Drunken Sunlight

The idea comes to me whilst watching TV. Have you ever sat in front of the TV staring to no effect? You stare right through it. You see it, you hear it, but you take none of it on board, you’re detached and nothing sinks in. I’m not really watching the show about makeovers. Women, who their husbands say look like men, are being dressed up to look sexy. All I can do is stare and forget what I see five minutes after having seen it. It’s self-induced ADHD, a desired ability to retain nothing. It’s early afternoon and in the TV break I grab myself a drink, a large Jack and Coke. And out of nowhere it seems like a good idea to get drunk. It feels like an impulsive but premeditated idea, not a casual drink leading to one drink too many. It feels more like the impulse hits and then it’s like a plan that downloads to my brain in seconds. The plan is as simple as: Bolt down drinks and leave the planet, a desire, born of inertia and in the spirit of experimentation, to get utterly fucked up.

Afternoon drunkenness feels like you’ve turned the world upside down. I always associate drunkenness with night life. Most find it hard to know what to do if it doesn’t involve going out and to bars and clubs. People need context. Of late, context is something I don’t have. I watch some TV. I put a washing load on. I sit in front of the washing machine for a while and watch it toss and turn the clothes over. In a moment of what might be self-awareness, I spit out a laugh.

I knocked back the first Jack and Coke, opting for gulping rather than sipping. I pulled the appropriate face after doing so. I poured another, gulped that, felt the burn and shuddered, only a little. I sipped at the bottle. I sipped a lot and then gulped at it. One gulp, a sip and another gulp. It was hard work. It took me the remainder of the bottle, that’s a quarter bottle of Jack, before I began to notice how altered things were becoming. Once you’ve drained a bottle of Jack Daniels in an impulsive moment, you may as well go as far as you can.

I had to go to my local store to buy more to drink, and quick. I was afraid that if this could be started by a dumb impulse then it could be stopped by an even dumber one.  The shop guy grunts at me as I enter the shop. I grunt back. We get along as well as ever. I look at the bottles on the shelf behind the counter. Vodka, it smells like glue, goes down easily when you mix it. Vodka and Coke will do nicely. I pick up a couple of alco-pops too. I’m not proud, I just want to be drunk. I look at what I’m about to buy, I put it all on the counter. It’s the middle of the afternoon and although I know that it means nothing to the shop guy, it means something to me. I rush back to my place, still worried that if I don’t start drinking soon then I’ll see my inhibitions return and the whole idea go out the window due to an attack of rationality. I had to drink enough to ensure that I could fall off the slippery edge of rational thought. If you can get this started it keeps itself going. It’s totally and magically self-perpetuating. Eager to get where I want to be I start drinking even before I get home, I glug back an entire alco-pop. It’s easy. Kids could do it.

Ten minutes later I’m sitting, poised to write, at my desk, but I’m staring off towards the muted television, everything is silent. Daytime TV without the sound seems to be able to grab my attention but only until my head starts to fill with thoughts again. Ten minutes, another alco-pop and a big shot of vodka later, the room is slowly starting to spin, and I don’t care what I’m thinking. You can’t care about what you’re thinking when you’re like this. I sit down at the computer and bring up a blank word document. I type away and write down my thoughts, all the ones that I feel nothing but removed from. They come thick and fast and my head begins to whir, and I have to drink more. I want to be ever more numb. I get up, mix vodka and coke and slouch in an armchair. I think I meant to sit back down at the computer, but my brain got it wrong, made the wrong choice and the alcohol influenced half of me doesn’t seem to care what I do now. Looking at the computer, it seems a shame to not document all that goes on in a drunken head. But there’s a difficult fulcrum to balance on. All intentions, good and bad, get drowned, and all that matters is this feeling. It’s my ticket to leaving everything behind.

Following weird impulses, I get up out of the armchair to turn the stereo on and crank the volume as loud as I can. Everything feels turned up to eleven if you mix booze and music. Then I sit down in front of the computer. I think I meant to sit on the floor this time, but I really don’t know what I’m doing. I look at the computer, and I follow the urge to write, the urge being pushed forward by my sober thoughts. I laugh at what I’m doing, what I’m writing. I don’t know if it’s that funny. I spend a lot of time wandering around the apartment, going from mixing drinks, to staring out the window, to tapping at the keyboard. I can’t stand still though. I think they put something in the vodka that makes you want to go out partying. I feel hyper in the head. I play with the idea of going out but I realise that it’s too early to be going anywhere and there’s nowhere I want to go anyway. I want to do nothing with my hyper feelings. I want to be hyper and keep it all in. I want to be hyper and motionless. This is probably how people spontaneously combust. I could go anywhere, do anything, but all night I never make it past the local booze store.

