IN DEFENSE OF DRINKING by Michael Ventura

My mother and father didn't drink.  A beer or chianti now and then, maybe a Seven & Seven, but they didn't *drink*.  They rarely kept liquor in the apartment.  Now that I think of it, I *never* saw them drunk.  And I don't remember seeing any of my many relatives that way.  Maybe a little loose on New Year's Eve, but never drunk.  As for inebriated people on the street, it just didn't happen in the Italian neighborhood of Brooklyn and the Bronx.  In fact, the first up-close drunk I saw in my youth - was me. Me and Dave, actually.  Fifteen years old, in 1960.  Dave lived in a modest house in Bayside, Queens, a couple of blocks from the not-yet-opened Long Island Expressway.  A slightly older friend of ours had given us, as a Christmas present, a bottle of Four Roses spiked with rum.  As we opened the bottle in the TV room, Dave's mom sat knitting in the living room.  The pedagogical theory was that it was better we get drunk in the house than somewhere they couldn't find us. It had been snowing for days, big flakes floating straight down, huge snowdrifts, no cars on the streets, no one outside.  Just outside the window, Dave's father had decorated a small pine with blue lights that made the snow blue, too.  As we took our first drink straight from the bottle, Dave went through his brother's records and picked a new one with a funny title, "Mingus Ah Um". We didn't know from jazz - we just put it on for the title - at the hellfire first cut, "Better Git It In Your Soul."  As Mingus and the whiskey peeled away dead matter off the cortex like a scouring brush, we felt suddenly alive in a way that we had never been.  Something was being said to us that had never been said, something of such urgency that we were hardly prepared for the very different urgency of the second cut, "Goodbye Porkpie Hat."  Sensuous, slow, thoughtful, elegaic...how could the whiskey go so well with both?  After you git it in your soul, the man was telling us, be prepared for the pain. Where were we?  Who were we?  How could Dave and Speedy (that was my name back then), who could say anything to each other, and who seemed to know the same things at the same time, and were going to be great adventurers, great writers, great *something*, live up to this man Mingus somehow, use what he was giving us, boys who didn't yet guess how hard it was going to be, just to be a man.  Somehow Dave's mother was looking the other way when we couldn't contain our energy anymore and we took the bottle and walked off into the snow. I yelled to the neighborhood, at the top of my lungs: "MIDDLE CLASS SHITS!" and Dave said something equally polemical, and we peed down into the empty Long Island Expressway, and we threw ourselves in the snow when the cops came by, and lying in the snow, laughing, loaded, already a little sick, loving the cold, loving each other, and reciting the Dylan Thomas poems we knew by heart, yelling them into the night--we *understood* Mingus, we understood everything, and the whiskey was part of it, and we loved the whiskey too.  God, we were happy.  You can't die bitter if you've had a friend like that, a night like that. (It's worth adding that 30 years later we can still tell each other anything, and the Mingus record just gets better.) Most of what you read now about alcohol and addiction leaves out how marvelous it can feel to be drunk, an omission that, as the addiction theorists would say, amounts to denial.  It's as though they have to deny the beauties of drinking or they couldn't make their point.  Is something wrong with their point, that it can't stand a little wild beauty?  (It was Rumi, the great Sufi, who said that wine gets drunk with us, not the other way around.) Didn't drink much in my 20s.  Except when I was 24 - I even drank in the morning that year.  Otherwise it wasn't unusual to go weeks or months without a beer.  Then one morning I was 26, driving into the West for the first time. If you've grown up in the East, your vision usually stops about 20 yards from where you stand.  Some wall, some tree.  Space back there feels cramped. Driving 200 miles is a big occasion.  But in the West, with its endless, beckoning vistas, I've driven 70 miles for a pizza, 500 for a party, 1000 for a girl.  This is not unusual behavior in Texas and New Mexico. Anyway, the best day of my life was the first time I drove into that big sky.  Driving across Oklahoma in a Pontiac Firebird on what was still called Route 66, horizon in front of me, horizon in my rear-view, horizon all around, great white clouds you could reach out and touch, it was more like flying than driving.  Crossing into the Texas Panhandle.  A huge storm to the south.  It was as though, before I had driven into that space, my mind had been a closed fist, and being in that wide, wide country for the first time, I can't tell you what it was, to feel that fist slowly open within my skull and reach out to the world. Stayed in Amarillo that night.  The motel room had a little porch.  The wind kept the mosquitos off.  I opened a bottle of VO.  