Shakin' the Shakes

Day After
I drank Harp ale laced with a couple of shots of Jameson's 12-year-old whiskey and then tripped back downtown to have my dinner at my favorite hangout, my neighborhood Irish pub, and then home for bed.

I wasn't drunk. I woke up this morning depressed. Yep, I must'a been drunk.

I'm finishing up reading Pursued by Furies, this amazing biography of Malcolm Lowry of Under the Volcano fame and bad fortune. Under the Volcano was so good poor old F-ed up Malc couldn't overcome it. He'd written Aquamarine as a young man after being sent to sea by his cotton broker father. Aquamarine was a squirrelly book, a young man's adulation of the sea being a form of encaged freedom--being on a ship sailing from England to the Pacific and back. The book was well-written but stained with Malc's admitted plagiarisms, borrowing huge chunks of the work of a Norwegian writer, Grieg, and the weirdo American Conrad Aiken's Blue Voyage, as well as something he lifted from Herald Tribune critic Burton Rascoe, this one haunting Malc for the rest of his life after Rascoe publically called Malc a plagiarist in his review of Ultramarine. Malc saw nothing wrong with borrowing chunks of other writers's writing saying that these writers's words were needed to lead into his own premises and that he had no problem admitting to "plagiarism," which in his writer's way of thinking wasn't plagiarism at all. Rascoe didn't see it that way.

Ultramarine didn't sell that well but it did introduce Malcolm Lowry as a potential at-least interesting writer and probably great writer, which he later proved true with the absolutely wonder-of-the-world writer it took to complete Under the Volcano, a book that I still read with much fierce excitement having lived in Mexico and having been to the same area where most of the action took place, probably having looked down into that same baranca, the abyss into which we all will be flung one day and into which poor ole Malc is fixing to be tossed in this massive biography of him by Gordon Bowker. Biographers like Bowker amaze me. Who the hell knows if the story they are spinning is true or not? Bowker tells Malcolm's story so fully it's as though he was a fly on all the walls that surrounded old Malc wherever he went.

Lowry was happiest when he lived in a squatter's shack on an island called Dollarton, just outside Vancouver, British Columbia. Bowker unfurls gaggle after gaggle of furies that were constantly dancing about Malc's head, the baddest one his dependency on alcohol--alcohol was Malcolm Lowry's true mother and the receiver of his true adoration--you know, like alcohol was his Ave Maria and perhaps he, like Jesus, was born of a virgin birth in a purity he couldn't live up to being plagued as he was by so many other furies, like insecurity, sexual confusion, paranoias having to do with syphilis and also having to do with impotency and homosexuality.

I haven't finished the book yet. Malc had already died in the first paragraph of this 600-page colossal, so I know he's dead already, but oh Jesus, you so want Malc to die anyway by this time in the book even though you know he's already dead.

I, however, do not know how his fury wife Marjorie died so I anxiously await the answer to that question.

That's what I did today trying to dampen the effects of alcohol on me after my hanging Friday night with 3 musician friends in the delightful working-class Irish bar far up the West Side from me here down in Manhattan's belly--which is a good book title and sometimes I have the urge to write at another book. I've written 10 books in my life; two of them were published; the last book I wrote I wrote during my year of hell living with who I called "the woman in my life." That's the novel I'm transferring from the laptop I wrote it on to the laptop I'm using now. [I can't tell y'all how much I dig these Toshiba laptops. This is my third one and it's the best so far. It's an old one, from 2004, a Tecra 8000 operating on XP Pro, but it looks and acts like new--I mean it's in perfect condition and what a joy to type on. I mean my fingers literally fly like raptors over these keys as if they were tasty rabbits and grabbing each one and eating it gives me such strength; I mean I'm killing a thousand rabbits a session writing the way I write on this laptop.]

