Proof is the bottom line

Curious, isn’t it, how so many artists, particularly writers, are/were afflicted with addictions. Alcohol seems to be the dominant demon haunting writers. It serves as muse for many writers then turns on them. Like a rabid dog.

Booze as muse.

I tend to lose focus after a few drinks, so that’s not an effective formula – so to speak – for me.

But literature is littered with the pickled corpses of many a scribe, as detailed in Proof.

Here’s to you

Got away with one on Saturday.

Yup, got on a bit of a buzz and nobody was the wiser.

Felt a little tired Sunday but otherwise had no real lasting effects as far as I can tell. No overwhelming desire to go get another or some unstoppable need. No shakes, no bugs crawling up and down my skin.

Just questions.

Like, am I playing with fire? Is this just an inevitable slide into addiction and so on?

Or is the “addiction treatment industry” telling us we have to do this and can’t do this and if we do do this then we need more treatment? I began to suspect as much as I heard the mantras repeated time and time again, and no doubt there are some hopeless addicts who really can’t stop and there are some who are/were clearly out of control who needed a break in the insanity but aren’t necessarily hopelessly addicted.

Could it be I just need to be careful?

Or is the next drink I take the one that puts me over the edge?

I go to these AA meetings and I hear people declare that they’re only one drink away from going off the deep end, that they can’t possibly handle life or a job or the bullshit that happens around them. I hear “experts” say they won’t give advice about saving marriages or jobs, only preserving sobriety, and maybe you’re better off getting divorced or losing that job, etc.

It’s like you’re being told to abdicate any and all responsibility for anything you do beyond keeping yourself sober no matter how selfish your actions might be. Family’s losing their home? Well, at least I’m sober. Half of these counselors are the Wayward Passage are multiple-time losers in marriage (or love or whatever you call it), or never been married, weigh at least 300 pounds and can’t understand why someone like me would think, um, gee, not sure that’s such a good decision.

But back to my Saturday night special. I was super sneaky about it, which gives me pause — but that last time I did it and thuh Missus discovered that I was buzzing and I took off like an idiot because it got all confrontational. I swear to God if they’d just leave us alone it’d be a lot more peaceful!  OK, that’s probably not healthy — “Let me be drunk and leave me alone, damn you!” But the point is if she (and these would-be do-gooders) didn’t overreact some of us wouldn’t feel pushed out of our homes or whatever safe place there is.

They tell you not to compare yourself to others — which I can see why because I see people who are REALLY fucked up and my problems seem like nothing in comparison and I wonder what my wife is whining about — but honestly, even in my own family, there are members who seem to have far deeper problems and they’re not being hauled off on an intervention. Jesus.

Ah, but I have to make dinner. Daughter’s birthday today. Cheers!

Gaaaaahhhhh!!!

That is all I have to say today.

Bless the filthy bloodsuckers

Well, the Obama (read: highly partisan Democratic) stimulus package has landed at the Great Obamassiah’s desk, apparently larded with a bit of pork and with all the GOP hoping it fails miserably, which if it had been the Democrats wishing such ill will they’d have been publicly pilloried as “traitors” and America haters.

Meanwhile, some stuff in the Senate puts limits on how much money executives at bailed out banks can collect on the government dime. Pity the poor bank executives: Can’t barely manage on $20 million a year, what with a Manhattan penthouse, a yacht in the Bahamas and mistresses to support. This  of course is pure speculation: Some of these bankers might have no interest in boats whatsoever.

Happy Valentine’s Day, you mother***ers.

And now some light reading courtesy of the New York Times.

Poe, Poe, pitiful me

Were he still alive today, Edgar Allan Poe would be 200 years old. He’d be a miracle of modern medicine and a testimonial to the magical powers of alcohol and a generally disagreeable disposition, but let’s not quibble.

Poe is an interesting and puzzling character in American history, American literature. He is considered a founding father of macabre writing, of mysteries. He was widely known as a raging alcoholic, a miserable SOB. He is revered by many modern writers. Yet he was a miserable drunk who died at 40 of mysterious causes. Some called it slow suicide — and this predated Alcoholics Anonymous by roughly a hundred years, as this “baffling” disease became better understood.

More on Poe.

Poe called Baltimore home. Baltimore has come to cultivate its quirky image, home to the likes of Poe and oddball moviemaker John Waters. Maybe I should move to Baltimore. They’d understand me there!!

Protected: Piss off!

