit that you are powerless over twelve-step meetings — that your life has become unmanageable. Scream and pass out.

2. Come to believe that only Santa Claus can restore you to sanity.

3. Make a decision to give all of your problems to Santa Claus, as we understand Him.

4. Turn your will and your mind over to the care of Santa Claus. They were worthless anyway. Also stick him with those pesky problems.

5. Make a searching and fearless inventory of your garage. You won't believe the junk you will find in there.

6. Confess to everyone that you can't sing, you can't dance, your butt is too fat, and you have bad breath.

7. Make yourself entirely ready to have Santa Claus fix those defects.

8. Write a letter to Santa Claus, humbly begging him to remove all of your shortcomings.

9. Make a list of all of the people you have pissed off.

10. Go piss them off again.

11. Continue to inventory your garage, and when you find that you are hoarding some really useless junk, promptly admit it.

12. Seek, through your cell phone, to maintain constant contact with Santa Claus, as we understand Him. If you can't get Him, call a psychic hotline. Do whatever the old witch says.

13. Make twenty copies of this letter, put your name at the bottom, and send them to all of your friends.

Our new religion is called "Ungroupism"®. It differs from our major competitor, the other cult religion, Anonymous Alcoholism®, in a number of important ways.

• First off, we never have any meetings. Attending meetings would be very unUngroupistic.

• Also, Ungroupism as such ought never be organized, so it isn't. There is no national headquarters, nor any state or local offices, either. If you want to contact the President of Ungroupism, or the Board of Directors, or the Trustees, you can't, because there aren't any.

• In addition, we are so anonymous that we don't give out any of our names, first or last, or even our initials. And since we never have any meetings, there is no way you can figure out who we are.

• The only requirement for membership in Ungroupism is a desire to stop going to lunatic meetings.

• Each ungroup has but one primary purpose — to carry the message to the meeting maker who still suffers.

• Our major competitor likes to brag that their religion was founded by "a Wall Street hustler who helped an Akron rectal surgeon through his last binge." Oh yeh? Well our religion was founded by a psychopathic serial killer who ate his last victim, so our religion is much better than your religion, thank you.

• You can join our fellowship, and become a member, any time you wish, just by saying that you are a member, but we don't. We are firm believers in the wise alcoholic teachings of our patron saint, W. C. Fields, who said, "The reason I don't belong to any clubs is, I would never join a club that would have me as a member."

We have developed a new treatment modality for alcoholism: the Cheech'n'Chong Treatment Program. It works like this: whenever you get cravings for alcohol, you put on a ballerina's tutu and slippers, and Mickey Mouse ears, just like Cheech and Chong in the movie "Up in Smoke". Then you jump up and down on one foot, while juggling five tennis balls, and reciting Shakespeare sonnets. Continue this procedure for as long as the cravings last.

RARELY HAS this simple program been known to fail, except for a few unfortunates who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves while wearing a tutu.

It works, if you work it.

And so does my magical ice cream cure that I just invented: Every time you get cravings for alcohol, you just go to Baskin Robbins and eat ice cream instead of drinking alcohol.

I particularly recommend the French Vanilla. Definitely avoid the Rum Raisin.

This simple program does not and can not ever fail, if you completely give yourself to it. RARELY HAVE we seen somebody fail this simple program, except for a few people who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with their ice cream. There are such unfortunates among us. They seem to have been born that way.

So Keep Coming Back! to Baskin Robbins. It Works If You Work It! You Die If You Don't! So Work It, You're Worth It!

Serenity Street, a traditional 12-step residential drug and alcohol treatment facility, is proud to announce the addition of Papa Doc Charlie Ngobo of Haiti to the staff, to enhance the spectrum of faith-based treatment options available at the center. Papa Ngobo is a master voodoo witch doctor, who has 30 years of experience in the practice of spiritual medicine for the treatment of hexes, evil spells, demonic possession, and zombification. Papa Ngobo explains that he favors the pointing of the chicken leg bone for treating alcoholism, combined with the shaking of an amayomama voodoo rattle, and chanting secret incantations. And, says Papa Doc, occasionally "You steek dee acupuncture needles in dee voodoo doll, mon, and eet keep you sober."

Papa Doc Ngobo continues, "Rarely, mon, has dees seemple program been known to fail, except for a few unfortunates, mon, who are constitutionally eencapable of being honest weeth demselves, mon, while dey is having duh chicken bones shoved in dey faces."

