Day 31: Fumbling drunken foibles that were somehow formative in the passing of time...

Status: 31 days. If only Baskin-Robbins came endowed with barstools and Happy hour specials in lieu of sugar cones and sprinkles.

Physiology:  Since the voluntary fast convened over one month ago I have lost 17 pounds of pure obsequious beer flab. My entire anatomy feels lighter.  The contours of my body is adjusting to clothes I haven’t been able to wear in four years. This afternoon I sauntered into my cool psychedelic rock-star ex-girlfriend and made her head swivel like the barstool we used to make out on another lifetime ago.

Life is good.

 Still smoking like a chimney from a nuclear facility (those who know me know that I mainly just smoke cheap little cigars and that I for the most part, despise cigarettes). Got really excited about a month ago when I bought the BLUE starter kit w/out testing it out first. For about fifteen minutes it felt cool to smoke in my moms house  while punching out paragraphs, emitting only vapors in the fashion of a humidifier  and then I realized that it still tasted (intrinsically) like a cigarette and my throat felt scratchy and after about forty-five minutes it felt like I as taking intermittent drags off a tampon  with a single A battery enclosed.

………………………………….

 

The first time I can consciously recall getting hammered was when I was in high school was in the summer of 1994. I filched a box of Franzia (good ol’ high brow wine in a box).  A few years later we would buy a cube and remove the aluminum canteen and christen it with the  celestial sobriquet of a “space bag.” But that July day I laid supine on the castaway lifeboat of my bed, drunk, in my boxers drinking straight from the box, holding the cardboard up as if taking hits from a Euclidean-shaped bong. 

In high school I had a paper route and saved up and went to Europe three times. Senior year it was Easter Sunday and we were Lake Zurich Switzerland and all of the boys wanted to  get drunk. Everything was closed but we found a gas station that carried one kind of German beer. We bought crates of it, hoisting it to up on our shoulders in Tiny Tim to Spiritually-awakened Scrooge like fashion as we lumbered back to our hotel room, excited that, “We were gonna get drunk.”

We got the beer to the hotel room and started pounding with everyone playing drinking games and verbally commenting that they wanna get shitfaced and piss-ass drunk and they can feel a buzz coming on.

I was by no means a beer aficionado but I kept looking at the beer thinking it just tasted funny. After my fellow precocious classmates were bumping into furniture and slurring their vowels, boasting about how phucked up they were becoming I looked at the label and noted the anomaly:

“Guys, this says alcoholic nein. This is non-alcoholic.”

They sobered up real quick.

 

There was the time I was in college and, after drinking, decided to urinate on my girlfriend’s plant. For some inexplicable reason she named her damn plant, “Karen the Fern” so I stand up on the radiators that look like they were constructed in the Hoover administration on the ninth floor of Geisert Hall and start peeing on good ol’ Karen.  I must have had a lot to drink because Karen started to overflow so I marshal the plant next to the window and it leaks out skiing down the side of Geisert   (Geisert Hall is the dorm on Bradley campus that looks like a game of Jenga strung in perpetual abeyance) in an inopportunely treacle , dribbling on Dr. Feuller who just so happen to be traipsing by underneath.

When I told the story to my friend Haley a few years later she batted her lashes and replied, “You mean to tell me that you peed on Dr. Feuller?”

Yes, I say, to my chagrin, I guess I did.

There was the time I was having a bad day and I was a student worker in the library at Bradley University and all I had in the house was a bottle of cheap Merlot (probably purchased from Aldi’s) somebody gave me for Christmas and I poured the ersatz merlot in an empty plastic GATORADE bottle and gratuitously slurped while checking out Reserve material to international students over spring break.

There was the time I was dog sitting for my girlfriend (Zoe the Alaskan huskie) she lived in a what used to be the caretaker’s house in the Jewish cemetery in West Peoria and (of course) to celebrate Hanukah we decided to have a party even though none of us are Jewish.  Somehow we had a lot of money and at first we just planted beer (mainly Moosehead and corona) in the fresh December snow like wics on a menorah but then three of us decided to kill a bottle of Wild Turkey and then good ol’ Goth Dan who just got discharged from the Navy shows up  and we start drinking Liquid Cocaine which is equal-parts Jagermeister , Goldschlager and  Rumple Minze and we are pounding, doing shots to Anne Frank while looking for a copy of Mein Kampf to urinate on when we all get sick, each of us throw up at  least twelve times before passing it.

In the morning everyone left and I was left with the mess to clean up.

It took me four days to air out the house.

There was the time I was drinking  also Jagermeister and Guinness and (ugh) Dr. McGillicuddy's (which tastes like a shot of toothepaste) with my boss and I went back to my apartment and, in the middle of the night, instead of making it to the bathroom, woke up, alighted the hem of mattress, threw-up in the middle of my mattress and bed stand, placed the mattress back on its frame as if making a peanut butter sandwich  and then return to the nocturnal haze of drunken sleep.

When I woke up my female roommate was furious because the house smelled just plain noisome and insisted I jettison the mattress. For some reason the hung-over dorm room Christmas lights in my head cogitated the bright idea that it would be easier to expel the mattress out the side window then it would be to lug it through the house. Somehow I was able to get the mattress into he square aperture of my ajar window and somehow, the mattress got stuck, a vomity tongue protruding from the side of the house in maudlin-sick clown visage fashion and finally I had to use an axe , chopping the mattress up in massacre frenetic pulse. 

I was so nauseated afterwards I think I buried the remains and slept on the floor for the remainder of the summer.

There was the time I was drinking in my apartment then went out and decided to propose to my ex-girlfriend at the time because she didn’t have health insurance and I figured she could be on mine and save money for medical bills. I literally stood outside her window serenading her with sapid poetry and CURE lyrics and then she came out and pushed me out of the way and told me that her kids were sleeping and (dejected) I found myself walking through the construction in Bradley university when they were erecting the alumni center, climbed up into a bulldozer and feel asleep in the machinist’s throne waking up when the bevy of blue collar workers arrived, scrambling down the street to collect my thoughts as they hurled vulgarities in my direction.

 There was the time (when drunk) I threw my sister across the room (worse thing I ever did) because I was envious that she went to a private high school out of state.

Worse thing I ever did.

There was the time (when nailed) I verbally went off on the love of my life. I wished a pox on her house. Wished AIDS on her kids. Told her I hope she wakes up and finds her husband listless next to her all because, I felt, I was born into the wrong family.

That I wasn’t good enough to spend my life with her.

Again, worse thing I ever did.

And there was the time ( when sober) I took forty days off to go down into the labyrinth of my psyche and find myself again. Find out what I am made of.  Find out why I felt compelled to drink incessantly for so many years.  There was the time I took forty days to diagnose my psychological fears and quash the minotaur of anxieties and failures that have metaphysically stunted and emotionally riddled me for years in an endeavor, hopefully, somehow to grow.

To give everything inside of me to something greater than the materialistic vagaries that propels everyone I know.  To give everything  burrowed inside the inky alphabetical pottage of my chest to something greater than the narratives I seismically bang out into the slate of the screen. To give everything inside my chest to something even greater than the human beings I love so much, that (as is true in love) you continue to get hurt, you continue to get fucked over, and still, you take a deep breath, you look inside yourself, you ejaculate everything that somehow is left inside the used prophylaxis of your flesh in a caterwaul, a scream, a voice, a word.