2pm & hanging for a drink

 

2pm & hanging for a drink

 

The thing is I don’t enjoy drinking that much, it’s the effect I like – as a way of making time pass with less friction, less pain, less loneliness. In short, pleasure. Because I don’t want a couple of drinks, I want to obliterate my mind. As Beefheart put it “God, fuck my mind for good!” Being is hard work & life has little pleasure when not tricked up by booze. As Georgie Best put it “I tried not drinking. The most boring 20 minutes of my life!” Because life is a joke. Yesterday I watched a video about Lagos, Nigeria. It focused on how hard people work over there, what with a corrupt political class, the argument is that you either sink or swim on your own. Quite frankly I’m with Camus on the absurdity of life & the importance of being a rebel. To resist the status quo. To seek out freedom. For however much these people earn, mentally, they are enslaved. I see the irony of course. Because here I am working at something. I do it, however, not for profit but because it brings me some relief from despair & ennui. We are afterall a humanity of drug addicts, whether legal or not. Dopamine, endorphins etc. There’s no getting away from it. All is chemistry. The brain needs to be tricked for the face of reality is too painful to bear. & so, if I was born in Nigeria I hope I would just smoke spliff until I died. Because, regardless of how much I‘d earn or indeed how long the duration of my life it doesn’t escape the question of whether life is worth living or not. Which brings me again to the conclusion that life is only worth living with company & drugs. Otherwise it’s the Sisyphean climb for life.

Now Nietzsche’s solution to this was to conjure up the myth of the eternal return, that one repeats the same life ad infinitum. His conclusion was that if one is destined to keeping living the same life, then one should try one’s upmost. But it could just as easily follow that why should someone try at all? Maybe Yoda’s right that there is not try, do or do not. But he had magic & special effects on his side & we know that magic people generally rely on drugs. The probable truth of the Buddha is that he had times of enlightenment (like an orgasm) but just as much of the time he scraped around in the dark, like we all do. Meditation’s not a hell of a lot different to drugs. It’s still about tricking the brain. & is taking me no further from the bottle shop, or going to my toilet bag & popping more valium.

So in short, be thankful when you’re happy, but don’t think it’s because you’ve worked out a truth. In fact it’s far more likely that if you work out a truth that it will lead to sorrow.

I decided to have a nap, rather than philosophize or have a drink. It was peaceful, but is that really all I want from life? No I think Samuel Johnson was right “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” Must be whiskey time!

 

 

Published & Copyright Malachi Doyle 2024.