THE DRUNK AIN’T PRETTY

He’s peeing blood and his teeth are yellow/brown. Some of them are missing. He’s fallen down recently, he doesn’t recall when, and through his thin, curly gray hair, a nasty scabbed over gash shows. He tells you he shit his pants a few days back and that the fire department came once to fish him out of a snow bank where he was waiting to die. People have had to bring him home from the bar from time to time because he’s so drunk he can’t walk or drive home. When he’s not laughing, he’s crying. He transitions from tears to laughter rapidly.

He won’t go into detox where people trained to recognize seizures and impending heart attacks can watch him because, “It’s dirty down there. Sheets full of blood, piss, shit and I don’t know what. No. No. I won’t go down there.” He takes your hand and squeezes it, fond of you, loving you, accepting your love because that’s all he thinks he has in the world. He doesn’t know all the love out there for the taking because he doesn’t feel he’s worth it, that he’s earned it.

In the drunk’s world, all love is earned or achieved. You gotta earn it. No one loves you for nothing. You get what you pay for and nothing more nor less. It’s a dog eat dog world out there, and he’s failed somehow miserably to measure up, and he feels like a school boy who long ago missed school one day when the teacher gave out the secret to life. He keeps failing the tests of life. He’s been lost ever since, all his life long in fact. Can’t you see that, damn it!

Out there, beyond the drunk, someplace, he fear’s there really is a secret to life, and now he’s too old to get it, to ever escape the constant sense of failure and doom he feels. The pain is unbearable, and no one has ever hurt like he hurts. So why don’t you just shut the fuck up and quit trying to help him? Helping him, caring about what happens to him, only makes him feel even more shamed, miserable and futile. He’d rather die, but he doesn’t have the courage even for that. He’d make a mess of that too. So just leave him alone, let him die slowly, one drink at a time. It ain’t pretty, and I don’t know many who can make there way out of that hole, even if they wanted to.


A KYRS RADIO SHOW POR MOIS?

Recently I listened to a talk by Lupito Flores who was instrumental in getting KYRS, our local, low power radio station, up and running. Spokane is the biggest city with a low power station anywhere in the U.S. I went so far as to imagine and speak to Flores about a radio show called, “Recovery”. I imagined taking my AA program and its twelve steps and enlarging their recovery goals to take in all kinds of recovery, recovery from religions and from faulty thinking of all kinds. I imagined pushing for Jung’s “individuation” as an enlightened goal for all. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized what a tremendous ego it takes to imagine that I could come up with a one size fits all solution to human biological engineering.

I also listened to religious shows, self-help gurus and infomercials with a new ear and knew that I would be little more than one more voice selling in the wilderness, a bazaar hawker promoting his intellectual wares to a naive public. Of course I have an answer for myself. It works fine for me for the most part, but will it work for others? I’d just end up fighting with the intellectual hawkers in the booths next to mine. What good would that do?

Actually, I believe in a very simple formula. I believe each of us must find a safe enough mental reality in which each of us would be so comfortable, so comfortable in our individual myths, that we don’t need to hawk it to other people in order to pick up numbers of believers to bolster our own weakly held mythologies. That’s hard to do, and I’m a long way from achieving my own goal. In fact, I’ll probably disappear from the face of the earth with little progress toward my goal, but for the most part I’m okay with my current condition.

A radio show could be conceived of which just encourages people sharing but not arguing over their belief stories. A discussion in which each speaker shares their own thoughts and perhaps uses other’s thoughts to spring from to their own thoughts, a mutually encouraging series of enlightened sharing (call in?). However, to show you one of my fears, I imagined immediately that such a show would be hijacked by fundamentalist callers. That’s right and I couldn‘t sit still and let them share their own feelings about their paths because I’m afraid of proselytizers who want to make their beliefs my beliefs and who are not happy just sitting in their own visions peacefully.

Eventually, I heard myself say to me in my imagination, “I have nothing to offer the world that it doesn’t already know if it would be but honest with itself.”

[PS: However, in finally typing this up, I did see that if I made “individuation” as a human goal, religious people who believe in a great god who directs their every action would not qualify as individuated persons. Therefore, my goal could be accommodated under the rubric of recovery while discouraging fundamentalists from dominating the radio conversation.]


A FRIGHTENING THOUGHT FROM FLORES’S TALK

Rupert Murdock’s media empire reaches 80% of the people in the world now, and he doesn’t in the least believe in economic and political justice for anyone other than himself and his rich buddies. He’s a dark international force for the freedom of the powerful to dominate the existence of the poor.
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“Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.” —Rex Stout