Midway through my life’s journey, I saw the lights of a police car in my rearview mirror. In a blackout, only snapshots come back to you, providing subtle hints of a night gone sideways. Usually these memories are of the worst scenes of the night. Once the mind has already checked out, certain still-shot images still register in the wetware.
I managed to get to the side of the road and go through a proper arrest. I recall refusing the sobriety test not because I wanted to contest the policeman’s assessment in court, but because I could barely stand up. I had been driving 35 miles-per-hour on a 65 mile-per-hour highway, at 4 AM, with no shirt and no shoes.
The mistake of that day had been made many hours prior to the sirens, when someone offered me a shot of liquor. I stayed strong and said no. Actually, I only said no once, then I gladly took the shot, and then another, and another. I liked claiming that “If I just stick to beer” nothing could go wrong. Light beer keeps the madness away, I believed, since you can’t drink it fast enough to get really stupid. This is not actually true, but it lengthens the process of getting wasted. That I even needed to consider this possibility speaks for itself. This propensity I considered a normal feature of people, fortifying my bias with a remembered passage from the novel Winesburg, Ohio about the men from the country coming to town for a rowdy night:
Under the influence of drink the naturally strong lusts of their natures, kept suppressed by the heroic labor of breaking up new ground, were released. A kind of crude and animal-like poetic fervor took possession of them. On the road home they stood up on the wagon seats and shouted at the stars. Sometimes they fought long and bitterly and at other times they broke forth into songs.
To drink was to relax and let loose, and let go of the frustrations and struggles of the day or week. I suspect that is true for many people. But there’s a problem in this notion for some of us that like to shout at the stars.
There is a saying among AA meetings: “One is too many, and twenty is not enough.” I had known for a long time, since the first time I ever drank alcohol, that I was prone to excess. Not only prone, but I yearned to overdo it. In high school and college the slogan was: “A day is not wasted if I am.” Escapism was a way of life. I found others with the same reason for existence, as we like to do for our vices. We all need our cheerleaders for enablement, whether it’s online or in person. We found camaraderie in drinking hard and finding oblivion. Together but apart in our stupors, we were modern Lotus-eaters.
Thus the way of life I subscribed to in high school and college became a continuation into adulthood, even into parenthood, and though I could keep the worst of nights to a minimum, sooner or later, the urge to go off the deep end with drinking returned, just as it always had for all the drunks through the ages. The illusion of control plays the repeatable trick upon those of us who like to escape. In so many ways the drug finds a path into our nervous system so that it can again reign over us.
I recall making the officer laugh while sitting a bright office while he booked me. Even then, under arrest, I had the need to please people, or try to charm as best I could, to avoid confrontation and evade difficult conversations. As a middle sibling I seemed to have found the way to walk the line. And how to lie, too. Lying allowed me to isolate and avoid people, life, and the small burdens of my easy life. I didn’t much care to be yelled at or made to feel dumb. Those two insecurities, well, I’ll come back to those, plus a few others.
The drunk driving charge would have taken me to jail immediately, but being so stinking drunk, I was dropped at an overnight detox center first. The night was a blur and I neglected to use my phone call to contact my wife for fear of waking her, only to leave her searching frantically for me the next day. There is much more to that part of this irresponsible story that I could go into, but suffice it to say that a general mode of selfishness ruled me.
My arrest was past due. Drunken driving charges should have been pinned on me years before, but somehow I had slipped through the net. Buzzed driving on the weekend was normal, and more than a few times in college I woke up without knowing how I had got home, until I looked outside to see my car. So the day of being arrested loomed over me for two decades, and finally, like many of my friends who were arrested before me, it was my turn. We had a sense of humor about getting in trouble. Screwing up gave us a story, as if we were still rebelling against a teacher from middle school. We shared a fake apathy as a core value, even while we worked hard to further our professional lives. The reality is that my life lacked any difficulty. I didn’t grown up wealthy, but I was from the 80s and 90s and I had faced no real hardships. I wanted to get wasted, just like the metal and rap and country music glorified. To smoke and drink at every opportunity, to blackout, to wake up in strange places - that’s what I enjoyed, or not so much enjoyed, as sought for escape. There was something to the Chuck Klosterman “killing ourselves to live” mentality with Nirvana’s nihilism, Snoop Dogg’s love of weed and disrespect of women, and outlaw country music’s unapologetic glorification of drunkenness. Add to that Fight Club and Rage Against the Machine and Smashing Pumpkins - the 90s really hated authority of all kinds.
