My Poetic Relationship With A Beer Can

For years, I drank too much beer.  

I’m sure I could come up with a few truly profound excuses for why I drank too much beer, but in the long run, most of those were delusory and foolish ways I rationalized the fact that my drunkenness had long been a serious problem.  

As a poet, however, I believed in “poetic license” as an absolute.  I had a license to drink my life into submission.  This, I rationalized, was part of the game of poetry.  After all, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Jack Kerouac, Hemingway, and dozens of other great American literary figures all drank themselves half to death in pursuit of “the muse”.  So.  I was in great company, right?  

Serious problems serve as impediments to one’s goals in life.  I can see this quite clearly 17 years after I stopped drinking.  But in the one muddle after another of many brief trips to an artificially euphoric Bohemia, so to speak, as a poet I honestly believed I was pursuing French Romantic poet Arthur Rimbaud’s supposed dictum: 

“A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses.”

Yes, a Bohemia of the brain.  I remember reading about famed journalist Jack Reed, a man whose alcoholism eroded his insides in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution.  Many observers at the time had taken note Reed had always wanted to become a great poet, but for some reason, he’d made himself a far better journalist.  But that urge for a mystical wonderland that drives many poets never left him.  Perhaps this is from where his “revolutionary tendencies” emerged.  A utopia.  Heaven on earth.  Eternal youth.  

I remember a little bar only a block away from where I once lived.  It was a haunt of the city’s journalists and reporters.  One newspaper columnist continually recounted and lauded his experiences in talking to other reporters there.  Friends and I decided to lurk there one night–where we found “some of the best voices of some kind of generation” absolutely sloshed, plowed, shickered, zotzed.  

I remember quipping to a friend that night: “Maybe if you’re stone drunk nobody can read your mind. . . “ 

Exactly.  That would be a definite advantage if telepathy existed and journalists, CIA agents and other important people needed to blunt the mind to keep it from “leaks”.  Which is a silly idea.  I’d have to have been drunk to dream up such a thing.  Interestingly, I was when I did just that.  

Something about interminably lousy habits make for all kinds of glorious excuses.  Disorganization of the senses.  Destruction of inspiration-killing inhibitions.  The old romantic idyll of the poet drinking alone to candlelight.  Movies like “Barfly”, a film based on the life of poet and famous drinker Charles Bukowski.  These are exactly how I justified my way out of the difficult “come to Jesus” appreciation that beer actually stood as an impediment for my hopes, dreams, and the development of my skills.  

The euphoria hidden inside a beer can seemed positively divine to me for as long as it lasted.  And since at the time–I was innocently naive–I believed divinity of that sort was the key to poetic inspiration, I’d drink more and more until that “systemized disorganization of the senses” had me sloppy drunk.  And incapable of reaching the Shangri-la on the other side of my attempts to hotwire reality via a succession of beery hours.  

There were complications to my beery habits.  

For one, I didn’t know I suffered from Bipolar Disorder.  Nor did I have one inkling as to how Bipolar and self-medication are common cousins to those of us who are condemned to live with an affective disorder that distorts our emotional responses to the object world.  If I was feeling low, and flat, and bored, I’d drink to capture that fairyland I believed was where poetry could be found like the mythical amaranth, ancient symbol of wisdom and enlightenment.  

If I was feeling too “up”, beer seemed to solve the problem: It could bring me back down to earth.  At least temporarily.  But as usual, once I got started, too much fake medication was never enough.  

But all in all, excuses rendered moot, I liked being drunk.  It was like checking out.  Avoiding reality.  But sure.  My reality of mood swings and emotional extremes was a reality to be feared.  In fact, the kind of dysfunctional mood swings manic-depressives know and hate are terrifying.  Think of yourself driving your car–when something beyond your control takes charge and runs you off the road.  How can you fix that on the fly?  Would anything actually work?  It seemed alcohol could tamp all that crazy down to where it wasn’t plaguing me.  

