December 8, 2012

  • Beer Haze and An Interminable Loss

    Three beers. That's all it takes now. I hadn't drank in 7 years because, well, frankly, I didn't feel like it. When I tell people that they think that I was a raging alcoholic and I have fallen off of the wagon but that wasn't and isn't the case. I remember when I quit, sitting at a very poor sushi restaurant in Kauai (sad how bad the seafood is in Hawaii-almost criminal) and I was drinking a small bit of sake, about the amount in a regular soy sauce bottle that haunts the tables of most Chinese food places. I took a sip. Then one more. And said, "I'm not going to drink anymore". At the time I was drinking, maybe, two glasses of wine, at most, a month. Now, seven years later, I have drank three beers and I know, at least for a time, I will not be done drinking. Three beers and I can feel the edges of my site become fuzzy and the back of my throat a touch numb. Funny, in my younger years I could drink scotch and be clever until the dusk turned to dawn. It usually took a winsome woman to draw out such fortitude but it was not unusual. Now it is three beers with my children asleep, my wife asleep, and I can't sleep like so many other nights. How many night have I not been able to sleep? College was years of unrest, I spent all my time working, then school, then study for school, full time at both-and now it seems like a dream and so far away. How could I have had such energy? I memorized the Krebs cycle and the 58 item menu at the Vietnamese restaurant I worked at. I studied like a wraith, full of fury and intent, I worked hatefully but diligently. What was it for?

    Oh, let me be so trite and silly. My artistic side wants to lament the effort because it left me in a place where I could lament the effort. In the tri-fold definition of a human life: body, mind, spirit-I was able to, because of school, serve my body. I can work. I can work at a level in which I am rewarded with an exchange that I can feed my family and I. I was exposed to a few great writers, some science, and bathtubs of booze (I didn't partake of it all, just my fair share) and pretty women. How trite is that? My wife says it isn't trite. She says that I am one of the only men that she has met that truly, really, likes women. That it isn't caught up in a tangle of neurosis. She told me, a few years ago, that I liked pussy and was so comfortable with it that it was strange. So comfortable with it that, when I was younger, I was mistaken for being gay. That's funny but true. Being comfortable, in that sense, I guess, makes one open-again, my wife, has said she has never met another person who has made so many connection with disparate people. I asked what the hell she was talking about and she said, "You have a radical, Christian fundamentalist friend that tells you to your face you are going to hell, who tries to convert you, and you still are friends with her. You also have a F to M friend that identifies as a heterosexual male even when he was a She and had huge tits. He also is a radical Atheist and Marxist to boot. This is not to point out in too much detail that your best man was a hunter, weed advocate, who regularly tries to get you to go bow hunting with him, the friend you most recently lent money to is a militant bicyclist, vegan, hipster." I told her it just happened. I liked them, like them. Not for anything in particular, really, I like them for them. I like discussing Christ in a literal sense with someone, I like bashing the Literal interpretation of Christ with someone, I like seeing love in all the forms that it comes (and I like shapely tits..they weren't huge either, just nice and shapely, I also like asymmetrical breasts too), and I have a tough time saying no to people I think really need money.

    This all comes out after three beers. I am a lonely drunk right now. Sitting her, with the light, the awful light-why can't we make better lighting that spews from the screens of computers?-and I can't help but think about how dissatisfying this all can be. We are here for such a few blinks of an eye. We don't even get a chance to know each other. Not that it really can happen on a mundane level. We are all in the third person because we have given up our ability to not be. We think, think in concepts, words, etc. These are all bounded things that are inherently flawed. A concept cannot be True because there is nothing that is actually bounded. Even if we look at it from the mundane point of view of cause an effect, the actual boundary of a set point in time is imposed and not actual. Thus our very means of communicating to ourselves and others is flawed, separate from the Truth. I want to be closer than that. I want not to be even close. I want to merge and feel that unimaginable sinking into the Great. I think that is why I like pussy so much, for me, the flawed concept it is the closest I will ever come to that merging. 

    I wonder what would happen if I drank one more beer? I won't, I am too tired, but it would be interesting. I can follow this train of thought now, I wonder if I could later? After? 

    This life is nothing but a tally card of all things lost until it is all lost. Our lives, or most of our lives, is filled with the interminable action of trying to keep that which is already lost. It cannot be kept. That sorrow that arises in this inevitability is pissing in the wind, to put it crassly. Why is it we cry over it despite our intellectual understanding that it is impossible to keep? Is that foolish or is it romantic? Perhaps it is only the fool that is the romantic? I am such a fool. There are things I would keep. Oh, really, much I would be okay with falling by the wayside. My life, my body, wealth, those I cling to but not with any real vehemence. I only cling to them for their practical purposes and not some transcendental hope. I know they are inert and flaccid in that arena. I would wish, though, that smile would last....

     

    We made love and she cried out. Her body flexed around me and I could see her muscles tense and spasm. Then she turned her head and looked at me. Black hair, black, the color of the space between the stars, and she smiled a smile of the secret of all women. The sun, just fresh and coming over the lips of dunes to splash into our cabin, and lit her face up. The mother of my children, my wife, perhaps from all                    time. I wish I could take that with me. But even that must go. 

    All of it goes, all, down, down, swirling like the last swig of a beer. Down some unknowable hole, maw, to somewhere or nowhere. 

    If it is nowhere I will mostly rejoice, but damn, I'll miss that smile. 

     

    Be well

    G