Excuses, Excuses . . .

 

The top 5 excuses the MFA graduate student makes to drink during the week:

5. You’re on vacation. Yes. We are on vacation a lot. If it isn’t summer, it’s winter, and if it isn’t winter, it’s spring break. All this time on your hands and there’s only so many hours in the day you can actually work. Besides, your job is to be creative, this is why you’re in grad school in the first place — someone said it would be alright. If you spend your morning being creative, and your afternoon at the bar, what’s to say you didn’t have a productive day?

4. You’re being creative! Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, John Berryman, Dylan Thomas, not to mention dozens of pop idols, musicians, actors and artists that all took something out of the bottle, or drugs. The natural state of a writer is intoxicated, although someone very smart once said that the hard work of being creative should be all the intoxication an artist needs. I don’t know who said it, maybe Shelley. It definitely wasn’t Coleridge.

3. You’ve earned it. Have you? It’s funny that right wing haters of the bleeding heart haven’t yet caught on that the single mom on welfare, or the illegal immigrant, is not the person they should prey on as the hypothetical moocher of American society. It’s the college grad student, especially the MFA student. While I really appreciate the shelter from a recessional storm, it is apparent that the work I do is not something that economically helps the country back onto solid financial footing. What are my excuses for that? Obviously, a misguided sense of self-worth, self-importance, and the belief that I’m more intelligent than many other people. That makes me strangely not so different from every financial asshole on Wall Street.

2. It’s just a resolution. We never keep them anyway. But here’s this blog: the resolution wasn’t only the changes to a drinking habit, there was this place to reflect about it. I haven’t given up on the resolution, because I haven’t given up on the blog. Thus, I cannot say I’ll shrug it off. The resolution is here to stay.

And the number 1 excuse an MFA student goes and gets 3 beers in the afternoon on a Monday:

1. Just one beer.

Just one beer. Just one. Mmmm? Maybe two. Or, if so-and-so makes it to the bar as well, three. This is the same by Tuesday, and today, Wednesday, it might be the same again.

The worst part about excuse #1 is that we know it’s a lie. #’s 5 and 2 are truths, and #’s 3 and 4 are fallacies. But #1 is a flat out fib, no way around it, and no use fooling yourself either. Because it isn’t the beer that makes me go to the bar in the afternoon — if it was the beer I could easily get a six pack and stay home with a movie. No, it’s the conversation — the company. What is it about the bar culture, especially (for me, at least) the dive bars full of smoke and veterans and wrinkled pool tables and toilet seats with no lids? That could be the subject of another posting.

I did not succeed this first week. Each excuse was a temptation and each of those temptations was a drink. There might be the dignity that today and Thursday will be sober, but that doesn’t change it. The semester begins next Wednesday, when #5 isn’t at all reasonable, but #3 gets exaggerated out of proportion. We’ll see what happens.

The Resolution

It’s time. The ball has dropped. The new year has been rung in, again. Now for a new start and therefore a resolution.

The idea: limit the amount of drinks had from Monday to Thursday to three total, most likely beer. The project: keep a public record of my progress as incentive. To some this might not be heroic and certainly not worth recording; to others, however, there is a possibility that, like me, you walk that line between grade A Bruce Banner citizenship, productive, handsome, never a parking ticket to your name; all the time fighting a Hulk inside that just wants a drink, and another, and another.

Not that I deplore the time spent, but I’ve always been wary of my drinking habit. Both my grandfathers were alcoholics and I have cousins and uncles who have suffered the consequences of indulging the habit. Worse, I’m an aspiring poet, so the romance of a binge has both attracted me and my friends who attend the University of Alabama’s MFA program, all writers, all with a keen sense of irony and justice when it comes to lifting a glass nightly.

I suppose a few things should be made clear: my intentions of this blog and a bit more about the habits that, with the help of this record, I hope to somewhat suppress.

1. 3 drinks between Monday and Thursday, most likely beer. Since less money will be spent I will be sampling the more expensive microbrews that are available, and recording my thoughts of the beers I taste on this blog. The hope is to make drinking a palatable experience, rather than habit.

2. I also hope to use this as a place that reflects on the nature and culture of alcohol and alcoholism. I don’t believe that this generation (the millennial’s, my generation), has a patent on heavy and cynical drinking: perhaps every person who has “walked the line” must imagine that his generation is a bunch of hedonists. But I want to postulate on the tendency, explore the human rationale for alcohol addiction. Also, what of the benefits alcohol has made to world culture?

3. There was a time when the afternoon beer did not occur to me. This was before college, and during and after college I have begun to sink into a state of daily intoxication. It is not a horror: I am 28, live with my fiancée and have a dog: every afternoon (around 3:30) I go to the local dive and have 2-6 drinks before walking home and cooking dinner, at about 6 o’ clock. This isn’t the binge drinking of the college student, or the wino with his lips around a bottle at 10 o’ clock in the morning. But, the fear is, could it be? What is that one awful event (a family member getting killed, my fiancée leaving me) that could shake the structure of my world so much the only bulwark is the drink?

A curiosity: how will I be affected by this challenge throughout the course of the year? Is it possible that I shall become a self-righteous stick-in-the-mud, like so many others who suppress and repress? Will the Bruce Banner give way to the Hulk? Especially, where do I go from here?