I didn't know what *real* whiskey was, couldn't have afforded it if I'd known.  And that night, VO was a gift from the gods.  But to understand that night, you have to understand a little about drinking alone.  Drinking alone has a very bad rap.  "Do you drink alone?" therapists ask you with a kind of squint.  But there is a kind of drunkenness you can only feel alone.  Sometimes it's a pain drunk; the whiskey burns your throat and you feel like you're drinking pure pain.  Now, pain is something we're *not* supposed to feel, on the Cosby show, in New Age thought, anywhere you look.  Like the song says, "I haven't got time for the pain." Transcend it, elevate it to grief, do *something* with it, but get out of it. Most of the therapies, and the entire pharmaceutical industry, is based on "Don't feel pain." And they say that all you're doing with alcohol is numbing that pain.  And often that's true. But sometimes it's not, and it would be refreshing to hear the theorists admit it.  (Theorists have a hard time admitting the "sometimes" things. Afraid their theories will collapse.  That's what's passing for "thought" these days.)  For there are messages in pain, trying to be heard.  So sometimes you don't drink to numb it.  You drink to swim in it, to inoculate yourself with it, to go so far down into it that it holds no surprises for you any longer. The great Zen poets knew about this sort of drinking.  Listen to Ikkyu: *so burning's knowing and I'm not even drunk on three wines plunge into the fire reality pure endless pain* But where was I?  In Amarillo.  Doing the other sort of drinking Ikkyu loved: *Ikkyu the whole day singing boozing so great so fully here he built a bridge no one uses 10,000 miles long* Whiskey, you see, is a mysterious fluid.  In the Irish language, whiskey was called the "water of life".  It can taste like pure pain or like edible fire, celebratory like all fire seems (even when it burns down your house).  And there I was, drunk already on the land, the road and the sky, watching the moon come up, too dumb for Zen but smart enough to know I was happy.  I shared that whiskey with the moon. The book I'd brought, John Steinbeck's *Grapes of Wrath*, was about other people who'd taken that highway a while back.  And this, I swear to you, was the page I opened to: *"And always, if he had a little money, a man could get drunk. The hard edges gone, and the warmth...sitting in a ditch, the earth grew soft under him.  Failures dulled and the future was no threat.  And hunger did not skulk about, but the world was soft and cozy, and a man could reach the place he started for.  The stars came down wonderfully close and the sky was soft.  Death was a friend, and sleep was death's brother. The old times came back, a girl with pretty feet, who danced one time at home...when was that?  Ought to find a girl to talk to.  That's nice.  Might lay with her too.  But warm here.  And the stars down so close, and sadness and pleasure so close together, really the same thing.  Like to stay drunk all the time.  Who says it's bad?  Preachers, but they got their own kind of drunkenness.  Thin, barren women, but they are too miserable to know.  Reformers, but they don't bite deep enough into living to know.  No, the stars are close and dear and I have joined the brotherhood of the worlds.  And everything's holy, everything, even me."* About 10 years later I was in a hospital in Austin, Texas, with most of my internal organs wired to TV screens.  My heart or my gall bladder or my liver - they never did find out for sure. (It felt like a heart attack, but apparently lots of things do.)  A nurse had just come in and cheerfully said that, my, my, about 10 minutes ago my brainwaves did a little flip, looks like a slight stroke.  "But you *look* fine, don'cha?"  And she just as cheerfully left.  I was married at the time, and at the moment, my wife looked about as bad as I did.  We were trying not to wonder whether I was ever going to leave that hospital. When I finally did leave, it was suggested that I stop drinking.  A dear friend came down from Santa Fe, "I've driven 800 miles to tell you you're an alcoholic." I asked my wife, "Am I an alcoholic?" "Let's put it this way," she said.  "Alcohol is a person in your life.  A person who lives with you.  With us." Time for therapy, right? Therapist: "Do you like to drink alone?" Me: "No. I *love* to drink alone." Therapist: "Then you're an alcoholic." But after more therapy, it went something like this: Therapist: "Hmmmmmmmmmm." Me: "Hearing a therapist say 'Hmmmm' is like hearing an M.D. say 'Uh-oh.'" Therapist: "Do you drink when you write?" Me: "Never.  I drink when I'm done." Therapist: "You don't drive drunk, at least not anymore.  You don't beat up on people.  It doesn't seem to interfere with your work (though the damage is cumulative - behind your soulful eyes, your brain may be rotting).  You're *too* responsible, you make up stuff to feel obligated about.  