Topic, Due 7/7/06 - Death

Death is a part of life - the final part, and is treated with a mixture of awe and fear by even the staunchest of monsters. So when Dr. Cuntsworthy asked me to think of an uncomfortable topic for the consideration of this august group, it didn't take me too long to light on this one. In this instance I am concerned as to what death means to you, the arch-monster.

The word limit is tight - 600 words, strictly no more. No one should crap on in the face of death. Make every word count. Due the seventh of July - the extra time is to allow for multiple revisions.

Good luck, gentlemen.

(I realise that we have not all posted yet on the previous topic, but onwards moves should be made to keep things fresh)

Alcoholics Eponymous

Any Recent Friday Night, In This Indescribably Foul Epoch, The Dominion of the Grek.

The road whips ahead of me as I slam my foot down on the accelerator. These buses have pretty good pickup for such huge vehicles, and I’ve become a master of weaving in and out of traffic, grinding along gutters and terrifying pedestrians with last-second manoeuvres in which I swing the front of the bus inches from their faces before coming neatly to stop right in the bus zone. I am the bus master, I am Hammerfoot the Fucking Excellent, but the bad sweat is coming, another turning of the wheel and this endless fucking grind of an existence swings around to the bad part of the week. For I am speeding hard down a major stretch of road towards the city centre and it’s 8:30 on a Friday night, and I’m hoping against hope not to see any of the worthless cunts I know will be lining the road only metres ahead. Of course, such hope is futile. The Grek swarm on nights like these, dressed like clowns with their bad haircuts, already loaded when they arrogantly hail the chariot and swagger aboard, reeking of cheap rum and bad cologne. Every stop is a victory over the urge to hop the sidewalk, grind the Grek into a paste and keep on rolling into the hills where I can roll the bus off a cliff and spend the rest of my life hunting kangaroos and yelling at the moon. And as I near the city, this strange and vicious urge grows stronger and stronger, and I wish I had outfitted the bus with a mechanism to simply dump the passengers under the wheels.

This, of course, is the product of a ressentiment lifestyle. One of the very huge problems with the driving of heavy vehicles is the inability to consume alcohol and still legally be able to operate the things. One of the very huge problems with being a casual shit-kicker in a bus company is the requirement that you work six days a week. The big problem with working night-shift is that even when you could conceivably drink, nobody else is awake or willing to wake up with the Captain at 9am on a Thursday morning. Combine all three and you have my existence – a life of involuntary asceticism, a grudging existence of dragging Greks to and from their petty drinkings and mean good times. When real people get drunk, great and horrible things happen. The Grek merely dance obnoxiously badly to terrible music and throw up. I was annoyed at first. But week after week after week my schedule was nothing but picking up adult infants, ferals and other worthless Greks, taking them to town so they can cornhole each other, piss their pants and max out their credit cards (respectively), then picking up the aforementioned scum and enduring insults, sneers and much annoyance for daring to take them to their houses. I became bitter, ugly, twisted and inextricably hostile to all that lived and breathed. In these circumstances I learned first-hand why bus drivers are all such foul-tempered cunts. Perhaps it isn’t hard to see from where ressentiment could spring.

Much has been made in the general media of the bad effects of alcohol on the human, but little has been said on the matter of sobriety. As a drunk who accidentally stumbled into the land of the sober for six months, I feel qualified to say to you, right fucking now, that a lack of alcohol turned me distinctly odd. Odd like off milk. There’s something distinctly untrustworthy about the man who won’t drink. Designated drivers are welcome for their utility but they find themselves isolated in a drinking situation. They make everyone uncomfortable as they sip their water and look at the clock, waiting to go home. There’s a constant edginess and aroma of bad times that make the sober man a stranger in the land of the vicious drunk. So much for the short term effects. Long term effects of sobriety include a draining away of the vicious fluids, ebullience of the liver, severe loss of drinking buddies and an increase of life expectancy with a corresponding decrease in social life expectancy.

