I've been out tonight 'till after midnight wallowing in the sounds of a Seventies jazz-rock confusion band of my acquaintance. And, because I'm a recovering alcoholic (the medical term is: drunk), I had two Coca-Colas and a cup of coffee at the bar. This is an important point: it comes up later. Pay attention, I'm talking to you. I'm trying to quit smoking, and it isn't going well. Cigars and Nicorettes don't cut itóthank God no one I know smokes good, solid cigarettes, so bumming them has been very disappointing. When you're trying to get off Marlboro 100s, a Carlton does not cut it. Such a whimsical attempt at smoking pleasure ( why do people even bother smoking Merit Ultra Lights? What's the point?
My sport futility vehicle, the Italian Error, my 1977 Fiat 124S Spider, doesn't want to run, and it occurred to me on the way home that it really hasn't wanted to run since late March, and there's only three months left in convertible season around here, and I'm obsessing about that ... at least the French Mistake, the 1989 Eagle Premier ES, is behaving itself. And by 5 am I'll be in its cushy seat screaming towards the dawn and the Jersey Shore, because if I don't get out of here by that hour I'll be sitting in traffic with every sun worshipping moron in this part of America ... I actually hate the shore. It's hot, there are nasty bugs, there are nasty vacationers fighting fate, weather, traffic and each other in search of a good time, the water is salted, the land is blighted, skin melanomas are now very common sights; in general it's not really a good scene. In April, it's cosmic, in October it's bliss, in July ... it creates a vacuum.
But I'm off to visit the Fixed Income Kids, my parents, whose income is fixed well above my own not inconsiderable take. I love to hear two people who are as fixed as you can be and still have self-respect complain about the high cost of everything. It's quite amusing. I take my mother shopping just so my father can keep active fuming about the bills.
A little local color: in New Jersey, we don't "go to the beach." We go "to the Shore." Once you get to "the Shore," the beach is really close by, but nobody refers to their destination as the beach per se. It's "the Shore."
But I can't fucking sleep. So, what better time to finally meet my commitment to the Auricular Media Immersion tribe and tell you what's on my mind now ...
What WAS on my mind was a little rumination about synchronicity, the I Ching, and Studebaker automobiles ( I started that a couple of months ago but I froze up as it began to be a rather long rant on the difference between hippies and freaks. Someday I will return to that theme. But thank God Alan got fired in the meantime. Or his glue-sniffing boss lost it all at the track. Whatever. So I never felt obligated to finish that little ditty.
NOW Alan keeps whining he wants "just a little more, please, we so enjoyed your first piece ... ." Oh, geez, stop. Here we go ...
NOW I mentioned a while back there that I'm a recovering alcoholic. What that means is, I don't drink or take drugs stronger than antihistamines anymore. Hmm, seven years and uh, March, April, May, June, July ... five months since my last drink. Some recovering alcoholics would declare me to be a backslider for taking the freaking Allerest. I guess sobriety is supposed to be accompanied by endless nose blowing, I don't know. But I have been thoroughly exposed to "THE PROGRAM." And this little ditty is about God, fate, THE PROGRAM, and other stuff.
Let me first state this: I'm sober because of the help of a lot of people who believe a lot of the stuff I'm going to dis in the next couple of thousand words. If you or someone you know really could use some sobriety, go get the phonebook and call Alcoholics Anonymous. And email me, I'd be glad to help (dmcgrath@essex.njnet.com). When you've been sober for 90 days you can tell them all to fuck off, but it is a moderately successful way to deal with addiction in a field largely marked by miserable failure. Something like 90 percent of all alcoholics die as a direct consequence of their disease. And it's not a nice way to go. And sobriety is just like real life, only without hangovers and legal bills. Trust me.
But THE PROGRAM is stupid nonetheless. Now, in my mind the problem with THE PROGRAM is that it's a closed system ( that is, there is no question THE PROGRAM cannot answer. If you have a problem with THE PROGRAM, well, it's your problem, bub ( THE PROGRAM has been tested and found superior to all others (actually, there are no others, and it hasn't be tested at all, but this is a closed system, don't argue with it already). And as anyone who knows me can attest, I'm an argumentative bastard. And I've long know the faint fetid odor of a closed system when I smell one. It's perfectly obvious to me (and to more than a few other philosophers) that any closed system must inherently be based upon a false premise. No system answers all questions. That's why we need meta-physics, meta-language, to talk about things we can't otherwise talk about. And even those break down at a certain level of granularity.
