I have been actively forbidden from reading Hemingway at the current point in time.

Addict

"She wasn't drunk, Meredith decided. She just had the nature of an addict, and the whole calming, peaceful, restorative atmosphere of the salon had permeated her skin and made her high." -Silver Girl, by Elin Hilderbrand

"This author," I informed my husband in my most decisive of tones, "does not actually know what it is to be an alcoholic." 

"Oh?" he inquired. "What makes you say that?" 

"Mmh." I considered the passage that brought about my statement. "She doesn't describe drunkenness well, and she doesn't quite get...the need of it. This character isn't an alcoholic. She just gets drunk a lot." 

This may seem a ridiculously nuanced distinction to some. Others will understand precisely what I'm talking about. 

As I sit here, the rain outside is playing a lovely percussion against the rooftops, accompanying itself with tinny droplet-clanks upon the gutters. There aren't may passing cars at a quarter to three in the morning, but whenever one goes past it gives the temporary illusion of waves hitting the shore of an ocean somewhere in the distance. Pure heaven is the smell of rain against sidewalk; it drifts in through the open window on a damp breeze that is cool and fresh against my legs. The thunderstorm has already passed, and in its wake the rain has settled into a soft, steady, drenching downfall. All is peace after the rumbling violence of a storm.

I would kill for a drink. What a strange saying, that. "I would kill for thisandsuchathing." It's clearly meant to convey a certain level of desperation, a willingness to temporarily discard one's deepest moral structures in order to fulfill a momentary whim. It is a measure of extremity, one that we don't pause to analyze too heavily since the phrase has entered our casual, day-to-day vernacular. And yet, what an eerie thing to claim, that one would kill for any reason at all. The potential is always there, and yet we say it so easily, so thoughtlessly. 

Which is kind of beautiful, if you want to perceive it that way. Death is ever-present, violence is constantly in-potentia, and so we take the concept and make it safe, take its teeth out and declaw it and make it casual, commonplace, even funny. I would kill for a drink.

Of course, it becomes much less funny if it turns out to be true, if the person saying it really would kill for a sandwich or a cigarette or a bathroom break or a cup of coffee. In this particular case, I don't think the sudden solidifying of a hypothetical situation in which I am called upon to end the life of a given individual in order to earn myself a glass of reasonably good wine would end in my bringing about the actual death of said individual. It's far more likely that I will be calling the police to be letting them know that some madman has broken into my apartment and is offering me drinks in exchange for the assassination of my husband.  

The police tend to frown on those sorts of shenanigans.

But I will be the first to admit that I would be eyeballing that glass like it was rainfall in the desert. The very moment said madman is carted away, before the paperwork that inevitably follows a random incursion of this nature is brought back by the kind Officer Biggensworth (who is very confused by the whole situation, and suspects there to be some kind of sick sex thing going on), that glass of wine will be gone. It will likely be gone the very instant it is set down. Because even while having my husband's life threatened, even while having MY life threatened, at least a portion of my attention will always be centered upon the location of the glass and its contents. Somewhere underneath the terror and the fury and the helplessness, there will be a part of me that is annoyed not because of the insanity of the situation, but because in the confusion someone spilled a few drops. A small part, yes, but a part nonetheless, will mourn the waste.

Unlike Elin Hilderbrand, you see, I can tell you a thing or two about the nature of the addict.

An addictive personality is defined by Wikipedia as,

 "a particular set of personality traits that make an individual predisposed to addictions. People who are substance dependent are characterized by a physical or psychological dependency that negatively impacts the quality of life of the person. They are frequently connected with substance abuse, but people with addictive personalities are also highly at risk of becoming addicted to gambling, food, pornography, exercise, work, and even relationships (codependency). People engaged in addictive behavior tend to plan their lives around it."


Addictive personality disorder is not listed in the DSM-IV, a surprising thing in this day and age of clinical diagnoses and subsequent druggings-unto-death of anything from an inability to pay attention to an unwillingness to follow directions to the tendency to feel sad every once in awhile for no particularly good reason. If you want my admittedly cynical opinion on the matter, this is likely because you can't give an addict expensive drugs to take away his or her tendency to get addicted to things. Because they'll get addicted to them. There is no way for pharmaceutical companies to make money off of them; they are, therefore, disregarded by the part of the psychological community in charge of what does and what does not go into the DSM-IV.


(Disclaimer for those with a tendency to write nasty emails if I do not back up with fact every single point I make that might be insulting to anyone, anywhere: I may be incorrect in this assessment. My apologies to the psychological community in general if this turns out to be the case. There's an off chance I will be researching this further; I promise if I turn out to be horribly off-base about this, I will come back and admit it.)


