Regular people drink, moderately or heavily, for a lot of reasons, a broad array. Alcoholics drink for a much narrower band. I think just four: genetic honeytraps, existential panic, total emptiness, and profound emotional trauma.
Some people, the bottle was just the wrong thing to grab, period. Poison candy. I have heard of lucky folks who recognized this immediately and put the candy away on a high shelf, never to be taken down again. Others, bright, alert, civically-minded individuals, with happy stories behind and a limitless future ahead, do not put the candy away, and all that shit is for balls now. It belongs to the bottle. A sprung trap laid was right in the weave of their DNA; neural pathways light up like a nightmare string of Christmas lights garlanding a haunted house, and that house is where they live the rest of their days. Unless they can quit.
Existential panic and total emptiness are the manic and depressive aspects of the death drive. Probably it's all more complicated than that but this is on-the-ground reporting, my shit and the shit of the people I've known, so I'll keep it straightforward. Alcoholics drinking in existential panic drink because their performance anxiety about life, the task of living, becomes overbearing and unbearable. Drinking is a pressure release. Eventually enough pressure is released that the anxiety is gone, because drinking is life, and life is finally thus contained, made harmless and eminently livable. Alcoholics drinking in a state of emptiness have the opposite problem; they are soaked in life, saturated and cannot take in any more, a sensation both leaden and untethered. There is nothing in life that holds attraction. Everything in it comes predigested, covered in shit, no points, no punchlines, no significance. Only drinking makes one feel warm, makes the heart beat like a human muscle instead of sitting in the chest like a cold rock in a river that has stopped flowing. You don't feel much better, usually, but less like a walking corpse. More able to keep up the performance.
Emotional trauma speaks for itself, I guess. One could write a great deal about its mechanism, and I mean to, but this is also where things get very subjective. Too many words for one post, too many bases to cover.
*
My whole deal is a spicy blend of all of the above; my uncle drinks. Most of the clan is made up of regular people, but here and there, like raisins in a porridge, an alkie, a suicide. Incidentally, few smoke anything to speak of, either; my uncle, though, enjoys cigars. That's a mother's side uncle. On my father's side, my favorite aunt smokes cigs. And me, the favored heir.
Obviously, the death drive and I are old companions. Incidentally, I am already smoking cigs again. Fuck it. No guilt. It's blissful. As I told a dude yesterday as we smoked before dawn, a man needs a death ritual, or he'll die.
Next post, I'll dive into the emotional trauma that drives me to drink. Strap in! It's gonna be a barrel of laffs and a slap-happy half.
*
Saw Joker. Movie of the year, movie of the decade, maybe the best fucking movie I've ever seen in my life. Just thinking of the sound engineering alone gives me a hard-on.
May everyone, eventually, get the joke.
*
Finished Doctor Sleep, read through The Institute, Everything's Eventual, and The Cycle of the Werewolf. Reading Dreamcatcher now. The King binge continues, and shall continue apace; let's see how many I can do in October. Gonna focus of the big bastards for awhile; Needful Things is on deck, then, Under the Dome. If I can do one more after that before November, I'll be happy. Still working sixty hours.
Oh! Did a little interstitial with Caitlin Doughty's Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?, lent to me by a coworker. Pretty good stuff. Pretty funny.
*
Listening to a lot of The Offspring. Playing lots of stuff to listen to in the kitchen, all kinds of stuff, particularly Funkadelic, Janis Joplin, Muddy Waters, and Santana, but what I want to be listening to for myself the last couple weeks is The Offspring. Feels like taking strong supplements of a long-neglected vitamin; the world feels brighter, food tastes better, and my attitude is lively. The Offspring reminds me that I have balls, basically, a good fucking pair that's seen me through some shit. Amazing how that gets away from you.
*
It's been the most beautiful day. October is the most beautiful month there is, on average, in my limited experience.
--JL
Showing posts with label alcoholism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label alcoholism. Show all posts
Monday, October 7, 2019
Thursday, October 3, 2019
#217
Writing this wearing my leather jacket at my desk, a first. Noticed yesterday that writing about drinking erodes my self-esteem, which is still better than the gritty cheer with which I talk about it aloud (when I have to or am compelled to) in order to try and mask my deep shame.
Second post in a row the first paragraph ends with the word "shame"! It is possible that my self-esteem is just plain low right now and that is why I want to drink, and am talking about drinking. It is possible that my drinking is rooted in low self-esteem.
Alcohol--when false bravado just doesn't cut it anymore! HaHA!
It is also because I believe in confession.
*
Hmm. As soon as I wrote that last sentence, I took my jacket off.
*
There are three drinking acts of which I am particularly ashamed--four, really, but the fourth is for another day, and something for which I repaid society, according to its appointed juridical extractors.
*
One is driving home from a certain friend's house so plastered I don't remember doing it. Letting me do this quite unhindered is only one of the many ways this person was not the best friend in the world to me. The friend is completely beside the actual point, of course; it's dangerous to try to stop me from doing whatever I want to do and I'm glad they did no more than ask if I was sure I wanted to do that. I try, but like anyone who really drinks, I'm maybe not such a nice guy, maybe not put together a hundred percent right no matter what kind things I say and beautiful things I try and keep faith in.