But THE PROGRAM has no such problems. Need I explain that THE PROGRAM is really a benign Christian cult? You see, you aren't really sober until you accept JEZUZ ( which, of course, explains why you can't argue with it. NO ONE in THE PROGRAM will actually admit this, but any self-help organization that concludes its meeting by having everyone hold hands and recite "The Lord's Prayer" is certainly heading in a clearly defined direction. (Special note to all you drunks out there: You can handle it. They're really weird, but they're really nice. And it's something to do while you try not to drink.)
So I not only went to meetings, but I was in outpatient therapy. I got sober in San Francisco, and I had outpatient at Garden Pacific, a little warehouse of a hospital at the corner of Geary and Masonic, diagonally across from what was a Sears (circa 1989). And it was there that I told the following story.
"So," sez the not-nice (actually, the all-too-nice and annoyingly sincere and I think more-than-a-little control freak) therapist. The nice therapist was Laurie Steele, and last I knew she worked at the Haight Free Clinic. But, "So," the not-nice therapist sez. "I want you all to tell me a story about a time when the Higher Power (HP) was present in your life."
All you recovering Catholics out there: sounds like CYO, don't it?
HP (not Hewlett-Packard, Higher Power) is god "as you understand him/her/it." It's the concept THE PROGRAM uses to try not to scare you off. (Note to drunks: You're really sick of the whole thing, aren't you? Just do it. No one ever died of not drinking. In fact, the bars just closed here, and there are a shitpot of ambulances screaming around outside. I wonder why ... .) But it's GOD they're talking about, all right, make no mistake about it. Big white beard, kid named Jesus, gleaming white pigeon, the whole bit.
Here is the theological point of our program tonight. (Fuck, only 2:30 am. Can I drag this out another hour and a half?) Please read the following response I made to this request, and then consider: Who was the HP watching out for that morning in the late 1970s? Please use both sides of the screen for your response ...
SO Dan (my brother), George (my pal from the fourth grade 'till this day, though lately I can't handle him), and the Unmentionable (it being an old Irish custom not to call down the devil, I usually don't mention this guy by name ( even longer story than this one) are doing what we did many, many nights. They are cruising aimlessly in Dan's 1974 VW Love Bug. I was somewhere else. The Bronx, perhaps?
The Love Bug, a marketing ploy by VeeDub to move as many standard beetles as they could before closing that line out, was named (no kidding) after a Disney movie, and came in two colors: Psychotic Orange, and Atomic Vomit Green. Fortunately, Dan's was the former color. It was pretty peppy as bugs went, but nothing really special. It's main distinguishing characteristic, besides the luscious choice of colors, was the black-out trim, which was in fact pretty exotic for its day. I believe Dan's car would actually glow under black light (or it could of been the peyote, but who knows now?).
The car was water-, and thus air-tight. This made it ideal for dope smoking: You had complete conservation of smoke, kind of like being inside the joint itself. To remain conscious under these conditions, it was often necessary (nay, DESIRABLE!) to imbibe amphetaminous substances, so as to ... speed things up a bit. RZZZZ! went the wombats! Opening the windows occasionally also helped.
Naturally, one needed many cans of Foster's Lager to trim the sails on the speed and clear the throat for more smoke. Many of these nights ended at the Middlesex Diner on Route 1 and 130 in North Brunswick, where we would glower at the salt shakers and order coffee and Nuclear Fallout, otherwise known as blueberry cheesecake. This invariably cracked the waitresses up, who as waitress will, began repeating Nuclear Fallout when other customers ordered blueberry cheesecake ( I think the cops in North Brunswick still enjoy a slab of Fallout when they're relaxing on shift.
But Fallout comes later in the night, when all's been smoked and done. Dan, George and the Unmentionable are, at this very moment in some parallel dimension, hurtling full-tilt up Canal Road in Griggstown. Griggstown is a little burg about five miles north of Princeton, and about five miles west of Kendall Park, where these three freaks hail from.
Canal Road is very picturesque, as it parallels the Delaware and Raritan Canal, a real old-timey barge canal that survived the railroads to become a water conduit for Central New Jersey and a vertical state park, too. I never understood that, vertical park ( I mean, it's a canal, it can't be vertical ... all the water would fall out. Actually, it's pretty damn long and flat, if you ask me ...
So Dan, George and the Unmentionable are hurtling down Canal Rd., heading north. If by some bizarre happenstance you actually know this area, they're passing right by the Causeway when ... oooh, bummer ... they hurtle by a Franklin Township cop. This of course being the absolutely worst circumstance they can imagine, Dan presses the green pedal and they hurtle some more, but not before the Franklin cruiser sets out after them.
Hurtle, hurtle. Past Bunker Hill Rd. Past the Rude Quail Farm. (What, you think I make this shit up? It's George Rude's Quail Farm, and what's more, he is.). Up ahead ( the Twi-, no, no, it's Butler Rd. The cop is closing. Hard right into Butler. Floor it.