Indeed, the patients are already enthusiastically recommending the new therapy. Said one, "This new spiritual program of treating the whole patient, mind, body, and spirit, is wonderful. Just as soon as we even began to accept the Voodoo Trinity of Bon Dieu, Legba, and Damballah as our Higher Power, we commenced to get results."

Papa added, "Dee Voodoo program never fails, mon, eet eez dee eendeeveedual who fails dee Voodoo program."

Another patient remarked, "Papa Ngobo has an infallible method for ending all selfishness and self-seeking immediately. When you surrender to the Higher Powers of Bon Dieu, Legba, and Damballah, you become a mindless zombie without a shred of ego, self-will or self-centeredness remaining. It's wonderful!"

And a patient who had been an agnostic said: "That floored me. It began looking as though religious people were right after all. My ideas about miracles were dramatically revised right then."

Papa Doc commented, "Dees Voodoo program eez spiritual, not reeleegious, mon. Eef eet were reeleegious, mon, den I couldn't get all of dat Medicare and health eensurance money, mon."

Papa Doc Ngobo left us with one last piece of advice for handling cravings, "You steek dee lime in dee coconut, and dreenk eet all up. You steek dee lime in dee coconut, and call me in dee morning..."

Serenity Street is also proud to announce that they have signed an employment contract with Ms. Helga the Witch, of Devonshire, England, who will soon be bringing her own special brand of faith-based, "eye of newt, wing of bat", spiritual cures to the clinic.

Furthermore, Serenity Street is in deep negotiations with a certain famous Count who resides in Transylvania. This Count is reported to have had a compulsive drinking problem for centuries, a problem that he just recently overcame with the help of a twelve-step therapeutic program. It is hoped that the Count will soon be another insightful, helpful counselor at the center.

A.A. #3, The Man on the Bed

...Two days later, a future fellow of Anonymous Alcoholism stared glassily at the strangers beside his bed. "Who are you fellows, and why this private room? I was always in a ward before."

They grinned, which he didn't like so much. Said one of the visitors, "We're giving you a treatment for alcoholism."

Hopelessness was written large on the man's face as he replied, "Oh, but that's no use. Nothing would fix me. I'm a goner. The last three times, I got drunk on the way home from here. I'm afraid to go out the door. I can't understand it."

Asked one of the visitors, "Can you move your right hand?"

With a puzzled look on his face, the man tried it, and discovered that he could.

Asked one of the visitors, as he offered a glass to the man, "Can you pick this up with your right hand, and put it to your mouth?"

The man tried it. "Why, yes, I can," said the man.

One of the visitors filled the glass with whiskey, and handed it to the man, and asked, "Can you use your right hand to lift this glass to your mouth, and drink all of this?"

The man discovered that he could.

One of the visitors filled the glass with whiskey again, and handed it to the man, and asked, "Can you use your left hand to lift this glass to your mouth, and drink all of this?"

The man discovered that he could do that, too.

Said one of the visitors, "That explains it. That is what is happening to you on the way home from here. At least one of your hands is lifting glasses of whiskey to your mouth, and you are drinking the whiskey. That is why you are getting drunk."

Said the man, "This is amazing. No one has ever been able to explain it to me so clearly before. I want to join your church right now."

The visitors thought they noticed something different about him already. He had begun to have a spiritual experience.

(See the Big Book, 3rd edition, page 157, paragraphs 1 to 3; page 42, paragraph 2; the last line of page 179 through the first line of page 180; and page 158, paragraph 3.)

Bill Wilson, miraculously healing the man on the bed

This will be a new reality TV show, and it will be great. What we will do is take a bunch of wild and crazy guys and gals, drinking-to-die alcoholics, and put them on an island with more alcohol than they can possibly drink.

People will die for real. People will get fed a bunch of cures for alcoholism that don't actually work — a bunch of spiritual stuff and twelve step programs and meetings and all of that. People will think that the cures will work, and will count on them, and will bet their lives on them, but they won't really work.

It will be an incredibly entertaining show, because we will be able to watch the people relapse and die drunk, one by one, right on TV.

The last one left alive gets the money.

Many city, state, and Federal government agencies have been frustrated by the very poor results obtained from existing drug and alcohol treatment programs, in spite of the large amounts of money spent trying to solve these social problems.

But the Bureau of Abstract Statistics reports a major discovery, finding that when survey questionnaires about continued drug and alcohol use are handed out and collected by parole officers, judges, or other officers of the court, the success rate of the drug and alcohol treatment programs suddenly jumps to 100%. Nobody reports any problems with relapses or continued use at all.