This was after my relapse--a fun, sad story--and one thing I had always carried an alcoholic's brand of pride over--yes, a boast I proudly made, while I drank and after I "quit"--that one thing I had never done in my drinking days, which spanned years and years, was get behind the wheel of a car. Well, I did, that night. Nice, right? Classy shit.
"I may be a fuckup, but I'm not that selfish/fucked up/retarded/insane/irresponsible," I said, any number of times.
Good lesson about myself. Much like the next story, which funnily enough, happened not long after!
*
My relapse didn't last a full year in its dangerous stages, I started out okay and drank like a normal person at the end for a period of eight months--a mirror to the eight months I drank hard in secret and with friends (as well as ostensible friends which are, to degrees varying from the subtle to the screamingly obvious, not true friends and only drinking relations) while pretending to drink like a normal person in front of family and my partner and housemates and God and everybody.
That's another way the relapse was worse than the drinking years. The first time around I drank angrily and openly, it was frankly incredible that my parents never really caught on when I was living at home (barring a few isolated incidents, which terrible though they were did not hinder me) and they were close to giving up on me once I was on my own. I wouldn't call for weeks, never had anything to say for myself. I'd picked up my mom at the airport once with a gin hangover, the raw reek of it seeping out my pores. She said she could smell me sweating gin, and I told her that this was logical, given the quantity of it I had drunk the night before. That left the conversation where it was, but I did switch to whiskey for keeps right after. Mellower cloud.
Not great. But far, far worse was this sneaking around my ex-fiancée, drinking again instead of confronting our failed relationship. To my credit, instead of dying, or worse, living with her a long long time, I did end things (a little while after we mutually decided to break our engagement, a long and excruciating story), and after a few more weeks of heavy drinking, I leveled out, then pretty much stopped. The narcissist and I shared a few drinks, and awhile after I got out of that, I had a drink or two with my friend that let me drive drunk, who is also an alcoholic and inextricable from my relapse.
Sometimes you meet someone, look into their eyes, and know that you're going to hold hands as you go into a dark place together. You're not sure if that's a good or bad thing, but you know as sure as you know you're gonna draw breath for a certain amount of time and then stop, that it is gonna fucking happen. It's like that, with that friend. I don't have them in my life anymore, part of me hates them for the way they treated me and for how things went, which is a long and complicated story--and it comes to me now, dear reader, that the purpose of this stupid and factually pointless endeavor, this idiotic blog, is simply to collate all my long and complicated stories into a shape that I can try to see and understand before I shuffle off.
Anyway, people like that often drink together until one or both of them die. That's the actual basic reason we can't be in each other's lives, along with a bunch of other fucked shit.
During the dark time directly following the final break with my ex-fiancée I got so drunk in my backyard I walked into my neighbor's house, which was occupied by a bunch of twenty-somethings that also drank. Uninvited, their door unlocked, and as far as I could tell, nobody home, but I remember parts of it well enough to be sure of this: I was horny, and I meant to offer to fuck whichever of the girls happened to be home. I was drunk enough to think this plausible and to walk into their house, but not so drunk that I didn't realize what the fuck was happening, the fucking outlandishly insane and fucked up thing that I was fucking doing my god who the fuck am I, and leave immediately. I have not been that drunk since, have hardly even been tipsy--but I have taken drinks.
I have taken drinks, again, after shit like that and shit almost as bad. That is what an alcoholic is. Someone capable of continuing to drink even after shit like that.
*
The third thing was much, much earlier, years and years ago, when I was living in this very house with my first ex. Don't remember anything leading up to sex, don't remember much about it, just dim flashes of me furiously fucking her. Like, angrily. Not like myself.
Asked her about it, the next morning, ashamed, weirded out, not sure if I should. She was flat and noncommittal. Women often are when you've acted like some kind of devil in human skin, raging or spitting contempt like acid. I let it lie. Have never forgotten it.
*
Okay, I feel sick. Haven't been sleeping well, and hey! Not sure I've helped my situation, here, with this typing. Christ oh fuck. Jesus. Drinking.
--JL
Second post in a row the first paragraph ends with the word "shame"! It is possible that my self-esteem is just plain low right now and that is why I want to drink, and am talking about drinking. It is possible that my drinking is rooted in low self-esteem.
Alcohol--when false bravado just doesn't cut it anymore! HaHA!
It is also because I believe in confession.
*
Hmm. As soon as I wrote that last sentence, I took my jacket off.
*
There are three drinking acts of which I am particularly ashamed--four, really, but the fourth is for another day, and something for which I repaid society, according to its appointed juridical extractors.
*
One is driving home from a certain friend's house so plastered I don't remember doing it. Letting me do this quite unhindered is only one of the many ways this person was not the best friend in the world to me. The friend is completely beside the actual point, of course; it's dangerous to try to stop me from doing whatever I want to do and I'm glad they did no more than ask if I was sure I wanted to do that. I try, but like anyone who really drinks, I'm maybe not such a nice guy, maybe not put together a hundred percent right no matter what kind things I say and beautiful things I try and keep faith in.
