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.