Well this sucks. I had specific intentions of avoiding the whole alcohol thing, thinking it's, (that subject,) really boring the ass off the general public at the present time. But it seems like I have some sort of a need to untangle my thinking about the subject, or about how to get past the subject.
That would be because after The White Fence, [formerly of the provisional title Hold Still,] I'm starting on another project, this one called Hold On, which is about the years 1980 and '81, in my life, the time during which my father died, my dog Molly died, a former girlfriend died of an O.D., and a new friend, a woman, a Feminist writer, with whom I was having a platonic but for me fascinating relationship, committed suicide. [Hold Still and Hold On both have sub-titles, but I thought I'd hold them in reserve.] It was a bleak time for me but there would be no point in telling the story, assuming that there is any, if I left out that at that time I was, to use the basic vernacular of the day, "in recovery", abstinent from drugs and alcohol for over seven years, and working at a proscribed [that word again,] program, getting private therapy, and making an unimpressive living doing house-painting, something to which I was constitutionally able to give only a limited part of my attention-deficited mind.
I feel that I have to come up with a way to insert the Drinking Thing into the story without seeming to assume that the reader has a fascination with it, because I know that isn't true. It's been my observation that most people think of alcohol as either a beverage or an antiseptic and that they either consume it for the flavor or the feeling, or both, or for more complicated aesthetic reasons having to do with gourmet dining; or they don't consume it, either because they have made a negative moral judgement about it for one reason or another, or they just don't drink, out of habit, out of a desire for simplicity, or for no particular reason at all. But the idea of someone becoming an alcoholic brings to mind not just the idea that it's a sickness, something that has become part of the political correctness of the day, and which I happen to believe myself, but also that the person is very apt to exhibit behavior that is uncomfortable to observe, possibly anti-social, and not infrequently dangerous. This goes against my idea that when writing something, the narrator, fiction or non-fiction, should be a bland, sort of not too visible presence.
One way of course is to make it fiction. I've made a couple of feeble attempts at fictionalizing my adventurous life, but I've decided I just haven't had the necessary talent ingredients, including the perspiring persistence, to get that done. As it is, I may not live long enough to get #1 published, assuming that is, that if I had endless time, it would eventually happen. [Even though I am, at the moment, in excellent health, in spite of being mildly hypochondriacal as well as psychochondriacal. My newest ailment along those lines is AvPD, a wonderful disorder I have mentioned elsewhere.]
As I think about it now, I think that the challenge here is to keep the subject of alcohol and my own personal involvement with it in a perspective that allows it to be only one baby elephant in a room full of baby elephants, rather than the one big Pachyderm.