This was after my relapse--a fun, sad story--and one thing I had always carried an alcoholic's brand of pride over--yes, a boast I proudly made, while I drank and after I "quit"--that one thing I had never done in my drinking days, which spanned years and years, was get behind the wheel of a car. Well, I did, that night. Nice, right? Classy shit.
"I may be a fuckup, but I'm not that selfish/fucked up/retarded/insane/irresponsible," I said, any number of times.
Good lesson about myself. Much like the next story, which funnily enough, happened not long after!
*
My relapse didn't last a full year in its dangerous stages, I started out okay and drank like a normal person at the end for a period of eight months--a mirror to the eight months I drank hard in secret and with friends (as well as ostensible friends which are, to degrees varying from the subtle to the screamingly obvious, not true friends and only drinking relations) while pretending to drink like a normal person in front of family and my partner and housemates and God and everybody.
That's another way the relapse was worse than the drinking years. The first time around I drank angrily and openly, it was frankly incredible that my parents never really caught on when I was living at home (barring a few isolated incidents, which terrible though they were did not hinder me) and they were close to giving up on me once I was on my own. I wouldn't call for weeks, never had anything to say for myself. I'd picked up my mom at the airport once with a gin hangover, the raw reek of it seeping out my pores. She said she could smell me sweating gin, and I told her that this was logical, given the quantity of it I had drunk the night before. That left the conversation where it was, but I did switch to whiskey for keeps right after. Mellower cloud.
Not great. But far, far worse was this sneaking around my ex-fiancée, drinking again instead of confronting our failed relationship. To my credit, instead of dying, or worse, living with her a long long time, I did end things (a little while after we mutually decided to break our engagement, a long and excruciating story), and after a few more weeks of heavy drinking, I leveled out, then pretty much stopped. The narcissist and I shared a few drinks, and awhile after I got out of that, I had a drink or two with my friend that let me drive drunk, who is also an alcoholic and inextricable from my relapse.
Sometimes you meet someone, look into their eyes, and know that you're going to hold hands as you go into a dark place together. You're not sure if that's a good or bad thing, but you know as sure as you know you're gonna draw breath for a certain amount of time and then stop, that it is gonna fucking happen. It's like that, with that friend. I don't have them in my life anymore, part of me hates them for the way they treated me and for how things went, which is a long and complicated story--and it comes to me now, dear reader, that the purpose of this stupid and factually pointless endeavor, this idiotic blog, is simply to collate all my long and complicated stories into a shape that I can try to see and understand before I shuffle off.
Anyway, people like that often drink together until one or both of them die. That's the actual basic reason we can't be in each other's lives, along with a bunch of other fucked shit.
During the dark time directly following the final break with my ex-fiancée I got so drunk in my backyard I walked into my neighbor's house, which was occupied by a bunch of twenty-somethings that also drank. Uninvited, their door unlocked, and as far as I could tell, nobody home, but I remember parts of it well enough to be sure of this: I was horny, and I meant to offer to fuck whichever of the girls happened to be home. I was drunk enough to think this plausible and to walk into their house, but not so drunk that I didn't realize what the fuck was happening, the fucking outlandishly insane and fucked up thing that I was fucking doing my god who the fuck am I, and leave immediately. I have not been that drunk since, have hardly even been tipsy--but I have taken drinks.
I have taken drinks, again, after shit like that and shit almost as bad. That is what an alcoholic is. Someone capable of continuing to drink even after shit like that.
*
The third thing was much, much earlier, years and years ago, when I was living in this very house with my first ex. Don't remember anything leading up to sex, don't remember much about it, just dim flashes of me furiously fucking her. Like, angrily. Not like myself.
Asked her about it, the next morning, ashamed, weirded out, not sure if I should. She was flat and noncommittal. Women often are when you've acted like some kind of devil in human skin, raging or spitting contempt like acid. I let it lie. Have never forgotten it.
*
Okay, I feel sick. Haven't been sleeping well, and hey! Not sure I've helped my situation, here, with this typing. Christ oh fuck. Jesus. Drinking.
--JL
Wednesday, October 2, 2019
#216
Tequila was my first drink, in cautious nips from the freezer after I got home from middle school. Merely exploratory, almost scientific. What is this magic substance truly about, which stays liquid while the water around has assumed solidity? Why is this beverage such a titan to all peoples, and in so many forms? I believe the only things more culturally omnipresent than alcohol are adultery and shame.
