Drunk

When I was a little kid, I never thought I'd be what I am now: a tattooed drunk sitting outside in the rain thinking about a woman smoking a cigarette wondering where my life is going. I guess I never though too much about where my life was going, but I never thought I'd be so bitter. Maybe bitter is too strong a word, but that's the only one I can think of right now.

For a guy like me who hates changes so much, I sure do a lot to fuck myself up and get myself out of whatever routine I'm in. I go through periodic upheavels where I change everything in my life inside of a week, and then sit there for a year and wonder if it was all the right thing to do. I've read too much Dave Eggers, and I've got that bitchy self-analysis shit down to a science.

If you all ever wonder why I drink so much, it's because the only times I've truly been comfortable with anything in my life are when I'm around my buddies and drunk. Those are the times where I feel nothing can go wrong, and that we're all enjoying the moment as much as we can. We all have dark pasts and fucked up families, and so when I'm around them it's like I don't have to explain anything, they just know. I am lucky to have what I have.

At the same time, I have been a model of the self fulfilling prophecy. I wanted to be a drinking, smoking, tattooed tough guy who was as blue collar as they come- that's what I grew up around, really. I am that now. Makes me think I should stop thinking that God is coming to kill me, though, because that might be a self fullfilling prophecy too.

I've been told that I've got a "Jackson Pollack death wish." I don't really want to die, mind you. I love being alive, I love experiencing things, I love doing stuff. Sometimes I sit and think about the songs that will come out in 2084 that I might love, but I won't be around to hear because I'll be dead, and I think that sucks. There's a lot of good shit about being alive, being in the streets and smelling the smells and feeling everything that comes my way.

There's certain things in this life that are specific to our time and place- people in 2100 New York may never know how good the boiled hot dogs taste on a warm day when you're walking around the city too long and are starving your balls off, or how immediately when you smell chestnuts you think of NYC at night during Christmas. It's these little things, these awesome little idiosyncracies that life is full of, that make it all worth doing. It's smelling your girl's perfume on a day when it's too damn cold to think, and knowing why you love her, or feeling every bit of that cement on your calloused hands and having people ask you, "Why don't you wear gloves?".

Some things are eternal, I guess. There's not a man who's ever lived on this Earth who didn't want to just feel a good woman in his arms at night, or didn't want freedom, in the purest sense, to choose his own way in life and not be a slave to those richer or more powerful than he. There's the beautiful moments when a man's personal life intresects with the course of history, and centuries hang in the balance, destined to go one way or another depending on one mind's thought process.

Ahhh, but now I am waxing poetically. What am I but a drunk who puts holes in hotel room walls and wanders around wondering whether anything he does matters?

Sometimes, I wonder if that's why I fear death so much. I figure, when you die, you know all the answers- if there's a God, it's probably pretty fuckin obvious (if there isn't, then I'll never know.) This has been my great struggle with all of life- whether or not there's something worth living for, if there's something worth all this fucking terrible bullshit that living life entails. Why are there people like Shane McGowan, who can make works of heartbreaking beauty but has condemned himself to death early from booze? Why are there world changing people that, with a stroke of their hand, change the course of history, people like Lenin or Washington or Rousseau or Napoleon? It is ridiculous.

Sometimes I think that if I knew the answers to all these questions, I wouldn't want to be around, in either body or soul. It's this fight that keeps me going, and without it I'd be like Rocky in a wheelchair....what's the fuckin point of keeping on going?

These are all musing from another misguided drunk, of course. Take them as you will.


If this was all too much for you, then enjoy this fucking great version of "The Irish Rover."