After a time, you begin to miss the hangover. Sobriety is a kind of clear-eyed, clean-shaven madness, where you sit upright and talk straight and never miss a beat, mechanically clicking down the hours until you can sleep, rising and doing it all again. Yes, I missed the hangover. That badge of merit that only comes after a night of chair-smashing, double-fisted drinking horrors – the wrenching headache that drives you from sleep at the crack of noon like a screaming goat skull on spider legs, the bloodshot eyes grinding open as the filthy light that filters through half-closed shutters shrieks directly at your brain and the running tap in the kitchen howls like a banshee on the moor. The foul temper as you rise, clutching your head and stumble into the hallway. Everything is smashed, there is glass everywhere, but you somehow make it unscathed to the bathroom where you collapse in the tub – still half-full of rancid melted ice-water and empties. Your hand reaches down and gropes around on the cold floor tiles and miraculously grasps a packet of painkillers. You empty this over the general vicinity of your mouth, some of it falls into the tub but at least a portion go into your mouth. You thrash in the water and sit up to avoid drowning in this filth, and scream at the top of your lungs to anyone who might hear, “BREAKFAST! BREAKFAST!”, but your distorted sense of hearing cannot process the reply. Heaving yourself from the tub you nearly tumble out as your balance gives way on the slippery tiles and you nearly brain yourself on the sink, but...

And so on in this vein. I missed the hangover, how much more did I miss the vicious times, the cheating at poker, the smashing chairs over people, the burning and the hate. But now the good news, humanoids. Due to completely ridiculous and far-fetched medical reasons why not, I can no longer be a bus driver. I will miss the money, but I will not for a second miss the files and columns and masses of Greks, all going off to drink. I will not miss being the chariot of the people. I will not miss the mind-numbing, constant sober, the wretched anti-binge I was on. And I will never again miss a good opportunity to get violently drunk, scream at fires, and throw hammers at things.

Fin.

Oh, how we danced and we swallowed the night, for it was all ripe for dreaming

‘So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank, the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.’

I feel that this article could not start better than with a Charles Bukowski quotation. The man’s life was a celebration of alcohol and alcoholism, a bacchanal passion to drink that can’t be reduced to the normal reasons like stress or conformism. He was a man who understood that a genuine drunk does not use alcohol as a social lubricant, or as a means of coping with unhappiness, or as a way to get laid, or as an escape, or for any reason other than that booze is an end to itself, and that he enjoys it. Those other things are, as any good DUI counselor will tell you, abuses of alcohol. A weak man drinks because everyone around him is drinking and he wants to fit in; a strong man drinks because he wants to and doesn’t give a damn who else does it. It’s its own thing and has to be treated as such; to paraphrase another favorite Buk quote, it’s something you can have that will be good, no matter what else. There’s little else in this life that you can say that about.

So I am about to admit something to you charming (just the whisky) people: Charles Bukowski is a personal hero of mine, and I’m hurtling towards alcoholism like a Japanese businessman to used teenage panties, baseball, rape porn, and over-crowded spaces. People who know me associate me with a ship welded from beer cans drifting capsized in an ocean of whisky, piss, and viscera. I pursue no goal so single-mindedly as my next drink once I’ve got one in me, and regret nothing more sorrowfully than the realization that there’s nothing left but the stagger home to an empty spinning bed. As one might expect, like an alky’s late-night whisky pour into a glass that turns out a few fingers short, I’m overflowing with drunken stories.

But that isn’t the point of this exercise, and I despise the internet sites filled with nothing but the inane recountings of banal stories that happened while so-and-so-with-internet-access-and-a-free-blog-site was hella-blasted at a kegger. This is a love letter to alcohol, as unfaithful, capricious, terrifying, captivating, sublime, giving, nurturing, reliable a mistress as one could hope to have in this or any world, if you treat her right. This is a love song to every whisky I’ve sipped or shot and to every beer I’ve pounded or nursed; to every afternoon, evening, or night I’ve spent drinking down sight and mind; to every couch or park bench I’ve racked out on when home was impossibly far; to every broken glass and to each survivor; to the walls I’ve beaten and to those that beat me; to the won’t-go-home drunks who drank up the sun with me; to all this and everything else, but most of all to the demon goddess alcohol itself, which in whatever form never fails to show up for another tango ‘til I’m sore. Again, there’s little else you can say that about in this world, and there ain’t no world but this one.