Rum came next, and I got my first really unhinged vomitous drunk off rum. I was never able to enjoy rum again after that, but I fuckin loved rum, people. As a teenager, I loved rum. It had a non-trivial amount to do with the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. At this late date, I can admit it had a lot to do with Jack Sparrow. It's always kind of embarrassing for a dude to a admit that he does something because another dude does it--that one imitated, at least, stylistically. We are proud to emulate what we tout as the good qualities of our available examples, things we think other dudes should emulate too. We are more reticent about why we wear our hat at quite that angle, with quite that feather tucked into the band, because we don't necessarily want other dudes to do it--I stole this for myself, motherfucker. I wear black leather because of Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, and smile lopsided because of Han Solo. This is less, say, defensible, though I wouldn't bother defending myself, than wishing to face death in like spirit to that of Seneca, to gain a power over one's own culture like to that of a Goethe or Da Vinci, or engage in the imitation of Christ.
Christ preferred wine. It took me awhile to get to wine, even though my parents let me have a little sometimes, like parents do. Wine's alright. I'm more James May than Oz Clarke, at least in this matter.
*
When all is said and done, the chips are counted and the vessels filled, I'm a whiskey and beer man. As much gin as I drank up, as much as I also liked and appreciated vodka, the bulk prize of my drinking goes to the sixpack and the pint of scotch--or the case and the fifth, depending on how bad it was, this need to fill myself with a roaring drunkenness, and think the thoughts and feel the feelings that rose screaming from that storm like demon birds. Killed my first fifth in high school and I didn't stop until I stopped. Didn't always kill a fifth, or down a whole case, but I always knew how. I say scotch 'cause it's the best, but any strong brown liquor in that family would do me fine at any time.
See how I talk about it? The vodka and rum and all that other nonsense is a vague memory, fine and all, but my mouth is fucking full of saliva right now thinking about a deep rich bottle of Tennessee devilry. Fuck me running, man.
*
Drunk plenty at bars and parties, plenty while out and about, trespassing and hell-raising, but for the most part, sitting at a kitchen table, or in a backyard, or a basement. Usually with a couple people, but alone a great deal, alone quite enough to be getting along with.
*
One thing about The Rock--the only truly phenomenal Michael Bay picture--is Sean Connery's line about trying your best. I think you should always try your best, but it's even better to just fucking gut up and win, to do and not try, and this line has a great way of putting it out; less direct but more flavorful than Yoda:
"Your best? Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen."
I don't know from prom queens, I'm not that kind of dude--I may have fucked one or two, but I'm not a prom king, is the point, and it didn't factor into my decisions--but this statement, borne in mind, has sure as shit been goddamn useful.
This attitude is key if you want to not drink and keep not drinking. I can't afford to be fucking around with my shitty little best. I don't fucking drink because I just fucking don't, and I won't. I go home, and engage in all manner of unmentionable activities.
Also God is with me. That is good, and frightening.
*
All right, fuckers, I'm out. Tired. Work has been pissing me off so fucking much lately. I've wanted a drink and a cig like mad, that wanting that is the actual closest thing to the physical sensation of thirst. What a knocked-ass fuck of a life. You can't stop kids from drinking and smoking, and you usually make things worse when you try, but shit hell and god damn do I understand the impulse.
This post has been a prelude to a drinking story. The kind of drinking story that turns into a few drinking stories? Yes. That's my basic plan. That's what I set out to do, and I did.
Already home, and not a prom queen in sight! Well, I guess I'll just read a book and go to bed.
--JL
Rum came next, and I got my first really unhinged vomitous drunk off rum. I was never able to enjoy rum again after that, but I fuckin loved rum, people. As a teenager, I loved rum. It had a non-trivial amount to do with the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. At this late date, I can admit it had a lot to do with Jack Sparrow. It's always kind of embarrassing for a dude to a admit that he does something because another dude does it--that one imitated, at least, stylistically. We are proud to emulate what we tout as the good qualities of our available examples, things we think other dudes should emulate too. We are more reticent about why we wear our hat at quite that angle, with quite that feather tucked into the band, because we don't necessarily want other dudes to do it--I stole this for myself, motherfucker. I wear black leather because of Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, and smile lopsided because of Han Solo. This is less, say, defensible, though I wouldn't bother defending myself, than wishing to face death in like spirit to that of Seneca, to gain a power over one's own culture like to that of a Goethe or Da Vinci, or engage in the imitation of Christ.
Christ preferred wine. It took me awhile to get to wine, even though my parents let me have a little sometimes, like parents do. Wine's alright. I'm more James May than Oz Clarke, at least in this matter.
*
When all is said and done, the chips are counted and the vessels filled, I'm a whiskey and beer man. As much gin as I drank up, as much as I also liked and appreciated vodka, the bulk prize of my drinking goes to the sixpack and the pint of scotch--or the case and the fifth, depending on how bad it was, this need to fill myself with a roaring drunkenness, and think the thoughts and feel the feelings that rose screaming from that storm like demon birds. Killed my first fifth in high school and I didn't stop until I stopped. Didn't always kill a fifth, or down a whole case, but I always knew how. I say scotch 'cause it's the best, but any strong brown liquor in that family would do me fine at any time.
See how I talk about it? The vodka and rum and all that other nonsense is a vague memory, fine and all, but my mouth is fucking full of saliva right now thinking about a deep rich bottle of Tennessee devilry. Fuck me running, man.