The Bureau suggests that this effect can be used as an "after-burner" to enhance the success rate of existing treatment programs. Sam Wannabe, a senior statistician with the Bureau, says, "It is obvious that we can save the taxpayers millions of dollars, just by using parole officers and judges to calculate the success rates of treatment programs. This is truly a great day in the war on drugs."

Shouldn't 180 meetings in 90 days fix the problem?

And the longer you stay in A.A., the worse it gets.

I laughed.

And then it occurred to me that if the T-shirt was being worn by a Buchmanite, or a true-believer Alcoholics Anonymous member, that it wasn't a joke.

When I asked God about that, He said, "Screw Bill Wilson. I'm not gonna quit drinking."

There is some strange stuff going around: A lot of A.A. and N.A. people seem to think that the magic of the Twelve Steps will heal anything, any time, anywhere. Newcomers are urged to quit taking their doctor-prescribed medications, and just trust the Twelve Steps to fix their ailments. That assumes that either the people involved have mind-over-matter powers, or that God favors these people so much that He will do them a special favor, and grant a miracle so that the newcomer is instantly healed, and does not require medications any longer.

This trust in the Twelve Steps has been abused a lot lately, to the point that people suffering from depression have been persuaded to quit taking their medications, and then they committed suicide. This has happened many times. There have also been too many other problems with sponsors telling sponsees to quit other medications, with disastrous medical consequences.

In order to prevent any more such tragedies, or abuse of the sponsor/sponsee relationship, the General Service Boards of both A.A. and N.A. are sending out the following directive: "The Magic Qualification Test".

The Magic Qualification Test is actually borrowed from Scientology. In practice, it is very simple: You walk into a room, and there isn't much in there. Just a table, and a few chairs. And an ashtray on the table. But you don't leave the room until you levitate the ashtray with your mind-powers.

A.A. and N.A. members will use the test in the following manner: Before a newcomer quits his doctor-prescribed medications, both the sponsor and the newcomer sponsee will be examined by the group, and checked to see if they can pass the Magic Qualification Test. When both have successfully passed the test, then the group will know for sure that the newcomer and his sponsor are qualified to use spiritual powers, and only spiritual powers, to treat medical ailments.

"God loves me so much that He fixed all of my problems and took away my desires to drink, or do drugs, or have illicit sex, or anything. God obviously loves me a whole lot more than He loves you, because God didn't do that for you, you poor, pathetic not-very-spiritual piece of dirt.

"God loves me so much that He even took away all of my self-centeredness, self-seeking, vanity, and conceit."

The Serene and Grateful Game This is a new game of spiritual one-upmanship, where your brains melt more than other peoples' do, and you feel more Serenity and Gratitude than they do. If you aren't really feeling Serene and Grateful, you can fake it until you make it by letting your eyes glaze over, painting a big mindless grin on your face, and tilting your head to one side to show that your brains are running out one ear as they melt.

God as I understand Her doesn't like the Twelve Steps at all.

And She really hates the male chauvinist pigism of the Big Book chapter, "To Wives."

When She's in a good mood, she just laughs at it all. But when She's in a bad mood, she makes some male members of A.A. relapse and die drunk.

You believe in God. I believe in God, too. But I also believe in Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny, and The Tooth Fairy, so I am obviously more religious than you, and morally superior to you, because I believe in a lot more supernatural stuff than you do.

Next, I'm going to come to believe that the world is flat, so I can really be more religious than all of you.

I tried the Twelve Steps, and they didn't work for me. God didn't remove my desires for alcohol and tobacco.
So I tried them again, and they didn't work.
My sponsor told me to work a better program.
So I tried them again, and they didn't work.
My sponsor told me to work an even better program.
So I tried them again, and they didn't work.
Then somebody said, "If you keep on doing what you've always been doing, you're gonna get what you've always been getting. To expect anything different is insane."

So I quit A.A..

Snappy come-backs, or text for T-shirts:

Bill Wilson wrote that alcohol is cunning, baffling, and powerful.
(Big Book, pages 58-59.)

• How cunning? What is the I.Q. of a bottle of whiskey?
• Is a fifth of Jack Daniels more cunning than a fifth of Old Grand-Dad?
• Is a fifth of Mexican Jose Cuervo tequila more baffling than a big tankard of inscrutable Japanese Sapporo beer?
• I think I have the powerful part figured out: Obviously, Everclear at 190 proof is much more powerful than beer at four or five percent, which is only 8 or 10 proof.

But the cunning and baffling parts, they still need some explanation.

