THE SAINT OF ADDICTION
[Study of Beer Can]
I’ve heard it said that we, as people, experience the thing, and following that give the
thing significance. Often have I found however that the case is retroactive. Maybe we did not view whatever it was that happened as significant at first. Only over time. Maybe even over decades, a particular example of human interaction or personal clarity, from long ago, is finally revealed to us. How much it still shapes who we are today might be especially poignant to consider, the longer the stretch of time between then and now. I mean, if your hand was forced, and you were made to find significance in a particular object, one which before was unremarkable, could you do it? I think of when I drank this beer on my desk. It is sitting there now, empty, innocent, without a word, and an eerie calm permeates through me. And then I think it has meant so much, to drink that beer, and sit at my computer. I don’t remember the specific instance because the act itself is something so casual to me. But I know at the very least that that is something close to what I did because I am a creature of habit. I can formulate, in my head, how I spent 20 minutes, here and there, depending on the object. That is reassuring because it is
an instance that says, “I am simple when I regard myself, along with all the problems I have, as frightfully complex.”
I like this whole issue with the beer and its meaning because it forces me to see liminalityin the everyday. Humans are incapable of finding a religious experience in anything besides a prophet ranting on a streetcorner, or anything else they might laugh at long enough to remember later. But points, beacons, of liminality are everywhere you look. In fact, you yourself, 100% of the time, choose where you see them. I suppose the question is, did God actually sanction this? No, he didn’t, you did, because it is your experience to have or not have. Even if He didn’t, and you felt something divine anyway, God could not take it away, precisely for the reason that it is not in his jurisdiction. I mean a Christian God, by the way. God granted us free will. So, the beer bottle seems to answer my question for me. It exists, it is a part of life and reality. This is not only enough but all there is. Sartre said, Existence precedes essence. People look too hard for essence when the irony is essence is exactly what we as people make sense of, and in a way manufacture, about existence. The beer bottle, with its brown-tinted glass and Red Stripe logo, tells me, now quietly, now with some urgency, that there are no divine portals. There is no ‘going into.’ The human and divine are not separated by a door. I think, with beautiful ire at the thought, that the booze goes into me, into my poor sewage, my stinking viscera. Through the bottleneck.
One drinks, gets drunk. One also sees God when God is not there. Maybe, sometimes, in some cases, a God of sorts is. The one that speaks in The Bible, The Quran, The Torah, The Vetic Texts. The same one that did those. My God is this bottle of Red Stripe, for the same reason—my inability, as Pascal said, to be alone with my thoughts in a room. Yet I will not erect a shrine in my closet to this bottle, the bottle itself sitting atop the shrine like some kind of silly hat. And not because I do not believe in false idols. I do believe in false idols. Nor will I carry the bottle around with me everywhere, gesticulating with it when I talk to people, like some sort of talisman of fate, protecting me in any situation I might find myself in. I believe any false idol is inevitably filling a void that the non-false idol cannot. I am for the ever-humane agency and, moreover, tendency, of individuals to have opinions about what they have experienced. To call it mystical, or not. As long as you are not out to smear anyone’s faith, and as long as you’re not a cult, suicidal or otherwise, I can only say that you must worship what you do, with its own Heavenly context, or the result of a crack dream. And that’s exactly why this bottle, as I look at it somewhat distrustfully, is not something I will worship. Its end has already been fulfilled in bringing me to the World of meaning.
It is every life’s motion I would worship if it were not so tiring and time-consuming. The liminality of the beer bottle is in its impermanence, which I relish most of all. Or maybe not.
. . .
Oh, Sacred 30th Beer
Looking at my hands’ clonus, I seethe and think of beer. Go to packy then back home.
Order a pizza. After 12 beers I’m feeling good and stuffed. I got a large pizza, too. Then walk the streets as it’s now entering late evening. Seek out cocaine in bars but can’t find it. People just want to be left alone. So recently it seemed I was perfectly illuminated. Perfectly centered. Or maybe I was just far away looking at myself doing things. Benumbed. Well I can’t get enough of that. It’s the closest thing to sanity I know, and also the closest thing to insanity I know. Being numb. Or not numb exactly, that’s way emo. Just far away from myself. Seeing and doing and feeling all the same things, but as if the center of me were far away from where I was. Like I was this satellite or orbital of self riding along the outskirts, and none of what I saw or felt was directly happening to me. After ruminating on this while walking around, I go back upstairs. Fourth floor walk-up. I open the door and settle in and grab another beer. Maybe I wasn’t really centered at all. It was just somehow comforting to feel so far away. So maybe there was no illumination. I like to pretend I am always in this state of before/after, always in the process of changing. But it’s that part of the process where no change has actually happened yet. I’m there,
perpetually there. And there will be change! You’ll see, you’ll see! I have the illumination to make you see!
Drink another 12 beers. Now it’s going on 3 in the morning and I am in a sorry sort of
way. Completely bloated and I can’t see straight. I fall and my head hits the rug. A beer bottle isunder the couch. I look at the logo: Red Stripe.
. . .