*
Drunk plenty at bars and parties, plenty while out and about, trespassing and hell-raising, but for the most part, sitting at a kitchen table, or in a backyard, or a basement. Usually with a couple people, but alone a great deal, alone quite enough to be getting along with.
*
One thing about The Rock--the only truly phenomenal Michael Bay picture--is Sean Connery's line about trying your best. I think you should always try your best, but it's even better to just fucking gut up and win, to do and not try, and this line has a great way of putting it out; less direct but more flavorful than Yoda:
"Your best? Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen."
I don't know from prom queens, I'm not that kind of dude--I may have fucked one or two, but I'm not a prom king, is the point, and it didn't factor into my decisions--but this statement, borne in mind, has sure as shit been goddamn useful.
This attitude is key if you want to not drink and keep not drinking. I can't afford to be fucking around with my shitty little best. I don't fucking drink because I just fucking don't, and I won't. I go home, and engage in all manner of unmentionable activities.
Also God is with me. That is good, and frightening.
*
All right, fuckers, I'm out. Tired. Work has been pissing me off so fucking much lately. I've wanted a drink and a cig like mad, that wanting that is the actual closest thing to the physical sensation of thirst. What a knocked-ass fuck of a life. You can't stop kids from drinking and smoking, and you usually make things worse when you try, but shit hell and god damn do I understand the impulse.
This post has been a prelude to a drinking story. The kind of drinking story that turns into a few drinking stories? Yes. That's my basic plan. That's what I set out to do, and I did.
Already home, and not a prom queen in sight! Well, I guess I'll just read a book and go to bed.
--JL
Tuesday, September 24, 2019
#215
Opened up Microsoft word and chose the font. Went with Cambria Math in fourteen-point. When I first started writing I thought to write straight into Times New Roman, twelve-point font, but that's better for proofing. Still dip back into it pretty often, it's not bad at all. It reminds you what you're doing, which is nice.
Pretty quickly I switched to Courier in ten-point. I would still use that for some stuff. I do not like Courier New. I quit using Courier when I began to feel that I had mastered my old typewriter, which I threw in the garbage in a fit of ego-destroying, memory-driven madness as I gruesomely extracted myself from a narcissist. I had stopped using Courier and its bastard before that, but more recently than I might care to admit maybe. Two and a half years ago.
This is really basic font-talk, I'm boring the shit out of myself, and the reason I am writing here instead of in the word document I opened is of course that despite my bravado, I am terrified to begin. Hilarious.
*
Started banging out stories with a purpose at the age of eleven. My fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Bates, made us, called 'em Super Subjects. Just little freewriting exercises. Ole girl knew what she was doing; I was a discipline issue when she took over halfway through the year, and before long mostly all I thought about was how to impress her with my writing. She was fucking tough, see. I sweated over the book reports she assigned and crumpled up I don't know how much good paper getting a paragraph just right.
Get 'em while their ego is as enormous as only a child's can be, before too much self-consciousness has set in but the process is in motion. I actually hungered to read my work in front of the class. Immigrant boy, best writer in the class. Yeah I fucking liked that. I was, too. Ms. Bates didn't talk to anyone about their writing like she talked to me, not even to KdB., who was and remains to this day fifty times smarter than me. An essay I had to write for D.A.R.E. about why I would never do drugs was selected as the best by the program people and I was put up on stage in the auditorium to read it aloud in front of all the fifth-grade classes. That this should have been my first professional success is perhaps a damning mark over my career; I'm stoned right now and also am a fucking alcoholic.
Hell, I knew when I was filling out those D.A.R.E. worksheets that I was putting on an act for these people. I could feel already that I was fucked up. I remember consciously and cynically putting a tremble into my hand when I filled in some bullshit about how I didn't want to drink because blah-blah-blah and I've seen what drink does to my uncle. More on him another day, there's always good stories around a drunk*. I would be stealing nips from the fine tequila my dad had a bottle of in the freezer right after I got home from school within two years of reading that essay in front of a bunch of beaming cops and teachers.
"So far above his grade level!"
lol
Anyway, the problem with writing is it can get out of your hands, become bigger than you, drive you around. When you're a kid it's just something you do, even if it's something you are; it feels more like a choice even though it's really unchaining a drive which, when liberated, will perversely never let you go. No matter what goes wrong, no matter the severity of the ego death or the blindness of drink, you just fucking keep writing. Mostly just to see it burn.
*
So, beginnings are hard, maybe even triggering. That's why I wrote this blog post instead of a single sentence. But it's loosened me up, see? I'm not as nervy as when I sat down. I got a rhythm going and I'm not done with the good good fucking great-ass feeling of punching keys. So I'm gonna try again. Forget all the important work I lost; get hard and go. Writing is Ironborn: what is dead may never die, but rises again, harder and stronger. Words are wind, and everything is built on the wind.**
*
Ready to start again.
--JL
*I cannot help but notice, dear reader, that the most hit-upon posts on FP are usually the ones which rely on what I have called the sordid tonal qualities of cigarettes and alcohol. I see you motherfuckers. Well, so be it; I'm finna bring some drinkin stories out this fall for sure. Maybe even tomorrow.
