Sober
My show WRITE CLUB is a competitive reading series. Each show is three bouts of 2 opposing writers, given 2 opposing ideas. They’re given 7 minutes to make their case. Audience picks a winner. It’s been monthly in Chicago since 2010, and there are also monthly shows in Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Denver, currently. Hit me up if you wish to start a chapter in your city, maybe. Info is at our website.
Below is an essay I performed for our St. Patrick’s Day show in 2015 — my assignment was Sober, vs. an opponent who had Drunk as their topic.
I want you to imagine that you’re standing in a public fountain — like in a park or a food court or something. I want you to further imagine that your pants are around your ankles, and that you are screaming at passersby:
YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND, MAN! YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND!
In this vignette, your pants, being around your ankles, are soaking up fountain water. Your chin is flecked with spit, so vehement is your screaming. There is a ring of wary cops closing in slowly on your fountain position.
Now — and this is the most important part — I want you to imagine that as you lay into passersby, with the veins standing out on your temples and your voice growing hoarse, with the cops closing in — I want you to imagine that you are stone. Cold. Sober.
Adds a dimension to the scenario, doesn’t it, a new resonance? If you’re hammered and pantsless and hollering, this is right and fitting. When hammered, when sozzled, it is EXPECTED at some point in your evening that you’ll be pantsless and yelling.
When you are SOBER, however, when you CHOOSE to shed your pants and hop in the fountain and start screaming, then, friend, you have arrived at a place where most fear to tread. Because you have arrived at the place of willful madness. You have shucked off the oppressive cowl of your prudence, and have unwound the Celtic knot of lunacy coiled inside every brain that we customarily keep concealed.
Because it is an altogether different thing to have a weaving drunk slurring:
Ah’lllllllll… cutchoo.
Before keeling over.
Than to have somebody standing ramrod straight and sober as a judge clearly enunciating:
I will cut you.
As they advance upon you in steady-legged fashion. With eyes blazing.
It is twenty years now since whiskey last passed over my lips, twenty years since I passed out church steps or tore into a horsemeat burrito at 4 in the AM. Or started awake to find the cigarette I’m holding is burning my fingers.
I hit it. Rock bottom. Then I kept digging. I knew in the queasiest depths of my soul that I must quit drinking or die.
My fear, which I have come to learn is a common one for those contemplating the abandonment of the guzzling that has defined them, was that I would grow soft and weak, that the rage and madness I had known would leave me.
I was afraid, in other words, that I would cease to be myself, that the ferocity that formed the floor of me would give out.
As with any true thing that wants to sound pretentious, the French have a phrase for it:
L’Appel du Vide — the call of the void.
L’Appel du Vide.
The siren song of oblivion, the welcome interruption in the ceaseless and agonizing incursion of reality, the blessed shutting of the aperture of the mind — permitting no light or sensation to pass.
When you have yielded for long years to the call of the void, you grow terror-stricken by the prospect of being denied its dependable refuge.
But when your refuge is killing you, you must leave its shelter. And brave this hateful and galling squeeze of wakefulness.
To be left with this appalling clarity, this unendurable shrieking, eye-stabbing, brain-wringing ORDEAL we call Reality. And Reality is an asshole. An asshole that never sleeps.
But then. When you do quit the drink. After you weather that initial shit storm, you emerge with your fury uncooled, your fire unextinguished, your ferocity undimmed.
And now — now when you look upon this world and tell it to fuck off, you do so with clear eyes and a steady voice. Gone is the despondent trailing off of the drunk getting hustled out of the tavern, a soppy lamentation of a “fuck off.” No longer does a bilious and muffled “fuck this” drop from your lips in that final semi-conscious protest as your head hits the grimy pillow.
No sir.
For though there remains L’Appel du Vide, and though this grisly farce we call reality isn’t going anywhere, and though the impulse to fold, defeated, in the face of this lumbering wagon train of halfwits and dick holes, con men and simpletons, exploiters and profiteers, it is ONLY by staring into the FACE of reality — though it is chewing with its mouth open, and though it’s got a pretty bad walleye, and though its breath is frankly quite gruesome — and THEN, in a measured and well-modulated tone, tell it to
Fuck.
Right.
Off.
And, though you are now screechinly aware that Reality will grind you entirely down, and though you know for a stone fact that you will know only dissipation and defeat, you have now the capacity to CHOOSE — in full possession of your faculties — to let Reality know it can go fuck itself, this is freedom.
I see you, Reality. I see you clearly. And I find you wanting and shabby and nightmarish. But I shall not turn my back on you — I will climb into this fountain and drop my pants and I shall resist you with my final breath.
More stuff at ianbelknap.com, including info on creative writing workshops. Twitter: @writeclubrules. Also — if I started a Patreon, would anybody put a fucking crowbar in their wallet and pony up? Or no?
