In Vino, Veritaserum
The character flaw of moderation has held me back a lot more than I'd like to admit. I remember in high school, all the cool guys were out there having loads and loads of unprotected sex with scads of slutty girls, which means they got all the really awesome STDs first. Monday mornings were the worst. While all the guys were giving each other the gonorrhea high-fives, the genital warts head-nods, the knowing chlamydia winks, the slower-moving social tortoises were left with slim pickings at the end, at home alone with our silent shame of friction burns and a yeast infection.

I survived in that social wasteland with the help of my good friends Cinemax and Vagisil, but I learned a lesson that I swore never to forget: overindulge.

The philosophy seemed to work for me in college. I recognized it was a problem once I hit 400 lbs. for the first time, but in the interim, I made a lot of friends on the fraternity row freak-show circuit. There's always a market for a guy who can eat eight whole chickens in one sitting. I had to quit when my heart stopped that one time, but I miss my comrades-in-arms: Ping-Pong Ball Debbie, Fire-Butt Ron, that guy who would eat sand and a special shout-out to my boy/girl Shortie the Hermaphrodite Dwarf. Man, for the life of me I can't remember Sand Eater's name. There was some tension there as our specialties kind of overlapped, but my God, you have to respect a guy who will eat sand. He claimed he could shit glass, but I never really felt like my stomach could withstand the verification process there.

Now that I'm older, wiser, I see things with the perspective of a grown-person and I realize how foolish I had been in the past. Overindulgence in any form is harmful and sinful and selfish, and looking back I realize: yeah, still should do more of it.

I'm especially thinking about drinking more. I really really should.

I feel so limited by the bounds of my actual personality. Reckless and compulsive consumption of alcohol, I think, would really let me chip free and polish up the facets of myself that have been hidden under the cloudy, hard-edged layers of reasonability and self-awareness.

Plus, my God! Think of the shit I could get away with!

Just a couple of drinks and I could be a Mel Gibson anti-Semite or an Michael Richards racist or a Mark Foley predator or an Isaiah Washington homophobe or a Lindsay Lohan... well, a Lindsay Lohan or even--and this might be most helpful to me in the short term--a Gavin Newsom other-person's-wife fucker. To finally catch up on my STDs, well... a high school dream come true.

Drinking makes everything better. You can be the person you really are underneath--the ugly, ugly person you are--once you are free of the fetters of inhibition, embarrassment, tact, conscience, social awareness, any awareness, urinary continence and (in the most specialest of circumstances) control of the esophageal sphincters that keep chewed and partially digested food from backing out the way it came in.

The magic, though is the Rehab. This is all Martin Luther's fault. Used to be that if a person, say, accidentally ordered some of his people to go kill the Archbishop of Canterbury who would then become a saint, since we were all Catholic, you'd have to go to Church and confess. The Church, then, would mete out a reasonable penance, in this case poor Peter O'Toole got flogged in front of people. And he was the king!

Protestantism ruined all of that. "No, no!" they said, "Don't go to confession! Confess directly to God in the privacy of your own soul!"

Yeah... problem with that approach? Not at all telegenic. Unless you can get a voice-over to speak out the internal monologue for you, but in order to get anyone to pay attention to it, you'd have to get a Zach Braff or at least the guy who does all those movie trailers to help you out and, trust me, you can't afford that.

In order for the Get Out Of Jail Free aspect of wanton consumption of alcohol to work, you need the power of a stay in a double-blind, completely discreet, totally anonymous detox resort tastefully announced by your newly-hired army of publicists.

A guest shot on Leno wouldn't hurt either.

I'm going to be working on this. Not sure how I get on the Tonight Show, but first thing's first. To the box of wine!

If I don't have an englarged liver, a scorching case of herpes and a press release by the end of the week, you will know I have failed.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 5.1


Pops

Labels: spanakopita

- posted by Pops @ 9:37 AM