Heavy drinking does for you as pack animal what PEDs do for the well trained athlete, only backward. The real boon: not strength not speed but compound confidence. Protestant guilt gives way to grace by way of tiny blast radiuses internal to every tissue the way self-importance would if you could hold your first-born child in your arms for the first time all the time.
Good drinkers go places most people never see while maintaining access to the spaces everyone knows. Different from the fentanyl nodder who freezes in place, one shoe nearby, on the multi-use path or kindergarten bench, we drunks pull into your tight civic crevices where dirt parcels meet concrete or surface air meets sewer air that meets a sewer lateral—some of the last public spaces synesthetic fits get thrown on purpose, but bloated, sweaty, inflamed, slurring, we manage not to get fired, and get fucked up, and manage not to get fired, and lose track of which feels better or worse; they make each other possible.
Cook’s kitchens
You share cook’s kitchens you didn’t design in homes you will never afford in neighborhoods never quite the smell of your skin or hair, with people whose genitalia should remain a mystery. You live inside of a dream. Not the good bad dream of Airbnb, or the bad good dream of a tent on the dope spot, just a dream. Key to enjoying a dream is not to allow it to grow outrageous. It’s like with porn—you go out of your league but not so far it’d be unrealistic should a few knobs tweak in your past.
Far but not too
For me far-but-not-too was the continuous hill face above Oakland, Berkeley, El Cerrito—houses tick-like in its fur. In that fur in those ticks on that hill face were widows. The widows referred to their husbands fondly as plush toys in curled, yellowed photos. You lived in the fur with these widows, walked their dogs, sat in buttock-sectioning wire benches in their gardens reading physical books so they could see you from kitchen windows and feel redeemed. Herons fished in their goldfish ponds, during atmospheric rivers giant possums on flat fence-tops startled you when sensor lights came on; undocumented spiders built webs making for stable-diffusion effects when timers triggered sprinklers and hummingbirds moved in laterally, drinking midair.
It was all very impressive, a concrete dream insisting you participate for half of your net salary.
Ownership-assault survival
And it dawns on you around the fourth landlady—these widows in their seventies, this stretch of Bay, the husbands in those photos, all came out of hippiedom.
Wealth against their wills, my first mortgage payment said. Right place right time, it guessed.
About 1:30 in the afternoon
One thing I used to love about 1:30 in the afternoon was not having to worry about getting robbed at gunpoint or rolled up on in the crosswalk, guys grabbing me and grabbing my phone and running off with one of us. But it’s nice, when these things happen, to have a space of one’s own to come back to—no roomies’ or landlords or landlords’ pets’ emotions to project-manage.
Not long into my devirginizing mortgage, I woke to a morning that was the tip of the spear of fire season. I opened my eyes in that unfamiliar address, finally my own, and had no clue where I was. Or who I was, what I was doing awake, or why awake was happening. It felt like recovery from surgery in a sauna. It was six or seven seconds before what you might call personal history flooded in, but the way you’d remember a dream. Get up, it said. You’re late, it said. I went from room to room looking for evidence of children.
I so enjoy the pictures you paint, Jason. This was great. I especially liked the ending of this line:
“... or why awake was happening to me.”
WOW! Worth the wait Jason. Wow! So evocative, specific, restrained.