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May 9, 2008I’m NOT an alcoholic…I’m an Axoholic!I’M ADDICTED TO MYSELF.“You have me hooked,” wrote a reader after “Get Drunk Tonight.” I have me hooked. Isn’t it tiresome having to be the same person for the length of a lifetime? Wouldn’t you just once like to look at life from behind someone else’s eyes? Besides John Malkovich. But you never get a vacation from yourself. You’re the same person who went to kindergarten, the Jersey Shore, Olney High School and Temple U, the same you who hit the sweet 16 of your first kiss, who lost your cherry, hit 21, the Big 3-0, the Big 4-0, the Big Yes, the same you—me—that is, the same me who has accumulated the out-of-control chaotic mess that now surrounds me. As author Anne Lamott’s father told his 10-year-old son who was overwhelmed by a report on birds he hadn’t started that was due the next day, “Just take it bird by bird.” BIRD BY BIRD,bit by bit, book by book, that’s how I brought this insanity of possessions into my life. I never thought I’d hate the sight of books, but no matter how many I sell, give away, or just leave on the corner of Fillmore and Page for all takers, there are hundreds more still waiting to be thrown in one pile or another. How did I come to accumulate so many heavy, cumbersome, tie-me-down objects? Just get it out of here, I told neighborhood dealer, Mickey of Mickey’s Monkey, who came by to look over my stuff. $110 later, he barely made a dent. After all, these are the accumulations of a lifetime. I came to the Bay Area from a four-bedroom house, moved to a two-bedroom house, thence to my six-room Victorian flat, each time fully outfitting any available wall, floor or sometimes ceiling space. Treasure hunting, that’s my other addiction. I’m so sick of my crap, though, that I’ve gained control of that one. Just don’t look, and you won’t see something you want. Don’t go into that cute little Cole Valley antique store, bypass that thrift shop, recycle all catalogs immediately. I’m moving to a one-bedroom apartment. Anything that doesn’t fit in it or my newly leased storage space, doesn’t make the cut. On my birthday every year I buy myself whatever I want. This year whatever I wanted was nothing. What do you give a Buddhist for her birthday? Nothing. Yes, I’ve been collecting for 35 years, and it’s time to clear the decks and move on. And hey, if you’re in your early, mid- or late forties, I have news for you—I, at 53, am actually younger than you are. Because, as a reader informed me Victor Hugo said, “Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.” This isn’t the autumn of my life, it’s the spring—time to spring forward, dude! WURF IN DAS AUTOI noticed on my Blog Stats referrers feature (websites from which people click to access my column) the listing translate.google.de/ and I thought, d-e? Isn’t that Germany? So I clicked on it, and indeed, there I was in German, courtesy Google’s translating feature. Whoa, zurückgreifen, dude! Apparently “wurf” is what throwing up sounds like in German. I hope my German reader enjoys my Kurze Aufmerksamkeitsspanne Poesie Ecke. Oh the wonders of the web. A lot of people, well duh, have a lot of opinions about alcohol and its use and abuse. “Get Drunk Tonight” shattered my Best Day Ever record. The most cogent advice came from the Peterman himself: “Alcohol is a depressant, why take a depressant with your antidepressant? If you are asking these questions, unprompted, and can’t come up with the answer, then maybe that is the answer. If you can’t answer the question, maybe it’s because the answer is not the one you want. So you figure it over and over again, hoping to get another answer.” Then this memorable motto: “Quit until you have to drink. Then drink until you have to quit. See which one you like better.” Whoa, zurückgreifen, dude! Another reader had the same idea: “Do you ignore some criteria of alcoholism and focus on the symptoms you don’t have in order to convince yourself that you’re not an alcoholic?” I’M STILL NOT CONVINCEDI am. I do, though, have a drinking problem. I can have a glass of wine with lunch and leave it at that. I can have my afternoon pint of Hoegarten at the Café and leave it at that. I know my limit. The problem is that, usually on social evenings, when subconsciously I have told myself, “I’m drinking tonight,” I arrive at that limit and surpass it. Wine just wants me to keep drinking it. I do that with pot too. I smoke pot only when I’ve told myself, “I’m not doing anything else tonight.” If there’s anything I want to get done that evening, I won’t have any. Well, I can’t do anything else tonight. I’m actually exhausted, but writing relaxes me. I am just winding down at 2:30 a.m. Write every day, in sickness and in health. Who said that? I can’t look it up, because my books are suffocating in cardboard and trapped in wrapping tape. Write every day—or as Philip Glass put it, “Get up in the morning and work all day. That’s the secret. Is there another one?”
The author will have another, please ------------------------------------------------------------ Life's too short
Hiccup! copyright Alexandra Jones 2008 |
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