My epigraph gets at the important elements of what I consider to be authentic drinking. Bukowski (actually Chinaski) is not drinking to escape his life; he has long given that up as ridiculous, and trusts that the only way available to him to achieve that aim is through his writing. Not his drinking. It is not medication for a sad life. It’s not even a way to avoid his life; it’s not locking oneself in a bathroom stall while the boss tries to inflate one’s workload and doesn’t come with that kind of anxiety. There is no anxiety about the world outside his bed, and it’s likely that the world didn’t really play a factor in his decision to drink. This is not to say that alcohol isn’t a respite that takes him away from an ominous world; only that that is incidental, like a good movie on a long flight. Deciding to stay in bed and drink is key; only afterwards (as likely around the time of the writing as the time of the drinking) did, or may, considerations about the world come in.

This is why I refuse to understand emotional drinkers. By ‘emotional drinkers’ I mean those who drink as a palliative against bad news; something bad happens in life and they respond with whisky. Running to alcohol rather than solving your problems is exactly as bad as running to anything else as a way of avoiding manning up. Alcohol is not, as a choice quote by a more famous and more fictional drunk than Buk has it, ‘the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems’ – it is only the cause of problems when it is taken to be their solution.

Whisky will never, ever solve a problem for you; at the best it will make your attitude towards it more appropriate, or at least less hysteric, than it would have otherwise been. But it will tend to help you ignore it, and in that way crawling into a bottle is one of man’s ultimate acts of cowardice. If you look to it as a problem-solver, you’ll wake up to find your problems compounded. And you’ll deserve it, for having been a fucking idiot who expected a fermented beverage to solve any problem but that of sobriety.

This is what I mean when I say that alcohol must be treated as an end in itself. If you treat it as a means to some other end, both your drunk and that other end are ruined, and you’ll have earned it. Alcohol’s there for those of us willing to stay in bed and drink, damn all the consequences, not for the pussified mooks hoping that vaguely looming consequences will run away at the sight of the brown-hued demon alcohol that belches fumes and shits fire. Not the case. Liquids make poor crutches.

Don’t drink to deal with your problems (unless your problem happens to be the dt’s). Drink to drink. Drink because you want to, because you enjoy it and choose to spend your time and money on it. Drink for love of alcohol, and never let a single fluid ounce pass your lips that isn’t flowing down a gullet braced with that love. And, if you do it right, then you might just get that gullet left alone, for a moment at least, by that world so many seem to fear. But even if you don’t, you’ll still have something locked away in there that will never be subject to its siphoning grip.

...In Which I Relive A Curative Narrative

The problem started around halfway down the bottle of absinthe.

It was not real absinthe, of course. Regardless of what you might have heard from various cowards about its mind-bending properties, the real stuff is rather pleasant. It is an excellent if expensive drunk when prepared properly. But this muck was the much more common Czech equivalent, alarmingly vivid mouthwash which is not so much a form of anisette as it is gustatory terrorism. After a first-rate bottle of Russian vodka, we were definitely slumming it in this neighbourhood.

But this night, The Russian didn’t care and neither did I. We had pickles, we had fresh olives, they could cut through the taste. We had the hearts and stomachs of men, they could handle the rather ridiculous 140-proof content. And what’s more, we were irritable young idiots with the desire to devolve ourselves with blasts of raw liquor.

Why, I don’t know. It had been a miserable time recently for both of us, we agreed. Terrible weather, general life drudgery, the absence of significant female companionship. I was in no mood for a quiet session. I am tired, pissed off and in general need of frying myself, came the mutual agreement.

But in any case, the problem... It is not an issue specific to The Russian. Many people drink and turn into muppets. But not many of them turn into Animal. One shot over the tipping point, one broken synapse fires and his evil brain says “DESTROY”. It has been other things before. This time it was his own house. He starts to pay particular attention to his chairs which are rapidly introduced to the walls, the floor and each other. It takes about four minutes to go from apartment to Reject Shop.

I find such situations very funny, because I have no idea how to react. Unless so savagely drunk that I barely possess basic motor skills, I can still retain ideas such as “empty bottles should not be thrown at passing police cars”. Previously, I had argued with The Russian that he had no such sense of proportion. He informed me that I was wrong. I informed him that the last time we walked out of a pub we vandalised a steamroller, stole a stack of fire extinguishers, trampled over a cyclone fence and managed to lose our bags in the 500m before I could throw his wretched corpse into a cab and that was a good enough indication.

