Whoops – my back’s out. I found a cane at a garage sale for $2. I needed it to get back to the car. This was after getting out of the car to deliver food to an inn. I felt it, heard it, and I called in through the open window for help. The girl was right there, in the kitchen at the inn. A nice girl - Ruthie by name. She works there with her sister Esther. (Sister Esther? That can’t be right… Esther works there with her sister Ruthie – that’s a little better. I may have to change their names.) But, after a minute or two, and a gingerly executed stretch, I thought it was a twinge that had passed – that I would be OK if I babied it. Alas, no. It happened again when I got out of the car a few blocks away at the garage sale. Here comes a crooked man, they said, and made the sale.

Won’t Elizabeth be happy?

 

It’s a nice cane, as canes go. I have another one, of course, but it was in one of my closets at home. Who knows which closet out of all of them? My right ankle has never been completely right. (And having written that sentence, I wish it were my left ankle.) It twists very easily, and swells for a time, but it seems to heal just as easily – miraculously, over night. It’s very strange. Well, it hasn’t happened in a while. That’s why I have no idea where the other cane is. Having two fireplaces back to back there’s a fair amount of space on either side devoted to storage. Many things, known and unknown, lost but not forgotten, are contained within those closets. Moving in was a hurried affair. Moving out will not be.

 

The chair in front of the computer isn’t too painful, provided I don’t move about too much.

 

Does this mean I will not be attending the annual Hollow Hills orgy and pig roast later today? No – I wouldn’t miss it for something so silly. I’ll hobble over in fine style.

 

 

My other cane is a Victorian sword stick, which is much more – ah – enigmatic, but I’m sure I won’t be using its secret feature. Besides, it is quite a collectible antique – not the kind of thing one brings to a pig roast where inebriated young women (I assume) would gather ‘round anyone so distinguished as to have a cane, as moths do with porch lights.

 

Don’t tell me to go to a chiropractor. I would rather dive into a swimming pool full of broken glass. I went to one – once, some time ago. If I ever see him again I’m going to kill him and say it was self defense. Some of you may be believers in such quackery. I’m warning you now: save your breath.

 

Anyhooooooooooooooooooooo…

 

Just one whiff – that’s all it took. I know it doesn’t rhyme. I went back to the little house with the lovely view – the one I had been so seriously considering – and the farm across the road was doing what farms across the road will often do, smelling absolutely awful. My Realtor friend said, “If you buy this you’ll hate me in six months.” I replied, “Don’t worry, I hate you now.” Well, golly I shoulda known, huh? It turns out the place doesn’t smell like that all of the time – no, only most of the time. I may never move. I may die here – in this chair.

 

The idea was we’d look at this other place, so I went over. He was on the phone with the seller. It was a no-go – bad timing. So we chatted for about forty minutes, this and that. Well, specifically, we chatted about alcoholism recovery. He found his way through something called Reiki. I found my way through the Big Book. But we agreed the local AA group was more likely to inspire thoughts of suicide than lead one to recover from alcoholism. It was an interesting conversation. I told him of my experience leading the Thursday Group. He said, “So you’re that guy!”

 

It’s weird: I was at an AA business meeting in which one leading group member said the Big Book was a strange way to try to recover. It just wasn’t in keeping with “the new” AA – whatever that may be.

 

Breathtaking subject change:

 

If McCain picks a Pro-Choice VP, Lieberman being a consideration, I understand, I can’t vote for him. Nor can millions of others. That would be a shame. It doesn’t assure an Obama victory – for I have never seen anybody crash and burn so dramatically without assistance – but it does improve his chances.

 

It’s really not warm enough for outdoor nudity today. This party may be a bust. No, I’m kidding – I’m sure it will be fine.

 

I’ll take the week off from strenuous labor, barring a miracle, and I’m sure I’ll be right as rain - no longer crooked. Where does that phrase come from – “right as rain” – Does anybody know? It’s one of those British expressions that doesn’t really mean anything until you discover its origin, and then it makes sense in some archaic application or other.