It often begins in childhood with simple jay-walking, giving in to the urge to take a shortcut across the street, seeking an easier, softer way.

Then it progresses to deliberately stepping in front of cars at crosswalks, arrogantly insisting that they are required by law to stop for you.

Finally, truckism grows into an irresistible compulsion to go down to the freeway and jump in front of fully-loaded, speeding, double-trailer semi trucks.

The victim of Truckism is powerless over his urges, and his life has become unmanageable. Only a spiritual cure can fix this dreaded spiritual disease.

The National Association for Truckism, Jay-Walking, and Other Road-Crossing Disorders (NATJAWORD) has found that the spiritual 12-step meetings of self-help groups like T.A. (Truckics Anonymous) can help in the recovery from this terrible heart-breaking disease.

As one T.A. member explained, "Recovery isn't easy. It requires a lot of work, a lot of meetings, a lot of doing the Twelve Steps, and above all, real rigorous honesty about your total worthlessness. But we are here to help, and ready to offer you unconditional love, whenever you are ready to admit what a pathetic loser you really are."

Irving Hornbecker, of Cleveland, Ohio, won Saturday's Powerball lottery, getting all five numbers and the Powerball correct. He will receive an estimated $32 million.

Mr. Hornbecker explained that his winning was due to his A.A. spiritual practices: "All I did was just what Step Eleven tells me to do, just sit quietly, and meditate, and wait for God to talk to me and tell me what to do. Well, God said, 'Irving, play 2-14-29-34-39, Powerball 24!' And lo and behold, God got the numbers right!"

A reporter asked Mr. Hornbecker what he planned to do with the money. He answered, "Give it all to A.A., of course."

Mr. Hornbecker added, "I was going to give it to my local group, but they explained that there is a tradition against anyone giving more than $2000 per year. But when I called up the national headquarters, they said that I could send all of the millions that I wanted to, and that they wouldn't let a silly little tradition about no outside donations get in the way of progress.
      "They said that they had already gotten a hundred thousand from the city of San Diego for holding the international convention there, and that it had worked out just fine, with no spiritual rules broken at all.
      "They said that they were sure that they could find something nice to spend tens of millions of dollars on, this time, too."

To do good is noble.
To teach others to do good is nobler...
And less trouble.
— Mark Twain

Some people have been spreading a nasty rumor about me, saying that I have switched from worshiping Doorknob Almighty as my Higher Power, to worshiping Divine Donut. That isn't true at all. I don't do that.

I worship the hole in the donut. That's the real Holy Spirit.

There is always an exception to the rule, except for this rule.

A.A. = Alzheimer's Anonymous

Those people are a real bitch to work with. It's nearly impossible to get them to do the Fourth through Seventh Steps correctly, because they go and forget all of their sins before they can list and confess them.

How to have fun with recovery:

1. Brag about all of your sober time.
2. Threaten to relapse if you don't get your own way.
3. Complain that people who do things you don't like are endangering your recovery.
4. Explain that you have to go to a meeting whenever your wife asks you to do something that you don't want to do, like take out the garbage.
5. Act like a real ass-hole, and then demand that everyone congratulate you for not drinking while you did it.
6. Dump your old wife because she isn't in recovery, and pick up on that new cutie who is showing up at the meetings.

If it is really God's Will that we spend our lives in meetings, why weren't we born with chairs glued to our butts?

Anonymous Alcoholism is actually part of a giant secret conspiracy that involves the CIA, the Trilateral Commission, and the AMA. It is a eugenics project whose goal is to clean the garbage out of the shallow end of the gene pool by getting all of the stupid and gullible people in the country to kill themselves.

That goal will be accomplished by generously sprinkling the mental landscape with "I.Q. traps", things that are like land mines, but which work on the mental, rather than physical, plane. The idea is that the smart people will dodge such traps, but the stupid people will moronically bumble right into one and get eliminated.

The philosophy behind the Übermensch Project is the idea that anyone who is so stupid that he can be talked into committing suicide really should — he really should be eliminated from the gene pool to make room for somebody with a few more working brain cells, and to keep him from making a bunch of children who are as moronic as he is.

One spectacularly successful example of an I.Q. trap was the Heaven's Gate project. There, a bunch of unbelievably gullible web-heads were actually talked into committing suicide so that they could "hitch a ride on an invisible flying saucer that was hiding behind a comet, and go to Heaven"!