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Toast

A couple of days before 2008 came to an ignoble end, I succumbed to the siren call of one last drunk. I got hammered. Sloshed. Slobberknocked. Wasted. I didn’t do it on New Year’s Eve. That would be such a cliche. God forbid I become another drunken cliche. No, I sobered up on New Year’s Eve, got myself to an AA meeting and climbed back on the wagon. But the day before … well. Check the rather extensive (though hardly complete) list of euphemisms for drunkenness at Proof. These begin to describe the depths of inebriation one can experience.

Can’t explain why I had to have this one last bender, except to offer this twisted explanation: When I first stopped boozing, it was as a result of an intervention. In other words, not on my terms. So I wanted to do it on my terms. I’ll quit when I’m damn good and ready, and just to prove it, here I go. Hic!

Makes perfect sense, right? Well, yeah, except that I could have killed myself or somebody else on the road in my blind drunkenness. It scared the bejeezus out of my wife and kids, and – this part kills me – my mom and father-in-law felt compelled to come rescue my sorry drunk ass.

At the AA meeting the next day they told a fellow relapser, Don’t beat yourself up, and they could just as well have spoken directly to me. The important thing is you came back in. Recovering addicts refer to their relapses as “going out.” These outings can last days, weeks, years. Mine lasted less than a day, at least in terms of actually using. I had started thinking about it for at least a week, as mild craving grew to obsession. Of course I told no one. I was out, and now I’m back in. Just like that.

One and Done, I pledge solemnly to myself. We shall see.

Which leads to this entry and my running across Proof, a New York Times blog about booze and the boozers who use it. Haven’t read the whole thing, but its writers seem to span a pretty broad spectrum of booze and those who use it and abuse it, for good and for bad. Lately, I’ve had to come to terms with the bad, because that’s what alcohol has become for me.

Which sucks, because I had become rather fond of alcohol. But therein lies the problem. Those of us who love alcohol the most are also in most cases the same ones who would benefit most from avoiding the stuff altogether. This is patently unfair, I say.  Why must alcohol be so damned addictive to some of us, why can’t we just have a nice harmless drunk and go on with our lives? It’s a cruel riddle wrapped in a vicious conundrum topped with a bitter sauce of resentment and recrimination.

Alcohol tends to be at the fore of many folks on New Year’s Eve, or Amateur Night as we veteran drunks call it. So it was when I ran across Proof as I sat at home in Recovery Mode, feeling surprisingly well considering the amount of vodka (Stoli, so at least it was good stuff) I had put away. The writer, Iain Gately, was describing his Boxing Day hangover cure of surfing off the Spanish coast, which apparently involves getting knocked about in the surf then getting one’s wet suit pissed on by a domesticated pig. Not making this up. In it, he goes on with his list of terms coined over the years for getting drunk. For fun and profit, go ahead and make your own list of alcohol-soaked euphemisms! Show your friends! Show your sponsor!

To read Proof, CLICK HERE.

One viewer’s response to an entry at Letting the Chips Fall, another Proof blog:

“… That said, I’ve changed my way of thinking about this series. This series is simply a dialogue about alcohol. Like it or not, drinking is powerful, dangerous and just is, so it should be discussed. In that spirit, I want to hear all of the voices, those of recovery and sobriety, those of excess, those of vanity, those of humility and all the voices in between. By listening with an open heart, I can only understand more about myself and my path. I am fairly certain that the happy result of that willingness to listen without judgment will be a deepening of the peace I finally enjoy.”

To some viewers, this entry (mine, not the previous paragraph) might seem a tad flip about the serious consequences of alcoholism, of the many lives it can destroy and the utter waste of lives and money we could blame on alcohol abuse. Those of us who live this life are more acutely aware (well, some of us are) than “normies” – who generally only see the destruction, not the seductive intoxication that subversively leads us down that path. Once upon a time, this was fun. It was cool. It was seductive.

What I have to remember now is that, for me, it’s destruction.

Blago’s rich pageant

Barack Obama must be laughing in spite of it all.

Sure, it’s embarrassing, the ensuing chaos as Illinois’ embattled governor names the U.S. Senate successor to Barack Obama, whose election as president creates a vacuum in his former Senate seat.

Against the advice of friends and adversaries alike, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has appointed former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris to that vacancy.

Obama haters have been furiously trying to tie Obama to Blago, whose antics seem to become increasingly erratic with each passing day.

What’s a poor president-elect to do??

CLICK HERE.

