ALCOHOLISM AND APOLOGIES

I have to admit, I don’t really get addiction. Sometimes I drink enough that it prompts half-worried conversations with friends and family, but I am not, in a classical sense, an alcoholic. In a romantic sense, maybe, as in sometimes I drink so much so often that it makes for a bad optics, raises questions about the long term-health of my body or of deeply suppressed psychological trauma (but seriously I’m okay). But in a classical sense, in which one gives alcohol free-reign to negatively affect one’s life, I’ve got nothing to worry about. Because I know addicts.

One, a best friend-turned-girlfriend-turned ex-turned-friend forever, called me months ago from rehab. She warned ahead that she was at the stage to tell me that she’s sorry. I did not answer that call or the next one. I finally spoke with her today from the comfortable aesthetic distance of facebook chat, and after some strained small-talk, she let on that she was working up an apology.

“An apology for what?”

 “Whatever fckd off things I might have said to you during belligerent rants,” she said. “Sorry  =. /”

“Wait, so you’re apologizing for things you may have said without knowing what they are?”

“*that’s the joy of black outs,” she said.

I really wish she hadn’t said that, about the blackouts. It seem to come from a narrative that, due greatly to the influence of drugs and alcohol, she has been a total bitch all these years. How could she ask me to accept an apology that comes out of a place like that? I don’t see her that way. I would not have spent so much time and love on her if I saw her that way. Sure, she was mean sometimes, but she was also often right. And let’s be honest with ourselves: booze or no booze, sometimes friends are mean. Sometimes we’re petty and selfish and insecure and cruel and we hate and frighten one another. Whenever we are still friends after the dust settles, it is because there is so much more to us than all of that.

And besides, that time she pulled a knife on me for calling her the wrong girl’s name in bed, homegirl was stone cold sober.

As far as I can tell without prying, the final-straw stages of her alcoholism were a lot darker than the blissful/tragic city nights that make up my recollections of her. What it comes down to, is that I don’t want our entire (mostly inebriated) history delegitimized just because she eventually spiraled. Good and bad, those times were significant and real.

And sure, Sara says her apology is more about her and her healing so I should just accept it, or whatever—but isn’t that just the kind of selfish expectation people should apologize for?

FOLLOWING MYSELF AROUND FOR A DAY: A DIARY

I saw you in my dreams this morning. I had woken up at 7:30 to make sure Sara made it off to work on time, but by 8:20 she had momentum of her own and I was losing a battle with the incredible gravity my own bed has after a weekend away. I closed my eyes to gather my thoughts. When next they opened, I found myself in seen-and-done-it-all Columbia walking through campus on a warm, cloudy day. You called out to me from a across the mall. You looked the part, too, dressed down in sweat pants and in glasses with your hair pulled back. When you hugged me, you were 20 again. I slurred, “Is this reality? I can’t tell anymore.” You promised me that it was and, because you were you, I believed it.

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In the pretty 10:00 light, which enters our apartment through the trees and shimmers with their leaves on the living room floor, am I moved to reflect on my weekend in my college town. What more is there to say about Columbia that hasn’t been said already? Some good conversations, some mean gossip, some former lovers, some future ones, some cool people, and more with egos bigger than their contributions to society. But more than anything, my Columbia is about the limitless, undying love affair we have with our friends. As much as I love the big parties, my favorite part usually comes at the end, after Julia has kicked out everyone who doesn't know her last name and the rest of the crowd falls away when the beer runs low. Then it’s just the few of us in the living room laying all over and around one another, bleary-eyed and high and sensitive.

And yet, at breakfast there is a nagging sense of unbelonging that makes my protestations a bit briefer each time Sara is ready to leave. The streets don’t quite look the same. My social world has reorganized itself along new axes, sometimes newcomers I’ve never heard of who view me suspiciously as I return the favor. There is a part of me that feels like that that town is cursed with over, that St. Louis is blessed with happening. I know how fucking stupid that sounds.