 

So – let’s have a look. I’ll type “right as rain” into my Google bar and see what pops out. Here’s the first entry: from World Wide Words; Michael Quinion writes on international English from a British viewpoint. Quinion is apparently the author of several books about language. I’ve put his picture in below. In answer to a query from Julane Marx of California, he has this to say:

 

"Perhaps surprisingly, there have been expressions starting right as ... since medieval times, always in the sense of something being satisfactory, safe, secure or comfortable. An early example, quoted as a proverb as long ago as 1546, is right as a line. In that, right might have had a literal sense of straightness, something desirable in a line, but it also clearly has a figurative sense of being correct or acceptable. There’s an even older example, from the Romance of the Rose of 1400: “right as an adamant”, where an adamant was a lodestone or magnet.

Lots of others have followed in the centuries since. There’s right as a gun, which appeared in one of John Fletcher’s plays, Prophetess, in 1622. Right as my leg is also from the seventeenth century — it’s in Sir Thomas Urquhart’s translation of Gargantua and Pantagruel, by Rabelais, published in 1664: “Some were young, quaint, clever, neat, pretty, juicy, tight, brisk, buxom, proper, kind-hearted, and as right as my leg, to any man’s thinking”. There’s right as a trivet from the nineteenth century, a trivet being a stand for a pot or kettle placed over an open fire; this may be found in Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers of 1837: “ ‘I hope you are well, sir.’ ‘Right as a trivet, sir,’ replied Bob Sawyer.” About the same time, or a little later, people were saying that things were as right as ninepence, as right as a book, as right as nails, or as right as the bank.

Right as rain is a latecomer to this illustrious collection of curious similes. It may have first appeared at the very end of the nineteenth century, but the first example I can find is from Max Beerbohm’s book Yet Again of 1909: “He looked, as himself would undoubtedly have said, ‘fit as a fiddle,’ or ‘right as rain.’ His cheeks were rosy, his eyes sparkling”. Since then it has almost completely taken over from the others.

It makes no more sense than the variants it has usurped and is clearly just a play on words (though perhaps there’s a lurking idea that rain often comes straight down, in a right line, to use the old sense). But the alliteration was undoubtedly why it was created and has helped its survival. As right as ninepence has had a good run, too, but that has vanished even in Britain since we decimalised the coinage and since ninepence stopped being worth very much."

Should I take pictures at the party?    

I’ve been invited to a pig roast up in the Hills on Saturday. It promises to be an orgy, compared to last weekend’s event.

 

“Sober” people bore me to death, by the way. In a group they are constantly correcting each other. It’s like watching communists trying to socialize: they are terrified of saying something which is not politically correct, terrified of each other’s judgments. Their speech is guarded, and they guard each other’s speech. Sober people talk in slogans and idiotic platitudes. Not one of them is likely to get up on a table and do a striptease. That’s a shame.

 

Well, no – last week’s party wasn’t a sober event, strictly-speaking. It was mixed. It’s just that they were all artsy-fartsy types, and old, into the bargain. It was just very bourgeois. On Saturday, by comparison, I will see ordinary Pioneer folks who may never have stepped into an art gallery unless they were hired to clean it. For them alcoholism is a Yuppie disease for people who have too much damn time on their hands.

 

Yes, well I’m a little terrified myself at the prospect of going to a party where I don’t know the folks too well, but Elizabeth insists that I should get out of the house and meet some people. Y’all know what she means by “people,” right? She means women.

 

She also wants me to join her pool league. I haven’t played pool since I was a teen, growing up on Long Island in the heyday of the finished basement. Everybody’s Dad had a pool table – everybody else’s Dad, that is. Mine had a table saw. My friends had gotten good enough that they could call their shots. I could make a bird house out of plywood. No, really – I had a nice one, painted with red deck stain.

 

Anyhooo, I’ll go… unless I chicken out.

 

One of the houses on my short list is down the road from the hotel where Elizabeth and her family and friends play pool. The more I think of it the more attractive the property is. I was wondering though: I do so many village jobs after business hours, it’ll be a long drive home and then back again. It’s not like I can pop into my spacious village apartment and play computer Solitaire or answer blog comments for an hour or so in between jobs. I may stack all my offices up on a single evening. Yes, that makes sense. I’ll also have to do real grocery shopping again. I won’t be able to walk up to the corner convenience, or to the supermarket, any time I wish. I’ll have to make a list, drive 20 miles to the store, and so on.