Beyond this, what does one do if one is confronted by wild mood swings; what does one believe about the world?  I believed the world was unjust, and I rebelled.  Like any human being, I desired stability, but suddenly, as if out of nowhere, the world was rendered horribly unstable.  But it’s not too far away to come to the realization that many people feel uncertainty in their lives, and that the human tendency is to project one’s inner chaos onto external events.  It’s also quite human to suggest one has power over uncertainty–when one actually doesn’t possess that agency at all.  What made me feel powerful?  How could I regain my power?  How could I reenter a world where I did have some kind of agency, some kind of ability to control my extreme, wild-eyed mood swings?  The answers are easy on Easy Street: 

More beer.  

The height of my life as a rebellious drunk peaked somewhere during the overly-hyped Reagan era.  This was a period where so-called conservatives, angry at the government for reasons difficult to understand to this day, insolently called for the removal of all governmental support for the arts and humanities.  I remember Georgia Senator Jesse Helms incoherently trying to equate the arts with either communism or the decline of Western civilization.  Half the time, I’d laugh at him.  But when Congress began to follow his dumb dictates, I began to rebel.  My friends began to rebel.  Since I traveled with the art crowd, everyone was upset that, as Newt Gingrich in 1995 urged, we might have to forsake any and all creative authenticity and sell ourselves.  Why should all our values submit to exchange value on some dimly lit marketplace?  

The mid-Eighties also introduced a period where Christian fundamentalism was rearing up like a renegade horse, demanding “the chosen” be allowed to “take the country back”.  What?  I remember chuckling.  To when?  Eighteen seventy-two?  

Solution?  More beer.  More rebelliousness.  And then some more beer.  As a reward for “standing up to the stupid”.  And the counterculture at the time agreed with rebelliousness:  Revolution at point-of-purchase.  One could purchase a Clash record and be introduced to revolutionary, anti-commercial ideas for only a few dollars.  You pay for propaganda the way cable companies deliver Fox News to your TV set.  

As I recall at the time, my rebellion bore a distinct relation to the rebellion then underway among conservative Christians: The world’s against me, and I’m fighting back!  

Everyone was fighting back.  Against what?  I don’t really remember. . . . 

This was all rationalization.  I didn’t really know what I was thinking.  I didn’t have the commitment to self-education that could have enabled me to actually combat via a seminally dumb culture war.  But if I altered my brain chemistry, getting high on alcohol, I gleaned an illusion of being powerful–when in reality I felt deeply powerless to change my circumstances.  

Of course this is hindsight.  I had no idea I was doing any of this when I’d pop the top off a beer and snort it down.  How is altering my mind in this way engaging in culture war?  Who knows?  It seemed valid at the time.  I was drinking at some awfully disturbing social, cultural and political changes wrought by people who likely didn’t care if I was alive or not.  Pop a top, drink at those people. . . . 

In other words, rather than taking action, I reacted.  I was against stuff.  And my solution?  You guessed it.  Alcohol.  

But that’s all technical.  This is what I see today was happening inside me.  The underlying premise of my often unruly behavior, after all, was Bipolar Disorder.  I’d enjoy brief periods of relative emotional lucidity, then I’d hit a jag, an episode, and suddenly, I was on an out-of-control roller coaster.  A roller coaster made of matchsticks.  

What does out-of-control look like?  In 1985, during a manic episode so confusing I shiver just to remember it, I’d been drinking all night.  But at around eight in the morning on a weekday, I took literally every single thing made of glass I could find–and hurled it into the street.  Why?  

Who knows why?  

Or the time, also quite irritable, while angrily marching down the street, a six-pack of tall boys in one hand, I grabbed a traffic cone and hurled it behind me, not losing a step.  Then a screech.  Rapidly turning, I was just in time to witness the falling orange of the cone landing on the hood. . . of a police car.  

Certainly, I was arrested.  I was so drunk I was blurry.  Not comprehending the seriousness of what I’d done, I pleasantly asked the police officer, “If I apologize, will you let me go?”

War stories abound in this poet’s “Beer Phase”.  Indeed, poetically speaking, I was “Picasso on the inside of the head”.  Or perhaps like fellow drunk Jackson Pollock, I was “a splatter-fest of the mind”.  My poetry distinctly resembled that stunted mindset.  Confusing, often incomprehensible, sometimes quite angry, the poems I’ve kept from that period of emotional darkness show honest struggle, a struggle to cut through something far bigger than I was.  

