Who (and What) I Am

He’s drunk in this clip. So am I. I’ve been a stone alcoholic since the age of 17. 67 now. 50 years of thriving in spite of a definitely fatal disease. Last night, I actually sang harmony with him. We were great together.

It killed me when he died. I thought he would live forever, like me and Keith, the impervious ones despite all our sins. And he was the one most like me. Blond, beautiful, suit and tie, way way smarter than everyone else in the biz. His own man. And then he up and dies on me. Damn.

Let me tell you how it’s going to go, how it’s been, and why. I really am THAT smart. I wrote two or three million words of InstaPunk.com over 10 years (multiple books worth) BECAUSE I was drunk enough to do it. It was the only way I could keep writing at all. Like Poe before me, I should have been dead before the age of 40. Not a pose. Why do geniuses die so young? Boredom. Nobody left to tell. Unless you’re all drunk up enough to pretend they might understand what you have to say.

Should be dead. Long ago. Not.

You have no idea what it’s like living inside this head. Fucking amazing. Running rings around everyone all the time, seeing the outside and the inside simultaneously, and it’s all stitched together with every moment of great art and poetry and the vilest sexual desires — everything consonant — constrained only by the miracle called Christian/Quantum consciousness. Tried to explain it to y’all a few hundred times, but you never got it. Why I tried beer as a substitute for flat-out alcohol poisoning, which has been my MISSION lo these many years. I used to buy an 18 pack of Buds every day while I was writing Instapunk and my wife was still going to work. Made me just dumb enough to write for all of you. But still trying to save everyone. Joke. Little boys lecturing me about Ayn Rand and the “flying spaghetti monster.” Little girls storming at me about their rights and vaginal imperatives. And there was never enough beer to make me dumb enough to save them from their damn dumb quasi-thoughts.

When it’s five minutes to 9 am this morning I’m going to drive to the liquor store and buy more vodka. I’ll pay for it by credit card. That will be a first. Why? My wife knows I’m a drunk. But I never use a credit card at a liquor store. She knows that I lie in order to control the disease and never let her see me drinking. Why I’m still alive and still so handsome. Hiding the physical act of drinking from her is how I’ve made our life together possible. Not that she doesn’t know. Just that the hiding is my ONE AND ONLY control. I really do drink less than the stone fucking alcoholics you hear about., with their two fifths a day. I could do that too. Stephen King lost five years drinking a case of 16-oz talls a day. With all my hiding, I average about two 2-shot drinks (OK, four) a day. That’s an average. Front-loaded, now that it’s vodka not beer. Not enough to kill you. Or at least not enough to kill me.

You see, my wife really is a saint. She knows about the hiding and the why of it. She knows I’m trying to stay alive because I love her, even though I’m really supposed to be dead. She plays along except when she gets mad, which she does when I yell. She’s a woman, you know. When you yell in the presence of a woman, you are automatically yelling at THEM.

All these blogsites suck. This one’s just about done now, today, and I’ve barely started talking about what it means to be a genius drunk. Guess I’ll leave you with one of the great song lyrics ever written. “People say I’m a drinker, but I’m sober half the time...”

But what happens when I use the credit card at Kurt’s? The mechanism I’ve used to control and prevent my impulse to suicide will be gone. And when I die, she’ll be mad as hell. And blame ME all to hell.

P.S. Didn’t do it. Use the credit card, I mean. Did go to the package store. But she knew and we had a fight about it. She thought I drove drunk. Didn’t. I waited enough hours. But they never listen, do they? I know when I’m safe to drive. I was so mad that Bowie died. I’m maybe the last guy alive who remembers that “Heroes” was a song about not life but death. The signature song of a movie called Christiane F, darkest heroin picture ever made. They weren’t heroes except for the delusions of heroin. They were dead people. In the last scene, literally dead in the gutter. Two incredibly beautiful youngsters dead in the gutter. German movie. Why the original title and first performance were of a song called “Helden.” Listen.

Stay tuned for Part 2, not immediately scheduled.