 

I’ll need a proper wood stove. The property runs down about a quarter mile through the woods to a little creek. Behind the creek, which serves as my property line, is a wetlands area. From the kitchen windows there is a nice view of the hills. Yes – it is becoming more attractive even as I write this. We shall see…

 

The girl at the corner convenience put her ice-cold hands up my back yesterday – snuck up on me from behind. She had been working in the cooler. I am so unused-to physical contact it was perhaps more shocking than it might have been otherwise, perhaps more fun as well. She promises the next time she lays hands on me they will be warm. Hmm.

 

Little by little, I may begin to develop a social life. I am tempted to put that term in quotes. It’s so precious. I love preciousness – or, that is to say I love laughing at it. Using the plural personal pronoun “them” when the singular “him” is called-for so as not to be gender specific is an example of preciousness. “Everybody and their mother” – no, that is incorrect. It will never be correct. It is “Everybody and his mother.” The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) petitioning the town of Fishkill to change its name to “Fishsave” is an example of preciousness. The word kill means “creek” in Dutch.

 

Well, really it is a derisive sort of laughter. It is too easy to laugh at idiocy, and the problem is that one usually laughs alone. I had mentioned a Talk Radio personality a few posts ago. I enjoy listening to him – until he uses the word impact as a verb, which it is not, and never will be. They all do it, though. It doesn’t matter then whatever else they may say. It could be true; it could even be brilliant, but my appreciation of it is ruined. Now, I’m no purist, as you know. My punctuation is quite wobbly – like Winnie the Pooh’s spelling. I love dangling my participles. I write informally. I write conversationally. But, really…

 

Having a “social life” suggests that it is a separate thing from “life” itself. Well, I suppose it is, in a sense. I seem to think that most people separate their “work” lives from their “outside of work” lives: they “work” so that they may “live.” If that is the case, then are they not alive while they are working? Yes, that would explain my difficulty finding decent workers. I am blessed beyond blessings in Elizabeth.

 

Just chawin’ over some beefs at the White Lodge today, and looking forward to the warmth of hands.

 

 

Regarding the last entry, sometimes the reason of love requires no reason.

 

The other day I attended a surprise party for a Rhubarb Valley Poet friend of mine. No, not the Laureate, who is already too over-celebrated to warrant jumping out from behind a side chair and shouting “Happy Birthday!” in a childlike frenzy which can’t truly be revisited with dignity, but some other fellow whose work is occasionally better.

 

Anyhooo, we go back, as they say. He’s almost completely blind now. I am told his sight will never completely leave him, but shapes and shadows will be the sum of his visual world.

 

It was an interesting gathering, because it included him primarily, but also a lovely friend of his whom I hadn’t seen at all since her last trip to South America - an artist of interest to me – although her last opening I completely forgot to attend. The event was convivial without being either tightly-wound or overly intimate.

 

Holy Schmack! – I write this kind of stuff every day. Perhaps a cure will be found in my own lifetime. Here I am offering a critique of a social occasion as if it were the opening of a new play.

 

Rhuvillians are the oddest people. I can’t help but like them. It’s funny to hear them speaking of such ordinary things as “state roads” and “ostriches.” They come from a Brigadoon which exists outside of time and space. The sign that welcomes visitors on the road reads: “Welcome to Rhubarb Valley, Where there really is something in the water.”

 

The main event of the party – apart from my poet friend’s hard-won achievement of managing to stay alive for 67 years – was the German chocolate cake, which remained heroically vertical despite the humidity while giving us a wonderfully inspired performance. I can taste it even now – days later. I’ll not be needing any more sugar for a week or two.

 

The doe, pictured below, regularly enjoys my back yard. Here she isn’t a nuisance because I have nothing in particular growing this year. I don’t even have window boxes. Last year I had all the window boxes done. This year I let it slide. I don’t know why. Weeks turned into a month, as they will, and it wasn’t until mid-July that I realized I had done nothing to dress up the place. The household does have character, nonetheless. (I am the character of my household.)

 

But across the street she is a nuisance. They have a garden. Along comes Betsy here – (Betsy is the name the White Tornado gives to all things, vacuum cleaners, cars, and what-not) – with her two spotted fawns, to devour the neighborhood. Getting a picture of the three of them together has proved as daunting a challenge as getting a picture of the myphets. The funny thing is I don’t really need pictures. They are never as good as memory – least not with my photographic skills. I do it all for you, deer people.

