The End of the Line?

I’ve been wondering lately just how seriously diseased my liver – among other vital organs – might be from my something like seven years of hard, continuous drinking. Conventional medical wisdom says that if you drink a lot you will die; hence, drink a lot young and you will die not so old. However, I have plenty of examples of hard drinkers before me who lived well past my present age – decades more, in fact: W.C. Fields is the obvious example. There’s also William Faulkner, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Samuel Peckinpah…shit, I can’t think of anyone’s names right now! Perhaps my mind is really going…

Four years or so ago I was carrying on a drunken conversation with my (sober) wife and in the  middle of it I couldn’t think of the word “dad” or any of the many synonyms. That was scary. Imagine having to talk around “my dad”. I felt pre-infantile, as if a certain key part of my brain had ceased to be.

Ah! Just thought of another name: William Holden. Plus no doubt John Wayne was a big drinker. Plus the writer/director of “Withnail and I” – and as I write that last phrase, the name comes to me: Bruce Robinson. Ernest Hemingway. I’m not sure how long F. Scott Fitzgerald really lasted. He had a long career but one that started when he was only about twenty. For all I know he was only 45 when his body’s vincibility took over.

The thing about alcohol is that, at the same time it kills your organs it also deadens the sensation – the analgesic effect. So whereas this morning I could feel my liver and/or other organs unknown screaming in rebellion against years of abuse, since my return to the bottle this early afternoon I’ve barely felt a thing. I wonder if that’s how that shitty Welsh poet…Dylan Thomas…felt up until the day he keeled over at the White Horse. Probably so. He probably never saw a doctor, either. He most likely hated doctors like I do…true poets…ha ha ha