The whiskey certainly doesn't undermine that. It's not good for your health, but your health is your business. You're a *moody* bastard, but so are lots of people who don't drink. So who am I to tell you to stop, except...hmmmmmmmmm." Me: "Hmmmmmmmm?" Therapist: "When you might have a quiet moment with your own soul - I think that's when you reach for a drink." Me: "The whole country reaches for the TV remote control when it's time to commune with their souls.  I prefer whiskey." Therapist: "We're not talking about the whole country, we're talking about you." Reaching for Old Bushmill's instead of listening to my soul.  She wasn't all the way right about that, but she was sometimes right.  And "sometimes", as I said, fucks up a lot of theories (especially about yourself).  On the other hand, I've got the right to tell my soul to shut up, a right which I think my soul supports.  Which left me where?  Paying a *lot* more attention to when I drink. See, I pray every day, have prayed every day for years, and part of my prayer goes like this: "May our souls speak to us, and may we listen."  I never pray for my or anyone's health, safety, or the like.  Just that our souls speak and that we listen.  That way, I figure, I'm not asking the gods for permission to exert my will over my own life or anyone else's.  If the soul says something we don't want to hear, that's tough.  But let it speak.  Let us listen. I do not want to live in such a way as to undermine my prayer. (Which may be a definition of religious life.)  So, having no intention of quitting the drinking I love, I've had to become more aware of the *choice* to drink.  Am I drinking, at this moment, to shut off my soul or another person's?  The question has become almost second nature.  I don't pay attention to the answer all the time, but in general I drink less.  Not every day, for instance.  Which is a big change.  And I feel my soul's gratitude at not being ignored as often. I also feel gratitude when Bushmill's on the rocks is exactly what the soul wants. I am attempting what the Buddhists call "right attention", which doesn't necessarily mean moderation.  It can also mean learning when to risk the immoderate. (After all, moderation all the time is an extreme, isn't it?) A couple of things worth mentioning: First, remember that white-male capitalism didn't invent inebriates. (Actually, the Goddess culture did.)  Every society we know about seems to have had and used some sort of booze and rugs from Day One.  Booze and drugs aren't what's swamping our culture.  Try meaningless work, enervating leisure, political powerlessness, education that leaves you stupider when you finish school than when you started, projecting what you fear onto other races and opposite sexes, and how everything, including what should be the sacred concept of "community", has been sacrificed for profit.  Our children have far less chance to pursue happiness than any generation in American history. People-abuse and planet-abuse make for lots of substance-abuse.  It's just denial to blame the substances. Second, nothing I'm saying should be construed as polemic against AA, ACoA, or anything like them.  I know people whose lives have been saved by those outfits, and while I might argue with their assumptions and even their methods, that's quibbling.  Whatever saves your life is right, as least for as long as it takes to save your life. I keep thinking of the brilliant thing my ex said about me and booze: "Alcohol is a person in your life."  A presence.  A spirit.  How that spirit relates to me will differ some from how it relates to you.  And even the spirits themselves differ.  The spirit of Bushmill's Irish Whiskey isn't at all the same as the spirits of Cuervo Gold or Chianti or Amstel or Dave's home brew (to which we still recite Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, e.e. cummings, the poets we loved most in our youth). I write this, then, in defense and praise of those spirits who have accompanied me into great happiness and serious misery.  At times protected me, at times attacked.  Spirits that have been straight-forward and devious, loyal and treacherous by turns (usually in proportion to how I was acting toward myself).  They have revealed great things, and hidden others; made some nights bearable; brought me closer to some people, took me farther away from others.  And they have made a fool of me - sometimes gently, sometimes brutally.  There is nothing simple about them.  There is nothing simple about anything spirited. I believe what the Sufis say: that something in you is already drunk, always drunk, and that this may be what is closest to the gods.  And sometimes, as in tribal ritual, we drink to meet and wake that inner drunkenness.  It's no accident that the 12-step programs are religious, for their task is to replace one door of the spirits with another.  And it's no secret that anything touching upon spirits is dangerous.  In the Bible, when angels appear even the prophets shake.  "Take this cup from me" is no idle metaphor.  And to raise a glass in another's honor is no idle gesture, it is a cup that's come down to us from our beginnings. "Hmmmmmmmmm," my therapist might say.  And now that the writing's done - a little Irish and a little ice.

