Old Paperbacks

I bought The Heart is a Lonely Hunter when I was a teenager fumbling through a secondhand bookshop.  It was probably midwinter and I was probably using money I didn't really have before I would scurry back to my flat and read and drink and smoke rolled cigarettes.  There is something about the title that is enough - I never really finished the book - but I can say I have picked it up many times and read parts of it, or it appears on my bedside table at times.

“Next to music beer was best.”

Carson McCullers is the classic alcoholic writer.  Dying at 50.  An androgynous name.  Titles like The Ballard of the Sad Cafe.  Stories about 'the south' and 'mutes' and 'blacks' and 'loneliness'.

“I want - I want - I want - was all that she could think about - 

but just what this real want was she did not know.”

I would sit and read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter as if it would reveal something to me.  But nothing happened.  What I needed was to get out and travel and live and fall in love and get lost and somehow find myself.  Instead of sitting on a old mattress reading a musty yellow paperback.  Smoking and drinking and nursing my depression.

"The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone."

Drinking was a real prop in those lonely days - a reason to go somewhere, to be somewhere and to motivate me to work.  Sad, really.  There should be something profound here, but all I can really share is that it was a way to spend the time and grow and experience towards my being sober.  As though everything that happened up to this point was all part of the journey of becoming sober.

And not wasting that experience equity - it is far too valuable and hard earned to be simply dismissed as time wasted getting wasted.  It is common to all addicts - thrashing against the addiction, stretching it, bending it, pulling away, tearing it up, embracing it - over the years we have all done all of these with our addictions. 

Now, let's hope with sustained vigilance I have arrived at some sort of steady truce, and silent understanding that drinking is an awesome ocean that needs respect.  And I am powerless and helpless in it. So I don't dare even dip my toe.  Just watch from the shore, and watch others surf knowing I can only sink.

"When a person knows and can't make the others understand,
what does he do?"

He is patient and shares his musings in a blog, that's what...