Me, Myself, and Hemingway
“Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary...”
- Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Necessary is a troubling word in this context. The possibility of wine’s necessity is something that I have always feared. My father was an alcoholic and from some of the stories I have recently heard, his father too suffered from the same affliction. My father died young, at the age of forty-one , an age which seems exponentially younger now that I am forty. I feel younger than how I remember my father. He seemed so ancient. This, in part, is no doubt common. Kids often think their parents or the other adults in their lives are far older than they actually are. When it comes to my father, the years of abuse he put his body through also made him appear to be older than he really was.
Watching my father destroy his body and his relationships through drinking made be very wary of picking up a drink. He died when I was fourteen years old and shortly after he died I thought, I am never drinking. Even at that young age I understood that addiction can be hereditary. I was afraid that upon my first drink, I would turn into a raging alcoholic. I went through high school and college without ever drinking. I had my first drink on my twenty-first birthday, and it was just one. As I got older and allowed myself to drink a bit more, I realized the monster was not going to emerge. Oh, I have an addictive personality, but in my case it is with food. I binge, I fast, I diet, and I binge again. My weight fluctuates dramatically from year to year. At my heaviest I was 276 pounds. At my lightest, 172 pounds. As frustrating as this is, I am grateful my addiction is carbs and not boos.
Recently however, I have noticed my urges changing. The stress and fear associated with my wife’s cancer diagnosis along with having to go to a job in which I have less and less faith in my abilities, my purpose, my impact, my safety, and my role in a failing educational construct has led to a shift in my cravings from spaghetti to scotch. And these feelings do not even begin to address the impact of the general public’s seeming hatred of public school teachers. When I wake up, I’m looking forward to having a scotch at night. When I am driving home, I am looking forward to pouring a glass of wine or popping open a beer. And then, most nights, I have nothing. After the kids go to sleep and I finish whatever work I have to do, I am no longer interested in the drink. Like Hemingway, sometimes it feels like a necessity, but it is on those days when I especially avoid pouring that single malt. I need to just want a drink, I cannot allow myself to need a drink.
And so, I write.
Some of these writings end up as part of this little blog that a few of you read, and some writings end up as nothing more than a saved file on my laptop, never to be opened again. I tend to overthink, then rationalize, and then think again. You would assume me to be an analytical personality knowing this, but truth be told I am much more of an Akousmatikoi rather than a Mathematikoi. My thoughts do not lead to logical conclusions based upon reason, they lead to emotional responses and emotional conclusions. And then the real mental work begins. I need to focus these emotions in order to harness their power into something useful or at the very least, not harmful. This is normally when my mind returns to Hemingway - the suffering artist. For all his brilliance and received adoration, he could not escape his own mind. His addiction and his depression finally won out and he eventually killed himself with his favorite shotgun.
I fear getting lost in my own mind and losing the ability to refocus. I am a pessimist by nature, a pessimist with a touch of nihilistic defeatism. I fear wanting or worse still needing that drink. I fear losing myself the way Hemingway did, but then I come to an important realization. Hemingway’s angst was in direct correlation to his brilliance. If this holds true for me, then I think I will be fine.
Rather than angst consuming me, I will likely just be in a pissy mood.