(Counter-disclaimer: fuck you, for making me feel the need to have to disclaimer something that might insult the psychological community. In fact, fuck the psychological community. For every psychiatrist that does good in the world, there's twenty assholes who are in it for the money and couldn't care less about this overly-medicated society in which three-year-olds  are given drugs that turn them into fucking ZOMBIES because their parents can't handle actually having to parent a fucking toddler.)


(Counter-counter-disclaimer: this is not to say that all drugs are bad and the entire psychological community sucks. I understand that there is a genuine need to medicate disorders that genuinely exist.)


(Counter-counter-counter-disclaimer: No, seriously, FUCK YOU for making me have to defend myself in this manner. I'm done disclaimering.)

<cough> 


What the DSM-IV does do is set up the criteria by which dependence and abuse can be defined. And that is the limit on the amount of research I'm willing to do at this point in time, since it appears to be having an odd effect on my disclaimer policy. 


What is addiction? It is a grasping, sucking, black hole in the precise center of your chest. It howls when you're bored, screeches when you're lonely, and keeps up a chattering thrum all the rest of the livelong day. It pulsates.  It clutches and gibbers at your heart, circles and wheels and mutters justifications in your head, and condenses the world down to two things and two things only:


what it is you want, outlined in a clear shining white,


and everything else, dim and grey and unimportant. 


I have, in the course of my life, been addicted to three things: smoking, drinking and a variety of social relationships. Smoking, I appear to have given up entirely one day when I suddenly realized I hated the taste. This is significant because I had tried to give it up when my husband found out about it, and didn't. I had tried to give it up when I promised various friends I would, and didn't. Why I finally did give it up is actually something of a mystery; one day I loved it, loved the smell, loved the taste, and the next I didn't. 


Drinking is not the problem it used to be, but then, I'm happier than I used to be. I haven't been actively drunk since the episode that forced into the light the absolute depth of the problem. I do still have a drink from time to time, more than one drink from time to time. That's not the problem, I feel. The problem is that I always want a drink, and upon having one, I always want another, then another and another and another. The nature of addiction, the vacuum of the soul.


Social dependency isn't a problem anymore. It went the way of smoking; I woke up one day and had lost my taste for people. Well. That's not strictly accurate. I still like them. I just don't need them to provide what they can't provide me with anyway, and thus no longer seem to expect it. People aren't as steady a thing to depend upon. Fickle thing, the human brain, as is proven by the abrupt switch flipped in my own that had provided me with a sweet and singular measure of sudden apathy that lasts to this day. And it's not like you can buy friends at the local 7-11, so when you run out of them, that's it. You're out. 


And much like cigarettes, booze or psychological drugs, most people aren't worth the side effects.


I remain an addict, though. That's a thing bleated about by every AA and NA member in the history of the organizations, and while I certainly have issues with some of the philosophies put forth by said organizations, that one is right spot-on one-hundred-percent correct. Once an addict, always an addict. You never get to escape it. Sometimes the thing in your chest is a roaring beast in the dark, other times it is a mosquito, easily swatted aside. But it never goes away. It is something you have to keep a constant eye out for, lest it creep into the back of your skull and whisper oh, what's the harm, it's only one. And never mind that it is never, not ever, only one. 


Why do I mention this, mention any of this? It's not a comfortable thing to talk about, after all. I see you all shifting from foot to foot and looking away awkwardly, don't think for a second I don't know it. Why have I done this, admitted to this terrible crack of weakness at the very heart of me? 


Honestly?


Because fucking Elin Hilderbrand doesn't know addiction from Adam, and her portrayal of it is weak and pathetic and watered-down, addiction for the beach-reading set, and that has made me very angry. A spa?! Really? An addictive personality is something to be looked down upon because upon being introduced to a spa, the character relaxes into a joyous puddle of goo? We're going to say THAT'S the danger of an addictive personality at work? REALLY?! Fuck you, Elin Hilderbrand, who is not an alcoholic and is not an addict and knows nothing of what being an addict is really like and who shouldn't have even tried to write that mental state OR the mental state of the people exposed to it without doing a modicum of research into the premise itself first. 


(Disclaimer: this is not to say that Elin Hilderbrand didn't do any research into it. Maybe she did. I don't know, maybe she actually has a relative with an addiction problem or something. If you are Elin Hilderbrand, I'm sorry for portraying you as a bad writer. You're not terrible! You're just like every other author of womenly beach-reads everywhere.)


(Disclaimer In Addendum: this is not to insult the beach-readers of the world. You read what you read, I don't care about that!)


(Counter-Disclaimer: No, fuck you, Elin Hilderbrand, this book is stupid and cookie-cutter and exactly like every other mediocre brainless general-fiction-book-for-women ever. It has nothing in it to set it apart and your writing is mediocre at best.)


(Disclaimer Realization: Four things I've been addicted to in my life. Cigarettes, alcohol, people and disclaimers.)