 

 

All of which is to say that summer is flying by.

 

Gee, but we were without music all day yesterday. I’m sorry. I had turned the speakers down so as not to hear the bleeps and bloops which emanate from this infernal contraption for no good reason, and as a result I didn’t realize the Leonard Cohen widget had passed into the last dimension.

 

Well, there’s nothing heavy on my mind. Here’s the WT:

 

 

I was yesterday at the Poet’s house – a rambling Victorian. His wood shop is located on the second floor. When he runs his large table saw the whole place vibrates with harmonic intensity. I don’t doubt that some of the paint chipped off as a result. But he’s an interesting fellow, as I’ve mentioned. The main rooms of the ground floor are largely taken over by electronic musical equipment – mixing boards, keyboards, drum machines, and the like, many musical instruments as well, lots of drums. He had played his bass to accompany Bley’s daughter a few months ago, at some event or other. Paul said he enjoyed it, which is a rarity.

 

Afterwards I drove up over East Hill to find a house for sale that someone had told me about, but I guess it must be well hidden. I found it not. It was, however, a pleasant drive through verdant country. Coming home I found my boys were afraid to eat the food in the fridge because they had thought it might be intended for a job. I assured them the brownies were there so that they might devour them, and so we did.

 

Today I’m back on Boogie Street, to steal a phrase. The weekend seems to have served as a short psychic vacation. Well, I feel rested. All’s well in the world. I will not be a witness to traffic jams today, nor a prisoner of them. I will not hear gunfire across the other side of town, nor will I have to take into account the possibility of earthquake, volcanic eruption, or even less than civil speech. So… that’s good.  

 

  

Clover called me on the telephone yesterday several times, at last to inform me that a world-renowned shaman had told her that someone she knows named John should go to hospital to have his heart examined.

 

That is correct: world-renowned shaman.

 

My heart has never given me cause to think much about it. Well, it has been broken a few times with the net result (I hope) that it has gotten larger, but in terms of the physical organ which pumps my blood from extremity to extremity which I have been told resides within my chest, I’ve never complained. But if she had not remembered to warn me of the world-renowned shaman’s concern and something dreadful had happened to me – something having to do with my heart, specifically – the karma would have been very bad indeed.

 

Heavens – we can’t have that.

 

Good morning, and welcome to Clover’s world. It is a world which is so entirely ordinary in its bourgeois voting-for-Obama-because-he’s-black sort of way that when it occasionally produces beauty and/or profound insight – which it has done, in my experience – it comes as a rare and a pleasant surprise. I love Clover, though she is a poor little lost soul. I’ve learned, despite appearances to the contrary, that she is a person to be taken seriously. Within the circle of our mutual acquaintance I seem to be the only person who takes that view, but I got to know her rather well a few years ago. Putting aside her still rather childish spirituality and her contrarian politics, she possesses depths which it can be quite rewarding to explore.

 

Being an heiress to a not small fortune – certainly enough to keep Clover in clover – is more of a burden to her than it really ought to be. Well, not to put too fine a point on it, she hates herself. I’ve told her many times to get a job. It doesn’t have to be a paying job, but it helps. Otherwise her life experience is likely to remain so rarefied that she may never get a chance to grow beyond her much too prolonged adolescence. (She’s 37.) No job so far – but she did explore the possibility of volunteering at the hospital. Perhaps I will see her there if the world-renowned shaman is world-renowned for good reason.

 

 

Clover “winters” in New Mexico don’t you know. She came back married this year, to a friend of mine – sort of. No, he is a friend, but we hardly know each other and both of us seem content with that. Yet I know absolutely that I may rely on him. Since she is a married lady now my behavior with her has changed. There will be no more sitting together on my sofa while I play with her hair. Well, that’s a story in its own right. She would hide behind her hair when I was first getting to know her, and it bothered me. It turns out she has a scar on her head – barely visible – which she received as a result of some childhood accident she was ashamed of, and I touched it lightly and said, “What’s this, then?”