**profound thanks to George R.R. Martin, who is a greater writer than he is taken for; I am aware that the man has risen high, but I stand by my statement. Like Stephen King, he is so fucking rad that to call him merely a great writer is to mildly insult him. The dudes are writer's writers and reader's writers in a way that will outlast much around us that will soon be deservedly forgotten. Speaking in a literary sense. They are at the center of letters and as universally despised as they are popular and beloved for a host of good, bad, simple, and complex reasons.
Pretty quickly I switched to Courier in ten-point. I would still use that for some stuff. I do not like Courier New. I quit using Courier when I began to feel that I had mastered my old typewriter, which I threw in the garbage in a fit of ego-destroying, memory-driven madness as I gruesomely extracted myself from a narcissist. I had stopped using Courier and its bastard before that, but more recently than I might care to admit maybe. Two and a half years ago.
This is really basic font-talk, I'm boring the shit out of myself, and the reason I am writing here instead of in the word document I opened is of course that despite my bravado, I am terrified to begin. Hilarious.
*
Started banging out stories with a purpose at the age of eleven. My fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Bates, made us, called 'em Super Subjects. Just little freewriting exercises. Ole girl knew what she was doing; I was a discipline issue when she took over halfway through the year, and before long mostly all I thought about was how to impress her with my writing. She was fucking tough, see. I sweated over the book reports she assigned and crumpled up I don't know how much good paper getting a paragraph just right.
Get 'em while their ego is as enormous as only a child's can be, before too much self-consciousness has set in but the process is in motion. I actually hungered to read my work in front of the class. Immigrant boy, best writer in the class. Yeah I fucking liked that. I was, too. Ms. Bates didn't talk to anyone about their writing like she talked to me, not even to KdB., who was and remains to this day fifty times smarter than me. An essay I had to write for D.A.R.E. about why I would never do drugs was selected as the best by the program people and I was put up on stage in the auditorium to read it aloud in front of all the fifth-grade classes. That this should have been my first professional success is perhaps a damning mark over my career; I'm stoned right now and also am a fucking alcoholic.
Hell, I knew when I was filling out those D.A.R.E. worksheets that I was putting on an act for these people. I could feel already that I was fucked up. I remember consciously and cynically putting a tremble into my hand when I filled in some bullshit about how I didn't want to drink because blah-blah-blah and I've seen what drink does to my uncle. More on him another day, there's always good stories around a drunk*. I would be stealing nips from the fine tequila my dad had a bottle of in the freezer right after I got home from school within two years of reading that essay in front of a bunch of beaming cops and teachers.
"So far above his grade level!"
lol
Anyway, the problem with writing is it can get out of your hands, become bigger than you, drive you around. When you're a kid it's just something you do, even if it's something you are; it feels more like a choice even though it's really unchaining a drive which, when liberated, will perversely never let you go. No matter what goes wrong, no matter the severity of the ego death or the blindness of drink, you just fucking keep writing. Mostly just to see it burn.
*
So, beginnings are hard, maybe even triggering. That's why I wrote this blog post instead of a single sentence. But it's loosened me up, see? I'm not as nervy as when I sat down. I got a rhythm going and I'm not done with the good good fucking great-ass feeling of punching keys. So I'm gonna try again. Forget all the important work I lost; get hard and go. Writing is Ironborn: what is dead may never die, but rises again, harder and stronger. Words are wind, and everything is built on the wind.**
*
Ready to start again.
--JL
*I cannot help but notice, dear reader, that the most hit-upon posts on FP are usually the ones which rely on what I have called the sordid tonal qualities of cigarettes and alcohol. I see you motherfuckers. Well, so be it; I'm finna bring some drinkin stories out this fall for sure. Maybe even tomorrow.
**profound thanks to George R.R. Martin, who is a greater writer than he is taken for; I am aware that the man has risen high, but I stand by my statement. Like Stephen King, he is so fucking rad that to call him merely a great writer is to mildly insult him. The dudes are writer's writers and reader's writers in a way that will outlast much around us that will soon be deservedly forgotten. Speaking in a literary sense. They are at the center of letters and as universally despised as they are popular and beloved for a host of good, bad, simple, and complex reasons.
Friday, January 4, 2019
#92
Reading comics has been central to my life for as long as I can remember. I used to read the funnies to my grandpa on his porch when I was three years old. My mom taught me to read when I was two, and I was at my grandparent's a lot, learning table manners from my grandma and watching VHS tapes and reading the comics pages while my grandpa moved through the rest of the paper.
In order to grant myself turnkey access to comics every day, shortly after my family moved into the house where I am typing this, I took a job delivering the local paper around my neighborhood. I was eleven, and it was my first job. I held it for a few years, and then the newspaper gave up having a paperboy just for my neighborhood because a man with a car needed a recession job. Later the paper folded.
My second job was at this Chinese place on the way to downtown from my neighborhood. I went there with my friends and we had a nice time, and I left a big tip because I had just helped my uncle move a giant cooler and I had a little money. That went over real well with the server and something about my mood and the place and the day made me ask if they might be hiring, and she said she didn't know but to leave my number and if they were then her boss would call me. She did, and I started there with the understanding that I would be going off to college after the winter, spring, and summer.