Now, Butler Rd. is a very good road on which to try and elude a police officer driving a 1978 Ford LTD if you happen to be driving a 1974 VW Love Bug. It's an unreconstructed rut, featuring "oil and stone" paving, in which the township casually dropped gravel here and there on the putative road surface, then sprinkles it lightly with waste oil. This is the same paving technique used in Times Beach, Mo. ( it's just a bare step above actual dirt. Hard for a big car to boogie fast upon ...
Butler Rd. also has a couple of other distinguishing characteristics, in that it starts out with a long straight, which climbs a small ridge and then drops down into another shorter straight, then into a hard left, a narrow bridge, then a hard right and up into another field altogether. It ends at South Middlebush Rd., at which one can make a very quick decision to hustle left or right ( either of which choice allows further branching options in short order. In other words, if our zeroes can just keep their distance from Mr. Policeman, they have every reasonable chance of losing him. In fact, as they turn up Butler, Mr. Policeman hasn't actually been able to see them for a bit of a while ... he's an eighth of a mile back, and closing, but Canal Rd. has it's own set of twisties leading up to Butler.
Up Butler. Damn. The cop guessed right and made the turn too. Hurtle, hurtle, hurtle. Understand that these three bozos are alternately pissing themselves with hysterical laughter and hysterical fear. They're going to jail, but this is better than Pong, I tell ya ...
Up ridge. Down other side .. WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?
Actually, it's a little boy about six years old. He's walking along the side of the road, very Norman Rockwell, barefoot boy with cheeks of .. wait, make that bare-ASSED boy .. the little tyke is starkers. It's about 6 am (3:15 am here nowóI might manage to stretch this out yet) and here is this, maybe seven year old kid, walking down the street, NAKED, with his Keds up over his shoulders.
FAR FUCKING OUT! Floor it. We're outta here. The copónever seen again. We can only surmise that he too topped the rise, said, "WHAT THE FUCK!" and stopped to investigate. The dopers are home-free. Nuclear Fallout for everybody!
"Now," sez I. Remember the block-long set-up to this tale? I'm relaying this sorry tale IN AN OUTPATIENT ALCOHOL TREATMENT PROGRAM as AN EXAMPLE of how MY HIGHER POWER works IN MY LIFE. Well, except that I wasn't directly involved, but I thought it was a good example nevertheless. It fit my purposes.
'Now," sez I. "What are we to make of this? Was HP watching over my brother, George and the Unmentionable? NOT VERY LIKELY!"
"Of course," I continue, "There's the little boy. Why is he out walking on this rural road at the crack of dawn? Well, it's a nice summer morning, maybe he thinks he's going to go to the canal to swim ... it's not a dangerous area, really, he isn't likely to be kidnapped and forced to perform on an ABC sitcom or something ... in fact, I think we can assume that the HP didn't have his best interests at heart, because whatever he was up to, I doubt his plans included the cops anymore than did those of my brother and his pals."
"So," sez I. "Who are we left with? THE COP! It's clear to me that the HP put my stoned-out brother, George, the Unmentionable, the screaming orange beetle hurtling, hurtling hurtling down Canal Rd., the cop, and the nekkid boy, all in the same place, so that the cop, poor working slob that he is, would have the opportunity to perform a useful civic deed in the form of helping this benighted child to return home and AT LEAST PUT A SHIRT ON, rather than spend the rest of that lovely day processing the dopers, who would get hardly a smack on the wrists anyway (this, kids, was the 1970s, when if caught smoking a joint on the NYC subway you'd get a ticket for smoking on the subwayóand that's all ... ).
Responds the no-so-nice therapist, "I think you have a problem with your Higher Power."
"Actually, I have a problem with you," I replied.
(Proofed, edited and deemed done: 4 am. I'm outta here).
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It is, now, 1:41 am EDT, July 27, 1996, somewhere (here, actually) in Bridgewater, NJ. I've been having a very odd time of it lately ( I'm on my way to yet another new job with the Cosmodemonic Telephone and Telegraph Co.; as a final act in my prior position, I've managed to piss off one over-important district manager (not my boss, some elses' boss) to her rather low maximum point of irritation. (Career tip, kids: If someone sends an idiotically formatted attachment to an email message to the entire business universe you inhabit, DO NOT cc: the same universe with your terse yet pithy analysis of what's wrong with this picture, even if it is the fifth time she's sent the same stupid message. Even if you have sent discrete yet pointed comments to the offender directly twice in the recent past. Oh, it's a long and stupid story ... ). Since I haven't officially even worked for her organization since July 12, there ain't shit she can do about me, but I hate starting things when there's so little reason for it.