A thousand beers ago
By Nicolo Nasol
“If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.” — Charles Bukowski
A THOUSAND beers ago, I still recall, my best friend took on the question “How can you fall for someone who’s completely over you?” during a drinking session at Fruits and Foods, our favorite bar. When he said “over,” he actually meant “above,” not over as in dead and done. So again, how can you fall for someone who’s completely “above” you? He alone tried answering his inquiry to this paradox. I listened. His thoughts shot deeper into the night until he arrived at an answer: “One just needs to be Superman, so he can fly higher than where she is, and then fall for her!”
I laughed at once at this drunkard’s nonsense and almost flipped the table over, but I was stunned upon realizing it must be a vague allusion to Nietzsche’s Übermensch, the Overman.
Believe me, my best friend’s a genius — a rather misguided one at that, especially with a little influence of alcohol. But he’s the unfortunate guy who suddenly falls asleep no matter how savory and sexually accommodating the chicks we are drinking with are. (His tolerance for alcohol back in those days was weaker than a girl’s — unbelievably low.) Well, that means two things: one, more beers for me, and two, I get to take all the ladies.
All are true except for the “ladies” part. Mind you, we don’t drink to get laid (such act goes against my drinking ethics). Heck, we don’t even drink for the taste (we even seek Kulafu if it’s available and the mood calls for it). In all truthfulness, we desperately drink and offer a toast for the enlightenment and salvation of mankind, and seriously so. To quote from the book Alcoholica Esoterica by Ian Lendler, “a bottle of beer contains more poetry and philosophy than any other books in the world.”
(There’s no refuting Lender’s statement. Its reverberance, long-stuck and percussive in my ears, soon led me to constitute my own unwritten fundamentals in drinking. One fundamental, carrying the force of a Zen koan, is “To drink is to know, and to know is to not drink.”)
******
My best friend and I drink for wild pleasure and celebration, of course, setting aside our intellectual ambitions for our hedonistic pursuits (this we try to keep in moderation). Inevitably, we drink for our dramas as well. Fact is, during life’s most tumultuous and trying times, you just want to sleep dead drunk for the night and wake up, regretfully, the next day with an even deadlier hangover.
There are times when I need a strong drink so I can write without inhibitions, but alcohol worsens my already god-awful penmanship. Reading the draft when I get sober, I can only make out, barely and with effort, the first paragraph. The rest of it resembles a drug addict’s scrawl on the walls.
Here I present to you a line I scrawled during one of my flights of intoxication: “Alcohol makes emotions inflammable, and it takes only a single question to lick both into flames.”
What lucidity only a drunk mind is capable of attaining! In vino nobis veritas, as they say (“In wine, there is truth”). A drunk mind is as mysterious as it is dangerous.
I am a bit proud of my ability to remember my drunken moments, however cringe-worthy, grotesque, and shameful my actions and words may be, as not everyone recalls his flights during intoxication; and even when they do, they wish to forget all of it. But not me.
******
My best friend and I have been drinking at my place for some nights now, catching up, for we haven’t seen each other for months. It has dawned on me we are still asking the same questions regarding life. (To interject a line, “As time flies, what remains the same? The question remains the same.”) Are we still as naive as when we were in college?
If so, a thousand more beers then.