After I dropped out of college I came back and worked there for four years except for once when I had a manic breakdown and left for a couple of months and another time I went to open a restaurant with my aunt and worked there for a few months before I had a physical altercation with my uncle, the giant cooler guy. I had also done some other jobs with him in the past: demolition on a house, a big sink installation, odd tasks and heavy hauls. He took a disagreement too far, but I should have just ducked his swing and dipped. Rather, I ducked his swing, picked him up, set him down hard on a table, then dragged him to the floor and put him in a chokehold till he tapped out. I should mention he is my uncle by marriage and no blood uncle of mine would ever have did me the way he did, and if they raised a hand to strike me I would probably just take the hit. I respect my blood uncles. I did not respect that dude. He nicked his scalp on a table-mounted can opener when I smacked him onto the table and he bled all over my shirt as he tried to punch my head, not really able to because I know my holds. Dude had no business taking a swing at me. Also they were overworking me and shorting my late paychecks.
Still, they were family, and I was wrong to fight him and never come back. I forgive them, but my aunt and I don't talk much, and she was once my favorite aunt, a special friend to me and my favorite cousin. I shan't be working with family again. Never spoke to the uncle again, don't know if he forgives me or not. Well, life is long. Perhaps one day there will be a peaceful reckoning.
Returning to the Chinese place as many times as I did is emblematic of a certain sentimentality I am prey to that has more or less destroyed my life several times over. There was no need to work there that long but that I could work hungover and read books behind the counter with my feet up when it was slow (this was not at all encouraged, you understand). It was not satisfying work; it was the menial, dragging, customer-and-telephone purgatory that is the lowest rungs of the service industry. Working for my aunt I learned how to work in a kitchen. I had to, fast, because she lied to me about what I would be doing; not merely "packing and register and some little part of the cooking and finishing the arepas and the empanadas", but line and dish and stock and janitor and register and packing and pantry and grill and fryer all at once. I even had to bake some shit. I also made drinks. I did everything you could imagine in that place. I got so I was getting good at it. Then that stupid, fundamentally moronic night with my uncle.
At the Chinese place the most involved thing I did was toss some soy sauce with chili oil mixed in over some cold noodles, ladle some peanut sauce over that, and throw sesame seeds on top. Folding crab rangoons and wontons, well, I never even got very good at that; I usually asked the girls to do it. I worked with mostly women. The other dudes were all drivers or cooks. I was the only male register monkey. I wiped tables and took orders and served people their food and bussed their shitty fucked up messes and smoked weed in the basement of the downtown location and a cigarette every hour, or two an hour if I thought I could get away with it. The last time I returned to that place, that level, watching the cooks do their thing, after actually working, having been the dude with the knife and the fire, was a considerable blow to my sense of self. That is when my drinking became very serious, instead of just serious.
Once my very serious drinking became a terrifying monster problem that ate my life and hurled me into an abyss, I really couldn't go back. When I began to drag myself up into some semblance of a new life, I started working at a national used car parts retailer. As a delivery driver. One step up the ladder.
Sentimentality. Maudlin and unrealistic and fixated on illusions and fleeting moments long past. That's the shit that kills me every time. I possess a more temperate form, which fuels my inveterate rereading and which I consider one of my great strengths, but if I don't watch it I can tie myself to anchors, several at a time, and throw myself into the ocean, and just try and hold my breath,
It doesn't work.
Working at that Chinese place defined my life in key ways. The stuff I learned, the people I worked with, the interactions I had with customers and bosses and partners and the food and the commuting, the different places I was at personally when I worked there, the stunts I pulled--I wouldn't take it back, you know, but it wasn't very healthy. It was a relationship based on valuing fleeting highs and allowance for misconduct and the indulgence of vice more than addressing grave structural problems, imbalances, and abuses, both ways, which mirrors a lot of other relationships in my life. I tend to stay. That's not always good. I tend to come back. That's not always good either. Sometimes it is good to break up and stay away, because the reasons you're staying sound beautiful in your head but they're fishhooks in your skin, the ones that drag you back thinking you were crazy to leave even though you had never before contemplated a more total suffering.
The very first shift I ever worked there was the very last day for one of the cooks. He'd worked his bit and he was going back to China to get back with his family and set them up with what he earned. We had a special dinner after close to celebrate him and see him off. It was the first time I had ever tasted jellyfish, and it was absolutely delicious. I was so happy to be there. I felt so warm and nourished by that food and by the laughter and the companionship of that night. Many times I thought of leaving, even years later, it was remembering that night that kept me going; the smell and taste of the broth, the shining faces.
Just ridiculous.
--JL
In order to grant myself turnkey access to comics every day, shortly after my family moved into the house where I am typing this, I took a job delivering the local paper around my neighborhood. I was eleven, and it was my first job. I held it for a few years, and then the newspaper gave up having a paperboy just for my neighborhood because a man with a car needed a recession job. Later the paper folded.