 

It’s not my story to tell, apart from that. But I’m happy to say she now wears her long hair back so that all may see her pretty face. I don’t take credit for it. I will say that if she and I demonstrated the slightest hint of compatibility both our lives might be very different today. I mention it so you may understand my fondness for her is something more than what you might expect from an unlikely friendship of opposites – the sort that I think many of us have experienced where we ask ourselves “Why on earth do I like this person?” and yet we do.

 

I get along well, generally-speaking, with people who are inclined to disagree with every single word that comes out of my mouth. Why? – I think it’s because I’ve been where they are. No one believes a thing I haven’t believed first – at least, no one I’ve yet had the pleasure to meet. You can make what you like with that, but it’s a fact.

 

Apart from introducing you all formally to a White Lodge character I’ve only mentioned in passing before, (and it was she whom I was teaching how to drive this time last year), I’d like to make mention of my fascination with people who have always walked the straight and narrow. I was about to write “my fascination with Boy Scouts,” but I thought better of it. I have known people – and, I know people today – who were every bit as sensible when they were quite young as they are today. They never found it necessary to step off the path. The thought “Gee, I wonder what taking heroine feels like?” never once entered their minds. I know – I’ve asked them.

 

I call such people “Boy Scouts.” I have absolutely no idea what goes on in their minds. I think they must have dreams of Muzak and blossoming flowers, with a gentle voice saying, “Please stand by…” Well, let me put it this way: they’re not very deep. They may be extremely smart but not very deep. That’s not a bad thing. My AA sponsor was just such a person. I required just such a person. He said, “I don’t understand what comes out of your mouth a lot of the time.” I said, “That’s fine. It hasn’t done me a lick of good.” My fascination with the people I call “Boy Scouts” is admittedly akin to Envy, though it doesn’t truly aspire to being sinful.

 

To illustrate what I mean, I’m sure most of you are familiar with radio and TV personality Sean Hannity. I don’t know him personally. We’ve met on several occasions because he does appearances at one of my favorite book stores when I am on Long Island. I had applied for a job there years ago. I really wanted that job, the stinkers… But anyhoo, I know him as if I went to school with him. It just so happens we went to different schools. I hear his voice and I think “Boy Scout.” Where on earth does this man keep his darkness? He doesn’t seem to have any. I share his values; I have similar opinions and similar concerns, but for me it was only by way of a very drawn-out Socratic process that I was able to arrive there, and I’ve always had the impression he was there to begin with and just never left.

 

Children of the World: I suppose that is what they are.

 

Clover and I are different in superficial ways, when you come right down to it. In some rather more important ways we both have much more in common with each other than we do with the “Boy Scouts” of the world. We have looked for Love in all the wrong places. If someone told us “Thou Shalt Not” – even if it were God Himself, we had to try it out anyway – if only to discover why.  

 

Ideas, philosophies, belief “systems” – what are they? – Flotsam and jetsam on the river of life. I have cast all of mine away and replaced them with their opposites. I have done this several times. Should we have respect for one another’s beliefs? No, of course not, particularly not if yours are rubbish. If your beliefs differ from mine I don’t respect them at all, and that’s simply because mine are right, yours are wrong. How can I respect what is wrong? That’s silly and illogical. We can only respect each other – not the things we happen to believe. I hold Clover’s beliefs in complete contempt, but not her – no, not ever my friend Clover for whom I have all respect.

 

So I was grateful that she called me yesterday to tell me about what the world-renowned shaman had told her. My tongue went nowhere near the vicinity of my cheek, nor did I have to suppress the Squabbler, for he loves her too. She thinks about me when I am not with her. She gives a damn. I don’t underestimate the value of giving a damn.

     

 

The ditto car arrived at 4:16 A.M. Home boy went upstairs. I could hear his visit to my neighbor. It lasted a few minutes. Now, only about an hour later as I write this, the car’s gone. It looks just like mine, same make, model, color. My wife used to say making love to me was like a Wagner opera: it takes nine hours.

 

The Led Zepplin song, Since I’ve Been Loving You used to be a sentimental favorite of mine, but my friend The Lady ruined it for me by telling me it was playing while she conceived her daughter with the fellow who wasn’t me – my rival, as it were. I was rather jealous. No, that’s not the right word. I don’t know if I’ve ever been jealous; more like excluded. But, after the third or fourth time she tormented me with that information, I said, “That song’s only eight minutes long. What else did you listen to?”

