Since, it seems, God hates me, one night I decide to actually have fun I end up stricken with insomnia. I had a few drinks earlier, which is something that, as a rule, I don't do. Drinking is strictly a social endeavor for me, and one that I neither pay much attention to nor into which I put much effort. In this past year, I've been to a bar twice, and been full-blown honest-to-Shiva drunk once, not because I wholly wanted to be, but my roommates seem to enjoy me being social more than I do. I don't drink to accomplish things like: make myself feel better, remove inhibitions about talking to girls, or make myself look cool. As any human who knows anything about this planet knows though, there are people who do, and they seem to all be my age and concentrated in New Jersey.
Being a kind of English major and, for the first time, diving into creative writing, puts me into contact with some pretty unsavory fellows. By that I mean the type of twenty-something "I write deep fiction about heavy shit" kids (and yes, I can say kids), all convinced they'll grow up to be the next William Faulkner. Or Wallace. Take your pick. I use William Faulkner as my base because he was one of the many artists who was a raging boozer, along with other well-knowns like Edgar Allen Poe, Tennessee Williams and Jackson Pollock. All of whom were also famous assholes. One quality these kids have is the tendency to flaunt their drinking problems, all of which I believe are either totally fabricated or at the very least highly embellished. When I enter into conversation with Wandering Human #18 of the day, and they start rambling on about how they'll drink at 7 AM if the work schedule calls for it or how their writing process is to take a shot of [insert weirdly spelled foreign whiskey here], my eyes start to glaze over and I think a nice quiet life alone a few hundred miles outside of Anchorage, Alaska in an igloo with wall-to-wall cargo pallets and a pet Malamute named O'Mally where I do nothing but eat frozen salmon and snow all day is a perfectly reasonable alternative to present company. Flaunting is not an attractive practice and alcoholism is not an attractive quality. To the sane, it's a subtle way of saying, "I have no self-confidence and my beer intake should intimidate you" or , "Hi, I'm a cunt."
And after all (culture commentary ahead), this is just my pathetic generation's given way for individuals to drop their pants and swing their wangs around in a "Mine's Bigger Than Your's" contest which doesn't end in indecent exposure charges and a restraining order. One example of this is tanning. Melanoma is in season simply because it is a sign of wealth. Back in Shakespeare's time, tans were considered gross because, if you were tan, you worked outside, and if you worked outside, you were a peasant, not fit for the pasty-faced wig-wearing Latin-literate Master Race. Nowadays, most jobs are indoors, so being pale is a symbol of working too much, spending too much time in front of a computer, being "emo," or any combination of the bunch. Tanning tells everyone but the blind that you have the money to afford skin cancer. The same can be said about obesity in Japan. Until recently, the Japanese viewed being overweight as an attractive asset because it meant that you had attractive assets. Being fat meant you had the money to be fat; you could afford to shove sushi and noodles down your throat and were five steps and fifty pounds above those toothless, rice-gumming country yokels.
Being a booze hound satisfies all of these cultural needs. One of the reasons I limit my drinking is because that shit is expensive. Claiming that you drink every night is a nice way to separate yourself from poor fuckers who don't possess the means, sheer force of stupidity, depression, or post-traumatic stress disorder required to be an alcoholic. It also takes care of self-esteem issues in the same way guys with tiny dicks make up for it by going balls-deep in debt to own a massive truck. It gives a sense of identity without having to go through all the work to have an actual personality.
At the core of this, I think, is the word subtle. Walking around shoving your drinking problems in people's faces is not a subtle activity, but the messages conveyed are. I've argued for a while now that my generation has fallen victim to the notion that personality replaces character. Sure, a bar-hopper can have a personality, and most of them do. You kind of need one to live that lifestyle. But what is the character of an alcoholic? An addict. A waste. And someone who genuinely dislikes themselves.
Man, O'Mally's a sweet name for Malamute.
Being a kind of English major and, for the first time, diving into creative writing, puts me into contact with some pretty unsavory fellows. By that I mean the type of twenty-something "I write deep fiction about heavy shit" kids (and yes, I can say kids), all convinced they'll grow up to be the next William Faulkner. Or Wallace. Take your pick. I use William Faulkner as my base because he was one of the many artists who was a raging boozer, along with other well-knowns like Edgar Allen Poe, Tennessee Williams and Jackson Pollock. All of whom were also famous assholes. One quality these kids have is the tendency to flaunt their drinking problems, all of which I believe are either totally fabricated or at the very least highly embellished. When I enter into conversation with Wandering Human #18 of the day, and they start rambling on about how they'll drink at 7 AM if the work schedule calls for it or how their writing process is to take a shot of [insert weirdly spelled foreign whiskey here], my eyes start to glaze over and I think a nice quiet life alone a few hundred miles outside of Anchorage, Alaska in an igloo with wall-to-wall cargo pallets and a pet Malamute named O'Mally where I do nothing but eat frozen salmon and snow all day is a perfectly reasonable alternative to present company. Flaunting is not an attractive practice and alcoholism is not an attractive quality. To the sane, it's a subtle way of saying, "I have no self-confidence and my beer intake should intimidate you" or , "Hi, I'm a cunt."
And after all (culture commentary ahead), this is just my pathetic generation's given way for individuals to drop their pants and swing their wangs around in a "Mine's Bigger Than Your's" contest which doesn't end in indecent exposure charges and a restraining order. One example of this is tanning. Melanoma is in season simply because it is a sign of wealth. Back in Shakespeare's time, tans were considered gross because, if you were tan, you worked outside, and if you worked outside, you were a peasant, not fit for the pasty-faced wig-wearing Latin-literate Master Race. Nowadays, most jobs are indoors, so being pale is a symbol of working too much, spending too much time in front of a computer, being "emo," or any combination of the bunch. Tanning tells everyone but the blind that you have the money to afford skin cancer. The same can be said about obesity in Japan. Until recently, the Japanese viewed being overweight as an attractive asset because it meant that you had attractive assets. Being fat meant you had the money to be fat; you could afford to shove sushi and noodles down your throat and were five steps and fifty pounds above those toothless, rice-gumming country yokels.
Being a booze hound satisfies all of these cultural needs. One of the reasons I limit my drinking is because that shit is expensive. Claiming that you drink every night is a nice way to separate yourself from poor fuckers who don't possess the means, sheer force of stupidity, depression, or post-traumatic stress disorder required to be an alcoholic. It also takes care of self-esteem issues in the same way guys with tiny dicks make up for it by going balls-deep in debt to own a massive truck. It gives a sense of identity without having to go through all the work to have an actual personality.
At the core of this, I think, is the word subtle. Walking around shoving your drinking problems in people's faces is not a subtle activity, but the messages conveyed are. I've argued for a while now that my generation has fallen victim to the notion that personality replaces character. Sure, a bar-hopper can have a personality, and most of them do. You kind of need one to live that lifestyle. But what is the character of an alcoholic? An addict. A waste. And someone who genuinely dislikes themselves.
Man, O'Mally's a sweet name for Malamute.
1 comment:
Can we have a malamute ANNND a newfoundland??????
And O'Mally rocks :P
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