86

Introductory Text

If I could just be drunk until the end of time
The Author's Narrative Part 13 86th Post Posted 17 June 2016 at 03:52:00 EDT Link to original

Alcohol goes great with nostalgia and melancholy. It's what gives us misty-eyed barflies, forlorn poetry, midnight phone calls, the last page of The Great Gatsby, Sinatra ballads and 73% of all country music.

That was my favorite part of drinking: the wistful interlude a couple hours after the first flush of drunkenness, when you wander away from a boisterous party and look out into the darkened woods and see for a moment the fragile past floating ghostly before you, colored in sunset oranges, all the bygone things which have slipped away in the gentle flow of time. Your breath catches in the tightness of your throat, and your eyes fill with tears. Then somebody calls your name or you have to piss, and you wander back into the party.

I felt like I was at my finest in these moments. I felt poetic and sensitive and alive. Eventually, though, it all became an awful parody of itself. The gentle wistfulness devolved into me sitting in front of my laptop, drunk on a Wednesday night, watching sad Youtube videos, weeping and slurping down vodka and water. I would watch any sort of weepy video (soldier homecomings, kids with cancer, dogs being put down, etc.) just to get a good cry on, to trigger that dopamine release that came with the tears. It was nothing more than emotional masturbation. Just like with the alcohol itself, I had found something that gave me true pleasure, then used it over and over until my feelings had become rote and dead.

The same sort of thing happened with my memories of Mother. At first they came unbidden, stirring up a sense of wonder so powerful it brought tears to my eyes. But over the course of too many drunks and too many hangovers, I replayed the memories over and over from every angle. Eventually I couldn't be sure if certain parts came from the original or were formed by during later recollections. The whispering magic became a monotonous drone. The vaporous impressions dried and hardened into simple facts.

Mother was a woman sewn together from different things.

Mother would come in late at night with a bag that squirmed.

Inside the bag were children.

We would go down into the basement where she kept the cages.

We would do things to them together.

I thought the memories had no more power. I thought they were just abstractions at this point. Bad data. Who could explain them? And why bother?

Now I found myself walking down the street in the middle of the night, trying to burn off the eerie feeling that Shawn's story had put inside me. At the intersection, a stiff breeze zipped down the empty lanes, making the traffic lights sway. I walked by a bar with a patio and listened to the low rumble of confident male voices. A smell came off the bar -- cigarettes and hot wings and liquor sweat. It was the smell of action. The smell of good times. I could just walk in there, have a couple drinks and hold court. Tell a few jokes. Make a few friends.

The problem with going out sober is you have to make all these little decisions: where to go, where to sit, what to get. When you go out drunk you just make one decision: to keep drinking. Every other decision just falls into place. Life becomes easy. As easy as listening to a story.

It wasn't worth going in the bar. It would be closing time in an hour anyways. So I walked past it... on down the street... by myself...

God, if there was no closing time. No tomorrow morning. Just darkness and magic and mystery forever. If I could just be drunk until the end of time.