THE CLOWN NOTICED IT WAS EASIER to feel clownish and behave clownishly when he drank. Which made no sense, taking the same medicine for sadness as for joy. It was only by not drinking at all for a while that he regained, however damaged and humbled, a lost sense of himself. Several times he quit for over a year, then had two beers to rub together, and next morning felt a little rough patch in him, a resistence to flow, to ready thought and action like barnacles on the bottom of his boat. He had few heroes who had never touched a drop. He even had one bright friend who claimed he drank for the hangovers that shamed him back to work. Why was that? Somewhere Milton said he who would be an epic poet should drink only water from a wooden bowl. What was this love of the sauce that so distracted and disabled them, mangled and squandered them? A splash or two might make him sociable, but could also make him start to feel rudderless, naked to invisible forces that spun and dropped him, while he laughed at the spectacle of his own ruin, circling the maelstrom within a toiletbowl
Posted on: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 15:57:12 +0000