After a lot more vodka, sitting and staring at the computer screen becomes freaked beyond belief but I can handle that. The screen is a blur, but I keep typing anyway, taking time to stare at the words, to see that they make some sort of grammatical sense. It took me a short while to work out that the red squiggles appearing on my screen were denoting spelling mistakes. It took me even longer to work out how I’d misspelled that many words. Repairing the broken sentences was a compulsive mission. I tried to call on all my sober faculties to correct those mistakes, but it really began to hurt. It really hurt to concentrate, to cling to a still point in a whirring head. Only after I had eradicated every red squiggle did I try to let go of any sober thoughts. I wanted to be through with being sane and rational. I slumped back in my chair again. My limbs were nothing but numb.

I considered that the world must be pretty fucked for me to be doing this. In a sober state I would know that for sure but in all drunkenness I’ve lost track of what’s so fucked and why. I’ve even lost sight of why I started to get drunk, really very drunk, in the middle of the afternoon. Fuck it, I manage to lose sight of everything. I stop to think what the natural conclusion to all this could be. Does this go anywhere? Is that a pertinent question? I get up, as though I could go anywhere. I go to the bathroom and whilst in there, as I splash water over my face, I stop in front of the mirror. I stare at me and think of how, when I’m drunk, I don’t even look like me. I look scary to me. It isn’t me in the mirror. That’s not me anymore. I rest my head on the mirror and laugh a little and then I keep laughing. I really laugh, maybe because the craziness in my head seems so funny. The thoughts, all of them seem to be drunken, are darting all over the place. I laugh until I start to choke. And I choke until I throw up. I make it to the toilet and with my face wrapped in porcelain I spew pure alcohol. Nothing smells quite like it. I know how horrible this feels but the feeling is entirely anaesthetized by being drunk. I rinse my mouth out after spewing and I feel refreshed for the whole procedure.

At this point I’m still far from done but I need to buy more alcohol as the Vodka is drying up. Buying more booze gives me something to do, a drunken purpose, but when I get to the shop, I feel the need to play sober. This is extremely fucking difficult. I don’t go to the usual place. I go to the second nearest shop five minutes further up the road. Something in me thinks that it would be bad to be seen in my local shop in this state and it must be obvious to the guy who served me before that I am in this state having drunk everything he sold me earlier. I’m not worried about not getting served, they really don’t have any strict policy on serving wasted customers. It just seems best to move on to another store, somewhere where I can play sober for five minutes and behave like a sane member of the sober society until it becomes obvious to these new people in this different store that I’m wasted to the point that I can’t count my money that I want to pay for the drinks with.

This other shop is a little bigger and I feel that I can hide more easily from people. I begin to feel paranoid about everything and I don’t want to have to talk or interact or deal in any way. I pick up a packet of Doritos and carry them around the shop for a while until the idea of buying them feels too dumb to go through with. I drop them in entirely the wrong place. I drop them on the marshmallow shelf and I ponder why there are countless packets of marshmallows in this shop. I stare at the marshmallows. I don’t know why. I hate myself for not buying marshmallows or Doritos and I’m now absolutely lost in the whirlwind of being drunk. Doing the mundane whilst drunk is unbelievable. Nothing falls into place. Dimensions are screwy. Physics now seems incomprehensible. I look at almost every bottle on the shelves, but I can’t work out what I want. As I approach the counter with beer and Southern Comfort I take a deep breath, try to concentrate on the mundane task of paying. In my drunk state I wonder if there is one part of my brain, a little part of me that is still cogently sane. I search my head and try to concentrate and be purely in that part of my head but I slowly watch it get infected and become as strange as the rest of me. I pay and then leave.

I open a beer during the walk home. I walk so slowly. I’m not in. There’s no-one’s home. I’m barely aware of anything. I get only halfway through the beer and realise that I don’t like it. I spill half the contents on the ground and then let the can slip from my grasp. Unable to complete a simple task like drinking a beer frightens me. I stop at the door to my building, and I don’t want to move. I’m caught up in my thoughts until it feels unnatural to be rooted to one spot, to be unmoving for no good reason.

Inside the lobby, I reach the stairs, but I can’t bound up like I usually do. I stop and I sit on the steps. It must be the first time in years that I’ve stopped for any considerable time in the lobby. I know that whilst I’m drunk I can stare at something that would normally trigger an emotional response, and I’ll feel nothing. I can see those emotional ties but they don’t seem to quite be there. It’s like you can see the pain but not feel it. There’s a connection missing. I see people and moments and memories that I have been on the run from for years. Maybe I can’t feel a thing or maybe I never remember feeling a thing. I sit on the steps and I remember and I marvel at the sunlight. Drunken sunlight is new to me. It’s some time in the afternoon and I’m as drunk as I can be. I can’t move. I reach into my pocket and produce a pen. Whatever it is that I think to write is lost. Writing on my hand is the last thing I remember before passing out. Not until much later in the afternoon of the next day will I notice the black smudged and unreadable ink, a note that is now lost forever.

Where next?

→ If you want to see how the world decides who reads and who doesn’t, Project Dudes Don’t Do Fiction — An Introduction

→ If you want to see what happens when meaning, consequence and feeling start to disappear, Bicycle versus Automobile

→ If you want to step back into a world where story is still forming, All the things I am supposed to want circa 1991

If the writing resonates, stay with it.