 

She said, “That’s all it took.”

 

I said, “Oh, you poor thing.”

 

Yes, I’m in a playful mood this morning, Teutonic god-like, because the subject is sex. Verily, this post grows out of a series of conversations between Elizabeth and I, quite give-and-take – I might volunteer some information, or she might volunteer some information, and then questions would be asked. I think it began after she returned from her concert, happy as can be that she had been sexually molested by several strangers. In exchange for showing her breasts and allowing them to be fondled – as many others at the concert were also doing – she received a string of beads. I suppose you might call them hippie beads.

 

Well, the best thing about the so-called sexual revolution is that I missed it, and the worst thing about the so-called sexual revolution is that I missed it. The movement’s chief movers and shakers are now senior citizens getting Modern Maturity delivered to their coffee tables while I am yet in my prime. But the consequences of their actions are still reverberating, as normally sensible young women (like Elizabeth) find themselves caving into a sort of peer pressure I never had to deal with. Being molested by strangers can be lots of fun in the right context, provided one never gives serious thought afterwards to what actually happened, but then if one does…

 

As did she. Now she doesn’t want to find the kids playing with those beads, nor see her daughter wearing them.

 

On a related topic, a guy might say to me, “Do you think I have a drinking problem? Should I go to AA?”

 

And I answer, “I don’t know if you have a drinking problem but if you go to AA you certainly will.” Secretly, I hope that he chooses not to go. If he does decide to go – and it will only take one meeting to do this for him – he will never again be able to enjoy his drinking. Personally, I prefer to see people enjoying themselves than not enjoying themselves. But if I happen to be there when he arrives I will say, “It’s my sad duty to inform you of the truth,” and the truth is if he asked those two questions in the first place the only correct answer was “Yes, and yes.” Normal people don’t wonder if they have a drinking problem.

 

So, Elizabeth suggested that I find a roommate, and she also had a suggestion about who that might be – a woman about my age, maybe a few years younger. I told her if I had a female roommate sex would be involved. She thought I meant the sex act, but of course what I meant was our sexuality would be a factor which might cause some unwanted tension. I explained I wouldn’t be engaging in marital activities with a person to whom I wasn’t married. She looked at me like I was a rare specie of fish washed up on the shore by an undersea earthquake.

 

She said, “But you have – I mean, you once did – and you had no problem with it. Why do you have a problem with it now?”

 

I answered, “Because you can’t squeeze toothpaste back into the tube – no matter how hard you try.”

 

“You can’t go home again because home is different and it’s changed. But it hasn’t really changed. You’ve changed. Is that it?”

 

“Something like that, yes.”

 

“I should throw those beads away...”

 

On the subject of drinking, if it still did for me what it used to do for me I would still be doing it. Duh. I drank quite happily for a very long time, but eventually it stopped working. Something happened, something changed. Nothing about the alcohol changed. Alcohol has been virtually unchanged for three or four thousand years. Something changed about me. It’s not complicated. And now, the thought of having a drink never enters my mind. It is never a temptation that I must resist. There is no problem; the problem is gone.

 

I learned something about conscience, specifically what it isn’t. It isn’t something we’re born with. I have a friend who told me children come into the world with all the wisdom that there is, and I said, “Rubbish!” Is she still my friend? I don’t know. I think so. It doesn’t matter.

 

Conscience doesn’t exist without information. One doesn’t merely “know” right from wrong in an intuitive way. As you can plainly see, what is wrong in one culture may be right in another, and within any individual’s mind his idea of what is right and what is wrong can and will change as his life experience informs him. And what is life experience? – It is everything he sees, hears, smells, touches; everybody he meets, everything he reads; everything he dreams, every bone he breaks, every cold he catches; everything he learns, and everything he thinks. When he is a child he acts as a child acts, and when he is a man he acts as a man. What has happened to change him? Information has come into him. He has been formed as he has been informed. Perhaps he has received some bad information and now he reclines on the psychiatrist’s couch. The point is the information people receive, whether it is good or bad, true or false, changes the way they think and feel, and subsequently the way they behave.