The boys in the Creative Concepts department nearly died laughing when their suggestion actually worked. They had never expected it to. They had proposed the Heaven's Gate project as just an outrageous joke, one dreary rainy afternoon when they were bored with having no real work to do. Now their new department motto is:

Another example of an I.Q. trap, one that we take a little more seriously, is the Anonymous Alcoholism practice of teaching people that they are "powerless over alcohol" and incapable of controlling their own drinking. A.A. teaches their intellectually-challenged members that if they even just feel like having a drink, they will "get triggered" and mentally blank out, and start drinking, and spin totally out of control, and be completely unable to stop drinking.

Since the people who go to A.A. are people who already have a drinking problem, the results are predictable: Those people who are gullible enough to believe the "powerless over alcohol" doctrine will go on wild drunken binges and die, hopefully before they reproduce, which will very conveniently wipe out their idiot genes.

So far, our eugenics experiment is working well. We can confidently predict a net five-point increase in the average I.Q. of all Americans by the year 2300, and ten points by 2500. We foresee, however, that the increase in the average intelligence of Americans will eventually render the simpler, stupider, I.Q. traps ineffective. Nobody will get fooled by them anymore. In the long run, we will need much smarter, much more sophisticated I.Q. traps than the ones that projects like A.A. are giving us now. We are working on that problem.

In addition, the increase in the average intelligence of Americans will also cause great difficulties for the politicians, who won't be able to fool people so easily any more. We have examined and debated various solutions to that problem, but have not found any easy answers. We have decided, for the time being at least, to do nothing. We are temporarily adopting a strategy of "Let the politicians fend for themselves. They will have to grow smarter, too."

William Griffith Wilson

Bill said, "When A.A. was quite young, a number of eminent psychologists and doctors made an exhaustive study of a good-sized group of so-called problem drinkers. The doctors weren't trying to find how different we were from one another; they sought to find whatever personality traits, if any, this group of alcoholics had in common. They finally came up with a conclusion that shocked the A.A. members of that time. These distinguished men had the nerve to say that most of the alcoholics under investigation were still childish, emotionally sensitive, and grandiose.
      "How we alcoholics did resent that verdict!" (12X12 pp 122-3)

"I'm happy to say that I didn't have those particular defects of character myself, but the rest of the alcoholics around here were real messes, and had a very hard time accepting that fact. They were really in denial about it."

"Even so has God restored us all to our right minds." (BB p 57)
"The power of God goes deep!" (BB p 114)

"So everything is wonderful now. All it took was Doing The Twelve Steps, wallowing in guilt and grovelling before God until we wore holes in the knees of our pants, confessing tons of sins, and Seeking and Doing the Will of God until we were sick of it. Still, the 'God Is My Shrink' program is great, and a whole lot cheaper than paying a real psychiatrist."

"The results are fantastic:"
"We get treated by the Great Physician," (BB p 351) "Him who has all knowledge and power." (BB p 85)
"We come to regard ourselves as intelligent agents, spearheads of God's ever advancing Creation." (BB p 49)
"We feel we are on the Broad Highway, walking hand in hand with the Spirit of the Universe." (BB p 75)

"Still, I sure am glad I wasn't one of those grandiose alcoholics."

12X12 = Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions
BB = The "Big Book", Alcoholics Anonymous

I like animals. They are just like people, except even stupider.

Blind faith is the number one offender. It kills more cultaholics than anything else.

The A.A. people are always saying that their program is "Spiritual, not Religious."

Some people were asking, "What's the difference between religion and spirituality?"

The answer is simple:

"The religious people meet in a church — specifically, in the church main hall.

The A.A. 'spiritual' people meet down in the church basement, along with the church mice."

(And you can't let those nuts out of the basement, either, because if they get upstairs, they'll put a teddy bear, a doorknob, a motorcycle, or a bedpan on the alter, and call it their "Higher Power", and start praying to it...)

A common creation story is that the Lord took some mud and made the first man, Adam. Considering what I see all of the current lumps of mud doing, I don't think that the Lord used ordinary mud. I suspect that it must have been silly putty.

I just got wiped out in the stock market. The last couple of years have been a real disaster. All of my investments are way down, sort of like the Titanic. My retirement fund has turned into a two-week vacation. But even on Friday afternoon, July 19, 2002, at the end of six of the worst weeks in the history of Wall Street, my stock broker was gleefully yelling at me, "Keep Coming Back! It Works!"

My TV smoked the other day, so I took it to the TV repairman. He looked it over, and then told me, "I can fix it, but only if you believe in electronics."

I said that I didn't understand what he meant.

He said that it was necessary for me to believe in electronics, and to believe that the fix would work, in order for it to work.