Of course it was cool, because the music and idols broke all the rules. Same as every generation, we scoffed at the proper society our parents tried to emulate, or at least pretend toward. Add in the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the internet to this mix, and a vacuum had been flipped on in that “end of history” period. The good people, the adults of the community that cared, they could not contend with the surrounding influences of the world. That battle was lost instantly when the internet made every possible idea, good or bad, suddenly available to all. Before I had ever heard of a religious “none,” I had arrived to that desolate place through culture, aided by the internet, and accelerated by my discovery and love of alcohol. Alongside drinking, I added a second drug of books. Knowledge was the additive, and together I learned that booze and books can act like mortar and bricks to build a powerful wall to hide inside.
I was rather obsessed with reading everything I could get my hands on for about fifteen years, and as any seeker knows, one book leads to another, and the more you learn, the more you become convinced that you know almost nothing at all. This is nothing that I discovered myself, as Socrates said, “I know that I know nothing,” and Protagoras’ Paradox added “the more you learn, the less you know,” both of which today have been appropriated into the fancier sounding Dunning-Kruger Effect. Truly the more I read the more unstable my convictions became, but I had to read, and read more, trying to make up for lost time as a drifting youth and cram in as much knowledge as possible to find the truth, the elusive truth. But the depths and nuances of knowledge slip away like eels as you can read one argument today and the counterpoint tomorrow, only to feel yesterday’s seemingly solid worldview vanish from beneath you like sand under your feet on the beach when the wave retreats. The tales of my Bible could no longer keep up with science, literature, and technology, as I was awash in many subjects and following ideas wherever they might lead me.
But there was too much information. Just too much to take in. So I would drink from the books and then drink from the bottle, and just as soon as I thought I knew everything, another subject could be found to upend the prior subject. Through it all I held a sense of righteousness and morality, thinking that I was right all the time (and surely, I felt that most people were more ignorant than my well-read self. This pursuit of knowledge was one of my chief insecurities). I drank, yes, but it was because I didn’t need the crutch of religion, of faith in the sky-fairy. That nonsense was an empty cup, and my cup was full. Actually, I often had a cup in each hand.
With science as a sword and the history of religious violence as my shield, I scoffed at faith as the appendix of history, a vestige of ancient society concocted by fearful goat herders. I had bet the house against Pascal’s wager, that indeed it was better to rule in hell than serve in heaven if that’s what it took to declare reason as the preferred path, as the road less travelled. With my cosmology of materialism hammered down, come what may, I was a good person with some flaws, who just needed to take an occasional break from drinking to get back under control. Everyone has their vice, right? In fact, isn’t it always those who pretend to have no vices where the sickness is worst, where the most heinous acts tend to flourish? My vice, often a public drunken one, allowed an open door to the skeletons in my closet. The only difference between me and a priest or rabbi or a guru was that I knew how to have fun.
And it was fun.
Until it wasn’t.
Because the motivation for all of the reading and the drinking wasn’t knowledge and escape. The urge came from the void, the pit of emptiness, which I thought could be filled with words and buried with a buzz. I came to call this gnawing feeling as the “Big Empty,” after a song title by Stone Temple Pilots.
When I was arrested, the snapshot of that dazzling blue light splash in the rearview mirror is almost a work of art in my mind, since that image marks my arrest and about-face from that void.
It was the best day of my life.
