The Drunk

It's nearly two years now.

A holiday weekend at the mental hospital, four months at The Last Word, and now a year and a half in a Sober House.

I knew they'd got me good, the day the special yellow-shirted deputy arrived. Not only was I broke, I couldn't work anymore. All my things in this efficiency apartment, oh my god, what would happen to my computer, my papers, my books? It was the end.

People at our recovery meetings often say, "I could drink, but I choose not to."

I can't drink. This might as well be a halfway house to me, though it is democratically run and I'm in no legal jeopardy. This is not will power.
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It's a large house, out in the residential sprawl. Sharing the rent with five other men, I also have cheap high speed internet and cable tv. I have my own room and complete privacy when I want. If there is a light tap at the door, I can ignore it without pretending to be away. It's as unusual as in an apartment house. Or, I can yell "FORK OFF!" and there's a laugh and they come in, or try the door knob anyway. BAM BAM! OPEN UP! So at worst this can be like a fraternity.

Firmly established here, with a reputation for being a stand-off, I'm left alone. The love of my sober life may be the one knocking, though, I shouldn't forget that. Being a part of this large Recovery community, she gets by the monastic hoods pretty easy, abruptly taking her stance and warning them, "I know the J-word!"

"Yeah? What's that?"

"Jiu-Jitzsu!"

"Oh all right then..."
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Now see, I was going to write here as the Drunk who is still caught in his trap, but then I remembered her.

And I've described how nice these accomodations are. I can tell you also that I have a part-time job that is wonderfully phony-baloney and only requires me to stand up straight, initial papers, and sometimes buffalo my boxx (sweet man. huge man! godfrey daniel!)

Let me say then, "despite myself".

All of this is against my will. Everything. I am an Alcoholic through and through since age 15, and just about everything I've learned about life, people, relationships, God, must have in someway been misapprehended. If living life were reading, I'd have gotten no farther than a "Whole Language" standard. Call me an impressionist.

Now I am very near writing a "gratitude list". A list of wonderful things I just can hardly believe, especially given my backward instincts. But I will spare you. There's no comedy in being fucking serene anyway. Hey, look. Everyone off my blog. Now. Get out of here!
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Yesterday Anonydoc was in Atlanta instead of Baton Rouge, so I went to pieces. (Yes, yes I'm in Missouri, do you want me to make sense?? ) It was a mistake , getting up and failing to turn on the Sanford And Son marathon, which would have saved me.

Then my greensleeves wanted to go see the play adaptation of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest at the Dutch Elm Theatre Barn. We were going to sit on the lawn there and, I supposed, watch the sun set on civilization itself. I didn't tell her how Ken Kesey used to be one of my leading lights, nor what visceral , unhealthy loathing I have for him now. (I think she may not know of him , since his career finished so early on, what with his project to spike all our drinks with his L.S.D. kool-aid. ) (And yes, it was kool-aide. Most people think "drinking the kool-aide " refers to Jim Jones and cyanide, I suppose, but Jonestown was ten years after The Merry Pranksters and the first Grateful Dead parties.)

Earlier in the day, in fact, we were talking about my 'drain bamage'. How I can't throw a frizbee forward anymore, only squarely to my right or , incredibly, backwards behind me (surprising the hell out of me everytime...That surprise is also brain damage, haha).

I don't think it's too far a stretch to link Kesey's Eugene, Oregon to my hometown of Oakapallohka, Iowa, where LSD and Mushrooms were plentiful even down to the junior high school.

Anyway, I say to the devil with Kesey. Please don't ask me about Sgt. Pepper , though. I can't be completely consistent now...(really, please)

Someone recently wrote about Cuckoo's Nest, savaging it so thoroughly as a cultural watermark I felt my natural pre-adolescent conservativism re-affirmed (trust your instincts, all you twelve year olds).

I grew up in the 70's, when the adults mimiced the kids, and "everything was a little upside down, as a matter of fact the wheels had stopped: what's good is bad, what's bad is good!..." (dylan paraphrasing and maybe misinterpreting) . Cuckoo's Nest was coincidentally the first serious movie my parents took me to, I remember well my mother whispering in my ear helpfully, through-out: for instance she knew that I'd be slow to gather that the Head Nurse was Evil Incarnate.

"She's a bad woman, John," she whispered as soon as Nurse Ratchet appeared on the screen. I wasn't going to understand that on my own until the end, so it was right for her to help me focus, or aim high in my steering , so to speak. I don't blame her.

But what was the moral persuasion of Kesey's novel and this movie? Sexually repressive Society was the central evil in our lives, preventing individuals from becoming fully born, fully themselves. We were born to live out our dreams, follow our bliss, and to interfere with someone's journey to Giganticism was petty and reflected our own cowardice.

(Suddenly I remember a Henry Miller title, just the title: "The Smile At The Foot Of The Ladder".)

From my teens to my late 30's I re-educated myself (drunk) into an Anarchist. If you'd put the question to me, "how is a flimsy fellow like you going to survive in anarchy?" I'd have answered that all hatred and violence comes from our being governed, our having our moral perogatives taken away from us by rule of law, and in anarchist society no one would hate anymore, no one would be violent except for the insane... who, by the way, should be set free.

I don't know if I ruined the day cancelling our date to the play, or saved it. I might have become overbearingly pedantic or polemical. I like to keep my cool now, ...sober. Oh thank you lord I'm sober. jayz.

I post this quick without re-reading. If I re-read it will take me hours to re-write and fake a theme here.