So I wasn't drunk last night and remember being awake and aware coming downtown on the 1 train, getting off at Penn Station, walking up 33rd to Sixth, looking right down Sixth and deciding to go to my favorite place of cuisine worship and have a big dinner. I spent most of my time at the pub ogling one of the waitresses there who I've known now for right at ten years and she is becoming one of the most beautiful women I've encountered in that number of years and I'm beginning to nozzle tons of pheromones at her by staring lustfully at her as she works. I'm not worried; Irish girls who are pretty love to flirt and love being called pretty--but Irish men tell me...well, I won't disrespect Irish women by believing anything an Irishman says.

But when I woke up this morning, again I was a little depressed--from the damn Jameson's, I surmised; beer doesn't bother me, but whiskey--ohhh, that's another story--I get depressed and being depressed is what ruined poor ole Malcolm Lowry and what has ruined many a friend of mine, including my own dear nephew who blew his head off out in California back in December. I can't bear depression--never have and keep vowing I never will. Every time I've met depression I didn't like it.

Problem is, there's nothing more embracing and loving as a shot of 12-year-old Jameson's Irish whiskey tossed down quick after you come into an Irish pub after walking 7 blocks in windy-ass bitter cold, the tip of your nose and your ears feeling as though they are surely frostbitten. And then, of course, once that first shot has warmed the cockles of yere heart, another one is just right for sparkin' up the old attitudes and generating a serious jolly good time with good ole-good ole friends, friends who love to just one up each other with tales from their music careers. That one night of good cheer is worth this one day of hangover depression, so there, I've solved that problem.

Never let depression get the best of you. As long as you have the privilege of living what we call life, existing for a time on this wonderful earth, being depressed is being dead while alive. As Emerson said, wake up and realize your own history, your own faith, your own self as the source of God, that human energy to survive that dwells in our Holy Temples, what I call the solar plexus or what Freud would call our instincts. Never worry, never fear, and never be depressed. I hate being around depressed people. Ohhhhhhhhh, out damn spot with them.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

DUMBOCRATS FALL AGAIN IN SENATE--WAR PROFITS GLEANERS WIN--NO DEBATE ON GEORGIE PORGIE'S CLEVER SURGE WAY OF GETTING OUT OF IRAQ; SENDING 20,000 MORE STUPID YOUNG'UNS TO POSSIBLE DOOM--AND ALL BECAUSE OF OUR PHONY PRESIDENT BEING SCARED TO f-ING DEATH ON SEPTEMBER 11TH OF THAT FATEFUL DAY WHEN THIS COUNTRY WAS ATTACKED AND THIS PHONY PRESIDENT WAS READING MY PET GOAT TO A BUNCH OF FLORIDA GRADESCHOOLERS WHEN THE FIRST BUILDING WAS HIT AND STILL READING THAT STUPID BOOK WHEN THE SECOND BUILDING WAS HIT AND THEN HE RAN LIKE A SCARED RABBIT NOT TO WASHINGTON BUT OUT TO THE SAFETY OF THE STRATEGIC AIR COMMAND BASE IN NEBRASKA.

THE ONLY WAY TO GET RID OF THIS PHONY PRESIDENT IS TO IMPEACH HIM. HIS POSSE IS BIGGER THAN WE THE PEOPLE'S; PLUS, THIS SNOBBISH LITTLE PHONY COWBOY SPOILED BRAT RICH SON OF A WIMP FATHER AND A BALLS-IN-THE-FAMILY MOTHER HAS THE MILITARY, THE CIA, THE FBI, THE DEA, THE NATIONAL GUARD, THE BORDER PATROL, BLACKWATER, THE SECRET SERVICE, ALL LOCAL POLICE AND FIREMEN, AND ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD ON HIS SIDE. THIS LITTLE SON OF A BEE COULD DECLARE HIMSELF CHANCELLOR ANY DAY NOW. DID YOU EVER ASK YOURSELF WHY IRAQ, IF IT'S A DEMOCRACY BASED ON OUR DEMOCRATIC IDEAS, HAS A PARLIAMENTARIAN GOVERNMENT AND NOT A BICAMERAL ONE LIKE WE HAVE? ALSO WHY OUR FIRST REP IN IRAQ, A JOKER NAMED BREMMER, WAS CALLED THE "VICEROY" OF IRAQ? INTERESTING, DON'T YA THINK?