WHY "WHAT DO YOU DO?" IS THE LAMEST QUESTION ON EARTH RIGHT NOW.

So what do you do? I do pretend to enjoy it when I'm asked this and I usually answer that I am a writer. When they press further (because no one has anything interesting to talk about—more on that in a future post), I usually give a broad description of the kind of copywriting I usually do. Yes, I write my own stuff, to answer their next question. They think it's cool probably because it sounds enough like work but without bitchy bosses or inflexible hours. Sometimes, a more "established" acquaintance will say, "at least you're not a waiter, right?" Whatever. I always knew it would be this way. Still, the ubiquity of the question demonstrates what occurs when a younger generation steps up into its fathers' society and, I think, underscores the need for us to develop healthier ways of looking at ourselves and others.

When I was in high school, "what do you do for fun?" was the default, small-talk opener amongst peers. In college, "what's your major?" or "what do you want to be?" took its place. Already, a shift was underway from seeing one another as people with rich inner lives to units of economic production. And yet each of these questions, trite and cliché, at least aimed at uncovering some sort of sympathetic truth. To ask them is to inquire into the nature of a human being. Since college, "what do you do?" is the unsurprising victor of the small-talk wars. I am told it will remain this way for the rest of my life.

Of course, this was not the first thing on my mind when I tied to read Chrisopher Hudspeth's "19 Tips of Females in 2012" (Note: introducing it as I have is in no way an attempt to legitimize this slipshoddery as worthwhile reading. It is not. I could write a rage-filled book with no punctuation about what's wrong with masquerading this glorified anthology of vaguely misogynistic tweets as an "article."). My first attempt to read this stalled at tip #4:

"Just because a dude has a Nikon camera and is decent at Photoshop does not make him a photographer. And more importantly, posing for him doesn’t make you a model."

The question this leads us to is an obvious one: what does make him a photographer? There are a number of legitimating criteria—consider things like taking photography "seriously," actively engaging in its history and craft, or regarding it as "the dream"—that become increasingly abstract by our mid-twenties, when, basically proficient at everything that interests us, the obstacles between "the hobby" and "the real" never feels greater than one evening of single-minded devotion.

More often, rather than wade into the quagmire of serious philosophical thinking, people employ the single expedient of commoditization: to wit, you are a photographer when someone pays you for photographs.

Anyone who has ever seriously attempted to make art has bumped up against this kind of resistance at one time or another. Even Paul Varjak is asked of the infallibly loveable Holly Golightly of 1961's Breakfast at Tiffany's, "Are you a real writer? I mean, does anybody buy what you write?" That Varjak is a prostitute is, to my eyes, beside the point. To society, to the Empire, it is the entire point. It is obvious what that makes Miss. Golightly.

It is obvious, also, what this makes the thousands (millions?) of aspiring artists and activists derided constantly for their perceived unwillingness to get "a job" while trying to make it. But under the conditions of the society they've inherited, some reluctance is entirely appropriate. For better and worse, the upbringing of a young intellectual builds, slowly and meticulously, her identity. At a time when she owns very little besides debt, it is the only thing that belongs to her and the thread that ties together her every experience. In a culture where she is defined as a person by the task for which she is mostly highly paid, we ask her to compromise her identity for minimum wage at McDonald's? We ask her to define herself as a fast food fry cook so that the next guy she meets at a party who asks her what she does before he asks her name will immediately identify her as low class and lacking in guile? It is preposterous and especially cruel.

And I know that the world can be cruel at times. I know that the economy is an unsympathetic reality to which we have all, more or less, agreed. I am not suggesting that naïve petulance is acceptable or that artists starve ("Hunger actually makes it really hard to concentrate." - Science). I just believe that if we must continue to extol the virtues of the "American work ethic," let's stop making our jobs the only thing we need to know about one another. Then maybe the next Picasso will bag your fucking groceries.

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