That giant sucking sound you hear …

… is the hastening decline of the so-called mainstream media.

The New York Times is selling off pieces parts. Advertising revenue and readership continue their precipitous slide. The Associated Press is scaling back. The Detroit newspapers have cut their daily home delivery to three days a week! Gannett is shrinking, Knight Ridder is dead and its successor (McClatchy) ain’t doing so great. TV ad revenue continues to shrink as well. Even the Internet enterprises are struggling in this dismal economy.

Media-haters like Rush Limberger must love it (and the fact that he himself is a media whore is somehow lost on him and his sycophants). With any luck at all, he’ll go deaf again. The Silence of the Hams. We can dream, can’t we?

Media stiffs (such as Obtuse One)  find themselves seeking new ways to monetize what we do as the old model continues to suffer. The days of printing or airing whatever we see fit and expecting advertisers to fall in line are slipping away. The question we face is how to continue to fight for what they (we) believe are important journalistic values, such as being independent from (excessive) influence from government and/or business and continue to make a living at it. There was a time when newspapers were considered licenses to print money and we ink-stained wretches in newsrooms made enough money on the spillover to survive. We didn’t concern ourselves with crap like revenue streams or ad lineage. Just shut up and give us our news hole. Damn you. Well, the land of milk and honey has done fallen under a plague of locusts and freeloaders.

As various media proliferate, that line separating the Fourth Estate from government, advertisers and other entities with agendas of their grows ever blurrier. Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch buys the Wall Street Journal, a respected publication but one that is already widely perceived as sympathetic to business interests at the expense of the Little Guy. Enter Murdoch, whose politics are well-known and loved by certain types, loathed by others. If you have to ask who is which is what, you really have not been paying attention. Even Wall Street Journalistas have expressed concern.

The point being here is that independent editorial voices are becoming harder and harder to come by.

Empty-headed bloggers with obvious axes to grind have been replaced by more sophisticated  bloggers with less-obvious (sometimes) axes to grind. Two problems have arisen: 1) Information consumers are increasingly gravitating toward messengers whom they already agree with, which kind of kills the concept of “fair and balanced,” let alone “unbiased” or “objective.” 2) Everybody wants all this stuff for free.

The problem with problem No. 1 is people who listen to one side of any story are handicapped by incomplete information – in all likelihood they’re starting off under false assumptions. Bad info begets bad info.

The problem with problem No. 2 is serious news gathering takes money. Not just salaries for talking heads and writers, but all that equipment, research, investigating (in many newsrooms the first things to go have been travel expenses and investigative reporting budgets — the stuff that sets the great newsrooms apart). In the best of times mistakes, misjudgments and outright fabrications have made it to print or gotten on the air. As newsrooms cut back on editors and copy editors, more and bigger mistakes will see the light of day (or newsrooms will simply kill ambitious projects out of fear of being sued — I guarantee that’s happening more often than it used to).

This phenomenon is already becoming evident in book publishing, as a growing number of  “memoirs” are being exposed as riddled with factual “oversights” or “omissions” or, um, lies. See more on that, CLICK HERE.

For more media gloaming, CLICK HERE.

Crawling into the NFL playoffs

Jeez, what a let-down.

Dallas is getting blown out, The Ravens are mopping up the Jags and the Browns still suck. Take heart, Cleveland fans, at least your bumbling Brownies didn’t strike the ultimate in futility: 0-16. That honor is reserved for the lowly, pro-in-name-only Detroit Kittens. They make the Browns look like a well-oiled machine.

Romeo Crennel, a fine defensive coordinator, will return to his natural position after five abortive years as head honcho at Cleveland. The only question is where. The burning question now is which lucky franchise will be able to lure Bill Cowher out of the broadcast booth — the Browns? Niners? Detroit (haw-haw!)?
All I know is that appearing in studio with a group of ex-jocks and coaches with a team of producers, directors, writers and assistants to help is a lot easier than being in charge of a professional sports team. As TV talking head, six months of work is a long time. NFL coaching has become a 12-hours-a-day, year-round job. No wonder most of these guys look like crap and probably feel worse; no wonder guys like Bill Parcells are having heart attacks at 55 (age is approximate — don’t hold me to it!) and guys like Romeo Crennel and Wade (Son of Bum) Phillips weigh 300 pounds and Bill Bellejerk only wears loose-fitting sweats — his tailor can’t keep up with his size changes!

Oh, well. On to the playoffs.