Grandiloquent thinking did shine through.  That’s an amusing facet of Bipolar Disorder.  Sometimes I believed I was perhaps the most misunderstood literary genius in the history of the human race.  Was I blessing other humans with words like this?

“A car, yesterday, usurped the curb

as an Indian sang all about the wind

beneath the sliver of his breath.

“So suddenly the curve of the concrete

became real within its name, raw birds

wheeled and chirped in self defense.”

Shazam!  Hypnotic!  Actually, not that bad. . . 

One time, I submitted an entire fascicle of poems to a famous literary critic, Jonathan Raban, a man whose writing in The New York Times Book Review had impressed me.  The 13 poems were like “the 13 appearances of the full phase of the moon set to the scene of The Dallas Cowboys running through the tunnel to enter the field of the Super Bowl.” 

A total winner.  Raban shot back like this:  “Why am I getting this stuff?”

Misunderstood.  Genius.  

I did gain some sympathy from one Lewis Lapham.  I must have launched 100 letters to him.  He was kind.  But there is no telling how the letters were received in the Harper’s Magazine newsroom. . . . 

Same with The Dallas Morning News: all kinds of truly insane opinion pieces written on the fly as if it was so easy even a third-grader with a brain transplant could have done it.  

Rejected.  

Yes, rejected.  Another grand incident in my self-hagiography involves “rejecting the rejections” of what I now see to have been a summarily chaotic excuse for poetry to the editor of The Southwest Review.  She’d politely reject the poem, I would batter the keyboard to produce my own rejection, and fire it back at her.  I did that six or seven times with a single poem.  

An iconoclast!  Right there, only a mile and a half from the editor herself!  

All done drunk on beer with an arm tied behind my back.   

It doesn’t hurt to giggle as we grapple with the worst of ourselves.  Many in this world never learn that poking fun at oneself helps with impartiality and with the goal of nearing the ideal of objectivity–especially when it comes to the mistakes we have made.  

I did try Alcoholic Anonymous for a year-and-a-half.  This was no good fit for someone who’s drinking was an adjunct to an affective disorder.  I’d sober up for maybe six weeks, then crash, inevitably reaching for some beer to stanch the terror of falling apart, and the other alcoholics would avoid me under the supposed auspices of “It’s a selfish program.”  Sure.  They were afraid of temptation–something cauterized under the idea of “not enabling him”.  

Great.  Just fantastic, folks.  

For those of us caught up in the swirling, self-medication vortex of Dante’s Inferno, a 12-step program well known for really imposing a tight and restrictive regime on those trying to get sober, those tight restrictions lead to a very familiar place: 

More rebellion, more need to release one’s sense of suffocation.  No.  Not a good fit at all.  My solution?  Take a wild guess.  

Interestingly, once I found appropriate medical treatment for Bipolar Disorder, my anxiety and mood swings slowly began to vanish–but my habit of reaching out to a beer can persisted, not that this illogical recourse was connected to reality.  Nope.  It was a habit.  One I had to break.  This took time.  And patience.  

People who live with Bipolar benefit from psychotherapy because, even though the persistent symptoms abate, the thought patterns associated with rationalizing the mood swings and disorder need to be untangled.  While it became obvious that my drinking was more subconscious self-medication than actual physical addiction, even more important is the set of facts surrounding a brand new learning curve.  After all, if one’s only two emotions are “up and down” or “black and white”, it takes time, experience, and trial and error to come to a semblance of learning to respond to moods like kindness, peace of mind, anger, fear, and the real version of my alcohol-infused false euphoria. 

Eventually, I did take on that china shop bull.  Immediately after beginning a regimen of antidepressants, I visited the public clinic’s resident psychiatrist for consultation.  He told me that I needed rest, time to recover, and that my nervous system was all-but-shattered.  

“How long will it take me to recover?”

“Let’s give it from five to 10 years,” he said.  

I sat stunned.  Then, when I asked him about my biggest fear–that losing the Bipolar would compromise my creativity–he gave me a line to remember:

“Think of yourself leaving a life like Van Gogh’s–and entering a live like Monet’s”.

Then more, the sort of thing legends are made of: “You’ve got a choice: You can be Monet–or Charlie Manson.  You have to choose.”  

I took the former.  Perhaps choosing the Monet option was my very first breakthrough.