"We may be indifferent to the death penalty, and may not declare ourselves, yes or no, so long as we have not seen a guillotine with our own eyes. But when we see one, the shock is violent, and we are compelled to decide and take part, for or against. Some admire it, like Le Maistre; others execrate it, like Beccaria. The guillotine is the concentration of the law; it is called the Avenger; it is not neutral and does not permit you to remain neutral. He who sees it quakes with the most mysterious of tremblings. All social questions set up their points of interrogation about this axe. The scaffold is vision. The scaffold is not a mere frame, the scaffold is not a machine, the scaffold is not an inert piece of mechanism made of wood, of iron, of ropes. It seems a sort of being which had some sombre origin of which we can have no idea; one would say that this frame sees, that this machine understands, that this mechanism comprehends; that this wood, this iron, and these ropes, have a will. In the fearful reverie into which its presence casts the soul, the awful apparition of the scaffold confounds itself with its horrid work. The scaffold becomes the accomplice of the executioner; it devours, it eats flesh, and it drinks blood. The scaffold is a sort of monster created by the judge and the workman, a spectre which seems to live with a kind of unspeakable life, drawn from all the death which it has wrought."

TELL US HOW YOU REALLY FEEL, HUGO, DON'T BEAT AROUND THE BUSH.

I believe the time has come to create some sort of organizational system for the books I plan on reading. Just because switching between five books at a time  has started to have the rather surreal effect of overlapping them all together in my head.

A typical scenario: Nabokov is watching Sisyphus push his rock up the mountain and shouting comments about literature  to Bill Bryson, who is hiking past with his pack on his back and who isn't looking where he is going (because Nabokov is shouting at him and he finds this alarming) so he runs headfirst into Leopold Bloom, who promptly starts rambling, and they both of them fall backwards into Sisyphus, who curses and loses control of his rock, which rolls down the hill and squashes Nabokov dead. Then French rebels, with the help of the Blue Beetle, build a barricade in objection to all this nonsense. Out of Sisyphus' rock and the One Ring and some Ice9 and a large quantity of rubber duckies and stuffed badgers.

The duckies and badgers have nothing to do with what I've been reading; they just wanted to be part of the barricade, and the French rebels figured well,  why not?

Entertaining as these sorts of scenes are, it is no way to go about reading.

The issue is, my interests keep expanding at an ever-increasing rate, and the people I've met who actually read keep cocking their heads at me adorably and recommending things that sound fascinating, and I've more than one professor who is in the regular habit of handing me things and suggesting I read them in a way that effectively renders the optional reading essential.

There are too many good things to read in the world.

I think I'll have to limit the number of books I'm reading to three at a time; one for intellectual work (Les Mis, Ulysses, etc etc), one for situations where I can't focus on anything hefty but still need something to read, and one book whose purpose is pure, unadulterated brain candy.

More later. Or maybe not; this is a very boring post, isn't it?

Nabokov

I like his essays better than his fiction.

That is all.

It Commences

In the library, she sits, staring at a book on a table. It shows no sign of staring back.

This is because it is a book.  Books do not have eyes to stare. However, there is a tension in the air that seems to imply that if it did happen to be graced with those particular organs, there would be an electrically charged who-blinks-first contest of wills going on the likes of which are the stuff of schoolyard legend. 

Somewhere in the apartment, there is music playing, accompanied by sung lyrics that in no way, shape or form follow those originally written. Outside, a beautiful spring day is beginning to wane. It has gone utterly unappreciated by those ensconced within. This is not entirely unusual for early spring; the inhabitants have grown accustomed to the cold and wet of winter keeping them indoors, and have allowed the bad habit of spending entire days without once venturing out-of-doors to become the standard.

She narrows her eyes at the book, then finally unfolds to pick it up. "Streams of consciousness, hmh?" she inquires of it. 

It has no reply. 

"Considered one of the greatest works of Modernist literature ever written. On all sorts of must-read lists, I hear." 

Flattery gets her nowhere.

"Well. You don't look so bad to me. Think you're tough? You're not tough." 

The music in the background is lowered. "Honey, are you talking to Ulysses again?" Her husband has been hearing Joycean muttering for days now. 

She doesn't look away from her steady regard of the cover. "Yes."

"Why don't you just read it?!"

"I'm trying to psych it out," she calls back. 

It should be mentioned that the only reason her husband is telling her to read it is because he's been on her to read Les Miserables for years now, and she has only recently agreed to the undertaking. After I get done with Ulysses, she said, then went back into the library to stare at it some more. He is beginning to lose patience. "Just read it, will you?"

She wrinkles her nose, at the book, at the husband, at the cartoon of her hugging James Joyce that she drew in a moment of Dubliners-inspired glee. Then, sighed, "Fiiiine."

And she opens the book.