I told him, "Well, yeh, I guess I believe it will work, if you fix it right."

He said, "No, no, no! That isn't good enough. You have to really believe that it will work." He fixed me with a steely glare and got right in my face. "You must totally believe in electronics. You must rid yourself of all doubts. You must abandon logic and Reason and human intelligence. You must have faith, and completely give yourself to this simple repair program. Grit your teeth together harder, to make yourself more religious, and say, 'I really, really, *really* believe in electronics.'"

I took my TV to another repairman. That guy was nuts.

One of the guys in our Anonymous Alcoholism group committed suicide. After the funeral, one of his friends remarked, "Well, he was totally miserable at the end, but at least he died sober."

Another friend remarked, "No he didn't. He killed himself by swallowing a huge fistful of downers and washing them down with half a bottle of whiskey."

The first friend said, "Oh no! How could he do such a thing? Just when he was doing so well! How could he totally ruin everything at the last minute like that? Now he has to give back all of his coins and keytags."

The "spiritual disease" of alcoholism closely resembles the "spiritual disease" of "Candyism", which is the illness that children get from eating too much candy.

The horrendous spiritual disease of Candyism is particularly prevalent around October 31st. Some researchers have speculated that the seasonal increase in that nasty spiritual disease is caused by the numerous evil spirits that are known to roam the Earth at Halloween. Somebody should call Ghostbusters.

Jesus Christ has been declared persona non grata and banned from the local Anonymous Alcoholism clubhouse, informed sources say. "Well, that joker was always zapping people's water or coffee, and turning it into wine, and getting them drunk. We just couldn't have that. We know that traditionally the only requirement for membership in A.A. is a desire to quit drinking, but Jesus's behavior was simply not acceptable here."

When asked if he thought they would get into trouble for banning Jesus, an anonymous spokesperson said, "No, I don't think we will have any problems with it. Besides, most of us here pray to a bedpan or a doorknob as our Higher Power anyway, so Jesus won't really be missed."

Every time I walk down the street, I find pennies on the sidewalk. That proves that the Lord loves me, and is giving me money.

Did I tell you about the new recovery group for compulsive talkers?

It's called On And On Anon.

It's the one Twelve-Step meeting where you are asked to please don't "share" your life story.

Memory loss is wonderful. I'm going back through all of the music of the sixties and seventies, and I'm discovering new things and learning so many things that I never knew before...

Now, there is just so much stuff that I don't know that I don't think I'll ever be bored again.

Guys don't make passes
At girls who are dumb asses.

I don't really like dumb blondes.
You know what dumb blondes will give you?
Dumb blond kids.
And who wants dumb kids?

I have a spiritual disease called "cyanidism". Whenever I drink some of Rev. Jim Jones' cyanide kool-aid, I become morose and unresponsive, and stop listening to anything that anybody else is trying to tell me. Some steppers insist that such disregard for others is all just a big ego trip, and that I need to stop being so selfish.

I was going to go see a football game, but they wanted $100 a ticket. That didn't make any sense to me. I used to live in the bad part of town, and I never had to pay money to watch the drug addicts beating each other up down there...

George W. Bush announced today that he is going to bomb the North Pole. He has "reliable intelligence" that tells him that Santa Claus intends to give WMD to Osama for Christmas.

When I was a kid, my mother told me to remember to pray to Santa at bedtime. As I was falling asleep, I thought "I still don't really believe in Santa Claus."

Then came a thought that was like the Voice of Thunder: "Who are you to say there is no Santa Claus?" It rang in my head, I couldn't get rid of it.

I tumbled out of my bed onto my knees. I know not what I said. But slowly a great peace came over me. I believe in Santa Claus. I know that, come Christmas, Santa will take care of me. I have found the answer to life.

(See the Big Book story "Our Southern Friend", 3rd edition pages 504-505, 4th edition pages 215-216.)

Man cannot live by bread alone.

He also requires sodium nitrate, BHA, BHT, polysorbate 60, strontium 90, Red Dye Number 3, and chocolate.

Alcoholics Anonymous is just like the Hotel California.
You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.

Decartes' famous line is, of course, "I think, therefore I am."

Only a rather foolish young man who was putting on airs of being an intellectual could have written such high-falutin' drivel. A wiser, older, man would have written, "I ache, therefore I exist."

A slogan a day keeps the thinking away.

At Charlie Towns' hospital in New York City in 1934, Doctor William D. Silkworth gave alcoholics the magical "belladonna cure", a drug cocktail whose main ingredient was the hallucinogenic drug belladonna. Bill Wilson went to that hospital and got that treatment for alcoholism four times in a little more than a year, the last one being in December of 1934.

