Back In Business

It is well known that many of the great writers of our past (and present) were also great drinkers. Ernest Hemingway had the mojito, John Mortimer had champagne, and F. Scott Fitzgerald had gin (and lots of it). Mark Twain once said, "sometimes too much to drink is barely enough" and Tennessee Williams hardly ever sat down to write without first consuming a martini and a bottle of red wine. Kingsley Amis notoriously claimed that a glass of scotch was the perfect artistic icebreaker and A.J. Liebling, an American journalist from the New Yorker, once fled a burning restaurant but not without snagging a bottle of brandy first. Suffice it to say that most writers can hold down a glass or two...

And I think that the motive is quite simple...it is the job, or the responsibility, of a writer to make the mere arrangement of words mean something that can exist beyond the two dimensional boundaries of a binding. Thus, writers live in their pain. Writers savor the sorrow. Writers reside and settle and exist in a space that feeds off of the severe, and often times diligent, emotions that contribute to great writing. And sometimes all of that emotion can get to be too much. Sometimes you can delve too deep and feel like survival is forever beyond the bounds of possibility...

But what if you, as a writer, also want to be happy? What if you also want to be productive beyond the margin of words?...

I had an incredibly shitty holiday and the writer in me dwelt in those emotions in the hopes that they would manifest themselves into some kind of creative genius. And the writer in me used an excellent bottle of bourbon to alleviate the anxiety around those emotions. And perhaps I created genius, who knows, but what I do know is that I wasn't particularly proud of the kind of person I was during that time. Maybe great writers don't make that distinction. Maybe great writers are great because they don't separate themselves from their work and if their work is something to be proud of, then it doesn't matter that they aren't something to be proud of...

Well, I am proud of the person that I have become; I am proud of the things that I strive for everyday and the things that I stand up for everyday and if that means that I am not the next Ernest Hemingway or Tennessee Williams, I think that I am finally okay with that...