Drunkenness is a two-dimensional condition. The end of the line; a violent fresco of scarlet rivers and distended limbs in degenerate ecstasy, all watched-over by machines of loving grace, while good men die like dogs in the street. Then,
prost.
I’m trying on my John Kennedy impression at the bar; ladies and gentlemen of the United States of America, I come to you on the eve of a great American tragedy, I have been shot through the head, and furthermore, I think my wife is fucking her personal trainer. A moment sooner, and he would hang tight through twilight television static; though there is nothing that a man can hold on to in this life.
Clare pours me another in gratitude; she can get away with this, I drink the cheapest draft and it is just us at the bar. I am here early again, not a minute after the opening bell. I’ve become accustomed to her couch, the southeastern corner, as the sun, little swords, pierce my eye; mirror. A face full of little white crystals and tangled hair. This is an old place now, though history happens
first: as tragedy, and
then: as farce;
neath the watch-care of sentinel pines,
perhaps we are all-deserving of such mirthful transgressions.
>>://002
Last semester, I’d developed a term paper, titled; In Defense of the Addict. The theory is simple; in order to be a soberly person, you must defend a hierarchy of behavioral standards in the socioeconomic context of useful economic social interface. Furthermore, you must exist in a state of permanent dissonance; the sober man is not actually a sober man, he is instead a user aspiring to a standard of individual cultural production in relation to his material strata. Through traditional treatment methodologies, alcoholics are trained to think of themselves as both the perpetrator, and victim of a chronic and terminal illness: physically dangerous bad behavior, though a dialectical analysis would provoke a disturbing synthesis; through the vice of addiction, you have simply become a less-useful instrument of neoliberal economic impulse, and more insidiously, you have transmuted the hope of cure into a cybernetic ouroboros of feedback and control. Adorno elaborates in his seminal socio-behavioral study, The Authoritarian Personality;
“A basically hierarchical, authoritarian, exploitative parent-child relation-
ship is apt to carry over into a power-oriented, exploitively dependent
attitude towards one's sex partner and one's God and may well culminate
in a political philosophy and social outlook which has no room for
anything but a desperate clinging to what appears to be strong and a
disdainful rejection of whatever is relegated to the bottom ... [and] the
formation of stereotypes and of ingroup-outgroup cleavages. Convention-
ality, rigidity, repressive denial, and the ensuing break-through of one's
weakness, fear and dependence are but other aspects of the same funda-
mental personality pattern, and they can be observed in personal life as
well as in attitudes toward religion and social issues. (p.971)”
The logical form of this argument remains sound when the operative terms defining social-authority are changed to reflect sober behavioral ideals, ideals which often function as a vehicle for conservative social hegemony. The sober man must cogently occupy the “lower” strata, and aspire to the “higher” as a means of self-marginalization, in classic protestant fashion. It is no wonder this treatment model is known for it’s limited efficacy; it’s argument follows the logical form of authoritarian political reaction. In the context of addiction, the dichotomy is not between good or bad, or user or sober, but rather sane or insane. To disregard a prescribed moral obligation is to liberate yourself from an autopanopticon. Let your guilelessness and goodwill reflect the worth of your soul, and for god’s sake, do what you know in your heart to be just.
-gracemachine>>://xoxo