I was right.

I had never seen an industrial fire hose in use before. They look fairly harmless coiled up, I suppose I had always imagined a fairly austere stream of water for garbage fires and the occasional minor prank.

That is, until The Russian tears one off the outside wall, brings it inside his own house and fires it off in the living room while yelling something about justice.

As it swats me arse over head like a giant fist, I wonder what effect the house being broken and soaked at 3am is having on the local populace. I don’t have to wonder long. As I take my clothes off (and The Russian is spraying cars in the street off his balcony) the phone rings. It’s the friendly local police. They are downstairs and badly desire to come up. They have had a report of “screaming and damage noises” coming from the apartment.

Cops at the door with report of possible domestic violence, in the middle of a government domestic violence campaign, on a long weekend. A visit to the apartment would be disastrous. I am half naked, everything is broken and wet, and The Russian is going grand mal on me destroying the environs. He would probably greet them with a blast of cold water and a long string of fucks. The prize for all of this behaviour begins at eviction and only goes up.

Fuck.

What would Dr. Gonzo do?

Lie convincingly, of course.

The four remaining neurons in my head plan quickly. I explain to the nice constable that coming up would be really quite unnecessary as it was some music that we had turned off hours ago. And he had got me out of bed. My friend likes loud music, horrible heavy metal, I explain.

A lot of intonation went into that one word, “friend”, and it immediately frames the situation. I am not a battered woman, I am a sleepy and confused fag. The horrible noise was music. The euphemism is perfect and everything fits.

But still Constable Care is sceptical and torn. He sounds unsure. Perhaps the radio call has been waiting to come through, he speculates. It is the long weekend, after all. He has had a busy night.

Ahh, an opening. One more fag card and I have lay-down misère. “We have some neighbours who don’t like us. I wish they’d just knock on the door and ask us to turn it down. Instead they wasted your time like this.”

Foregone conclusion, past tense. He doesn’t even realise he’s been dismissed. Off he toddles, happy as a clam, content that we are being victimised by evil gay-haters and goes to fight the good fight elsewhere.

The Russian has a moment of clarity, and his brain runs a search string: “WET APARTMENT”. It only just registers. He stumbles with the hose outside and starts to try and stuff it back in the holder.

I help.

And the door closes behind us.

Clarity hits hard in these situations. I suddenly realise that I am as drunk as Caligula, soaked to the bone and locked in the hallway of a security apartment building in my underwear in the middle of winter with a screaming bastard from the Caucuses who is now battering the keyless door. It was undoubtedly the neighbours, fuck their yuppie guts, who arranged the first visit from John Law and if he comes back a second time and sees inside the apartment he will immediately assume from the wreckage and debris that neither of us live there. He will also see the fact that we are both soaking wet and I am partially naked, and relations will go downhill from there.

So I do what anyone sensible would do – I take a nap. I lie down in the dead center of the corridor and pass out. I am kicked awake several minutes later and hear the door opening. The Russian has found a spare key somehow.

Safely inside once more, he now decides to fight me. I have to put him in a rear naked choke to get him to stop. He damn near passes out, laughs like a drain then announces loudly he is going out to beat up fags. And leaves again.

The world goes grey.

I wake up face down in the carpet. Sunlight streams through the windows for the first time in weeks. The apartment is dry. The chairs can be screwed back together. The Russian doesn’t remember a damn thing. Strangely, the fire hose is perfectly coiled as it once was.

We are alive, and there is one day of the long weekend left.

Beer.

TOPIC - Due 6/16 - Alcohol

Assuming the world doesn't end on 6/6/06, just like it hasn't on every other occurrence of that date, your discussion here must concern alcohol. I'm assuming we've all got some experience with the stuff and can therefore write a first-hand ethnography of the American, English, or antipodean alky, but are also circumspective enough to have thoughts about liquor beyond 'I'M SO FUCKING DRUNK.' So pour yourself a glass of whisky and let's hear them.

Due date 6/16, local time. Word limit is 1,200. Get going.