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And remember, the next time that you feel whatever it is that you feel when you post to alt.angst, 1) you have a gift with words and emotion, a method of emptying your soul, will mine sits overflowing and rotting, that I envy and appreciate and 2) there are others who are just as confused about love and the future as yourself.

Peace,

--- Zog _______________________________________________________________________________ Paul D. Herzog                  | "Could you give me a wish if I tell you what Alcatel Network Systems, Inc.   |  I want?  Will the price be no object? Dallas, Texas                   |  I wish for dreams of light I-net: pdherzog@aud.alcatel.com |  I live for wishing well's surprise." Work:  (214) 996-2624           | Home:  (214) 739-3638           |                        --- Bob Mould



Solutions to Everything 
by Michael Ventura 

Reprinted without permission from the L.A. Weekly. 

1.	Make mistakes. As Coleman Hawkins said, "If you don't make mistakes, you aren't really trying." 

2.	Stop lying about yourself. To yourself. To your family. To your business associates. Maybe even to your enemies. (Your enemies oppress you as much by your fidelity to your own lies as by anything else.) 
3.	Stop tolerating in your leaders what you would not tolerate in your friends. But... 
4.	Tolerate impurity. Trying to be pure about anything is a way of setting yourself up to fail. Asking other people to be pure is a way of setting them up. 
5.	Read one book a month -- a book that you didn't find out about in a magazine or a newspaper. Browse an independent bookstore and wait till some book says, "Read me," and read it. 

6.	Listen to the voices. The wee inner voices. Even if they don't speak, only breathe a little, like dirty phone calls. Do anything they tell you to do except rape, kill or pillage. (The voices make mistakes sometimes, but they don't make boring mistakes.) 
7.	Leave people alone when they tell you to leave them alone. If they mean it, they need it. If they don't mean it, they're trying to manipulate you, so fuck them. (Note: this rule applies to grown-ups only.) 
8.	Don't make the sophisticated error of thinking that a negative voice is automatically smarter than a positive voice. 

9.	Eat real food but don't be a fanatic about it. 
10.	Don't be a fanatic about anything. 
11.	Do only exercises that take you somewhere. Walk, ride a bike, roller-skate, swim. All other exercise is ego- and/or fear-driven, and if you listen to ego and fear you will drown out the voices you most need. 
12.	Don't run. Really, don't. America likes to run because running from (fill in the blank) is what we do best. Everybody who runs in running down an alley away from something terrible. Stop running and find out what's behind you. 

13.	Don't dye your hair unless you're a woman over 40 and you dye it the color of my obsessions. Even then, don't cover up all your gray. Gray is gorgeous. And if you're a man, then really don't dye to cover gray. Dig it: EVERYBODY KNOWS. And they talk about it in a snide way behind your back. I'm not kidding. 

14.	Eat Italian food. Italians went from being oppressive Romans to being the inefficient wonderful Italians they are today. It's probably the food. 
15.	Order my novel "Night Time Losing Time" at your local independent bookstore. (This won't solve the world's problems or yours, but it'll do wonders for some of mine.) 

