I'm on fire.
Mike Murder's simple gift has fucked me up for today. I'm torn, betwixt and between all of a sudden. I entered the bathroom of the Public library, my blood boiling. The fever has settled good. And I was absolutely fine this morning. Something has given away in me, with a loud bang. I go to the bathroom stall and turn up that little half pint of vodka and gagging on it's nasty taste. Georgi vodka is not to be enoyed. Don't fool yourself. You drink it because you want to quell the fever in you. The fucking thirst.
And it does just that. I grow amazingly calm as it sinks in like a slow moving knife through skin. I walk out of the stall, confident, head high, stride sure. I am made new. But this too is a mean lie. It's mean because this feeling of elation, of great calmness, of pure control is frighteningly temporary. I go through my routine of going online, of blogging of reading emails, and IMing friends and slowly and surely the feeling of sheer contentment boils off. It melts away like water on a hot iron skillet.
What is left is a man trying to deal with his nerves. Mike Murder has fucked me today. He has sent me into a tailspin, although a familiar one. I get up. I am electrified, my nerves jangly. I am all electric, like a man getting a blowjob. I am longing for the other feeling again. That calmness that enveloped me. The LAMICTAL in my system is supposed to provide me this relief. It's supposed to give me that which I lack.
"You need to ask your psychiatrist what is it that's wrong," Dr L says. "There is something that alcohol is providing that your drugs are not." You're goddamned right that's the case. But what is the point of going somewhere with drugs that alcohol puts you? What's the fucking point?
I get up from my seat, from in the middle of my work, and head to the ascending flight of stairs in the library. I'm on my way to the nearby liquor store. I climb the steps and stop in the middle. It was just a couple of swallows of fucking vodka. I'm not THAT weak. I am the one in control here. I turn and walk angrily down the stairs. There is a broken feeling in me, as if I denied myself some simple but deep pleasure. I am a child that dropped his icecream to the curb. I force myself to take a seat, but my fucking mind can't concentrate on anything. My writing seems flawed, weak, lacking flesh. It seems as if I'm simply trying to populate paper with words. This is all wrong! And I do the equivalent of tearing out and crumpling paper...I hit the delete key.
I rise from my seat and head for the stair. I have a new determination, stronger than before. But like a man swerving his car at the last minute before driving headlong into a tree, I take a turn from the stairway and head for the bathroom instead. I don't have to use it. It's just a destination. It is somewhere other than the liquor store.God, my body is not mine. My brain is not mine. I fight my own will.
"Son," my father said to me once. "A man that is in conflict with himself is indeed a miserable man." This statement consoles me like none other. My father told me not to fight myself, but to give in. To fuck that woman if you needed to, to take that drink if you wanted it, to smoke that cigarette if it pleased you. He was not one to fight himself. He was not one with any fucking regrets in his life. He lived life on his own terms. And maybe, just maybe, I learned too much from that man.
The will to fight was no longer within me. I walked back to my cubicle. It was time to give in. I looked up at the clock. My therapy was to begin in five minutes. My conflict had caused me to lose track of time. Oh wretched man that I am. I have to thank Mike Murder for this when I see him. I'll be slack jawed and fucked. Drunk and angry with myself, but I will have that calmness, that oceanic feeling that only comes with my dipping my sodden brain into the vat of witch oil.
I look up at the clock again. ONLY a minute has past, and not the ten minutes that it felt like. I rose anew, and headed for the stairwell, but this time I was not deterred. I left the building and headed to he nearby liquor store and bought a pint of Smirnoff vodka. Something easier to digest. I go back to the bathroom of the library and take several swallows. I am awash to the extent that sweat beads from my pores.
I am not the winner here, neither am I the loser. I am the man in the midst of something that he can't or no longer needs to control. I can't it seems. I can only control it's damage. I will get a drink, but how many? That is where this battle has to be fought. Not diplomatically. There will be a war. It's inevitable. But the damage caused, the depth of it's fury, the length of its fire, THAT I can control. I can stop at two drinks, four drinks, five. I can deal with that and then stay away from the booze, from the fire.
I'm not talking about beer or wine people. That's not drinking. That's for people who want to get drunk but don't want the accountability. They want to blame something and not themselves. They are not feeling the fever in my opinion. Ask some of the famous drinkers, and they'll tell you the same. Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, O'Neil, Williams, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Mailer, Baldwin, Cheever...Edgar Allen Poe for crissakes!! They were killing the fever within, the fire that boiled the veins. It pours out of the fingertips when one writes. I have to write. It expels a need too. Somehow the two are explicitly linked. Somewhere, years from now, when geneticists figure out the spark of life, they'll find alcohol and writing in the same spark, the same fire.The creative process is a tax, it wears on the soul.
I don't know where my anxiety comes from, I can't be that analytical. I just know that there are some feelings that are connected, some emotions that are tied and bound. My anxiety, my drinking, my writing has some shared center somewhere....somewhere my friend.I retire to the bathroom again. I am fit and fine. I find a stall and pull that condemnable bottle from my back pocket. I know this will not be the last time I will be in this stall. Or maybe it will. As the daring of the alcohol pushes aside the reluctance of the mind, I grow more bolder with my actions. I can see the future. Sitting in my cubicle drinking. The cavalier Hobobob will emerge and it will take over. The son-of-a-bitch Hobobob will arrive shortly thereafter and the games will begin.
That's unless I cut this ride short.
Trust me, I already have. The battle ends here.
Hobobob
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