 

The guy at the AA meeting receives some new information there – information that ruins his drinking. Henceforth, he will be unable to take a drink without that new information coming into his mind. He may try to deny it. This will make it even worse. He may become like Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, if he wasn’t already exhibiting such a terrible conflict within his personality. His days of wine and roses are in the past tense now. He cannot re-live them. Alcoholism, when you boil it down beyond all of the theoretical causes for it which are offered by medicine, psychology, etc., is really nothing more than a habitual sin, a false idea which has gained control of a man’s will. Knowing its true nature – though he may try in vain to recapture his ignorance, his innocence – is the beginning of the end for him, one way or another.

 

The only way I have ever heard of to recover from alcoholism is to have a religious conversion experience. I know there are other methods. I’ve never heard of one of them working. Their adherents cling desperately to testimonials of success, and I have known non-drinking drunks whose lives remain a misery because their illness has never been properly treated though they have not taken a drink in 20 years. I don’t call that success. I’d like to buy such men a drink. It would be the best thing for them.

 

As we know better we do better.

 

Once upon a time, if I woke up in a motel room next to a woman I had met the night before I would have thought the situation was perfectly natural, perfectly normal. Since it seems to be the norm – and the chances are that I have surrounded myself with people who believe as I do, that it is quite alright to be in this situation – the experience is fun, the experience is pleasurable. In order to continue to be able to appreciate that experience I would have to shun and avoid any person who tried to tell me there was something wrong with my behavior. Such a person would be my enemy. I would say that he is judgmental, narrow-minded, old-fashioned, and so on. And really, what have I done that is so wrong? I say I have done nothing wrong. There is no right, no wrong. We just make that stuff up so we can control each other, so that one group of people can have control over another group of people. It’s oppressive, dammit! And I’m a free spirit, a free thinking person. I know better. I am God. The woman who is passed out drunk in the bed next to me is God. We are all God.

 

“And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars my joys and desires.”

 

How dare they! It’s apostasy, I tell you. It’s hypocrisy too – because we all know those narrow-minded judgmental religious people are secretly buggering the altar boys. It’s in all the papers, isn’t it?

 

Well, I am making the connection between sexual promiscuity and alcoholism because in my personal experience they are intimately connected as though they are married to each other. I can’t have the one without the other. What I learned in the process of recovering from alcoholism is not that there is something wrong with sex – no, on the contrary, I was amazed to find just exactly how right it really is, but how very wrong I had been in the way I pursued its rewards. Moreover, the rewards of having sex were progressively ambiguous – like the alcohol, it no longer did for me what it used to do, and if I were to continue trying to re-live an experience which is now passed I would do so in vain. I could try, of course, but it just wouldn’t be the same. The problem is that now I have learned something about Love that I didn’t know before, and I can’t act as if I don’t know it; I can’t pretend I haven’t experienced something wonderful that puts all lesser experiences to shame.

 

Let’s return to William Blake:

 

“I fear’d the fury of my wind

Would blight all blossoms fair & true;

And my sun it shin’d & shin’d

And my wind it never blew.

 

But a blossom fair or true

Was not found on any tree;

For all blossoms grew & grew

Fruitless, false, tho’ fair to see.”

 

Why was Adam hiding in the bushes? – Because he was ashamed. Why was he ashamed? – Because he had learned something he could not un-learn. He who had known perfection had discovered imperfection. He who had known the infinite world had now discovered the limitations of the finite one. If you put perfection up against imperfection, what happens? Imperfection loses – every time. With us the process works the other way ‘round. We live in the finite world to begin with. We only know limitation and imperfection. When we get a glimpse then of what is limitless and perfect it ruins our lives because we realize we can’t go back to what was less than perfect. This is the awful threat of the awakening conscience, that sleeping monster we will go to some lengths to avoid disturbing.

 

I wrote this over the course of two days, being extremely busy with other things, and having to come back to it wherever I could find the time. Several points are as yet “dangling” I realize. This post is a combination of stream of consciousness writing and academic writing which could be expanded into an actual essay. I would greatly appreciate comments from those of you who disagree, or who can find fault with my logic. It will help me to correct any errors I am making, and to make clear what may seem unclear. I am no smarter than any of you. I learn nothing without argument.

 

I’m disappointed that we seem to be devolving into no more than exchanging amicable social greetings here – which is fine for MySpace – but I post my random thoughts on Blogstream, and only on Blogstream, because Blogstream was a place for writers. I am hoping it still is.