Most of the hard-core old alcoholics also suffered from delirium tremens, which also causes people to hallucinate, so they had quite a variety of "visions" while detoxing. After a group of such alcoholics had been detoxed, Dr. Silkworth examined them and questioned them, to determine the nature of their experiences.

"Joe, what did you see? Silkworth asked.

"I saw pink elephants with purple polka dots, and they were flying through the air and trumpeting with their big trunks and laughing," Joe answered.

"Sorry," Silkworth said. "That was just a hallucination. What about you, Fred?"

"I saw bugs. There were millions of bugs, cockroaches and beetles and centipedes, crawling all over the walls and floors, and then they crawled up my legs and were all over me. I was screaming for them to get off, but they wouldn't."

"Sorry," Silkworth said. "That was just a hallucination. What about you, Bill Wilson?"

"I saw God. There was a big white flash and then I felt like I was on a mountain-top, with a wind of spirit blowing through me."

"Wow," said Dr. Silkworth, "I can certify that as a genuine spiritual experience. And I can assure you that you were not hallucinating. I feel humbled, just to be in your magnificent presence, Bill Wilson."

Today is the last day of your previous lifetime. Are you going to waste it watching TV commercials?

I am all for teaching the theory of Intelligent Design in high school science classrooms, right alongside the theory of Evolution and the Theory of Gravity and the Round Earth theory and other such "scientific" theories. I think that all theories should get equal time, no matter where they come from or who says them, and the spiritual theories certainly must not be neglected.

One time-honored old spiritual theory that really must be taught to children is The Witchcraft Theory of Diseases. This theory says that diseases are not caused by silly invisible things that you can't even see, like viruses or bacteria; diseases are caused by witches casting evil spells and putting nasty hexes on people. (You can see the witch, can't you? YES!)

When your children get sick, it is because that ugly old lady next door put a hex on them. Obviously. And the only cure is to burn that witch at the stake.

And the proof of the theory is, when your children get sick with chicken pox or mumps or measles, just burn that old lady to a crisp, and then just see how soon your children get better after that.

Such an obviously correct theory must be taught in high school science classes right along with the Intelligent Design Theory and the Flat-Earth Theory and the Hollow-Earth Theory.

And in addition to the Intelligent Design theory, there is the Drunken Design theory:

God says,

"Look, I was drunk on my ass when I designed the Physical Universe. It was just a joke, a lark. I was at a party, and we were just messing around. Don't take it so seriously; it doesn't mean anything.

"I mean, especially, haven't you looked at quantum physics? Don't any of you have the brains to notice that it is all totally goofy, flat-out crazy?

"Particles dematerialize in one place and rematerialize in another place without going through the space in between?

"Particles exist only as clouds of probabilities until they suddenly become real, no matter how improbable that may be?

"And that tiny world is populated by quarks — charming quarks, fuzzy quarks, and strange quarks?

"Don't you get it?

"Don't you think we were laughing our heads off when we made up that nonsense?

"It was a good party."

REMEMBER: George Bush's wonderful new Department of Homeland Security is making your city just as safe as New Orleans.

Have you heard of the new 12-Step group for the Masters Of War who repeatedly get us into endless little wars in distant foreign countries?

It's called On And On And On And On And On Anon.

I went to A.A., and they told me that I could use anything for my "Higher Power", even a doorknob or a bedpan. I decided to have a real higher-powered "Higher Power", so I got on my knees and began praying to Miraculous Microwave.

All of a sudden, a brilliant light appeared inside it and blazed out through the holes in the front, and the oven began smoking, and a loud deep bass voice inside it growled, "ZOOOOL!"

Bill Murphy the Ghostbuster walked in and said, "Hmmmm... You don't usually see such behavior in a major household appliance."

If Jesus died for my picayune little sins, then he really got taken advantage of in a bad business deal.

(I thought those Jewish guys were supposed to have a reputation for being sharp businessmen and good hagglers...)

I mean, a human sacrifice just wasn't necessary for me. I'm sure that crabby old Jahweh could have been appeased for my sins with just the sacrifice of a few chickens and goats.

I joined Blabbermouths Anonymous, and I was really doing well in the program, until I realized that it wasn't anonymous at all. In fact, everybody in town knew everything that we were doing...