My second job was at this Chinese place on the way to downtown from my neighborhood. I went there with my friends and we had a nice time, and I left a big tip because I had just helped my uncle move a giant cooler and I had a little money. That went over real well with the server and something about my mood and the place and the day made me ask if they might be hiring, and she said she didn't know but to leave my number and if they were then her boss would call me. She did, and I started there with the understanding that I would be going off to college after the winter, spring, and summer.
After I dropped out of college I came back and worked there for four years except for once when I had a manic breakdown and left for a couple of months and another time I went to open a restaurant with my aunt and worked there for a few months before I had a physical altercation with my uncle, the giant cooler guy. I had also done some other jobs with him in the past: demolition on a house, a big sink installation, odd tasks and heavy hauls. He took a disagreement too far, but I should have just ducked his swing and dipped. Rather, I ducked his swing, picked him up, set him down hard on a table, then dragged him to the floor and put him in a chokehold till he tapped out. I should mention he is my uncle by marriage and no blood uncle of mine would ever have did me the way he did, and if they raised a hand to strike me I would probably just take the hit. I respect my blood uncles. I did not respect that dude. He nicked his scalp on a table-mounted can opener when I smacked him onto the table and he bled all over my shirt as he tried to punch my head, not really able to because I know my holds. Dude had no business taking a swing at me. Also they were overworking me and shorting my late paychecks.
Still, they were family, and I was wrong to fight him and never come back. I forgive them, but my aunt and I don't talk much, and she was once my favorite aunt, a special friend to me and my favorite cousin. I shan't be working with family again. Never spoke to the uncle again, don't know if he forgives me or not. Well, life is long. Perhaps one day there will be a peaceful reckoning.
Returning to the Chinese place as many times as I did is emblematic of a certain sentimentality I am prey to that has more or less destroyed my life several times over. There was no need to work there that long but that I could work hungover and read books behind the counter with my feet up when it was slow (this was not at all encouraged, you understand). It was not satisfying work; it was the menial, dragging, customer-and-telephone purgatory that is the lowest rungs of the service industry. Working for my aunt I learned how to work in a kitchen. I had to, fast, because she lied to me about what I would be doing; not merely "packing and register and some little part of the cooking and finishing the arepas and the empanadas", but line and dish and stock and janitor and register and packing and pantry and grill and fryer all at once. I even had to bake some shit. I also made drinks. I did everything you could imagine in that place. I got so I was getting good at it. Then that stupid, fundamentally moronic night with my uncle.
At the Chinese place the most involved thing I did was toss some soy sauce with chili oil mixed in over some cold noodles, ladle some peanut sauce over that, and throw sesame seeds on top. Folding crab rangoons and wontons, well, I never even got very good at that; I usually asked the girls to do it. I worked with mostly women. The other dudes were all drivers or cooks. I was the only male register monkey. I wiped tables and took orders and served people their food and bussed their shitty fucked up messes and smoked weed in the basement of the downtown location and a cigarette every hour, or two an hour if I thought I could get away with it. The last time I returned to that place, that level, watching the cooks do their thing, after actually working, having been the dude with the knife and the fire, was a considerable blow to my sense of self. That is when my drinking became very serious, instead of just serious.
Once my very serious drinking became a terrifying monster problem that ate my life and hurled me into an abyss, I really couldn't go back. When I began to drag myself up into some semblance of a new life, I started working at a national used car parts retailer. As a delivery driver. One step up the ladder.
Sentimentality. Maudlin and unrealistic and fixated on illusions and fleeting moments long past. That's the shit that kills me every time. I possess a more temperate form, which fuels my inveterate rereading and which I consider one of my great strengths, but if I don't watch it I can tie myself to anchors, several at a time, and throw myself into the ocean, and just try and hold my breath,
It doesn't work.
Working at that Chinese place defined my life in key ways. The stuff I learned, the people I worked with, the interactions I had with customers and bosses and partners and the food and the commuting, the different places I was at personally when I worked there, the stunts I pulled--I wouldn't take it back, you know, but it wasn't very healthy. It was a relationship based on valuing fleeting highs and allowance for misconduct and the indulgence of vice more than addressing grave structural problems, imbalances, and abuses, both ways, which mirrors a lot of other relationships in my life. I tend to stay. That's not always good. I tend to come back. That's not always good either. Sometimes it is good to break up and stay away, because the reasons you're staying sound beautiful in your head but they're fishhooks in your skin, the ones that drag you back thinking you were crazy to leave even though you had never before contemplated a more total suffering.
The very first shift I ever worked there was the very last day for one of the cooks. He'd worked his bit and he was going back to China to get back with his family and set them up with what he earned. We had a special dinner after close to celebrate him and see him off. It was the first time I had ever tasted jellyfish, and it was absolutely delicious. I was so happy to be there. I felt so warm and nourished by that food and by the laughter and the companionship of that night. Many times I thought of leaving, even years later, it was remembering that night that kept me going; the smell and taste of the broth, the shining faces.
Just ridiculous.
--JL
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