16.	Learn to drive. You may think you know how, but my experience of the way you drive is that you probably don't. So here's how: Drive for space. Space in front of you is the safest thing you can have with a car. Darting in and out of traffic doesn't change anything, it just makes you older. You can't beat the average traffic flow on any given street or freeway by more than five minutes, which only makes a difference if you're having a baby. And don't you feel like an idiot when you've passed six cars and they pull up beside you at the next light? They're laughing at you. And they hate you. That isn't good for you. Drive for space. If the move ain't smooth, it ain't right. There's no excuse for a jerky turn, stop or acceleration. It's hard on the car, it's hard on the other passengers, it confuses other drivers, it's not aesthetic. Such moves are for emergencies only. Ninety percent of the time you drive with your habits, not your head, so figure out what your bad habits are -- gunning it through the yellows? not signaling? tailgating? Your worst habit will turn into your worst accident. So stop it. Drive for space. End of lesson. 
17.	Dance. Jesus said, in one of the gnostic gospels, "He who does not dance does not know what happens." 

18.	Don't worry so much about being fat. Fat feels great in bed. 
19.	Have at least one other living thing in your abode. Rhododendrons, for instance, are fantastic creatures. They give much, ask little, have marvelous names, and they don't shit where I walk. 
20.	Look into people's eyes when you talk to them. 
21.	Call your parents by their real first names the very next time you see them. Try it. Watch their faces. Then do it at least half the time you talk to or about them from now on. (If people all over the world did this, nations would cease to war.) 
22.	Have candlelight in your life. (If you should get into rituals, it'll come in handy.) 
23.	No matter how rushed your schedule is, spend at least five minutes in the morning quietly in bed with your loved one just being gentle together. Perhaps drinking tea. 
24.	Tell your mother and father, individually -- and your children, if you have children -- what you really think. Once a year, minimum. If more people did this, it would save more lives than arresting drunk drivers. 
25.	Do not avoid the eyes of the homeless. 
26.	If you think something is wrong -- at work, in your family, in your self, in your country -- agitate for change. If you won't do that, it doesn't matter how tan you are. 
27.	As regards No. 23: Assuming that you want a loved one but don't have one, my bet is it's not because you're fat, ugly, crazy, old, a failure, a drunk, a ninny or a clod. Lot's of fat ugly crazy older failing drunk ninnying clods have loved ones. Lots who don't want one, and would probably even put up with you. So there's some lie at the heart of your loneliness; being with someone would reveal the lie, and you don't want that. 
28.	Tape this to your bathroom mirror: 

One can only accept in others what one can accept in oneself. 
-- James Baldwin 

29.	Work is a sacrament. Don't despise anyone's. 
30.	Don't talk down to kids. 
31.	Don't chicken out about sex. Given that you're with a consenting adult, do whatever you fantasize. This is much more important than quitting smoking. 
32.	Watch at least one black-and-white film per month. 
33.	Regarding No. 6: Entertain the notice that there are... voices. Some come from within, some from the plants and objects and such around you, and some come from what I call, for shorthand purposes, the Infinite. If you don't listen to them, your life will be more difficult than it has to be. 
34.	Pay more taxes -- and insist that those taxes, and the taxes you already pay, go for education. Giving the young a lively, thorough, truthful education is the most important environmental issue today, even more important than acid rain, tropical rain forests and ozone holes. 
35.	Let me make that a lot clearer. Recycling and shopping ecologically are almost pointless when so many high-school students drop out, and most who graduate can't read much and have no skills to speak of. How can these people inherit a world? Even if we give them a greener world, are they equipped to keep it that way? You want a solution, so here's a solution: Take to the Streets for the Education of the Children. 
36.	Pray. 
37.	Stop looking for other people to supply the solution. You're the solution. If you're not, there is no solution. 

38.	Be aware of the Network. We live by a network of connections and links. Your connection to yourself, to your intimates, to your place, to the collective, to the planes, to the Infinite. (Each is a distinct connection.) Equally powerful are the collective's connections to you (not at all the same as yours to it), to groups of intimates, to itself, to the planet, to the Infinite.All these levels and connections interweave. All are equally important. All the links or connective points of this network (call them the acupuncture points of our universe) both take and generate energy. Any link out of sync weakens the others. (The West, for instance, has concentrated too much on the individual, the East, too much on the collective; both approaches have been catastrophic on every level of the network.) This network, from you all the way to the Infinite, is a living whole, ceaselessly changing. Some of these changes take millions of years. Some happen instantaneously. May the links of the network shine. 

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