I went to a meeting of Pollyannas Anonymous, and someone shared,
      "Oh, I'm just so happy that we have this wonderful 12-Step group that will solve all of our problems for us, and make God take care of our wills and our lives for us, and make us all so happy and serene, and isn't it just so peachy keen that we can meet like this and share our lives...?"

Sociologists have announced that 2042 will be a watershed year. In that year, whites will become a minority, and the other races, taken together, will constitute the majority. As soon as whites become the minority, they will be so cool, and will have a bunch of culture and traditions known only to other brother whites.

Well, since us white people don't seem to actually have any of those secret cultural and traditional things right now, we had better get busy developing some, in preparation for when we will become a cool minority. For example, let's develop a tradition called "Rehab":

There is a rich white cultural custom where someone uses drugs and alcohol until they are totally wrecked, blasted, wasted, and non-functional, preferably on television. Then the wasted doper engages in a cultural practice called "checking into rehab". There, for a price of anything from $7,000 to $40,000, the rich degenerate can enjoy 28 days of detoxing and sobering up while someone preaches 12-Step cult religion at them, and they spend their days in meetings where they confess that they never really enjoyed getting high as a kite. It wasn't any fun at all. That's why they spent thousands and thousands of dollars to get more dope and get even higher.

After 28 days of that, the whites walk out of rehab and announce to the TV cameras that they have seen the light, and are cured, and are on a different path now.

Then, a few days later, they forget all about the rehab nonsense, and go back to doing whatever they wish to do.

Now this may seem like a pointless waste of thousands of dollars, but don't knock it. It's "traditional". It's what the hip white people do.

The late-night TV infomercial said, "Learn to trade stocks like a pro." So I bought the get-rich-quick scheme, and tried it, and quickly lost all of my money.

When I complained to the salesman, he said, "You did trade stocks like a pro. You used some crazy brain-damaged trading system, and you got totally wiped out, just like the real pros have been doing lately. So now you should get in line to receive your Federal bail-out check, just like the real pros are doing now."

Dear Mr. Bernanke and Sec. Paulson:

      I need a bailout. I invested all of my cash funds in some risky high-profit financial instruments — lottery tickets — and things didn't go my way. So now I find myself a little short of liquidity, and in a credit crunch, and need a bailout, just like AIG and Fannie and Freddie and Citigroup.

      Now I realize that I'm going to have to take a financial hit for my greedy, risky asset management. I know that I won't get more than ten cents on the dollar for my worthless paper. Well, those lottery tickets were worth $60 million before the market turned against me, so I guess I'll have to settle for a mere $6 million bailout now. Oh, and you can have all of my worthless lottery tickets in return.

      Please send the check this week. You know I'm too big to fail.

      Thank you.

I looked at Lt. Dan, and was aghast. Last year, a cripple in a wheel chair. Now, walking on his own two feet. I said, "Lt. Dan, you have legs."

My ideas about miracles were dramatically revised right then and there.

(See the Big Book, 3rd Edition, William Wilson, Chapter 1, Bill's Story, page 11.

Vladimir Putin, the Premier/President/Prime Minister/Czar of Russia, has announced that he is annexing Hell as another province of the new Soviet Empire. And the Devil will be his new right-hand man. When contacted for a comment, the Devil said that Putin had it all wrong. No way was the Devil going to be the number-two man. "I own that bitch's soul," the Devil said. "He's my servant, and Russia will be my new province. Still, I have to admire the guy's ambition and gall. The way that he ruthlessly murders people is refreshing. Yes, he's welcome in my domain."

In 1992, the AMA allowed a joint committee of two A.A. front groups to write the definition of "alcoholism, the disease." The resulting definition is so goofy that it does not even say that alcoholism is caused by drinking alcohol. It does not say what causes "alcoholism". "Alcoholism" is a disease without a cause. But hey, the A.A. members must know all about it, so they are qualified to define the disease.

Next, the AMA is going to allow Scientology to write the definition of "paranoid schizophrenia, the disease," which is what the Scientology founder Lafayette Ronald Hubbard suffered from, so they must be qualified to describe that disease.

Then the Moonies will write the definition of "cancer, the disease", because that's what Rev. Sun Myung Moon died from.

And then the surviving members of Jim Jones' People's Temple will write the definition of "cyanidism, the disease," because 914 People's Temple members died from drinking cyanide-laced "Flavoraid".

It's going to be a great new day in medicine when cult religions get to define and describe all of our diseases.

More Humor: Also see:

• Do You Think Too Much?
• A 12-Step program for the dead.

All jokes on this page, except the Mark Twain one, are original material, written by, and copyright © 2012 by,

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